The obvious explanation for the inattentiveness of Canada’s NATO allies to Canada’s troubles with U.S. president Donald Trump at the recent Munich Security Conference appears to have eluded Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, who prefers to imagine that it’s simply because Europe “has its own challenges” at the moment.
Ah yes. Of course. Ukraine and all that.
Canada hasn’t exactly distinguished itself in recent days by standing up for Ukraine, which Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have now decided to carve up and divide between themselves in a shocking betrayal of of the 32-member NATO alliance, to say nothing of Ukraine’s 57,000 war dead. So there’s that. But quite apart from the absence of any useful contribution from Canada about how to rescue Ukraine from its humiliating fate, Europeans should not be expected to stand up for Canada so long as Canada refuses to stand up for itself.
The main reason Joly’s walking-dead Liberal government should not expect to be taken seriously by the Europeans or anyone else is that our sort-of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau relinquished his Parliamentary mandate by convincing Governor General Mary Simon to lock the doors of the House of Commons on January 6.
Even at this late hour, in what should be understood as the final hours of NATO’s 76 years as a united guarantor of its member states’ peace and prosperity, there is one small thing Ottawa can do. It would be a small gesture of solidarity with Ukraine, and with our NATO allies. It might go some distance in answering the indignities that Trump has heaped upon this country over the past couple of months.
In answer to his blizzard of taunts and threats to abrogate the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement, to enact crippling, irrational tariffs and his threats of “economic force” to extort our surrender and annexation as the 51st American state, there’s one small non-tariff response we should be capable of offering.
We should tell Trump that he will not be permitted to set foot in this country. That he is not welcome here.
Canada holds the Group of 7 presidency this year, and our own teams of diplocrats have been liaising with their counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan in advance of the June 15-17 G7 summit in Kananaskis. As though everything was normal. Everyone involved should be immediately advised that Canada will not submit to the obscene self-abasement of allowing Trump any opportunity to parade his loutish belligerence and traitorous vulgarity on Canadian soil.
We might at least remember the last time Canada convened a G7 meeting. That was in 2018, in Charlevoix, Que. Trump showed up late, ill-prepared and barely briefed, and he left early, for a meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (he would later say that he and Kim had fallen “in love.”) Trump burst onto the scene at Charlevoix, then as now demanding to know why Vladimir Putin should not be there, and how after all, so what if Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. They’re mostly Russian speakers, those Crimeans, he said.
Trump’s outbursts were not well received by then-British prime minister Theresa May, who only a few weeks earlier had expelled 23 Russian diplomats and 80 intelligence and consular staff and their families following the revelation that Russian spies had attempted to assassinate the Russian intelligence-agency defector Sergei Skripal with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. On Air Force One on the way to Singapore, Trump blew up the G7’s 28-point agreement statement, in a huff about something Trudeau said about the tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel — a lunacy Trump has revived in recent days.
In refusing Trump’s admittance to Kananaskis we could even conjure a diplomatic excuse, if that were more to Ottawa’s liking. We could say, I’m sorry Mr. President but to be honest, given the hostility you’ve incited in ordinary Canadians, we cannot guarantee your safety here. Or we could be even more honest. Sorry, Mr. President, but because the Trudeau Liberals had Parliament prorogued so that the party could find a replacement for Trudeau, we’re not even sure who the prime minister might be in June.
However we handle it, barricading the Americans from Kananaskis could serve as a loud signal to what remains of the free world, that Canada has at last realized that we can’t cope with the economic and geopolitical catastrophe we’re facing by whistling past an American graveyard.
We could appoint a thousand fentanyl czars and darken the skies above the 49th parallel with Blackhawk helicopters, and we could criminalize the very thought of interprovincial trade barriers and build pipelines from coast to coast and back again, with a Conservative supermajority in Ottawa, and none of it will make a speck of difference.
Trump has made it official. He could not be clearer. The United States is not obliged to the defence of Canadian or European sovereignty in times of peace or war. The United States no longer intends to honour its mutual-defence commitments or its solemn trade commitments.
Here’s another thing we might muster the courage to admit. Canada could boost defence spending to five per cent of gross domestic product, or ten per cent, and it wouldn’t make a difference. Who does Trump expect us to defend ourselves against? His newfound best friend in Moscow?
Another thing we should start saying out loud, about all the American bellyaching about how the United States should no longer be NATO’s armourer and military guarantor. The Americans wanted it this way, Canada’s NORAD role was to serve as a giant debris field for any and all nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles intercepted on their trajectory towards the Lower 48 states. We did our job.
Europe’s role was to patch itself back together after the obliterations of the Second World War and serve as a subcontinental forward operating base for American military installations with Soviet bullseyes in every American gunsight
It was a magnificent system, built to nourish American power at its pinnacle. We all did what America asked, and for that we are now all dismissed as cheats and deadbeats, scroungers and freeloaders. As for the Ukraine war, Putin is right, Trump says. It was all the Ukrainians’ fault that they were attacked, for imagining that they might join the European Union, for having the audacity to imagine that one day they would join the NATO family, and that they could persist as a free people, in their own sovereign state.
And so Trump went behind the backs of the NATO democracies to pursue a complete normalization with Putin’s terror state. It is only beginning with an American plunder of Ukraine’s mineral resources and Putin’s absolution for mass murders he has committed. Trump says he and Putin hope to meet soon, perhaps in Washington, maybe in Moscow, to stride forward for “the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”
Trump’s capitulations to Putin have shocked the conscience of old-school American patriots, a rapidly vanishing minority. Among them is Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker, a Republican senator from Mississippi. He was at a loss for words on Tuesday. There’s no explaining Trump’s collaborations with Vladimir Putin, Wicker said. “Putin is a war criminal who should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.”
He’s right of course. But Trump lauds him as a partner in peace.
Putin has not abandoned his explicit, years-long, unshakable insistence that Ukraine is not a real country, that it is not entitled to sovereignty of any kind, that it is a hostile invention of Europe that must be smashed and carved out of Russia’s vast landscape like a cancerous tumour. Trump is not bothered.
At the very least, Canadians should tell him: Do as you will, but stay the hell away from us. You’re not welcome here.
National Post