J.D. Vance’s Best Friend, a Canadian Politician, Isn’t Discussing Him

J.D. Vance’s best friend has no comment.

In truth, J.D. Vance’s best friend really doesn’t want anyone to know he’s J.D. Vance’s best friend — not now that he’s running for Canadian parliament in an industrial city on the shores of Lake Ontario. For three consecutive days in late April, I arrive at J.D. Vance’s best friend’s campaign headquarters, on Division Street in the hardscrabble Ontario village of Bowmanville, and I’m told that J.D. Vance’s best friend is most definitely aware of my two prior visits. From behind a locked door, a polite older volunteer informs me that if J.D. Vance’s best friend has any comments to offer he will be sure to contact me. 

Such is the plight of a Canadian politician named Jamil Jivani. A Yale law classmate of Vance and his wife Usha, the son of a Kenyan father and white Canadian mother and the product of underprivileged circumstances, Jivani had been parachuted into the safe district east of Toronto in good measure because of his connections to the vice president. Like Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Jivani has written a memoir of childhood hardship, one filled with uncheckable tales of youthful illiteracy and near brushes with violence, only his book purporting to portray young male rage disappeared without a trace; both tales read like special-need pleas for preferential treatment from an Ivy League school.

A few months before my arrival, Jivani’s Canada First, MAGA-adjacent Conservative party had been heading for a landslide victory, offering tax cuts and anti-woke policies, along with juvenile name calling. But then Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada and derisively referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “governor,” offending the entire nation. In short order, Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian automobiles and steel and aluminum, in blatant breach of the treaty Trump himself had negotiated in his first term. Casting wolfish eyes on Canada as America’s “51st state,” Trump became the most despised figure in the country — along with his bearded sidekick Vice President J.D. Vance.

For reasons that seem to careen from grandiose designs on being a Mount Rushmore-worthy historical figure to schoolyard bullying, Trump thus transformed Canadian politics — and society. Trump’s degrading and ridiculous attacks instantly incited a 25-point swing to the center-left Liberal party, obliterating the huge polling advantage of a Conservative leader with an uncanny resemblance to a young Richard Nixon — the slicked back hair, sly smile, bottomless grievance. By contrast, the new Liberal leader Mark Carney was a former head of the Banks of Canada and England, an economist with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and a history of dealing with the catastrophe of Brexit. His quiet demeanor and no-bullshit approach seemed to match the rising sense of outrage and defiance in Canada — or at least that is what the…