Alan Zendell, October 26, 2025

I have a cherished photograph taken in 1944, of my father and my favorite uncle, looking sharp in their U. S. Army infantry uniforms. I always loved that picture when I was a kid, but there was something I never understood about it until many years later. My uncle was Canadian. Why was he wearing an American army uniform? I naively assumed he had come to the States and enlisted as a romantic, patriotic, not to say courageous gesture, and I grew up believing our solidarity with Canada was unshakable. (I only learned as an adult that my uncle had been born in Brooklyn, but he grew up in Alberta.)

Apparently, most of America felt as I did during and after World War II. Futurists and sci-fi writers in the sixties and seventies frequently predicted that our nations would eventually merge into a single North American confederation, and I was all on board with that notion. It seemed like a match made in heaven. Clichés and silliness aside, in all the times I’ve been in Canada, I literally never met a Canadian who wasn’t “nice.” That includes an RCMP officer who pulled me over for speeding in British Columbia, then spent fifteen minutes helping my wife and me map a scenic route through the Canadian Rockies.

My love affair with Canada grew teeth when my wife and I took a road trip from New York to Quebec and Montreal, in 1966. It flourished, when we moved to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue in 1974, where we frequently engaged with families from Vancouver, BC and many of our neighbors were Canadians who worked for Boeing.

The first chink in that romantic fantasy occurred a few years later, when Washington State and federal officials announced plans to raise Ross Dam, which provided massive amounts of hydroelectric power to Seattle. The problem was that raising the dam would also raise Ross Lake, which would result in flooding a thousand square miles of BC farmland. When Canadians raised the issue, I was appalled at the callous reaction on our side of the border. No one cared.

A lot older and at least a little wiser, I couldn’t believe my ears when Donald Trump, early in his first term, attacked Canada for allegedly trying to bankrupt Wisconsin dairy farmers. Of course, that was typical Trump hyperbole, seizing on an economic competition that had been going on for decades, and turning it into divisive, hate-filled rhetoric. Against Canada, our staunchest and most reliable ally in the world? In his second term, Trump has vilified Canada more than any other nation except China, simply because they wouldn’t accept his ambition to be Emperor of North America.

Trump began this unsolicited fight by claiming Canada has been ripping off the United States since World War II, and he would punish them with tariffs. Then he decided that Canada, a nation comprised of ten provinces and three territories that is rich in critical rare earth minerals, and whose total area is ninety percent of the United States’ should become our fifty-first state.

I have been communicating with Canadian friends during Trump’s tenure, and what they’ve told me surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. It always helps to see the other side’s point of view. While we see Trump’s attacks on Canada the same way as everything else he attacks – one massive extortion game after another – my Canadian friends don’t see it that way. Nearly eighty percent of Canadians want to move their trade relationships away from the U. S. toward Europe and Asia. That didn’t surprise me, but what did was their reason. What Trump accomplished was making Canadians painfully aware of how one-sided their dependency on the United States is, which they now see as a threat to their sovereignty. Even out of the mouth of Donald Trump sometimes comes wisdom, however inadvertently.

Last week, the government of Ontario released a 1987 video of Ronald Reagan explaining to Americans that tariffs are the worst possible way to manage an economy as part of his pitch for open markets, which Republicans pushed hard for the next thirty years. You can watch the speech here: https://nyti.ms/477ySrI. Ontario paid to run the video as a commercial during World Series games between Toronto and Los Angeles. Trump threw a tantrum and slapped an additional ten percent tariff on Canadian products.

The Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993. Both times, the American president, first Republican George H. W. Bush, then Democrat Bill Clinton, invited them to visit the White House and both times they accepted. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens if Toronto wins this time, or even if they lose. Will Trump let his irrational anger at Canada govern his actions? It would be true to form for him to issue an Executive Order requiring all MLB teams to be based in the United States, just out of spite, one more item in Trump’s politics of the absurd.