Diane Francis: If Trump walks all over Canada, it's because Trudeau made it weak
A flurry of satirical articles and angry comebacks followed U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s recent crack about making Canada the 51st state.
Last week, Fox News reported, citing anonymous sources, that Trump joked to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that if a threatened 25 per cent tariff would kill Canada’s economy, then maybe Canada should become the 51st state.
The bilateral relationship between Canada and the United States is rocky, and that is something I’m familiar with. I’m a citizen of both countries and the author of a 2014 book that predicted the two countries would merge by the end of the century.
Yet as I pointed out a decade ago in my book, no self-respecting Republican like Trump would ever support taking over Canada because it would mean that the GOP would never again take the presidency, as most Canadians fall on the left of the American political spectrum.
As a small-C Canadian conservative myself, I’m to the left of the Democrats. So there’s that.
But the two countries have increasingly integrated economically, as I predicted. Politically speaking, a drift toward an outright union is still unlikely in the near future, but Trudeau has made such a scenario more plausible.
In 2015, he described Canada as the world’s first “post-national state” in an interview with New York Times Magazine. He actually stated that, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” and has governed accordingly.
It was an inaccurate, offensive and belittling description, rooted in his attitude that there’s Quebec and then there’s the rest of Canada, which is a bunch of scattered regions without a common identity or shared values.
Unfortunately, Trudeau has pandered to Quebec, continued unjust equalization payments to
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