U.S. President Donald Trump’s imbecilic and unnecessary suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state has led some of my own family members — on my wife’s side, who are Canadian — not to travel to the United States, even in the midst of winter. Now this is personal.
The dislike that some Canadians feel toward Trump, and America in general, is something I experienced at a wedding of one of my wife’s cousins, shortly after Trump’s first term. At what should have been a non-political event, one of the speakers attacked the United States with such vehemence, it made me want to leave the room — and I’m no Trump supporter.
Trump’s recent pronouncements have also led to informal boycotts of U.S. goods and cancelled vacations to the U.S. Also witness the almost un-Canadian nationalist celebrations over the recent defeat of the U.S. hockey team.
Although Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, has dampened “invasion” talk, Canadians have reasons to be outraged by Trump’s threats, and perhaps there’s something good about restoring Canada’s beleaguered sense of national pride. Yet as nationalist surges tend to do, it has led to greater support for the current Liberal government. If this allows the Liberals to stay in power, it would be tragic for both countries.
What Canada needs, more than even good relations with the U.S., is a dramatic shift from the ruinous policies that have made it an economic laggard with a stunted military, and now a global partner in the anti-Israel jihad of the global left.
Sadly, if Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre were prime minister instead of Justin Trudeau, perhaps Trump’s rhetoric wouldn’t be so vociferously belligerent. Trudeau is everything Trump hates — a would-be European with typically progressive positions on everything from COVID lockdowns to internet censorship, net-zero policies and racial abasement. He may not be an authoritarian of the Putin mould, but he’s hardly someone you would rely on in the trenches.
Yet to my Canadian extended family, I would say this: there are lessons to be learned from Trump’s attacks. Nowhere is this clearer as in areas like immigration, defence and protectionism. For many Canadians, the threat of high tariffs is the most pressing danger, as it threatens to unravel the last remaining stronghold of Canadian industry, automobiles, and could also hit the country’s resource industry, notably oil. In terms of merchandise trade, Canada had a $100-billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year.
Read the rest of this piece at National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: White House 45 via Flickr, under Public Domain.
Email this Story
