Can Canada survive Donald Trump?

According to the crack journos at CBC and the Globe & Mail, Canada is facing an existential crisis. Our forever besties south of the border want to annex us. For real! Read any recent op-ed by Andrew Coyne. It’s all because of the unhinged moron our neighbours voted into the White House last November. Catherine Cullen, of CBC’s The House, got a few minutes with UK Foreign Secretary this morning. He was in Canada for a meeting of the G 7 foreign ministers to formulate their Ukraine strategy. She spent one minute asking one question about Ukraine, and ten minutes asking one question, over and over again, about why our G 7 allies aren’t standing with us against Trump. The short answer, Catherine, is that every one of them is, just like Canada, a US vassal. Number one rule for vassals who have ceded their sovereignty to the Hegemon is this; remember your place. Otherwise, you’re cruising for a slap-down. Neither Lammy nor any of the other G 7 chihuahuas are dumb enough to risk that simply because the thin-skinned Canadians feel threatened by Trump referring to us as the 51st state. Perhaps our elite are suffering a pang of conscience for the many years they looked the other way while the Leader of the Democratic World bullied sundry smaller nations. Surely they are acquainted with the “Ledeen Doctrine;” every ten years the US needs to throw some shitty little country against the wall to show the world we mean business. The term was coined 25 years before Mafia Don entered politics. Maybe they’re afraid it’s our turn, or maybe it’s just a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has always hit the journalism profession particularly hard. While much of our over-reaction strikes me as juvenile posturing unworthy of a serious country, the moment provides an opportunity for sober second thought on some recent decisions. The F-35 purchase comes to mind. The more you read about it, the more you realize it’s an overpriced piece of shit American pilots would prefer not to fly. There are sound reasons the plane has never seen combat, unless you count dropping bombs on Gaza or shooting down Chinese weather balloons. The F-16 and F-18 are superior fighter jets. By far the most intelligent thing I’ve seen in the Globe re the Trump threats is a full page advert on page A20 in today’s paper, placed by Caldwell Investment Management CEO Brendan Caldwell. It’s an open letter to Mark Carney, exhorting him to take the high road and eschew the “elbows up” jingoism so popular these days. After all, we don’t demonstrate Canadian values by stooping to Uncle Sam’s level.