The Pendulum Swings. Canada Kept Notes.
This post is part of my Medium blog.
The midterms came in Tuesday night and the ground moved. Democrats took back both chambers of Congress. They broke through in Texas, where a Democrat won a Senate seat for the first time since 1988. And the detail I keep coming back to is the New York Post front page — a paper that has spent a decade building Trump up put a wide-eyed Trump under an enormous blue wave with the headline "BLUE TSUNAMI" and the subhead "Trump suffers historic rebuke." When your own tabloid prints that, the wind has genuinely changed.
What changed it was the price of things. Affordability was the issue voters named, and tariffs were one of the reasons their groceries cost more. A Cato Institute survey back in September found about 75 percent of Americans believed the tariffs had raised prices. The trade war stopped being an argument about leverage and became a line item on a receipt.
So yes, the pendulum is swinging. CTV's coverage framed the results as a victory for Canadians hoping for tariff relief, and Democratic leaders have been blunt about wanting the sweeping tariffs reversed. Trade talks with Ottawa are back on after months of on-again, off-again theater. If you're a Canadian exporter, this is the best political weather you've seen in a year.
Hold the celebration, though, because the pendulum swings and the machinery stays. After the Supreme Court ruled in February that the president couldn't use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs, the administration simply kept building the same wall with other tools — Section 122, Section 301, Section 232, and eventually Section 338, a provision so obscure it had barely been touched since the 1930s. None of those need Congress. The new Congress can threaten the legal authority behind the tariffs and the White House can veto whatever it passes. So the honest question isn't whether protectionism disappears with the blue wave. It's how much of it survives the transition, and whether "strategic tariffs" becomes the permanent bipartisan compromise. Watch that. I suspect we'll find out fast, because trade analysts expect Canada to be the earliest test of what the trade regime looks like after the election: an administration looking for an off-ramp, and a Congress threatening the statute underneath it.
Here's the part I find more interesting than the election itself: whether parts of the Canadian economy have recalibrated to the point where they've stopped needing the pendulum to swing back at all.
The early evidence says they have. Global Affairs' State of Trade report shows Canadian goods trade with the United States declined in 2025 under the tariffs, and at the same time exports to non-U.S. markets surged, pushing the non-U.S. share of Canadian exports to its highest level in over four decades. Aluminum producers redirected product to other markets and found they could live with it. Prime Minister Carney has been saying for months that trade with the US will not return to a pre-Trump normal. And the day after the blue wave, Dominic LeBlanc, the minister responsible for Canada-U.S. trade, stood up and said affordability and diversification remain the focus, blue wave or no blue wave.
Sit with that sentence for a second. A neighbour just won an election that's good for you, and your government's first public answer is: nice, but we're keeping the new habits. That's not spite. That's a country that spent four years getting a lesson about single points of failure and decided not to unlearn it. The next federal budget lands within days, and diversification is at the top of it. Whether Canadian firms keep their new routes when the old ones reopen — whether the aluminum that found European buyers comes back south, whether procurement stays diversified once the tariffs ease — is the thing to watch over the next year. Reversing a policy takes one election. Reversing a habit takes actual effort.
Which is where the books come in. In Contingent and Essential, after years of economic turmoil, Canada finds itself in a better position than the United States. In Contingent, the period from 2026 to 2029 gets called the Squeeze: the United States over-invests in AI, the world loses confidence in the dollar, and American executives who once treated a Canadian posting as a career demotion become grateful for a job, for boring Canadian procurement, and for institutions that still knew how to buy medicine. By Essential, Canada is the country that caged its AI systems and kept people in the decision chain, while the Americans tore their rules out entirely and asked Ottawa — three separate times — for the technical guts of how Canada contained the problem. Canada said no three times. The characters spend whole chapters arguing about whether that caution is strength or stagnation, and I never fully resolve it, because I don't think it resolves.
I wrote that arc as fiction. Watching this week, the fiction part feels less like the interesting half. The midterms don't hand Canada its economy back. The habits do. The pendulum swings because voters punish prices, and it will swing again when they punish something else. The countries that come out ahead are the ones that spent the swing building something the next swing can't take away.