What The U.S. Midterm Results Mean For Canada

The Democratic Party swept the U.S. midterms, winning a majority in both the House and the Senate, known together as Congress. Democrats even won seats in typically Republican states like Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia. This means the Democrats will have control of Congress and the ability to check the power of President Donald Trump during the last two years of his presidency. And because the U.S. is such an influential country, these changes in government could have big impacts on the rest of the world. We've seen this directly through the tariffs and the trade war. But even with this transfer of power, change can be slow. And Trump has already shown his penchant for bypassing Congress with the use of executive orders. So today, Doug Saunders is on the show. He's an international affairs columnist for The Globe. He's here to tell us what we could see shift in U.S. foreign policy and how it all might affect Canada. I'm Manika Ramen Welms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Doug, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Manika. Good to be with you. So you and I are both in Toronto. We're following the midterms here from Canada. What was your reaction to these results? Well, I think along with almost everybody in the world, it was a relief to see the United States no longer controlled by one party in all major branches of government that has taken a hostile turn toward places like Canada. Okay, so a big shift is what you're noticing, what a lot of people noticed here. I want to look at how this new Democratic-controlled Congress might affect certain policy areas. I think the big one, of course, on people's minds is trade. Could we see a shift in America's trade policy, specifically, of course, the tariffs and the trade war against Canada? Yes, we could, but paradoxically... It's possible that in 2027 and 2028, things could get even worse for Canada as a consequence of this Democratic Party wave in Congress. Worse for Canada? OK, how? Well, that line of thinking, which a number of informed observers in the United States think is likely. holds that foreign policy, including trade and warfare and things like that, is one of the few areas where the president can act largely unrestrained by Congress. Congress has very limited powers to limit what he does. They can limit paying for what he does, but things like trade wars don't cost him anything. And this line of thinking holds that Donald Trump is going to be embittered... By his loss of Republicans in Congress and will lash out at his perceived enemies, which includes Canada and on the trade front and and Iran on the military front. I don't know. And it might include siding with people like Russian President Vladimir Putin even more. But anyway, it could be two years of... a president who's gelded in domestic areas, lashing out internationally. And there are not that many things Congress could do about it. Not nothing. And it's worth getting into that. But so we should keep in mind that what's arguably good for Americans might not necessarily be good for the rest of the world because of this. strange separation of powers they have in the United States. Okay, this is an important distinction here, what you're highlighting here, Doug. What power does Congress have? When we're talking about this trade war, the tariffs that are on a range of countries, of course, including Canada, does Congress have any power to ratchet some of these back? Well, it's a matter of constitutional debate in the United States. But things like treaties are... solely the purview of the executive branch, that is the president. Now, there have been Supreme Court rulings which have severely limited President Trump's ability to unilaterally impose punitive sanctions or tariffs for no reason. So the president has the ability to do it under certain circumstances where there's an imminent threat or something like that to the United States. And he's used... All sorts of convoluted legal and constitutional arguments to claim that his tariffs are things that he can just do. The Supreme Court has knocked down a lot of these very arbitrary tariffs, but there are still some that are in place, including some against Canada, that he does have the power to do. He also has the power. Largely to declare war and to engage in war, there are congressional checks and balances, but those have largely been overridden by presidents over the last many decades, and he's certainly no exception. We should keep in mind that the Republican-dominated Congress, which is going to remain in office until the end of 2026, It wasn't always happy with President Trump's international dealings. Um, it, it. Certainly its members didn't like the punitive tariffs against Canada and the threats to Canada's sovereignty, but even more, they didn't like the war on Iran and the very high gas prices that resulted from that and so on. And over this past summer, Congress passed a resolution outlawing the war, or at least telling the president to withdraw American troops from the area around Iran. And that didn't work. You need a very large majority in Congress to pass anything binding on that. Even the Republicans didn't have that. And even though a lot of Democrats joined them them in in this, the president's office basically argued when it started bombing Iran again shortly after this resolution, that that was a new war and wasn't subject to to that resolution. It shows how difficult it can be for Congress, even to use its powers to to stop an active war. Okay, so Doug, you're already saying that, you know, with Congress, even when it was Republican held, and trying to do things to curtail Trump's power, it wasn't even being effective at that stage. So with this change with the Democratic controlled Congress, is there going to be anything that they can do now that that could be effective? There are some small things that we can get into that, but the big things, like overturning tariffs and stopping wars and things like that, one problem is that they can pass any resolution or law they want, and the president can veto it. And to overcome the presidential veto of any bill that comes out of both houses of Congress, you need two-thirds majorities in both houses. Now, the Democrats have quite a robust majority in the House of Representatives, but it's not close to two-thirds. And in the Senate, it's just slightly above 50-50. They would need, in other words, a lot of Republicans. to join them in anything censoring the president. It's not impossible, but it would need to be a pretty mild piece of legislation to get those two-thirds majorities. What about money, Doug? Because Congress does control funding, right? So couldn't Congress maybe just cut funding for the war and have an effect that way? Yeah, that is certainly an area. Um, where it could exercise power. I mean, tariffs, no, those are just resolutions, uh, and so on. For any military action, you need funding. Thank Congress controls the purse strings. Now, the way it works in the United States is the new Democratic Congress won't come into office until the beginning of 2027. you So there'll be about two months with the Republicans in power. Certainly, the lame duck Republican Congress very could authorize major spending bills to fund To fund the war, to fund... much. You know, aid to foreign countries, whatever it wants to do, and it would be. Probably not until almost 2028 before the Democratic Congress could do anything about that. There's reason to be skeptical about that, though, because one thing about the Republican majority Congress that's existed under President Trump is that they don't tend to get along with each other very well. They're very factionalized and they might not be able to settle that. But certainly spending is one thing. Cutting funding to the U.S. military is... Is often a difficult thing to do because often there is not specific funding envelopes for specific military actions or anything like that. So you'd have someone like Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, saying... Secretary of War now, actually, right? It's been rebranded. Well, he's the Secretary of Defense, but you could say he styles himself Secretary of War. I don't think anyone other than him and the president go along with that title. But Secretary Hegseth would probably... Lash out and say you're unpatriotic, you're cutting funding to the great American military just as we're facing historic threats or something like that. Now. Congress could turn around and it could impeach Secretary Hegseth. That's another area where Congress does have power. And there's been a lot of conversation among prominent Democrats in the weeks before the election about whether Congress should use its time and resources to devote it to impeachment trials against various prominent figures, including potentially President Trump, which would be the third impeachment of President Trump if they did it. Which is what we saw last time President Trump was president, and then the Republicans lost big during the midterms. Democrats got more control. They went through these impeachment processes here, Doug. Is that something that we could be seeing again then? Yes, of course it is. The consensus among a lot of senior Democrats seemed to be that a third impeachment of President Trump might not be a good use of Congress's time. Remember, Congress is going to be mainly concerning itself with restoring domestic uh institutions that have been ravaged and destroyed uh by the Trump administration particularly during its first year of of slashing and destruction. They're going to want to restore the so-called Obamacare uh health plan. I mean just just in recent months Americans have seen their their health care premiums I think double or increase dramatically anyway under that. That'll take a bunch of time and a bunch of legislation. Thank you very much. There's probably things they want to do around constraining ICE and things like that, that although they involve borders or domestic policy, there's a whole list of institutions they'll want to restore. There are some international institutions Congress may want to restore, such as the United States Agency for International Development, which was just about eliminated under the cuts headed by billionaire Elon Musk in the beginning of 2025. Yeah, this was a big part of U.S. foreign policy, right? USAID. This is USAID was responsible for a very major slice of the pie of all foreign aid around the world. Mm-hmm. And there are people who said that the number of people who are losing their lives as a result of the cutoff of its crucial USAID programs is in the many, many thousands. So there will be pressure to do that. So that is one international policy area where Congress might try to do it. Remember, Remember, the legislative efforts needed to restore things, it's... It's kind of one of the tragedies of these sort of strongman authoritarian figures like President Trump in that it's very easy and quick to destroy an institution that's existed for decades to restore an institution like that and its thousands of staff or sometimes tens of thousands of staff and its funding and offices and structures and things. That can take years. And so... So something like an impeachment trial, which remember, it's a political act, not a legal act. It requires a major vote in the House of Representatives to impeach. And then I think, anyway, a large majority vote in the Senate to convict on the impeachment. It is. As we saw with the ones during Trump's first term, those eat up. Pretty much all of Congress's time and energy during the period when they're doing the impeachment. So will they want to? I'm not sure. We'll be right back. All right, Doug, let's turn this back to Canada now. In the days leading up to the midterms, it sounded like his stance on Canada was softening a little bit, right? He was making statements that maybe he was planning on making a trade deal in the near future. He seemed more open to it. What do you make of that shift? And does that mean that we could now see a deal sometime soon? I wouldn't be too optimistic about any kind of reasonable restoration of what used to be called NAFTA happening in the near future just because of the way... Trump and his staff negotiate things like this. What is now the USMCA, yes, previously NAFTA. Yes, USMCA or CUSMA. Depending on which country you're in, yes. And who knows what they'll call the next one, if there should be a next one. So there's a couple of arguments. One is that Trump is now conciliatory because he's been defeated or his party's been defeated on the legislative level. A counter-argument is that he'll be emboldened in his lashing out at Canada because now he has nothing to lose. He needed to be making those noises in late October and early November about reopening free trade talks with Canada because a lot of states... That are swing states or that have swing Senate and House of Representatives constituencies that were close are states that are tied up in trade with Canada, like Wisconsin and Michigan and places like that. And Maine, right? We saw the Republican Senator Susan Collins come out and try to, you know, make some progress just before the midterms on this trade stuff because it was such a huge issue. Yeah. So President Trump was hearing from his. Republican candidates that they were in trouble electorally because of his attacks on Canada and because of their farmers and manufacturers having to pay Canadian tariffs in retaliation and things like this. He no longer has that to worry about. He's lost those figures. All of the Republican candidates who Trump himself. Placed or endorsed strongly, pretty much all of them have been defeated. Thank you. So he doesn't necessarily have an incentive to do that. He may desperately want to lower consumer prices at this point, and his tariffs certainly have contributed to the heavy-duty inflation that American consumers have been feeling, although his war with Iran and the consequent shutdown of petroleum supplies is a much larger factor in that inflation. But, I mean, at this point, it's done. Uh, the inflation has happened in this, the voters suffered from the inflation and they voted overwhelmingly because of that inflation for Democrats. And, uh, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily count on us seeing a warmer, friendlier Trump. He did after, after watching the defeat, he did give an interview with the New York Times where he, he said, I think we can work with these people or something like that. But His track record on these things isn't very good. Don't forget that after the 2020 election, which where he lost the presidency, he initially sounded somewhat conciliatory. And it was only within sort of the 48 hours after the election that he concocted this idea that the election had been stolen from him and attempted to started attempting to overturn it. So we need to watch carefully in the days ahead what President Trump is going to be doing in terms of international policy. He also has said that he does not intend to launch a new military attack on Iran after the election, which he'd spent quite some time before the election telegraphing the idea that he he would be doing. Yeah, he was saying the opposite before the midterms. And then right before the election, he sort of suggested that, no, he would not be. doing that. Maybe he'd heard that it wasn't polling very well. But at this point, who knows? It's very, very hard to say what he's going to do. And therefore, it's hard to say how a Democratic-dominated Congress can respond. But there are some things it could do. Yeah, like what? I've heard from American political analysts who say that although the big-ticket actions are not extremely easy for Congress to do things like reversing tariffs or outlawing a war or things like that. There are a number of smaller things that Congress could do. One thing is they suggested that they pass a bill outlawing the funding of separatist movements by The federal government of the United States, which would prevent President Trump and his circle from doing what they attempted to do with Alberta recently. And there were stories about them attempting or wanting to do this with Quebec as well. So this is separatist movements outside of the United States than in other countries. Yes, yes. And and that would be of particular interest to Canadians. Yeah, we talked about this on the podcast, actually, with the Alberta example. So this yeah, this is something that Canadians would be thinking about. Yeah, exactly. There are a number of things that this Congress could do to show solidarity with Canadians. Congress, although it does not technically have foreign policy powers, it's able to sort of conduct de facto foreign policy on its own. It can send Congress people on missions to countries. It can Invite leaders of countries to address Congress, which is an important symbolic thing. So there's a lot of people saying they should start off by inviting Prime Minister Carney to address the joint session of both houses of Congress to show solidarity with Canada, particularly popular idea with the many newly elected Congress people from states that are dependent on relations with Canada and things like that. There are things that could happen. A lot of this stuff is just messaging. Now, you know, certainly sending ICBMs to blow up a country's capital is not just messaging. But there are things that a Congress can do to send a completely different message. It can also restore, in fact, the messaging institutions of the United States. It could restore the U.S.'s various media outlets in foreign languages in places like Afghanistan and Cuba and so on. Go on. It's a lot of little things rather than a big thing that the optimists say are possible. Let me ask you more about this idea of messaging here, Doug. You're talking about messaging from Congress. I want to ask you about messaging from Trump. We hear a lot of aggressive messaging and rhetoric from him against Canada, including threats of annexation, of course. He says that they're jokes, but this is what he says. With Trump's power now weakened, you mentioned the fact that, you know, he might lash out now that he's in a weakened state. Do you think that Canada is going to continue to be a target for him? Yes. I think it will be. This is impossible to assess through a rational assessment or calculation of the president's possible actions, because the president of the United States at the moment is not a rational actor, and he's increasingly less so all the time. So you're dealing more with pathology than ideology here. But he seems to have firmly ensconced in his imagination the idea that Canada is somehow a threat to him or a problem for him or problem for the United States that needs dealing with much as he did with Denmark and Greenland now that was a little bit easier they were able to The Danes were able to strike a deal around Greenland, which essentially reiterates what has been the status quo of Greenland for the last 60 years or more. And he was able to say, he actually said the morning after the election, we got Greenland. That won't work with Canada because there is, you know, he's not seeking to have American military bases there beyond what's already here It's a bit more intangible and has to do with his belief that trade with a country is somehow a loss for the United States and that tariffs. imposed on a country are somehow a gain for the United States rather than a loss to its consumers and possibly he's being told by some people in his office that you can fund the government with tariffs and instead of taxes and and cut taxes that way. I don't see any signs that a lot of those Thoughts are going to go away during his last two years in office And I would look at observers like there was an important essay by political scientists Daniel Drezner and Elizabeth Saunders in the United States published the day after the election, arguing that Trump is likely to spend his last two years lashing out at international targets because it's the only outlet that he has. For his pathologies, that's unlikely to be checked That's the worst case scenario argument But I think Canadians need to be prepared for that possibility that despite people who have Canada's back. dominating both houses of Congress things could actually get worse for Canada during those next final two years of President Trump's term of office. So just lastly here, Doug, I mean, it sounds like you're thinking about this already, but how much do these midterm results actually change things for the relationship between Canada and the US now? On one hand, we need to think of the United States. Not as being, you know a solo instrument like a saxophone or something like that. I always say we should think of it as a polyphonic instrument like a piano where, you know now the bottom two octaves are playing our tune, but the guy tinkling on the left-hand keys is being very dissonant and being against us That's actually a really interesting analogy That really paints a picture there, yeah It does. And we could do what we did during the first Trump term which is we got we got NAFTA renegotiated by playing with the voices in the United States that were not in tune with the president. We pulled off governors and Congress people and key industrial leaders to make the deal essentially us Working around the president a lot of states are now on Canada's side, right A lot of a lot of members of Congress are now on Canada's side. Now, I wouldn't be too sanguine about that just because it's not exactly like a piano in that sense, in that the president has ability to do things that drown out everything else. If he punishes Canada economically or ever decides to act on his threats to Canada's sovereignty in some way, that's not something where playing a three-dimensional chess is going to help Canada. That's going to be a strongman rule. Congress can try to stop it or prevent it after After it's happened. And it may be able to do that, but we shouldn't count on it being able to do that. So, you know, at the end of the day, the president has a lot of power in the United States. It may be a structural failure of their constitution that the president is both the head of government and the head of state. And that therefore the checks and balances are extremely limited upon presidential power. But Canada has to keep that in mind and that we could be a victim of that presidential power, regardless of whether the majority of elected politicians in the United States, starting in 2027, are very much on Canada's side. Doug, it's always good to talk to you and hear your insight. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you, Monica. That was Doug Saunders. He's an international affairs columnist for The Globe. That's it for today. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms. I host and produce the show along with Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chong is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.