You may want to sit down, because I’m about to give praise to Pierre Poilievre for this bit of press conference.
First of all, because he didn’t use his time in front of the cameras to call people names or throw cheap shots. As leader of the opposition, Poilievre’s job is to oppose and find faults with the government. Even if he has to exaggerate to find them. We’ll get to that in a minute. But Poilievre is right to point out that Prime Minister Mark Carney promised elbows up and dollar-for-dollar retaliation and appears to have climbed down from both. And I freaking love the line about how his elbows appear to have “mysteriously gone missing.” It’s a complete sentence, for one thing. It’s also on the witty side, using ninth-grade conjugation. I knew he wasn’t as dumb as he pretended to be! Praise be!
Here’s the thing though. It’s entirely possible that the time for elbows up is gone and that what’s needed is a different kind of strategy. Let’s run through Brigitte’s Fighting Scenario and Strategic Trade War Games because why not.
First of all, I never understood the elbows up thing because I don’t hockey. What I think it means is that when you’re in the corners of the oblong ice rink (there’s another mystery for you; what the geometric hell?), you bang your opponent into the boards while your elbows are “accidentally” up which results in a big ouchie and possibly a concussion too, if your accidentally high elbows know what part of the noggin to aim for.
Maybe I’m wrong — and with y’all as my reading crowd I’m sure to hear about it if I am — but elbows up means fighting dirty. Which is sometimes needed, don’t get me wrong. But the problem with relying only on one fighting strategy is that your opponent gets used to it, adapts to it and then it ceases to work. That’s why good fighters have more than one strategy.
Also! Importantly! You don’t telegraph all your strategies because what works even better than strategy in a fight is surprise.





I won a bunch of competitive karate sparring matches including two world titles by surprising my opponents. I was also a wicked defensive fighter. I would lure them into thinking they had a shot and when they took it, I would nail them in the chin (or the solar plexus) with a hard defensive side kick. It didn’t take many of those to make them hesitate to come at me. I won by taking away their urge to score first.
Multinational trade relationships aren’t karate sparring matches. For one thing, there are no referees. And you have to worry about collateral damage to entire economies.
I’m not here to spin for the Liberals. They have enough people out there doing that. But I want to say that in a contest between the leaders of Canada and the United States, I don’t think Carney’s the fool.
You don’t have to bleed Liberal red to grant that the PM is a smart and knowledgeable man doing his utmost to get the best solution for Canada against a chaotic and economically illiterate yahoo who’s using trade wars to distract people from the Epstein issue. Trump doesn’t give a single shit who his tactics hurt. I don’t know Mark Carney personally but I think we can all agree he cares about that more than Trump does.
I know he doesn’t listen to me (he’d be in another place if he did), but Pierre Poilievre should totally continue making the kinds of points he did in that press conference and push for results instead of calling people childish names or inventing straw men like a ban on cars or making a case out of a TERF-sympathetic nurse (no, I don’t want to explain) who really should just get a fucking clue already.
I don’t know what Mark Carney is plotting any more than you do. I do trust him to be working hard at it with the best minds in the country helping him navigate this mess. I also do know that Pierre Poilievre wouldn’t be doing better against Donald Trump. It’s not the sparring match I want, but it’s the one I’m stuck with.
Do elbows need to come down sometimes to fight efficiently? Yeah, probably. I don’t have the perfect answer but I believe discussing these things properly like Poilievre just did is the right way forward.
On a completely different note, I wrote in the Ottawa Citizen about locally owned and independent businesses. This isn’t against chains and impersonal conglomerates, as much as it is a tribute to small business owners who work hard to make something unique.
I am perfectly aware that chain outlets are often owned and operated by local, small business people. In fact that’s the case with the Baskin-Robbins franchise owners. They employ local people, too. It’s all good. In a city the size of Ottawa, we benefit from a mix of … well, a lot of things.