By Aunt America
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
With the world order changed after 9/11, Europe grappling with the fallout from its own immigration policies, and the nation currently facing the Strait of Hormuz mess, you might have missed the issue closest to home: Why does Canada not want us to keep ignoring it?
Of course you missed it. You were busy thinking about our migration policies, and the price of gas vis-à-vis the Strait of Hormuz, and how alarming it is that those of us who were adults for 9/11 are noticing how live video of that day now seems like archival, historical footage from a less technologically advanced age. The age we were in then. One that’s passed us by.
We got along with Canada then. We got along with everybody after 9/11, except perhaps the nations who were immediate recipients of our bombs. Canada, for its part, shut down its airspace when we slammed the door on ours, cared for stranded American passengers, and began sharing intelligence. In a time of tremendous upheaval and fear, it was nice.
It is not nice anymore.
I wish I could say I had no idea what happened to our relationship with Canada when I know damn well what happened to Canada, including just about every foreign nation exceptThe View and Nigeria: Trump happened to Canada.
All the socially acceptable people there– who are also the loudest– hate him, and his stupid hair, and everything he stands for, and the first time he went away, they thought he was going away for good, and packed in their bullhorns and protest signs, and then he came back again, and now everybody had to drive to Dollar Tree for new poster board. He is, to these Canadians, an existential threat at most and a waste of marker ink at the very least.
You haven’t heard much about this. If you did, you didn’t dwell on it for long. Canadians have all kinds of bile to spit at Trump, and when we hear it, we just sort of blink and go back to our cheeseburgers, because America doesn’t care in the slightest what Canada thinks. We don’t care enough to be upset about it, and the ones who hate us hate that most of all.
At least we have enough baked-in distrust of Europe that we expend energy mocking the French and going about Mets games played in London with our THE BRITISH BLEW A 13-COLONY LEAD shirts. We grant Europe the courtesy of scoffing at it. Canada, however, falls beneath our notice.
This has been building for a while. The United States was squarely in the corner of the Canadians during the 2002 figure skating scandal that robbed their pairs team of a gold medal, not coincidentally by the Russians and the French. We linked arms across Niagara Falls immediately.
Then they blew it.
This past winter, Canada lost its most cherished weapon– everyone’s assumption that Canadians are just so gosh darn nice that we don’t need to worry about ire from them, and if there is ire, it will be spoken in Québécois, and we won’t understand it enough to be offended anyway.
In various international competitions, Canadians began booing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which temporarily raised them past the status of the Jon Hamm “I don’t think about you at all” meme.
“Trump,” they explained.
In the subsequent Olympics, Canadians were taped out-and-out violating rules at the curling competition, and we neither understand nor care about curling, but we were not in their corner on this one. This one, we pointed at the round handled rock thingies sailing over the green line we did not know the name of and declared such actions decidedly uncool. The image of the big-hearted but hapless Dudley Do-Right northern neighbor was shattered.
Then we beat them at hockey, both men and women, and carried the gold medals aloft for a few moments and then went back to ignoring Canada, and hockey, again. None of this helped border relations.
Maybe they’re seething up there. We don’t know, because, again, we don’t care.
But. You know who does care? Alberta.
The moose-intensive province of Alberta is currently the home of an independence movement. Energy-rich and blocked from benefiting from it, Alberta is drowned both by heavy taxes and bureaucracy. And there isn’t much they can do about it because they suffer the New York State problem– constantly out-shouted by dense urban centers that have no idea what a citizen not entirely encased in concrete does in a day. They are neglected by their faraway national government on the other side of the continent and identify more firmly with Montana than Montreal.
Americans give ta-dah hands to Alberta as proof that Canada is so loused up by leftist policies that even Canadians don’t like Canada anymore. U.S. conservatives are largely rooting for Albertan independence– first, because it upsets everyone they love to see upset, and second, mineral-rich Alberta may well come under U.S. protection, possibly as a territory, maybe even as a state, much as that would louse up every American map ever made since 1959.
So where’s this going?
Well, most Americans considered the Canadian beef as settled between the frozen goal lines in Italy. But if Canada doesn’t recognize Alberta’s independence after a vote set for October 19, they sure as hell aren’t going to recognize America reaching out its great eagle wing to snuggle in a Northern protrusion.
I don’t see this becoming a shooting war because Canada doesn’t have much to shoot with. We have more nuclear aircraft carriers (eleven) than they do nuclear weapons (zero). Its military, what there is of it, leans heavily on NORAD and NATO for protection.
I don’t have to tell you what Trump thinks about NATO– even if you haven’t heard his exact words, you can probably imagine what they are.
The truth is, for all the accusations against the United States as a colonizer, it has shown great restraint just when its power is the most potent. If that weren’t the case, Canada and Mexico would have become Frozen America and Hot America long ago.
No, if this is going to be a problem, it’s going to be a UK problem. But they’re so busy putting out their self-set fires and grappling with disintegrating free speech that I don’t think they’ll much mind the whole Alberta-US elopement thing.
Who’s going to spearhead the massive workforce and resource dedication such an action would require? Charles? His mother might. His mother would. She I’d be scared of. Him– no. A particularly grumpy kindergarten class could take down Charles.
And as we’ve seen thus far in the Trump administration, when we decide to let our military run on the leash, you hear Chinook helicopters, and then you hear doom. We could roll through Ottawa before McDonald’s shuts down its breakfast menu.
If it’s going to go there– that’s where it’s going. What seemed unthinkable is at least possible now. It wouldn’t surprise anyone that the Trump Administration has Canadian contingency plans now. Plans that never existed in 1984.
Whose fault is that? Ours? Theirs? Does it matter? The seed has been planted. Public opinion usually moves at the speed of a glacier. Most Americans still don’t want to subjugate Canada. But a lot of them have at least thought about it now. And that’s not good for Canada.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
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