Opinion This summer, I inadvertently found myself in some pretty rarified company and simply had to take advantage of the situation. There I was, in a small group, unexpectedly talking to a former member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet. How could I not ask about the deteriorating relationship between our two countries? So, I did: “Our government has to make a huge, multi-billion-dollar decision soon about whether to buy your F-35 fighter jets or, instead, purchase the cheaper Gripen plane from Sweden. Which one should we buy?” The former cabinet secretary went through all of the logical reasons why the Americanmade F-35 was the obvious choice: a superior design, a much more powerful plane, already interwoven with the Canadian military with plenty of interoperability, and so on. “Yeah, that’s all true,” I said, “but you’re forgetting one thing ‒ we Canadians don’t like your president very much these days. And it will be very hard for any Canadian government to sell the public on the notion of giving tens of billions of dollars to an American company, given what he’s doing to our economy right now.” The man politely accepted everything I said, but then added: “Don’t ever confuse the United States of America with one guy.” That comment sort of stopped our conversation in its tracks. Because it’s true. That this American president takes up a massively disproportionate amount of bandwidth should not obscure the fact that there are plenty of Americans ‒ even plenty in positions of authority ‒ who wish us well, who feel affection for us and who think that Trump’s actions are completely counterproductive. That’s often hard to remember when the president insultingly refers to Canada as a potential 51st state, or calls our two most recent prime ministers “Governor,” in another example of puerile trolling. Someone once suggested to me that Mark Carney should have responded to that slight by saying, “No, that was my last job. I was the governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada. Now, I’m Prime Minister of a sovereign country.” He may have thought it, but I’m not sure that he’s ever said it, preferring instead not to wave a red cape at the bull and saying that he doesn’t intend to react to every online post of Trump’s. In fact, one time during a joint meeting, Trump accidentally called Carney “President,” to which Carney thanked him for the upgrade. But the fact is that for more than 200 years, our two countries have had one of the best relationships in the world, making the current tensions all the more heartbreaking. I can’t count the number of times American friends of mine have either emailed, called or told me in person how awful they feel for the way their president is treating us. Even people who voted for Trump find his behaviour appalling. Like many Canadians, I’ve had to remind myself that more than 75 million Americans voted for Trump in 2024 and, rather than dismiss them all as a bunch of boobs, I’ve tried hard to understand why that happened. I’ve talked to many people who told me that they held their collective noses and voted for Trump because they thought the Democratic Party alternative was worse. To oversimplify, they saw the Democrats as a party obsessed with which pronouns to use, while dismissively referring to the heartland of America as “flyover country.” In other words, the only people who mattered were on the two coasts: well educated, upper income, so-called coastal elites. Trump’s superpower ‒ if we can call it that ‒ is that he’s somehow convinced Red State America that he is their champion, that he gives voice to their concerns despite the fact that so many of his policies seem to fly in the face of what’s actually good for his coalition. By putting tariffs on a wide variety of Canadian-made goods, Trump has made those products more expensive for the very people who need to buy them. And yet, either his supporters haven’t put two and two together, or they cut him a lot of slack because they think he’s still their guy. How have Canadians reacted to Trump’s mistreatment of their country? In a wide variety of ways, almost all of which the vast majority of Canadians seem to support. Polls show that most people are very pleased with Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s edict to pull all American booze off of the shelves of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario retail outlets. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew got rave reviews when he simply said: “No CUSMA, no boozema!” referring to his move to refuse to sell American spirits as 16 | www.snowbirds.org
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