In Oshawa, Ontario, General Motors recently announced 1,200 layoffs — a direct consequence of the American tariffs that have hammered Canada's automotive heartland. It is precisely the kind of community that Conservative MP Jamil Jivani was elected to represent. Which is what made his comments on American conservative media so jarring, and what made his own party leader's swift rebuke so significant.
Speaking on Breitbart News radio — an American outlet that serves as a flagship platform of the MAGA movement — Jivani told his audience that Canada "is shooting ourselves in the foot if we continue this anti-America hissy fit." The remarks, reported by CBC News, landed like a grenade in the middle of a federal election campaign in which Canadian sovereignty and economic self-defense against American tariffs have become the dominant issues.
Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader, was unambiguous in his response. "Canadians are legitimately upset by the unjustifiable tariffs and comments that the president has made," he told reporters. Jivani, he added pointedly, "speaks for himself, I speak for the party."
In Canada, as Canadians would politely insist, we're more than just America's neighbor — we're a distinct nation with our own priorities. Right now, for a Conservative leader trying to win a federal election, being seen to dismiss those priorities — even by a single backbench MP — carries substantial political cost.
The Oshawa Problem
The geography of Jivani's remarks is the story's most politically devastating detail. His riding of Bowmanville-Oshawa North sits at the epicenter of Canadian auto manufacturing. The community's economic identity is bound up in the production of vehicles that cross the Canada-US border freely under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement — or, more accurately, that used to cross freely before Washington began treating CUSMA as, in President Donald Trump's own word, "irrelevant."
When Jivani characterized Canadian anger at American tariff policy as an "anti-American hissy fit," he was characterizing the legitimate economic anxiety of his own constituents as petulance. Auto workers and their union representatives have been among the most vocal in demanding that Ottawa take a firm stand against American trade aggression — not because they dislike Americans, but because the tariffs are directly costing them their livelihoods.
That the MP representing a community being economically damaged by those tariffs chose to frame Canadian frustration as irrational and childish — and chose to do so on American conservative media rather than Canadian outlets — has generated considerable scrutiny.
The Vance Connection
Jivani's Washington visit, which preceded the Breitbart appearance, drew attention in part because of his documented personal connection to US Vice-President JD Vance. The two men have been close friends since their university days; Jivani delivered a Bible reading at Vance's wedding. That relationship gave Jivani unusual access to the current American administration at a time when official Canadian government channels have been strained.
But a Globe and Mail analysis of the Washington trip raised pointed questions about whose interests Jivani was actually advancing. Rather than using his platform and access to make the case for Canada's negotiating position — that the tariffs are unjustified and that CUSMA commitments should be honored — Jivani appeared to use his American media appearances to distance himself from Canadian public opinion and signal sympathy with the American administration's framing.
He was notably excluded from the Conservative Party's 74-member shadow cabinet, a fact that provides context for what some observers describe as a pattern of operating outside his party's institutional framework.
The Defining Conservative Tension
For Poilievre, the episode illuminates the most difficult tension in Conservative politics heading into the election: how to be economically nationalist — how to be unambiguously on the side of Canadian workers and Canadian sovereignty — without alienating the segment of the Conservative base that has cultural and ideological affinities with American-style conservatism and the Trump movement specifically.
Poilievre has attempted to hold this tension by presenting himself as a Canadian-first economic hawk — someone who can deliver a harder line on trade than the Liberals while also being credible to conservatives who are not reflexively anti-American. His rebuke of Jivani fits that posture: it allows him to distance himself from comments that are politically toxic in the current moment without endorsing the Carney government's overall approach to the bilateral relationship.
But the Jivani episode also illustrates how the MAGA alignment within Canadian conservatism creates recurring problems for the party's general election positioning. Canada is heading to the polls at a moment when the public's appetite for accommodation of Washington is at a historical low — the Nanos Research poll released February 17 found that 64 percent of Canadians now view the United States as a possible threat to Canadian sovereignty. Any Conservative MP who appears to be messaging in a way that serves American rather than Canadian interests is, at best, a political liability.
The CUSMA Stakes
The backdrop to the entire episode is the mandatory CUSMA review underway this year, with Janice Charette heading Canada's negotiating team. President Trump has publicly dismissed the agreement as "irrelevant," and his administration has signaled interest in replacing the three-country framework with separate bilateral deals — an arrangement that would generally be seen as more favorable to American negotiating leverage.
In that context, a Canadian MP's decision to characterize his own country's negotiating position as an "anti-American hissy fit" on an American conservative media platform — at the very moment the trade deal is under renegotiation — raised questions that went well beyond internal Conservative Party management. Poilievre's swift and unequivocal response suggests his team understood the stakes immediately.
