International could get local real fast
Trevor's take

A graduate of the University of Toronto, Trevor Hutchinson is a songwriter, writer and bookkeeper. He serves as Contributing Editor at The Lindsay Advocate. He lives with his fiancee and their five kids in Lindsay.

This column represents the start of the seventh calendar year of having the great privilege of occupying this space and joining both local and national conversations. It’s probably 15 with the windchill (as I sometimes answer the question of how long have I been married?)
For giggles, and as a memory test, I went back through the previous years to see what I had opined on. No great theme emerged but there were a couple pieces on the city’s strategic and environmental plans, which I used as an example of the optimism I try to start a year with. And of course, there was one from the COVID years with the basic theme of ‘this sucks and it’s going to get worse’.
I can’t say that I am feeling the complete optimism of earlier years, nor the despair of the bad pandemic January, but I have guarded hopes that 2025 will be better than 2024 (which makes me statistically similar to about 70 per cent of people in 33 different countries according to one recent Ipsos poll.)
Of course, there is a huge X factor in all of this – what will U.S. President Donald Trump do and how will it affect us? While international politics may seem lightyears away from our concerns over the Elm Tree Road Bridge or the coming byelection, U.S. politics affects every Canadian. We are all like a mouse sleeping next to an elephant, as Pierre Trudeau once famously described Canada-U.S. relations: “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
A trade war and the imposition of tariffs, were that to happen, can immediately and negatively affect our city’s biggest economic sectors of agriculture and tourism, not to mention our burgeoning manufacturing sector. And of course, any major disruption to the world order can tank the global economy which can have immediate local repercussions. A sudden and harsh economic downturn can lead to higher unemployment, higher costs and lower revenues, which will immediately affect Kawartha Lakes, along with every other municipality in the country. Of course, for a certain segment of our population, this will all be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fault.
And if Trump’s threatened actions are the X factor going into 2025, the Y factor must be a looming federal election. Politicians and voters on both political extremes may well performatively don Canada jerseys and jackets during, say, an international sports competition, during the silly season it’s party before country, especially for all opposition parties. This would be the case regardless of what party was in power.
But Trump’s possible economic actions must be treated as an existential threat to our city, province and country and we need a Canada before partisan politics approach.
We’ll have to wait and see for now but here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2025!