Trump vs. Canada
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his thoughts on the reported $500 million-dollar deal between World Liberty Financial, a Trump-family business venture, and the United Arab Emirates, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. David discusses the helplessness we feel as we are bombarded with stories where it seems all restraint has broken down and explains what laws exist that are meant to curtail corrupt practices.
Then, David is joined by former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to discuss the Trump administration’s overtures to an Albertan secessionist movement, the harm the Trump presidency has done to the American-Canadian alliance, and how Trump is pushing Canada into China’s arms. David and Premier Kenney also discuss how the failures to address immigration by liberal parties across the West have led to dangerous far-right populist movements.
Finally, David discusses The Imperialist, by Sara Jeannette Duncan, and how it can help us better understand what is being lost by Trump’s destruction of the relationship between America and Canada.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Jason Kenney, former premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, former Canadian minister of immigration, former Canadian minister of defense. My book this week will be a 1904 novel by a Canadian writer named Sara Jeannette Duncan, titled The Imperialist, which casts a reflective light on some of the themes of my conversation with Jason Kenney.
Before turning to either, some opening thoughts on an absolutely astonishing story reported by The Wall Street Journal on January 31. According to The Wall Street Journal, four days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as United States president, a United Arab Emirates businessman made a $500 million commitment to invest in one of [the] Trump family’s companies, his cryptocurrency company, a decision that resulted in a payment of $187 million to the Trump family up front and $31 million to the family of Steven Witkoff, the Middle East envoy. The investment, which amounted to $500 million over a period of the deal, made no apparent business sense. The company in which this astonishing half-a-billion-dollar investment was made, that company had almost no products, and its few revenue sources were outside the limit of the deal. It is impossible to understand how any of this could have made any business sense. But the businessman, who is a member of the royal family and a brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates, and who oversees not just his own enormous wealth but the very important state investment fund, committed this vast amount of money to these two families—in return for what?
A potential answer to that question emerged just two months after the $500 million deal. At that point, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration gave the UAE access to 500,000 a year extremely high-tech computer chips, chips that could help build one of the largest artificial-intelligence data centers in the world. This was a departure from the Biden administration’s approach, which allowed the United Arab Emirates a limited number of chips, due to concerns the chips could make their way to China. So there’s a big deal allowing the United Arab Emirates access to tightly held chips, coming so soon after a $500 million investment into a Trump family entity.
A spokesman for World Liberty told the Journal that President Trump and Steve Witkoff “had no involvement in the deal” and that “the deal didn’t grant either party involved any sort of access to government decision-making or influence over policy.” White House counsel also told The Wall Street Journal—and I am quoting again—“The President has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities”; that’s the end of that quote. Next quote: nd Witkoff “has not and does not participate in any official matters that could impact his financial interests.” This is an astonishing story, a disturbing story, a story with implications not only for U.S. public integrity but for United States national security.
I’m not gonna comment more on the story because the story is much discussed already. (Laughs.) You will have your own thoughts about its meaning and implications. I wanna talk about the feeling of helplessness that this story leaves behind. I think a lot of Americans read things like this and just say, What can we do? The Donald Trump administration, there’s story after story that seemingly attests to corruption on a scale never seen not just in American history, but in the history of any democratic country. You get big corruption, billion-dollar corruption, in authoritarian societies with unfree presses. But where the press is free, where the parliament or congress is open, normally, there is some restraint on this kind of behavior by high officials. But in the United States, over the past year and a bit of the second Trump administration, all the restraints seem to have broken down; there seem to be no rules at all.
The New York Times has estimated that the Trump family has made over $1 billion in this first year-plus of the Trump administration. The New Yorker has an update in which they estimate the Trump family’s stake at $4 billion. Whatever the actual number is, again, it is an astonishing sum never before seen in the history not just of the United States, but of any pure democracy, and such things are unimaginable, or have never happened before. And we’re left feeling, What can we do? And the thing I wanna stress here is that, while the laws are dormant, they are not dead. There are recourses that can be had—not immediately, because we have this broken Department of Justice and a supine Congress, but soon. There are relevant statutes that bear upon what seems to have happened here between the Trump family, the Witkoff families, and the United Arab Emirates.
Now, let me first remind you that the United States, it seems hard to believe, but it actually does have a law governing public corruption. It’s Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 201. And I’m going to read from the United States Department of Justice explainer of 201. This is on the United States Department of Justice website. It hasn’t been taken down yet. They’ve left it up. They may wanna take it down later, but I’m going to read some relevant passages from it to you now.
“Section 201 of Title 18 is entitled ‘Bribery of public officials and witnesses.’ The statute,” says the DOJ, “comprises two distinct offenses … and in common parlance only the first of these is true ‘bribery.’”
“The first offense, codified in section 201(b), prohibits the giving or accepting of anything of value to or by a public official, if the thing is given ‘with intent to influence’ an official act, or if it is received by the official ‘in return for being influenced.’”
“The second offense … concerns what are commonly known as ‘gratuities’ … Section 201(c) prohibits that same public official from accepting the same thing of value, if he does so ‘for or because of’ any official act, and prohibits anyone from giving any such thing to him for such a reason.”
Now, the Supreme Court has sharply limited the application of sections 201, both the section on bribery and the section on gratuities. But it remains against the law for someone, anyone, and a public official—and a Middle East envoy is also a public official—for anyone who is a public official—and a president is a public official—to give or do anything, any official act, in exchange for something of value. If that’s what’s happened here, that is a crime. It remains a crime. And it’s a crime that, even if the Trump administration chooses not to act on it today, has a statute of limitations of five years from the last act necessary to complete the crime. If some future Department of Justice, some future prosecutor, were to deem that payment unlawful or an effort to influence the behavior of the United States government, from the day that the last payment is due, there’s five years in which an action could be brought. It is not hopeless. The law is not dead; it is just dormant.
And meanwhile, there’s another legal wrinkle that I invite people—imagine that the United States will again have a more active Department of Justice and a more independent Congress—to bear in mind, which is the United Emirates officials who made this purchase, whatever its purpose—and, again, we’re not gonna use legal language here; we’re mindful that nothing has been proven, but the facts are suggestive—they are exposed to something even more formidable, which is, in 2016, the United States Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a measure called the Global Magnitsky [Human Rights Accountability] Act.
This act, named for a murdered Russian businessman, Sergei Magnitsky, gives the president, and the president alone, considerable power to act against non-U.S. entities and persons deemed to be active in global corruption. Under the Global Magnitsky Act, a future American president can take sanctions against any entity or any person—a businessman or any friend controlled by the businessman—and can impose the following: economic sanctions, including asset blocking and prohibitions on transactions. They can freeze any property held within U.S. jurisdiction and prohibit U.S. individuals or entities from entering into transactions with the designated person or entity. And they can impose visa restrictions to deny entry to the United States and revoke any already-issued visas to any person that the president of the United States, under the Global Magnitsky Act, by executive action, deems to have participated in significant global corruption. So there is a lot of exposure here. There are a lot of remedies at hand. There are tools. And the fact that those tools are not being used today does not mean that they cannot be used tomorrow.
Now, Trump and those around him understand the danger to them as well or better than I do or than you now do. That could be one of the reasons why Donald Trump is so panicky to ensure that, by any means necessary, he retains control of Congress, both houses, in 2026 and why he so covets a third term: because only by overthrowing the electoral system of the United States can he feel that he has security from some of the legal risks to which he might be exposed if the implications of these latest reports turn out to be valid and true. For Donald Trump, he may feel that his alternatives are power or prison. And for the rest of us, those feelings of Donald Trump should be a beacon to remind ourselves that the law is alive; the law matters, that things that you think of as shocking and outlandish and impossible and un-American, other people have thought about them before you and have taken measures to make sure that they don’t happen and that, if they do, they are punished.
Punishment for crime is not something that just happens to 5-year-old people who have overstayed their visas or who never had a visa in the first place. Punishment for crime is something that can happen to the most powerful people in the land. And indeed, it’s more called for against the most powerful than it is against the least powerful because it is the most powerful who are also the most dangerous. They have the greatest responsibility. They have the greatest visibility. They have the greatest position of trust. They have the least excuse for using their power to benefit and enrich themselves, and to plunder the Treasury, and to put American national security at risk.
Again, this is a news report. There is more to be learned. None of this has been proven in court. But it oughta be tested in court. And let’s hope that if the American people are allowed the right to make their voices heard freely and fairly in 2026 and 2028, it will be tested in court in due time and by the executive actions allowed by the Global Magnitsky Act.
And now my dialogue with Jason Kenney.
[Music]
Frum: Jason Kenney served as premier of the province of Alberta from 2019 through 2022, leading the province through the shock of the COVID pandemic. He held, previously, major offices in the federal Conservative cabinets of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, including as minister of citizenship and immigration and as minister of national defense.
This listing of jobs does not begin to do justice to Jason Kenney’s importance to Canadian politics over the past two decades. More than any other Canadian politician, Jason Kenney built the Canadian Conservatives into a truly multiethnic party, competitive among Canadians of every origin, whether South Asian, East Asian, Afro Caribbean, or from the traditional immigration sources in Europe.
Since leaving politics, Jason Kenney has worked as a corporate director and adviser, and a senior fellow at two Canadian think tanks: the free-market C. D. Howe Institute and Cardus, an institution that applies Christian teaching to industrial relations.
I’ve known Jason Kenney since his days as head of the Canadian [Taxpayers] Federation, a long, long time ago, in a very different world, and it’s a pleasure to welcome (Laughs.) Jason to The David Frum Show. Jason, thank you for joining me.
Jason Kenney: Great to be here, David.
Frum: So let’s start by talking about some very Alberta-specific things that have been much in the news recently, which is that the Trump administration seems to be trying to foment an Alberta secessionist movement as a preliminary to annexing either the province of Alberta solo or the entire country of Canada. Can you help the non-Canadians among us understand what’s going on here? Why would the Trump people be trying to break up Canada and grab a piece of it?
Kenney: Well, as you know, the annex Canada stuff started in December, after the last U.S. election, when [Trump] was visited by [then-Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago. And [he] apparently used this line, Fifty-first state, you’ll be the governor, as a joke, to which Trudeau responded, and he saw that he rumbled Canadians; it got a lot of attention. And I think it suddenly became a new squeeze toy for the president-elect. So he spent much of December and January of last year toying with this idea, to the point where a year ago, he was asked, Mr. President, would you use military force, as you have threatened to do with Panama and Greenland, to annex Canada and make it the 51st state? And he said, No, I don’t need to do that; I will just use economic force. And that became a pretty consistent rhetorical theme, which was then followed in February, March of last year with the imposition of prejudicial tariffs on Canada, treating us as though we were as large a source of narcotics and illegal migration as Mexico, which is, of course, patently absurd. And it’s been a very bumptious relationship ever since.
Concurrent with that, we’ve had an emerging—well, there’s been a marginal separatist movement in the province of Alberta for five decades, rooted in historical alienation but really amplified by the 10 years of Justin Trudeau’s premiership, which was really problematic for Alberta’s large oil-and-gas industry. And my successor, the current premier, has enabled, through a much more accessible citizens’ initiative referendum process, a referendum that looks likely to happen later this year. And so people in the Trump administration, and certainly MAGA influencers, are now toying with that: Perhaps if Canada is not willing to be annexed, Alberta is.
Now, Alberta’s always had a large history of American immigration. Southern Alberta was settled by farmers and ranchers from the upper Midwest. The oil industry was often populated by American professionals. And so there are closer connections, and in many cultural and economic ways, those connections are very durable. But the vast majority of Albertans have no interest in this, but some of these marginal separatist leaders have been paying visits to Washington and apparently meeting with Trump administration officials. That’s been confirmed now by the Financial Times. And [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent recently intimated that, If [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark Carney doesn’t watch his manners and mind his p’s and q’s, perhaps we’ll invite Alberta to be part of the United States.
So you see this kind of growing momentum. And I think it’s time for Prime Minister Carney, if he’s not already done so, to telegraph some very strong messages that this is one red line that cannot be crossed; it would result in significant sanctions. And I think we should start—and perhaps this is partly what Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech was about—start building a Denmark-style coalition, which was very effective in forcing Trump’s 180 on Greenland. I don’t think we should overheat this yet, but they need to know that if they actually play in this space and start making offers of debt forgiveness and lines of credit and all this nonsense, or actually offering prospective-state status for Canada, that that will be a bridge too far.
Frum: Let me just go a little slower through what you just said, because some of this may be a little insider-y for any non-Canadians listening. It’s when Trump and Bessent and others talk about annexing Alberta that there is a mechanism by which they could really make trouble. There is a scheduled referendum. The legal status of this referendum is very hazy; Quebec has had two referendums, and the Canadian Supreme Court has imposed very stringent conditions on whether those referendums would mean anything. But Alberta does have one. There is an opportunity to make real trouble if an American administration were minded to do it, and it sounds like this administration is, with a view to breaking up Canada, detaching Alberta, which is the most oil-wealthy part of Canada, and seizing it as an American Puerto Rico or other territory of some kind.
Kenney: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any realistic prospect of actually making Alberta a U.S. state. It would require, obviously, a constitutional amendment. And by the way, the sane Republicans would pretty quickly calculate that Alberta, even though it’s the most conservative province in Canada, would most likely send, reliably, two Democrat senators to Washington. So it actually doesn’t make sense in American partisan political terms.
But you’re right—Trump has often said he needs nothing from Canada; he wants nothing from us. And yet he’s always wanted to get Keystone XL built, the prospective enlarged pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Context, as you’ve said, is that Alberta has the third-largest proven and probable oil reserves in the world, 180 billion barrels of accessible crude reserves, and the third-largest natural gas reserves. We are by far the largest supplier of imported oil to the United States. Any given year, 60 to 65 percent of U.S. oil imports come from Alberta; that’s 10 times what you import from Saudi Arabia and five times from all of OPEC combined. And for all of the noise around Venezuela’s famous reserves, which, like Alberta’s, are very heavy and therefore the right kind of product for a lot of the U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, the truth is we have a well-developed industry. We are producing 6 million barrels a day, unlike Venezuela, at 800,000 a day, and given the technology and human capital in Canada, [it’s] much easier to increase that. So this notion that Venezuela is suddenly going to become the major source, I think, is a misdirect. If he was actually thinking in avaricious terms, as he tends to, Alberta would be an obvious target.
Frum: So a couple of points to amplify here: The United States, of course, is now by far the world’s largest producer of oil and gas; it is net-net totally self-sufficient in petroleum products. But the United States imports certain products from Canada, certain heavier grades of oil, to meet the needs of certain refineries, even though overall the United States is not an importer. And then it exports other things, so while it’s a net exporter, there’s a category of imports from Canada.
I often think, when people make this comparison between Canada and Venezuela, I think about the offer to an oil-industry executive. You wanna get more of this kind of heavy oil that comes from either Canada or Venezuela, so you have two places to put your net investment for your marginal return: one, a place with a long history (Laughs.) of confiscations, nationalizations, kidnappings, murders, guerrilla warfare, no electricity, in the jungle; or the other place, where you can stay at a Westin hotel overnight and drive out in perfect safety to the fields, where there are no murders, no kidnappings, (Laughs.) no guerrilla warfare, and lots of electricity.
Kenney: Exactly. I’ve often made the comparison with other sources of U.S. imports, which is you don’t have to park a U.S. naval fleet off the northwest coast of British Columbia to guarantee security of supply. So we’re the obvious partner. And, David, when I was premier, I actually helped to de-risk—that was, provide government financing and loan guarantees—to get the Keystone XL project done because it makes perfect sense for us to be selling more to the United States. It would be good for both parties. But Trump has had this bizarre contradiction where he says he doesn’t want anything from Canada, doesn’t need our energy; yet he’s wanted a Keystone XL. That would add upwards of a million barrels a day. Despite all of the rumbling from Trump, that would be a longer-term project; we should pursue it. But the point is that all of this, I think, in the back of his confusing mind—I am concerned, at least, and many others are, that if we do end up with a referendum on Alberta separation later this year, that that’s an invitation for a great deal of mischief from President Trump.
Frum: Well, the precedent here would be the 2015 referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, where malign Russian actors do seem to have played a very big role in trying to promote the breakup of the United Kingdom, with a view to making Scotland some kind of adversarial entity. As I understand it, the British submarine fleet is based in Scotland, so if Scotland were to withdraw from the United Kingdom, it would make it harder for Britain to be a nuclear power. And the Scottish referendum failed, but a lot of mischief was done, and now the United States seems interested in repeating this playbook against Canada, only with the United States in the role of [President Vladimir] Putin’s Russia.
Kenney: And the complicating factor is that some of the separatist leaders here have been quite clear that they actually prefer U.S. state status, as opposed to that of an independent nation, because the whole Alberta independence project is rooted in totally understandable frustration with Ottawa. Some of this is rooted in Canadian history. Alberta [and] our neighboring, resource-rich province Saskatchewan, which happens to be the largest source of potash in the world and the second-largest source of uranium, these two provinces were created as a bit of an afterthought in confederation and had a history of being sort of mercantilist outposts for central Canada, so that’s part of our history, amplified by the recent Trudeau government.
So people are using this as a kind of opportunity to express their frustration; that’s understandable.But the notion of turning Alberta into a landlocked statelet, where people would have to get a work permit to go and work in British Columbia or other provinces in Canada—Albertans are fundamentally patriotic. They’re happy to sing “O Canada” at the hockey games. They’ve migrated to the province from elsewhere in the country. Their kids have served in the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] or the military very often. So there’s a fundamental attachment to Canada. And yet the separatists, who are kind of confused in their ultimate goal—some of them are suggesting they can get a sweetheart deal from Donald Trump that will forgive our debts, give us some line of credit, facilitate our exit from the country. And for a fairly small portion of our population, that’s actually a seductive proposition.
Frum: Yeah. Let’s put this in the context of a larger U.S.-Canada relationship. Now, one of the things that’s so bizarre about the Trump era is, as you know and as I know, until Donald Trump, you could not get Americans to pay any attention to the U.S.-Canada relationship whatsoever. It was, Canada, friendly neighbor to the north. It could not be a more boring subject, because things just hummed along. I’ve given talks to audiences of Canadian officeholders, where they would say, What do we do to get more attention from the United States? And I’d always say, Why do you want that? If you have kids (Laughs.) and you’ve driven them [on] any long road trip in a car, you know there’s one kid in the corner who’s reading their comic book, not bothering anybody, and there’s another kid who’s kicking the mom’s seat.
Kenney: (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) You’d rather be the kid in the corner reading the comic book than kicking Mom’s seat. But now there is this enormous attention, and where does it come from? What is the possible basis for why Donald Trump has decided that Canada is, maybe after Denmark, America’s leading geopolitical problem that must be crushed by military force?
Kenney: No idea how it developed, because it wasn’t the case in his first term. It was never part of his public rhetoric. I think he barely ever mentioned Canada in his last campaign, in ’24. And a lot of people hypothesized that it was just that he was irritated by Justin Trudeau, but Trudeau’s long gone now. In fact, Trudeau’s exit was accelerated by all of these Trump threats. It sort of focused the mind in the Liberal Party and our politics more generally that we needed somebody capable of dealing with Trump and his threats. I don’t know why President Trump didn’t say, Look, I helped you Canadians get rid of this clown Trudeau. But he’s continued these erratic threats.
And most recently, for example, David, Prime Minister Carney welcomed Donald Trump’s invitation for Canada to diversify our trade relations and so went to Beijing, like most historic U.S. allies are doing right now, to repair relations with the People’s Republic of China and made a fairly limited tariff deal to lower Canadian tariffs on electric-vehicle imports in exchange for lowering Chinese tariffs on—or, effectively, a blockade on some Canadian ag exports. So Trump, when presented with this, said, Good for Carney. He should do this. He should make deals. I make deals; he should make deals. Then Carney gave his speech at Davos, which I thought was a fairly persuasive argument about how middle powers should work together to deal with this destabilizing threat. But I think what happened was Trump was furious at being upstaged by Prime Minister Carney at Davos and so immediately threatened 100 percent tariffs in response to Canada’s China deal.
So from day to day, we just don’t know where this is going. We have the renegotiation of USMCA [United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement] coming up this summer, a deal that Trump once called the greatest trade deal in world history, which Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade rep, and [Secretary of Commerce] Howard Lutnick have suggested they don’t need, they’re just going to tear up. For their second-largest trading partner—and Canada is the most important trading partner for 24 of the 50 United States; as I say, by far the largest source of energy; the only source of fertilizer for your farmers; totally integrated economies in many respects. And we are now being forced to do things we don’t want to do, like reengaging the PRC on a bunch of issues.
Frum: Okay, let me just underscore what happened with that PRC deal. So the Biden administration, I think—I forget the year, ’23 or ’24—wanted to put big tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and thought it would be much more effective if there were a united North American front on this issue. The North American electric-vehicle industry is disproportionately located in the United States. Canada signed up and imposed exactly the same tariff on Chinese vehicles that the United States did, at the American request. The Chinese delayed their retaliation for a while and then, very cunningly, took disproportionate revenge on Canada, recognizing Canada as the weaker link, who got less from the tariffs and were more exposed. They imposed penalties on Canadian agricultural experts that were very, very painful to Canada and that Canada absorbed as part of its alliance with the United States.
And when Donald Trump came along and Howard Lutnick, who seems to be the designated blabber of this administration, and said, We’re gonna take the entire automobile industry away from Canada and relocate the North American automobile industry entirely to the United States, Canadians naturally thought, Why should Canada suffer these agricultural punishments to protect a North American industry that the Americans are now proposing to take away from Canada? In that case, why not at least sell agricultural exports to China? And that was the origin of the deal, is Canada said, Canada will reduce its tariffs on Chinese EVs in exchange for some relief on Canadian agricultural exports to China. And this was a war that Canada did not start, Canada did not want, Canada volunteered to join, and that Canada took disproportionate pain for participating in.
Kenney: All of that’s correct. To be clear, you know I’m one of the original China hawks in Canadian politics, so I don’t like the deal. It has all sorts of add-ons. Of course, the Chinese insisted that it be framed as a “strategic partnership.” It includes strategic cooperation on policing, on media, lots of bizarre things—the kind of nastiness that the Chinese require if you want access to their market in the long run. I don’t like this.
And let me just say this, David: I think one of the great, perhaps accidental, achievements of the first Trump administration was his resetting the Western policy paradigm on China, something that the Biden administration continued and, in fact, amplified. And Canada, by the way, David, it’s not the first time we’ve been through this, having to pay a trade price with China for being loyal American allies. Several years ago, we, at the request of the United States Department of Justice, detained the daughter of the CEO of Huawei, who was charged in the U.S. with various kinds of fraud and embezzlement. And in response, the Chinese kidnapped a couple of our diplomats, detained them for years, and slammed an embargo on a bunch of our major Canadian exports—again, agricultural products.
So I think they’re entirely unreliable, and I keep telling Canadian exporters, If you think this is a reliable market, wait until [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] launches his planned invasion or blockade of Taiwan and we all have to stop exporting to them. So I think it’s very regrettable, but here’s the point: President Trump had an opportunity, I think, to double down on the new Western policy setting towards the PRC by creating a free-trade alliance against unfair Chinese trading practices, industrial espionage, political interference, territorial aggression, and all of that. Instead, he has inexplicably done the opposite by creating a rupture in the historic political and trade alliances of the United States, forcing Europe, Canada, and others to turn back towards China and reverse the progress that he had made in isolating China, to some extent, in his first administration. So I don’t know how these guys like Elbridge Colby at the Defense Department, these people who have given some veneer of intellectual respectability to Trump’s geopolitical strategy, feel when, in fact, he’s doing the opposite of their stated intent.
Frum: So the situation that President Trump inherited in 2025 was a lot of mood in Canada that said, We want to cooperate more closely with the United States for protection against a common threat. And what Carney’s trip to China represented was Canadians saying, or at least the important parts of Canada, including the prime minister and his government saying, We’ve decided that, of these two threats, the more immediately dangerous is the United States, not China anymore. That’s quite an achievement.
Kenney: It is, and we’re not the only ones—you’ve seen the train of European leaders beating a path to the door of Beijing recently. It’s so terribly unfortunate and counterproductive for the interests of the United States.
And by the way, Trump made his own tariff deal with them. He’s given them access to advanced Nvidia chips to help them catch up to the United States in the AI arms race. And he says he wants a megadeal—he admires Xi, and whether Xi invades Taiwan is up to Xi. So we’re watching this, saying, You’re gonna impose 100 percent tariffs on us for a minor sectoral tariff deal when you want a grand bargain with the same country. It’s very hard for us, like other U.S. allies, to unpack how to deal with all of this.
Frum: Well, let me ask you about your former portfolio: national defense. So Canada has been, admittedly, a defense laggard for a long time. That now seems to be changing. And there was a program, over many years, to make a major Canadian commitment to American airframes for defense of the skies over Canada and the Arctic. And that now is one of the potential casualties of the Trump-created crisis. Talk a little bit about what’s happening to the U.S.-Canada defense and especially to the F-35 fighter program.
Kenney: Well, first, some context: Canada, as you know, used to have a very robust post-war military—we had played an oversized role in the Second [World] War and in the first half of the Cold War. My dad was a Canadian fighter jet pilot in those days. We had a very robust Arctic defense through NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command]. But regrettably, since [Canadian Prime Minister] Pierre Trudeau’s administration, there’s been this drawdown in our defense. We, like the European countries, took a very big peace dividend and ended up averaging 1.5 percent defense expenditure on GDP for the past, let’s say, 25 years, although we did punch above our weight again in Afghanistan, demonstrating our reliability as an ally.
Now, credit where it’s due, Donald Trump’s been right about calling on his allies to pay their dues on alliance defense, and so Mark Carney has responded remarkably, with a commitment to go from roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent to 3.5 percent, with an outlined commitment to go above that. So we’re doing this huge defense enlargement. Predating that was this commitment to replace our fighter jet fleet. It was a long and protracted process that settled on the F-35, and almost all defense experts in Canada will agree it is the best platform for us, in part because of the interoperability with the U.S. and other allied F-35 fleets. So we’re committed to buying 88 of those. The first tranche of 16 will be arriving in the next 18 months. And that’s all good, but with the Trump threat, suddenly, we’re looking at our major defense supplier moving from being our greatest ally to, in some respects, hostile. And as you know, Trump has said, on the next-generation fighter, they’re going to ensure that foreign purchasers get a less-capable grade than the United States Air Force does. So we’re now wondering, Are we exposing ourselves to some kind of vulnerability, about which we are unaware, if our entire air force is dependent on American support, American parts, American political goodwill?
And so I think Mark Carney has, quite prudently, while proceeding with the initial tranche of the F-35 purchase, launched a review about our broader air force needs. And there is a view, which I think is not irrational, that perhaps we should purchase a smaller fleet of 35s and then look at a European platform, like the Gripen from Sweden, to complement that. Again, most defense hawks here want the full F-35 purchase. The argument is we could buy a lot more frames from the Swedes, which are, in some respects, more operable in the Arctic because they can take off short landing strips, gravel landing strips, and so forth. So there is an argument, and I think it’s worth having. It is enraging Trump’s ambassador in Ottawa, who is the most ineffective and unpopular U.S. ambassador, I think, in history here. But I think it’s only natural that we should at least take a look at this.
Frum: Yeah. By the way, how easy a job is it to be U.S. ambassador to Canada? How much does everybody like you and want to see you? How welcome are you [in] every business community? To screw that up, that takes a kind of perverse genius.
Kenney: Especially for this guy, [Pete] Hoekstra, who is a Dutch immigrant to the United States, whose family was liberated from the Nazis in Holland by the First Canadian Army in 1944.
Frum: Well, let’s talk about these airframes. I was in Norway at the beginning of last year, where there was a vigorous similar debate about what kind of frigate platform to buy. And there were a number of choices: There was an American choice, which was, by all accounts, the most capable but also the most expensive, and there were choices from other countries as well. And the Norwegians had been in advanced talks to purchase—they’re a Russian neighbor, they’ve had a lot of Russian aggression in their waters, they’re very wealthy because of their oil resources, and there was a lot of inclination to buy the American platform, the most expensive but the best. And after Trump made his comment about, We’re going to put a kill switch on U.S. equipment, the Norwegians flipped and realized, We don’t need the best frigate in the world. We’re not gonna fight the Americans. We need a frigate that’s better than the Russian frigate. And the British frigate is better than the Russian frigate, cheaper, and now more secure. And they ended by buying a fleet of British frigates rather than [American], not as a punitive measure, but because they could no longer trust the American product to be consistent with their self-defense and sovereignty.
Kenney: That’s a precise echo of the debate we’re having now on the Gripen. Look, as a former defense minister, all of the guys I worked with would want me to be unqualifiedly committed to going the full distance on the F-35 because of the capability of that platform. I understand it, but I do think it’s prudent to look at, For every incremental F-35, could we buy two or more Gripens that would be perfectly adequate for our needs, complementing a core F-35 fleet? It’s a debate worth having, but it’s only happening—it’s only happening—because of the instability that Trump has imposed in this relationship.
Frum: Let me ask you now about your other portfolio, citizenship and immigration, which in Canada is one of the most important portfolios in the government because Canada is such an immigration country and continues to be. You won’t say this, so let me say it for you: You were not just a minister; you were the leader of a comprehensive political transformation of the Conservative Party, where I can’t begin to imagine how many Lunar New Years, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, dedication ceremonies you went to and what a toll it took on you personally, psychically to do it, but—
Kenney: Yes, it’s true.
Frum: (Laughs.) And you learned greetings—
Kenney: My nickname was the “minister of curry in a hurry” because I would do as many as five curry banquets in a night. (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) And you’d record greetings in Vietnamese and in Punjabi and in Italian. And you did this while Canada was simultaneously expanding its immigration intake, but also upping the quality in terms of human skills of the immigrants it took.
Now, that was a while ago. Since then, we’ve had the Syrian civil war, which sent a lot of refugees into Europe in ways that have been very destabilizing to European politics. We’ve had the Brexit referendum, where Britain made, in my opinion, the self-harming choice to leave the European Union, in part because of fear of the consequences of the migration into Europe of the refugees that came in 2015, or the so-called refugees. And now we’ve had two terms of Trump. You’re one of the leaders of Canadian intellectual, capital-C and lowercase-c, conservatism. How should conservatives in Canada and elsewhere—in the United States, in Britain, in the West—think about immigration now? And you speak as someone with this history of being a leading advocate of immigration. How does it look to you today in light of the past decade of developments?
Kenney: Well, let me say that people like Reihan Salam at the Manhattan Institute and scholars around the world have said that Canada’s Harper-era immigration policy was really a model of immigration policy for a developed country. In the late ’60s, Canada developed the point system, which was essentially a human-capital model, to select economic immigrants based on an analysis of their language ability, education, adaptability, their age— more points for younger immigrants—etc. This did significantly change the composition of our immigration, from post-war, it was more typically blue-collar Europeans, to white-collar people from the developing world became the predominant economic immigrants.
And it worked very well, but it was starting to—there were problems in it. There were integrity issues, large numbers of fake asylum claims, human smuggling, lots of kinds of fraud, and a degrading of the system. So I went through—you’re absolutely right—several years of a rigorous reform, which really, I think, created an optimal system. We had robust but manageable levels. On a population of 33 million, we were admitting about a quarter of a million people a year. And there was a broad public consensus: 80 percent support. Canada was the only developed democracy, with the possible exception of Australia, which had broad cross-partisan support for immigration generally.
And then, unfortunately, Justin Trudeau, with his typical liberal naivete, which was given a kind of veneer of intellectual respectability by business-interest groups, said, Canada needs a population of 100 million as soon as possible—pressure from the business community, as always, for more access to foreign labor. A bunch of these pressures had Canada quadrupling, quintupling intake levels: huge intake of low-skilled guest workers, huge intake of poorly qualified foreign students at dodgy diploma mills. And then, concurrently, Trudeau basically invited anybody from the United States who had a failed asylum claim to come up here. That’s cratered the asylum system. And all of this in the face of a housing crisis, a crisis in access to health care and other public services, and stagnating incomes for people—as you’ve often pointed out, David, high levels of sustained, low-skilled immigration inevitably reduce per-capita GDP, and Canada has been on a multiyear decline in per-capita GDP. All of this has accelerated our reduction in competitiveness and productivity. I think it’s perhaps the worst legacy of the Trudeau decade.
And so it’s really regrettable, and now we have seen, quite predictably, that broad pro-immigration consensus—which I was always mindful that it wasn’t something we could take for granted; we had to demonstrate that immigration was a net positive for the country—that has now frayed, and public support for immigration has turned upside down. So the Carney government is trying to get some of this back on track. But it is a concern, and it’s a reminder that even a model system with broad support is conditional and it can be upended overnight.
Frum: So you may be a little reluctant to speak about the American context, but let me ask an American question, and you take it where you wanna go.
So under President [Joe] Biden, the American asylum system just collapsed. A system that was designed to welcome Anne Frank’s family from Germany, Hungarians fleeing the Soviet crackdown in 1956, that’s what the asylum system is for. And it became, basically, a backup immigration system for those who had no other way to get into the United States, and hundreds of thousands of people came into the United States until Biden’s last year, when he course-corrected. And this doesn’t seem to have been so much a policy as the absence of a policy, driven by veto-wielders who were important to the Biden coalition.
So this does tremendous damage to Biden’s standing, and it helps to reelect Donald Trump in 2024. And now we have paramilitaries (Laughs.) running the streets of Minneapolis and American citizens being gunned down by poorly trained Border Patrol, who have no business being inside an American city. And it seems like there has been this veering from one crazy extreme to an even crazier and more murderous extreme on the other hand. What should politicians and people who are trying to be prudent, who lean conservative—how should they think about any of this?
Kenney: It is tragic, and I do think you’re right that Biden and the left of the Democrat Party, who dominated his domestic policy agenda, bear a lot of the burden for what’s happened in the United States. I’ll remind you that people like Marco Rubio tried to get a comprehensive immigration settlement in the United States, which made a lot of sense—which was basically what [President Ronald] Reagan did. But I recall meeting with Janet Napolitano when she was secretary of homeland security about cooperating on stopping illegal border crossings from the U.S. into Canada. I was looking for an agreement to help us…send back, illegal border crossers. And she said, Look, we can’t do anything until we have comprehensive agreement in Congress, which is, I don’t think—is that at all possible in the United States, David? Is it at all possible? I can’t see, even post-Trump, anybody winning a Republican primary if they have any commitment to regularize long-standing, law-abiding overstayers in the United States. So I think the United States is locked into a permanent catastrophe when it comes to mismanaging immigration.
Frum: But in all the democratic countries, or almost all—in Britain, in Germany, in France—you have parties of the far right that are running on programs of xenophobia, xenophobia that in the United States has turned violent and deadly, and parties of the left that are not able to articulate, What would border security look like in a context of the need for human beings? It looks like 2025 will be the first year since the first American census in 1790 when the population of the United States shrinks. Birth rates in almost every developed country—maybe Israel is the exception—are below replacement, so simply to keep your population stable, you need to bring in people. And of course, you need skills and different human capacities, not all of which occur spontaneously in every country on its own. And there are people who wanna move, which if you want to see human beings be free, if human beings wanna move, you’ll wanna start with, Well, they should be able to if they want to.
So you need to control the borders. You need security. You need not to have police states inside the United States. How do we think about this? What’s the answer? If someone from the moderate side of American politics were to call you and say, What should a post-Trump American immigration policy look like?, what should it look like?
Kenney: Well, the starting point has to be systems characterized by integrity, which is to say with minimal space for illegally regular migration, smuggling, trafficking, mass border crossings. You’re quite right: That means significant reform of our asylum systems. The principal driver of the rise in xenophobic anti-immigrant politics has been large-scale illegal migration. You cannot sustain broad public support for, or demonstrate the net benefits of, regulated immigration if your vast majority of migrants are people who just crash your borders, in the case of Europe, primarily young military-aged men, coming from problematic source countries with a history of violence and with very poor integration results—let’s be honest. The people who are voting AfD [Alternative for Democracy] and for the Le Pens and for [U.K. politician] Nigel Farage, they are observing things happening in their communities that are unpleasant, that are disruptive of social cohesion. It’s not xenophobic or racist to note that. It’s necessary for mainstream politicians to be serious about dealing with those challenges, as, for example, the Aussies were, very effectively, in stopping illegal marine migration and, as I would argue, we were in the Harper government in stopping some of this.
So I think a shared commitment, left to right—like the Danish government, a social-democratic government, has been very hardheaded about these things and has avoided the emergence of a xenophobic alt-right. So I think, from the center left to the center right, we need to be a little more hardheaded and a little less softhearted when it comes to those issues.
Secondly, maximizing human capital when it comes to the selection of economic immigrants so you get more bang for the economic buck from the newcomers that you welcome. If immigration is nothing but a tool for large businesses to commodify labor and to, consequently, suppress wage levels for lower-skilled workers, then, again, you’re undermining the economic case for immigration. That means we’re all going to have to, per the Japanese, invest more in automation and coping with shrinking populations. That, I think, is inevitable.
Frum: And at the same time, a rule of law governing the immigration-enforcement apparatus within a country, because you can’t have these paramilitary forces roaming the streets of cities masked.
Kenney: Of course you can’t. But on the other hand, you can’t be overly sentimental about this either, David, if you’re gonna have a system with integrity. In the case of Canada, for example, our version of ICE, the Canada Border Services Agency, is resourced and they only do about 13,000 removals a year. Because of the overhang from the Trudeau catastrophe in mismanaging the system, we probably have 3 million, going on 4 million people who are falling out of status who are now here illegally, and that population is going to keep growing. If you don’t deal with it, what’s the point of having an orderly system?
Frum: A more legal process, a warm welcome, and the rule of law.
Kenney: It’s not mysterious what we need to do.
Frum: As you see the rise of these xenophobic parties, is there any space for the kind of politics that you’re talking about?
Kenney: Right now, it’s hard to conceive of that, isn’t it? You see this huge momentum from the august British Tories, the most successful party in the history of the democratic world, towards reform, driven largely by these issues; this momentum from the Aussie Liberals to One Nation. Canada, David, is perhaps one of the only major democracies where we do not see—yet—the rise of that kind of xenophobic politics.
And I would like to say to my friends on the Canadian left, who are sometimes hysterical about the populism of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre—look, I think his populism is largely stylistic. It’s basically focusing on the concerns of ordinary working people. Pierre Poilievre’s populism is, Let’s focus on issues like the cost of living, the cost of food, and lock up really bad, violent repeat criminals. And let’s keep immigration levels at a manageable level, where we can properly integrate people. That’s Pierre Poilievre’s populism. If you don’t like that populism, then take a look at what’s happening in the U.K., Australia, Germany, France, and elsewhere. We have a party like that, which Mr. Poilievre has been very effective at pushing out to the margins—the People’s Party of Canada—at, like, 1 or 2 percent in the polls. So again, if you don’t like this kind of mainstream fusion of center-right conservatism and sort of stylistic populism that Mr. Poilievre represents, then you’re gonna get something a hell of a lot more problematic in our politics. So I’m grateful to live in a country where we still, despite the disaster of the Trudeau years, have something more like a mainstream center-right conservative consensus in Canadian conservative politics.
Frum: And let me end with this last thought. There has been now a 40-year consensus in Canada in favor of stronger U.S.-Canadian ties. At the beginning, it was quite controversial, but it’s become a position that is held by both of the two big parties and broadly by people across the Canadian political spectrum. That was true from the middle 1980s until the middle 2010s—warmer, closer integration on everything from trade to national security to food and energy and environment. And this is now in jeopardy because of actions by the Trump administration. And the reactions that are being seen in Canada—much as the present U.S. ambassador to Canada blames Canada for flinching every time it gets slapped, let’s not overlook who’s doing the slapping and why the flinching is happening.
Kenney: Yeah, I will confess I’m quite annoyed with many on the Canadian right, who are reflexively blaming Canada, Carney, whatever, for the disrepair of the relationship when it’s entirely the doing of the United States. There is sort of an element on the right of Canadian politics who, actually, in some bizarre sense, admire Trump and his disruptive—because he “owns the libs” and he’s fighting “woke.” And Trudeau built up such animosity that there’s, unfortunately, now a reflex for, as I say, some on the right to blame Canada for all of this, which I think is absurd.
Look, we’re stepping up to our responsibilities on defense in a very significant way. We have been the most important trade ally of the United States for decades. We are the largest source of energy, of fertilizers. We’re natural partners, and we’re prepared to make pragmatic deals with Donald Trump to respond to rational elements of his agenda. So hopefully, saner heads will prevail after he loses at the Supreme Court, I think, on the emergency tariffs and perhaps is chastened at the midterms. Perhaps we can finally get back to some semblance of normalcy in this critical and historic relationship.
Frum: Jason Kenney, thank you so much for joining me today.
Kenney: Thank you, David.
Frum: Bye-bye.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Jason Kenney for joining me today on The David Frum [Show]. Now, as mentioned, my book this week is a 1904 novel by a writer named Sara Jeannette Duncan, titled The Imperialist. Many of the books I’ve discussed on this program—Jane Eyre, Frankenstein—have been famous classics. I would venture a pretty firm guess that very, very few people who [are] watching or listening to this program have ever read or even heard of the novel The Imperialist, by Sara Jeannette Duncan. But I read it as a young man, it made a big impression on me, and I wanna talk about it today because I think it’s very relevant to my discussion just now with Jason.
Sara Jeannette Duncan was a Canadian-born writer who wrote many, many novels, most of which I have not read, many of them set in India, the country where she settled in after marrying a British civil servant who was responsible for the administration of British rule in India. She wrote one novel about her native Canada, and that is this book, The Imperialist.
Now, the phrase the imperialist today conjures up images of brutality and exploitation. But in 1904, it was a word laden with some irony, but a great deal of idealism. Here’s the story. The story concerns a young man named Lorne Murchison, the son of Scottish immigrants to Canada. He lives in the fictional small town of Elgin, Ontario. And he becomes interested in politics. He makes a trip to Britain, his first, the home that his parents came from, and is inspired by a vision of the grandeur and beauty of the possibilities of a united British empire.
Now, this was a topic much on the minds of people in Britain and the British dominions at the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th. Sometime in the late 19th century, the economy of the islands of Great Britain was overtaken in size by the United States and Imperial Germany.
But the economy of the British empire as a whole—Britain plus Ireland plus Canada plus Australia plus New Zealand plus South Africa plus India plus the other British dominions and overseas colonies—that entity remained the world’s largest economic unit until during the First World War. And many in that unit were captivated by the idea, What if this economic unit could also become some kind of strategic unit? And they are captivated by a vision of an imperial federation, with a parliament in London, where Britain would be an important partner, but just one, and where Canada and the other dominions would have representation. For Canadians, this was an especially exciting idea because it offered the possibility for Canada to be less vulnerable to its American neighbor and to achieve, with the other countries of the British imperial system, some kind of collective power that Canada on its own lacked.
The novel is not a political treatise. It’s actually really more a study of small-town life, with many ironic comments about class divisions and the sharp ethnic divide between people who came from England and people who came from Scotland; people who worshipped in Anglican and Methodist churches on the one hand, and people who worshipped in Presbyterian churches on the other. And that will be a very particular treat. But this vision of Canadians wrestling with their place in the world, I don’t know that it’s ever been dealt with better in literature than by this one book, written now more than 100 years ago.
And it captured that Canada has long wrestled with this question of, Was Canada to be a country unto itself, small as it was, or was it to be part of something bigger? And again and again and again, Canadians have been attracted by the vision of being part of something bigger—whether it was the British empire before the First World War or before the Second World War, whether it was some kind of transatlantic community of nations, whether it was part of some kind of North American free-trade zone. This has been an idea that has really spoken to not just the practical, but the romantic element of the Canadian mind. And this is an ideal and a vision that has really taken a tremendous pummeling (Laughs.) during the Donald Trump years. And what Americans are hearing from their Canadian friends is not just a shock to Canadians’ economic self-interest, although that’s very real, but a puncturing of a kind of pan-national dream that expressed itself at one point through imperialism and at other points in other ways.
I remember, during the great debate in the middle of the 1980s over the free-trade agreement with the United States, my wife and I were newly married, and we were very engaged in this debate, and both of us were strongly in favor of the free-trade agreement with the United States. At that time, much of the opposition to the agreement came from the literary and artistic community in Canada. And there were many, many statements and open letters and signatories on statements by writers and artists who were against the free-trade agreement. So Danielle and I and some friends organized a signature of writers and artists who were in favor of the agreement, and we put together a very impressive list, and there was an open letter published in the newspapers. And it was to Danielle that fell the job of recruiting the signature of Mavis Gallant, the great writer of Canadian short stories, then living in Paris, and Danielle spoke to her in Paris.
And Mavis Gallant recounted to her a conversation that she had had with one of the leading opponents of the free-trade agreement. I won’t mention him because he’s still alive—I won’t mention the name, but his quote struck me as really quite incisive and profound. He said, What Canada is debating in this choice is whether Canada wants to be a big small country or a small big country. And he saw himself and his fellow opponents of the agreement as advocating being a big small country, kind of a greater Belgium, and those on the other side as wanting Canada to be a small big country, a kind of lesser France or a lesser Britain. And I thought that was a very profound and true insight. And Canadians did find, in their partnership with the United States that has been so intimate since the middle of the 1980s, a way to be a small big country. And Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada’s continued national existence have really changed the grammar and have re-empowered those who, as this incisive opponent of the agreement said, thought of Canada as being instead a big small country.
The future is quite dark for the North American relationship. I think there are people now in their 20s who will carry the memory of the Donald Trump administration with them to the end of the present century and maybe even beyond that. And to understand what has been lost, no one voiced it better than Sara Jeannette Duncan in 1904 in her novel The Imperialist. It’s still in print if you wanna take a look.
Thanks so much to Jason Kenney for joining me today. Thanks to all of you for listening and watching The David Frum [Show]. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. Follow me on social media, @DavidFrum on Instagram and X (Twitter). Thanks so much for joining. See you next week on The David Frum [Show].
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