No choice for Canadian voters when it comes to sending billions to Ukraine

Say what you will about Donald Trump — he knows how to drum up publicity. He's even managed to interest Americans in Canada’s upcoming federal election, now less than a week away.

The president's influence on the contest was all but guaranteed last month, when he made good on his threats to levy a 25% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum — with further duties on lumber and pharmaceuticals a possibility.

Despite his ostensible Canada-first outlook, Pierre Poilievre has been in lockstep with the Liberal government policy on Ukraine for over three years.

Prior to this movie, Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party was strongly favored to unseat the reigning Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau successor Mark Carney.

Not so today.

Agreeing to agree

The Liberals have benefited from a surge of Canadian antipathy toward Trump, to the extent that they now seem to be running more against the American president than the opposition Conservative Party — something that the American media has not failed to notice. For his part, Trump has actually endorsed Carney.

With the April 28 election looming, what has become a two-party race between Liberals and Conservatives remains close.

While the vote may serve as a referendum on Trump's economic policy, another issue has proven depressingly uncontroversial: support for Ukraine. For all of their differences, Canada's four major political parties all share a turgid and demented determination to continue to pour billions of dollars into the black hole of Kyiv.

This despite Trump’s repeated pledge to end the Russia-Ukraine war. While saying he could do it in a mere 24 hours may have been typical Trumpian hyperbole, it's clear that securing peace remains a priority for the president.

Biden's folly

One need only look at what happened under the previous administration to understand why. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a regular visitor to the Biden White House, always clad in his odd mixture of combat gear and activewear — and never leaving empty handed.

The engagement of U.S. and NATO military personnel alongside Ukrainian soldiers, as well as the use of American and British missiles to strike the Russian heartland, brought America perilously close to nuclear war with Russia. Seeing the horrible potential for a third world war, both Trump and then-Senator JD Vance urged caution and encouraged peace.

Incredibly, Canada seems not to have taken the hint.

Alone and outgunned

Even as Trump slowly but surely extricates the U.S. from supporting Ukraine and distances itself from NATO members who delusionally believe they can either take on Russia in a conventional war or somehow survive a nuclear one, Canadian political leaders talk about going it alone against Russia without America.

This is beyond ludicrous. Canada does not have a single operational tank left after giving all of its working Leopard models to Ukraine. It has yet to replenished the vast quantities of armaments it has given Ukraine; in fact, it is unable to do so. The U.K.’s military is also a shell of what it was, say, in 1982, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went to war over the Falkland Islands.

Besides, the war is effectively over. Ukraine cannot continue to furnish more troops for the battlefield even if it continues to abduct recruits from the streets and bars. Anyone who advocates the continuation of the war is, knowingly or not, arguing for the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainians. It is a consummation that might have already occurred.

Not up for debate?

Canadians should demand to know why all four party leaders at the English-language leaders’ debate in Montreal last Thursday stood foursquare behind that policy.

Yes, such painful pandering should be expected from Carney, as well as Bloc Quebecois (separatist) chief Yves-Francois Blanchet and New Democratic Party boss Jagmeet Singh. But Poilievre?

Despite his ostensible Canada-first outlook, the politician has been in lockstep with the Liberal government policy on Ukraine for over three years.

When asked how a Conservative government would respond to Zelenskyy’s continued demands for money and armaments, Poilievre responded, “I believe we should continue to support Ukraine. Our party supported donating missiles that the Canadian military was decommissioning. We supported funds and other armaments to back the Ukrainians in the defense of their sovereignty.”

Knowing full well how unpopular this view is with his conservative base, Poilievre quickly tried to change the subject, emphasizing the need “to rebuild our own Canadian military, because the Russians want to make incursions into our waters."

"We'll be buying four massive Arctic ice breakers," Poilievre continued. "I'll be opening the first Arctic base since the Cold War in Canada, CFB, Iqaluit.”

Fleshing it out

That wasn’t good enough for the debate moderator, who pressed Poilievre to “put a little more flesh on the bone of what you think Canada could do for Ukraine.” His response:

My answer is that we should continue to support Ukraine. We don't need to follow the Americans in everything they do when they're wrong, then we will stand on our own and with other allies and with respect to Ukraine, that includes support with intelligence equipment, armaments, but it also includes defunding Putin. Right now, Vladimir Putin has a monopoly on the European energy market because, frankly, the liberals blocked exports of Canadian natural gas off the Atlantic coast. They blocked multiple projects. I would rapidly approve those projects on national security grounds, so that we can, we can actually ship Canadian natural gas over to Europe, break European dependence on Putin, defund the war, and turn dollars for dictators back into paychecks for our people.

Nice try, but it still adds up to flaky policy based on a perceived need to appease the Ukrainian-Canadian vote that is preponderant in many key constituencies across Canada — a vote that generally goes to the Liberals.

Poilievre's words may also alienate Conservatives to the point that they decide not to vote at all — or to give their vote to the one Canadian party that opposes aid to Ukraine: Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada.

Maxime effort

People's Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier campaigns in Edmonton April 18. NurPhoto/Getty Images

A libertarian alternative that has fielded candidates in every Canadian riding and could actually capture one or two this election, the PPC lacked the 5% share of national voters necessary to participate in the debate.

Nevertheless, Bernier continues to speak for all Canadians fed up with their country's involvement in this endless and expensive quagmire.

As he told Align:

The war in Ukraine is not a conflict between good and evil, or autocracy versus democracy. It’s a longstanding conflict over border territories between these two countries that has been amplified and turned into a proxy war by NATO and the imperialist warmongers in Washington and other western capitals.

It doesn’t concern Canada and we should have nothing to do with it. Russia is not our enemy. The only reason Canada is so involved is that the establishment parties are pandering to Canadians of Ukrainian descent.

It's a message that deserves a wider hearing and could resonate with Canadians fed up with the endless and expensive quagmire.