It is easy to demonize the current US president for a myriad of reasons. Some have called him by the alleged tint of his skin (orange), some have called him a threat to democracy and used words like dictator, fascist etc. I am not going to delve into all that. He is, as far as I am concerned, the legitimate leader of a large country, duly elected by a majority of their voting population. What those people where thinking while voting for him in a majority, I question. But that is not the point of this post.
I live in Canada. I am a citizen of the country. I get to vote for an MP in my riding federally. The party who elects the most MPs is usually invited to form government by the head of state or (now) his representative. Our democratic norms are pretty simple and straightforward. There are plenty of things to criticize our electoral system for and the governments that come as a result. Anyway, all of this to say, we in Canada do not get to vote for a foreign leader. But we definitely have to live with the consequences of other people's choices. This comes in many forms. I have actively tried to curb my consumption of media that talks about the US president and the myriad of issues he has been creating in the US. Because I can't really change any of that. I have noticed that once you get sucked into that sphere of talk, it is very hard to get out of it and get a different perspective on things. It is very hard to go a day without hearing about the next interesting thing the US president is doing. Honestly, there are some days I wish we could all just get day off from his antics.
Now, onto the our relationship. The former prime minister Pierre Trudeau explained it this way in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington DC in 1969:
Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
Canada has certainly felt every twitch and grunt of late. I am not sure how much of it is a comedy act, and how much is sane policy. Perhaps sane is too nice a word to use. The US president somewhat routinely muses about invading or subsuming Canada into the United States somehow - via economic means or otherwise. I am not sure what to make of it. Is this the fever dream of an insane person? Or is it something else? I mean, a few years ago if you had told me Putin was musing about invading Ukraine because it would be better, I would have thought it was a joke. Alas, that is not that. Those poor people in Ukraine are paying the price of that action. Is that what the US president intends for us? We would probably not survive very long in a pitched battle with the most powerful military power on earth. It is an eerie uncomfortable feeling to have someone say that my home is better off under new management.
I am not sure there is much we can do to mitigate that. One hopes that the lesser insane people that help make such decisions would dissuade anything like this, but that is a tall order given the types of people who are in government there. So then what can we do? Canadians have been actively boycotting the United States. It is heartening to see grandmas in grocery stores scrutinizing labels of items to see if they come from the US and ignoring them if so. Or putting the thing upside down as a warning to the next shopper. And it is working. I have never seen so many Canadian items of equivalent American ones. I have discovered shoe companies that make shoes in Canada, spent too much time thinking about the origins of the tomatoes in ketchup bottles and had many thoughts on labelling rules in Canada. This has been a people driven thing - not something our governments mandated. People, of their own volition, have taken it upon themselves to take a stand against the threats from the US government.
Governments have also stepped up their actions - banning sales of alcohol from the US for instance. Then there is the whole tariff regime the president has been pursuing. I am still shocked that Canada is paying tariffs to trade with our largest trading partner, at rates that are much higher than say China - traditional trade adversaries for the US. Maybe I have the numbers wrong - but how does it make sense to impose heavy tariffs on your citizenry for buying things from your closest neighbour? And because the two economies have been so intertwined for so long, things like automobile tariffs are ridiculously convoluted - calculated on parts that are made in Canada and Mexico - parts which cross borders far more than I do before a finished car pops up somewhere.
These trade tariffs are causing so many problems in Canada. People are losing jobs, companies are moving to the US or spending money to have manufacturing there - at rates that are not profitable enough, all to fulfill the president's poor understanding of deals and world trade. We will come out with the short end of the stick as a result - our largest trade partner is out to squeeze our entire trade based economy with a large hammer.
Anyway, I have no idea what the future holds for these two countries. Part of me wishes something new will distract the president and he will leave us alone. Part of me wishes the voting people of that country somehow chase the man and his ilk to some island far far away from us all, never to bother us all again. But those are not realistic. I just hope we come out of this, with our sovereignty intact and our trade based economy diversified and not destroyed by our neighbour.
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