I, like you, have been drafted into the Trade War. I did not want to fight. I had no choice. I can’t remember when we last had a say in how we were going to live our lives. It’s been a strange few years. I spent the pandemic obsessively sanitizing my hands and following the arrows on the floor in supermarkets. Now, I find myself obsessively checking ketchup bottles for their country of origin and asking bartenders to ‘hold the bourbon’ in my Old Fashioned. I feel like I am going crazy, but I have been assured it is the world that has gone mad. It’s not us. It’s them. And by them, of course, I mean Americans.
We may not have a lot of guns in Canada but we do have plenty of triggers. I was so enraged by President Trump’s comments about us becoming the 51st State that I did the most passive aggressive thing possible. I didn’t yell or scream or call for a war. I did the ‘polite’ thing which is code for the most ‘passive aggressive’ thing. I wrote a book. I had been working on a novel but every time I sat down to write I’d hear Mr. Trump say another ridiculous thing and I’d spend the rest of my day growling under my breath. The things I was writing were not the things that I wanted to say and so I called my publisher and asked to change course. I wrote a collection of essays called, ‘Sorry, Not Sorry – An Unapologetic Look at What Makes Canada Worth Fighting For.’ I had hoped it to be timely. But then I began to worry.
Trump met with Prime Minister Carney. There was talk of a new deal. I began to fret that by the time it came out, the trade war would have passed, and my book would be as irrelevant as a catalogue of N-95 masks. Thank God for JD Vance. The man, who is one Mcdonald’s-grease-encrusted heartbeat away from the gold-veneered Oval Office, set his sights on Canada last week. Or should I say ‘site’? Primarily, his X account. ‘With all due respect to my Canadian friends’ he wrote, ‘whose politics focus obsessively on the United States: your stagnating living standards have nothing to do with Donald Trump or whatever bogeyman the CBC tells you to blame. The fault lies with your leadership, elected by you.’
Thanks for the advice, JD. “It’s your own fault that we are crazy.’ I haven’t heard advice like that since I was in grade school. I’m reminded of being held down on the playground while one of the older kids smacked me in the face with my own hand. ‘Stop hitting yourself’, they’d taunt as they laughed, stealing my recess snack. In this scenario, the older kid is the United States and my bag of ketchup chips is a tariff. JD Vance tweeted of his ‘Canadian friends’. He seems to only have one Canadian friend, Conservative MP, and possible Pierre Poilievre 2.0, Jamil Jivani. Jivani and Vance became friends at Yale. I’m sure they graduated with a degree in ‘common sense’ like most of the ordinary, hardworking rural folks they claim to represent did when, they too, graduated from Yale. I wonder if Jamil isn’t the person for whom this tweet was directed.
After all, Jivani seems to be a doing a bit of a ‘look-at-me’ tour ahead of Pierre’s upcoming leadership review. Poilievre is looking weak ever since two of his MP’s hid behind see-through ‘Scheer curtains’ to allow Carney’s budget to pass. And now, it seems, Jivani prowls the edges of the herd, waiting for the wounded ‘Lying King’ to die so that he can command the herd. Jamil has been speaking to youth and denouncing ‘Liberal racism’ and DEI. And then, suddenly, the Vice President of the United States is decrying the same and blaming the CBC. ‘JD blames CBC for DEI’. That is the closest anyone in the current White House has come to learning the entire alphabet. The resource that JD wants most from Canada isn’t oil or water. Both he and Jamil need the same thing to survive – angry young men.
Americans love to gaslight us. When it comes to Alberta, they even oil and gaslight us. America is an ally. Our best friend. But with friends like these, who needs enemies. Lately, America is acting more like a toxic ex-boyfriend. Trump says that America doesn’t need us. But, as any woman will tell you, nobody wants you more than the man who is telling all his friends how worthless you are. America is ‘negging’ us. In dating terms it’s belittling someone to make them doubt themself. It’s used to gain control in a relationship. A psychiatrist might say that negging could be a sign of narcissistic tendencies and insecurity. If narcissistic tendencies and insecurity could have a baby, that baby would be Donald Trump. If someone is negging you, they might say, “Your hair looks nice today – for a change”. Or “I met your Prime Minister. He’d make a great governor of the State of Canada.”
The Vice President telling us we voted for the wrong guy seems to me like foreign interference. Mr. Trump recently accused us of the same. When Premier Ford bought American ad time to play a speech by Ronald Reagan that argued against tariffs, Trump cried foul. He said it was AI and fake. Yes, Zombie Reagan looked a lot more lifelike than the currently alive Trump. But that’s because it was a real clip. Trump raised tariffs our Canada by 10% saying the ad was ‘a serious misrepresentation of the facts’. “You’re hitting yourself”.
I thought that things were calming down. I thought that our best friend might have a change of heart and recognize us for who we are. But, just like Wicked, we are getting a sequel. As the days roll on, I feel as though we may have gone over the rainbow to the land of OZ. In this case the Emerald City is covered in faux-gold and has a new ballroom. The Wicked Witch is not green, he’s orange. The Wicked Bitch of the South, turned evil when spurned by the Mayor Trudeau of Munchkin land. So, his broomstick up his ass, he sends his flying monkeys to conquer us. But who is really behind the curtain? Putin? Musk? It couldn’t be Andrew Scheer again, could it? No. I sometimes fear that nobody at all is behind the curtain. With no one to give us our hearts, brains, and courage, it seems we will have to find them ourselves.
So, big thanks to JD for making this a perfect week to launch my book. I truly wish it was not.