TORONTO – Presidential Executive Orders (EO) in the USA define the President, his policies and the character of the new administration. They are the directives which will guide Congressional activity and bureaucratic behavior for the next four years. They are intended to take care or “urgent business” – establish the priorities of the nation all entities who hope or need to deal with US federal jurisdiction.
They normally aim to dissipate equivocation. Also, they are not all issued on the first day… despite all the signals about what the precedence might be, anxious onlookers (Canada on tariffs, for example) might have to hold their breath and “wait for the other shoe to drop”. It always does.
Notwithstanding other trends or interests, how the USA promotes its own will determine that America will retain its title as “the elephant in the room”. The commercial, financial, industrial, territorial and military/security concerns are relatively simple to decipher. They are all accompanied by objective data: numbers, material costs in easy to spin cost-benefit analyses.
The cultural-social may not be quite that overt. Yet, on one, Trump must have felt he needed to make issues clear to his supporters and “foes”. He signed an EO titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
In the culture wars that have been inflicted on contemporary Western societies, some view this as clear a declaration of an aggressive resistance mounted by the “family values” factions of society. It may come as a stimulus in Canada, where some woke Catholic school boards may begin to reassess their interpretations of their obligations outlined in the Constitution Act of 1982.
In the legal profession as practiced in the Anglo-Saxon world, the EO may spell anathema to biologically-challenged ideology and to the eventual cultural fall-out everywhere, as “institutions” and legislators recalculate the woke view of “conventional, acceptable human interaction”.
Genspect, an international organization that bills itself as a promoter of a healthy approach to sex and gender, applauds the EO as “establishing the definition of a “woman” as “adult female” (see here: Genspect on President Trump’s Executive Order on Gender Ideology in US Federal Policy).
For Trump, this must be a little like setting the cat among the pigeons – let Trudeau and others think about this while we hang tariffs over their heads.
In fact, the Province of Ontario is re-evaluating its role as the “defender of Canada’s interests”. Why not? There is no Federal government to do the job, thanks to J. Trudeau’s withdrawal from Federal responsibilities at a time of crisis.
In the pic above, President Donald Trump signing executive orders: the photo was posted today on the WhiteHouse Twitter-X page (@WhiteHouse)
