Donald Trump during his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.
Donald Trump during his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4. Credit: Donald J. Trump / Wikimedia Commons Credit: Donald J. Trump / Wikimedia Commons

The Canadian Prime Minister could not have put it more clearly.

Donald Trump, he said, is dead serious when he says he wants to annex Canada. 

Trump’s ambitions constitute a dire and dangerous threat to Canada’s very existence, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century.

Justin Trudeau candidly told Canadians (and the world) that the only reason Trump started the current trade battle with this country was to impoverish Canada so that it will be ripe for the picking.

Virtually all other Canadian leaders, of all political stripes, agree.

They speak with one voice when they say the U.S. leader’s talk about migrants, fentanyl, or even the U.S.’s overall trade balance is, at best, disingenuous, at worst, utterly dishonest.

Ironically, Trump and his spokespeople seem to agree with that assessment, because they keep stepping on their own official message. 

In a profanity-laced phone conversation with Trudeau, Trump not only evoked lumber, dairy, and US banks’ access to Canadians’ money, he also said, ominously, he wanted to change the border with Canada.

Then, for good measure, the US’ big boss added he wanted to abrogate the treaty covering shared waters with Canada. Those waters include all of the Great Lakes, as well as the Saint Lawrence, Columbia, St John, Red, Yukon, and many, many other rivers and watersheds.

Not mere trolling

Trump’s repeated 51st state epithet, and his obnoxious references to our prime minister as a governor are not mere trolling or typical Trump-style trash talk, as some of Trump’s acolytes and sycophants claim. 

One of those is our own Canadian Quisling, the self-styled Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary.  

O’Leary made a name for himself as one of the dragons on the CBC show Dragon’s Den. He then tried to emulate Trump’s success in parlaying a career as a reality television personality to politics. He ran – unlike his US mentor, unsuccessfully – for the leadership of the Conservative Party. 

When Trump’s existential threat to Canada first emerged, O’Leary got a lot of unearned air time in Canada. He was supposedly in the know, because of his close personal relationship with the Don of Mar-a-Lago. 

O’Leary kept lecturing Canadians that they had to distinguish the “signal from the noise”.

The noise is, supposedly, Trump’s unambiguous threat to take us over. The true signal, says O’Leary, is that the US President only wants a new sort of economic relationship with Canada.

Few in Canada pay the slightest heed to O’Leary’s guff now. It seems Mr. Wonderful was either acting as an agent for Trump, or, almost as bad, was living in his own fantasy world.

It should now be obvious to anyone paying even the slightest attention that Trump’s personal legacy ambition is a US that stretches from the north pole to the Rio Grande. 

The US’ leader wants to be lord and master of the world’s largest country by territory – an über-country, which would include not only Greenland and its 57,000 people, but 42 million Canadians, and all of this country’s vast natural resources.

Trump said more than a month ago that he would win over Canada not with a military invasion, but with economic warfare. 

He has now started that war.

Canada needs a wartime-like effort

Canada’s trade and economic policies going back three quarters of a century have, unfortunately, tied us far too closely to the US and weakened our capacity to resist Trump’s aggressive intentions.

As Linda McQuaig has pointed out, there was a time when Canada possessed a vigorous constellation of publicly-owned corporations. 

During the Great Depression in the run-up to World War II, and then as part of the historically unprecedented war effort, the Canadian government, in essence, threw out the free enterprise play book, and interceded in the economy in a massive way.

The Canadian industrial public sector grew to include: multiple crown corporations to manufacture military equipment, a railroad, an airline, a nuclear research and production facility, a medical research and vaccine-producing company, an oil and gas corporation, a public broadcaster, a satellite corporation, and much more.

Over time, almost all of those have been privatized, as Canada became seized with the Reagan-Thatcher ideology of small government combined with low taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

We still have our public broadcaster, though the leader of our Official Opposition party has promised to de-fund it. 

A few lonely voices are now suggesting that a good part of our response to the Trump threat should be a 21st century version of the interventionist policies of an earlier time in our history.

We cannot rely, they say, on the profit motive, greed, and the self-interest of corporations (whose only loyalty is solely to their shareholders) to assure our prosperity and independence.

We are a medium-sized country and economy, with significant natural resources. But we do not necessarily have the home-grown capital necessary to exploit, process, and distribute those resources. 

In addition, we certainly cannot depend on the private corporate sector to carry out its activities in a way that respects the environment and Indigenous rights, and fosters equality among all Canadians.

However, when, via our governments, we pool together our resources as a country, we can achieve great results. That’s what some say we have to do now, at this fraught moment.

McQuaig suggests entrusting a publicly-owned Crown corporation, rather than private interests, with the task of building the new highspeed rail the Prime Minister announced recently. 

She also points to the opportunity for a publicly-owned entity to spearhead development of the green energy sector. 

Where are Canada’s friends?

At the same time as we adopt a bold and interventionist industrial policy, we will have to keep working on building friends and allies. 

So far, our potential allies, notably the United Kingdom (UK), seem more intent on placating Trump than speaking up for Canada. 

We have no choice but to keep rattling their cage. We have to communicate with the public at large in the UK, and in the EU, and not only with the political elites. 

But we also need allies in the US itself. 

It is instructive to note that while the ups and downs of Trump’s economic war are all-consuming for Canadian news media, that is not the case for their US counterparts.

Trump and his gang are shooting at so many targets at once it is hard for Americans, including American journalists, to know where to look.

On March 6, US news outlets were full of stories on Trump’s tariffs and their impact, especially on the tanking stock markets.

But by March 7 US news media were focused elsewhere: on the U.S.’s monthly job figures, on Elon Musk’s war against the US federal government, on South Carolina’s plans to execute a condemned prisoner by firing squad, and on Trump’s ever-shifting stance toward Ukraine and Russia.

With so much going on at once it is understandable that Canada’s potential friends in the US have trouble keeping their focus on this country.

Still, Americans who want to resist Trump, and assure their democracy survives him, would be well advised to give a high priority to their president’s expansionist ambitions. 

Creating an empire and subjugating other peoples has always been an integral part of the fascist project. 

If folks in the US want to stop the plague of authoritarianism from entirely engulfing their country, they cannot afford to exclusively restrict their attention to what is happening within their own borders.  

Someone, somewhere in the US must start a massive “Hands Off Canada” movement. It is in decent Americans’ own interest to do so. 

To be continued.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...