Canada appeared last week to be undergoing a paroxysm over U.S. President Donald Trump. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau incited public fears three weeks ago by declaring before a microphone he knew to be open that Trump was serious about taking over Canada. A knowledgeable and worldly friend who always has perceptive opinions on world affairs wrote me last weekend expressing his concern that Trump was making a spheres of influence agreement with Russia that would permit President Vladimir Putin to absorb Ukraine while the U.S. took over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone. None of this is happening. When he was first elected president eight years ago, many otherwise or apparently serious people made outrageous allegations, such as the national intelligence director, James Clapper, who declared that Trump was a Russian intelligence asset who had been elected by Russian manipulation of the 2016 election. All of this was demonstrated to be utter fiction. And we have now, after Trump has surmounted corrupt political impeachments and prosecutions and assassination attempts, and won an uncontestedly fair election (and complete acquittal) from the majority of his countrymen, graduated to the point where his legitimacy as president is accepted, but fantastic schemes of collusion with America’s rivals and aggression against its allies are being imputed to him by people who know better.
This newspaper recently headlined on its front-page that Trump was behaving with “dishonour” in Ukraine. He is working out a peace that preserves 85 per cent of that country’s territory and population, and assures that its revised borders will be guaranteed by Russia and the principal European NATO powers, that Ukraine can affiliate with the European Union when ready, and the United States will remain an ally in solidarity with the European guarantor-powers of post-war Ukraine, and military assistance will be replaced by massive reconstruction assistance. The U.S. will supply sophisticated military assistance in exchange for strategic minerals mined in Ukraine, which was President Volodymyr Zelenskyy‘s initiative. Wherein is the dishonour? There is none. I cannot be the only person in this country who has noticed that there was barely a peep about peace in Ukraine until Trump was inaugurated. There have been approximately 1.25-million casualties in that war, about half of them deaths, and as many as 10-million refugees, and there was no exit strategy except the West giving Ukraine sufficient ordnance and weaponry to avoid defeat but not to win, until there were no more Ukrainians alive to pull the triggers.
Every week we learn more about the corruption of the American bipartisan political establishment that Trump has overthrown. Using the excuse of the COVID pandemic in 2020 to deluge the country with harvested ballots (exposed by the fact that the 2024 electorate was at least two million votes smaller than 2020’s, despite a significant population increase and mighty efforts by both parties to get out the vote), the attempted censorship of discordant opinions, the whitewashing of the crimes of the Biden family, the colossal feather-bedding of the federal payroll with agents of woke anti-Americanism. All of it is oozing out now, sluggish and filthy. The U.S. public unambiguously approves what Trump calls “draining the swamp.” The cameo role played by Canada in the propagation of Trump-hate is especially contemptible, as American political events, though of legitimate concern to us, are none of our business.
Trump told me a month before the election that he has nothing but goodwill for Canada, “but you have better trade negotiators than we do, and we’ll have to do something about that.” He is a poker player-negotiator who starts with a shock-and-awe opening gambit to try to get an edge at the start. We are already deescalating toward normal trade renegotiations. This is a subject that is so complicated and requires such intricate trade-offs that only specialists can negotiate it. When Justin Trudeau scurried down to Palm Beach, Fla., with his coat-tails trailing behind him and told his host that Canada would collapse under the weight of the contemplated tariff increase, Trump took him literally and asked what the rationale of the country was since English-speaking Canadians are practically indistinguishable from Americans from northern states (meant as a compliment), and Canada relies completely on the U.S. for its defence. Trudeau blundered into this, Trump’s response was not irrational, though reference to a 51st state for a country of 41-million people was gratuitous, but the discredited Liberals have grappled this to their bosoms as a lifeline to continue their total self-immersion in the public trough.
Now we are subjected to the toe-curling, cringe-making and nausea-inducing spectacle of Mark Carney campaigning for the succession to Trudeau as the man to negotiate with Trump, by insulting Trump with juvenile snideries and by disparaging U.S. society, as well as to exploit the “huge opportunity” presented by strangling our greatest industry (oil and gas) and inflicting skyrocketing costs on everyone by abandoning conventional energy. Like the Rip Van Winkle awakening after 20 years, he is trumpeting Canada’s crumbling health-care system as a moral advantage over the U.S. Our health care waiting times grow endlessly; we have many thousands too few doctors (many of the best we had are now happily in the U.S.) and almost all ailments have to be treated in chronically over-crowded emergency rooms, though three-quarters of them are not emergencies. This is the system that epitomizes to our likely next prime minister the superiority Carney detects in our society over the United States, although the average American has an annual income 50 per cent higher than the average Canadian and the poorest American state has a higher per capita income than the wealthiest Canadian province.
If you are about to negotiate with someone who represents an entity eight times as populous, 15 times as rich and 1,000 times as strong militarily as yourself, you do not begin by reviling the opposite party as a neanderthalian beast, having as an opening gambit said that he could completely flatten you by raising tariffs.
Trump’s gratuitous remarks about a 51st state are irritating, but not incomprehensible given that we are almost completely reliant on the Americans for our national defence, that our prime minister threw in the towel pre-emptively on tariff discussions and there was no obvious purpose to our persistence as an independent country given our trade deficit with the U.S. (which Trump exaggerated, as is his habit, but Trudeau didn’t know enough to correct him). We should pull our military weight, adopt policies that encourage investment and economic growth that raises per capita income, emancipate ourselves from climate change idiocy, which Carney wants to make more onerous, and develop the thick skins of a more confident people. The American flag is burned by hooligans and riffraff all the time all over the world and Americans don’t notice. It is time for Canadian leadership that is self-confident and not sulky, under-achieving, hyper-sensitive and not thunder-struck with paranoia about the weather.
National Post