Colin Smith

Smith is using a recognizable technique. Propaganda analysts identified it in the 1930s and called it “transfer”: take the emotional charge already attached to one thing and carry it over to another by associating the two. Trump is a foreign president attacking Canada’s economy, threatening key Canadian industries and talking openly about annexation. Trudeau was Canada’s elected prime minister, and he left office eighteen months ago. Smith is now asking Ontarians and Quebecers, in the middle of an active attack on their livelihoods, to attenuate their anger about Trump by dredging up legacy resentment about a former PM. Her framing is profoundly cynical. Only Smith could try and disguise a deliberate and manipulative redirection of anger as an appeal for empathy. Her sequence: exploit resentment, blur unlike things together, be unnecessarily divisive at the exact moment solidarity is worth most. The central move is to manufacture an internal enemy while an external one threatens us. The effect is to weaken one of Canada’s strongest assets in confronting Trump: a united national front. Smith talks about others' anger while she is the one who is now stoking it on purpose (to divide Canadians rather than directed at the outrageous American tariffs). After the sad spectacle of Smith's self-serving communication and weak leadership this week, the more justified anger in Alberta may be directed at a premier whose instinct, when Canada is attacked by a foreign power, is to gratuitously revive old regional resentments and signal more sympathy for the aggressor than solidarity with her own country.