Late last week, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan announced that he wants to take legal action to prevent American-based cruise ships from stopping at British Columbia ports permanently.
That was in response to B.C. Premier David Eby’s recent announcement that commercial trucks travelling through the province from Washington State up to Alaska will be forced to pay new fees in response to the escalating trade war with the United States.
On top of the increasing ugly rhetoric between the White House and American politicians and the federal and provincial governments in Canada over tariffs, that has seen many products related to America being shunned by Canadian consumers, U.S. President Donald Trump is escalating his efforts to destroy our national pride and annex our beautiful country, which has been an independent entity since 1867.
He said recently that he loves Canada and its national anthem, and we could even keep it as our state anthem "when" we become the 51st state.
What’s unsettling about that is that I remember years ago, before Russia invaded its neighbour and one-time friend Ukraine in 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin also questioned Ukraine’s right to exist as a nation, stating that it was “not even a real country.”
I find it all very disturbing.
I spent all of my life until recently living in a world in which, while there was always fear of a nuclear war between the western and eastern worlds, at least you knew exactly who your friends were.
The end of the Second World War in 1945 saw a new world order arise out of the chaos in which the west, headed by the U.S., decided it would work together to keep the world peaceful and the size of that alliance, which included Canada and Western Europe, worked well to keep any major conflicts around the world from breaking out.
Mind you, wars did happen over the years since 1945, even proxy wars, and many people lost their lives in them, but both the west and the east kept them local affairs that usually didn’t have huge impacts on most people’s lives around the globe, including us here in Canada.
Free trade blossomed as countries began integrating their economies in the more peaceful atmosphere to make is simpler and cheaper for their citizens to buy food and other necessary products, and most of us flourished as a result.
I've spent the last 60 years living with the benefits of these arrangements and I assumed that humanity saw the advantages of working together and the world would only get better as we advanced into the future.
Now I’m beginning to realize that the decades from 1945 to now were a golden age that is coming quickly to an end.
Who would have thought that the U.S., our strong neighbour and ally and biggest trading partner, would turn on us so viciously as to call for an end to our nation and to have us absorbed into their republic?
All of a sudden, we’re realizing just how vulnerable we are when a behemoth like the U.S. starts questioning our right to exist.
Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (remember him? He’s the father of Justin) famously said to former U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969 that “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant…one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
I think Trudeau said that as more of a friendly joke at the time because that was when relations between our two countries were more “normal”, but it has now taken on an ominous tone.
It appears that our future as a country is now increasingly uncertain as the “elephant” is looking like it wants to stomp on us.
We certainly don't have the military strength to put up much of a fight, if it ever comes to that.
One of my uncles once served in the Canadian Armed Forces and he told me that if the Russians (who were considered our adversaries at that time) were ever to invade Canada and we were left alone to defend ourselves, the military would only be able to defend Parliament Hill for half an hour.
We're now living in scary times, and I fear they could become even scarier.
