I don’t think Trump has done America any favours in all honesty. The United States had a damn good run, but now the Americans are retreating from the world, turning in on themselves, venturing out only for the purposes of spectacle, or for the dumb excitement of causing a scene. On our side of the 49th parallel, we’re stuck with as grave a crisis as this country has ever faced.
As much as some say “It’s over, or it was never gonna happen, etc…” something ended in the last three days. Perhaps the “unintended consequences” type thing, and there’s no going back to the way things were or there damn well shouldn’t be.
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It may be that now, we’ve got only 30 days.
That’s how long Trump has given us to decipher and satisfy his shifting, nonsensical demands. The reprieve appears to have been really a face-saving measure, an off-ramp he took after his inane tariff-everybody ideas took such a drubbing from the American Manufacturers Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal and so on.
Reiterating his determination to force our annexation as America’s 51st state if we fail to submit to a crippling 25 per cent tariff on southbound Canadian exports — with a 10 per cent exception for Alberta oil, which he pretends his country doesn’t need — it’s come down to a jumble of interim commitments about border security. There’s even a provision requiring the appointment of a “fentanyl czar,” which sounds like something out of a script for South Park.
For every cliché about Canada enjoying the privilege of living under the “American security umbrella,” it was always to Washington’s benefit that Canada was America’s best friend. When we prospered, we prospered with the Americans, and they with us. We did so by keeping our heads down, and our great fortune was that Americans weren’t especially interested in paying attention to us anyway.
But we’re just now emerging from a decade shaped by a prime ministerial retard who craved the American limelight and sought it out obsessively. From the beginning, Trudeau championed every annoying fad and frivolous cause taken up by American “progressives” whose policy preoccupations are now being turned to rubble from the wrecking-ball onslaught of Donald Trump’s weirdly-mutated Republican Party.
So now we’re stepping out into this strange new world too reliant on foreign trade, too reliant on the United States and too reliant on oil, after enduring 10 years of being subjected to what you could call a federally funded National Demoralization Strategy.
It’s impossible to say what comes next. But there’s no turning back now, or at least there shouldn’t be after our neighbour and ally dangled an ax over our necks. Climbing into bed further with America at this point isn’t the answer.
Do we have the will to persist in the resistance to American hegemony that was at the heart of our founding prime minister's grand visions?
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Mark Cuban
