You get to elect a poster-boy Prime Minister who speaks both French and English. Meanwhile, the US manages to come up with a President who struggles to spell Marine Corps. Or is that Core?
5,525 miles is a lot of border to share and all without major issue since the War of 1812. Thus far, prior to the rise of Trump, it’s gone pretty well. Conservative icon Ronald Reagan summed it up neatly when addressing the Canadian Parliament in 1981:
“We are happy to be your neighbor. We want to remain your friend. We are determined to be your partner and we are intent on working closely with you in a spirit of co-operation.”
Trump, rather not so neatly, recently boasted that he took pride in lying to Trudeau about the veracity of his understanding of the trade-deficit between
the two countries.
Add to that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariff fiasco, targeting Canada along with the rest of the world, and significant differences on fundamental issues like climate change, refugees and NATO, and you start to sense that the co-operation Reagan spoke about is starting to corrode.
In that context, Canada is starting to project itself more on the world stage and also, by any reasonable metric, is outstripping the US in terms of quality of life:
The US noticeably fails to make the top ten.
Canada is what the US thinks it should be, but never has been. Canadian citizenry are protected in a common sense fashion. Sure, fire-arms can be obtained in Canada, but why the disparity between gun deaths in the US per annum and gun deaths in Canada, or elsewhere, come to that?
American Second Amendment enthusiasts love to holler that if guns were regulated / controlled in the US, what’s to stop them flooding in from their dangerous neighbor to the south? Canada looks on and mutters “oh please.”
Canada affords its people with real, meaningful protections to live and thrive in a twenty-first century world without the need to rely on an eighteenth century constitutional amendment to bear muskets. And did I mention yet the health-care to be found in Canada?
Likewise, for further example, Ottawa warmly welcomed Google’s unveiling of “Family Link” – an internet monitoring feature that allows parents to monitor and regulate the web browsing habits of their children.
Meanwhile, Trump gives approval to the repeal of net neutrality in the US, running the very real risk that millions of Americans will end up paying more for their internet usage.
Washington is ceding to Ottawa, at a rate of knots, moral leadership emanating from the North American land-mass. The US, under Trump, continues to regress. Canada, under Trudeau, continues to develop and progress.
Ronald Reagan
We are happy to be your neighbor. We want to remain your friend. We are determined to be your partner and we are intent on working closely with you in a spirit of co-operation.
~1981. Address to Canadian Parliament.