Are we having fun yet? Isn’t 2025 turning into a great year? Everyday, yet another preposterous, scary curve ball. Everyday, we are confronted with the unimaginable. Everyday, we are exposed to the worst examples of humanity (if such a word exists). We are coming for you Canada. Watch out Greenland. Bend over Panama. And Gaza, the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Leaving all of us to wonder whether Lord Rump is truly out of his mind and not just thinking outside his Pandora’s box. Judging from his bulldozing persona, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
This is an existential version of the Cold War. Geopolitical tensions. An atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. Dystopian literature, like Brave New World and Fahrenheit 45, which embodied the anxieties about totalitarianism and nuclear war, was the norm. It was a time of social movements and calls for civil rights and freedoms. Sound familiar?
If you read any newspaper (yes, they still exist), every opinion piece can’t avoid acknowledging the elephant in the room. With a slight reprieve we welcome, as a Globe and Mail editorial noted, “the breather we needed from the trauma of enduring an American leader who seems to wake up every morning and ask himself, How will I make good people sick to their stomachs today.”
Fear seems to be Trump’s favourite diplomatic tool. For the first time in Canadian modern history, a US President is threatening to annex Canada by economic force. Canada is simply a piece of real estate with valuable rare earth minerals and crude oil to be raped and pillaged. The Trumpet’s plan is unclear, yet he seems to want to hurt Canada so hard through tariffs and economic turmoil that we will beg to join the United States. I beg to differ.
The Demander-in-Chief keeps pointing ominously to a 1908 treaty with Great Britain, that established the 49th parallel as the boundary between the US and the then-Dominion of Canada, blatantly suggesting it could be erased. It is a little more complicated than that, the Canadian Constitution replaced the Treaty making it clear that we have sovereignty over our own territory, twit-face.
How do Americans and Canadians feel about it all? Bloomberg revealed that only 26% of Americans want Canada to become the 51st state. Most Americans do not support Trump’s “muscular foreign policy of bullying everyone around.” The Toronto Star revealed that 71% of Canadians are against Canada joining the United States. Clearly, there is no political room for Trump to merge Canada and the US, but as we have witnessed, it’s not about politics, it’s about the almighty American dollar with a shit load of narcissism.
The White House claims that the reason for the tariffs is to stop the illegal smuggling of fentanyl into the US. Like the accuser, there is no rationality to the accusations. A mere 0.08% of all fentanyl seized in the US was from our border. 0.08%. Economist Paul Krugman explained that the use of fentanyl to justify Trump’s trade war is no different than claiming the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” to invade Iraq. “It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons – George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.”
This is not the first time that the US has considered taking over Canada. The War Plan Red of 1930 was drummed up by the US Department of War on how to invade Canada if ever needed. It involved kicking the attack off the east coast with poison gas in Halifax, and working their way inward. On our coast, military strategists planned a naval attack on Victoria, launched from Port Angeles, as well as a combined assault on Vancouver and Vancouver Island. I’ll spare you the details of the war on other provinces, but you get the idea.
Although the Plan was declassified in 1974, the New York Times reported that the United States Congress had assigned $57 million in 1935 (nearly $1 billion today) to build three air bases near the US/Canadian border in line with the Plan’s recommendations. The air bases were supposed to be disguised as civilian airports, but it was accidentally revealed that they were actually military air bases. Take note.
Americans have a history of underestimating us Canadians. And never more so, than now. Canadians are suddenly booing the US anthem at sporting events and even boycotting American goods. We are feeling threatened and protective, two highly charged emotions leading to a decidedly unCanadian sentiment: Patriotism. My name is Alex, and I am a hyphenated Canadian. “I believe in peace keeping, not policing. Diversity not assimilation. And, the beaver is a truly noble animal!”
