Not much for me to write here…because the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson has put it together so completely.
Here, from his latest commentary at amgreatness.com, is Mr. Hanson’s explanation of the acrimony that currently exists between the USA and Canada:
The United States is leaping ahead of other Western countries in ways few anticipated several decades ago, while Canada is stagnating.
America is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas.
Its technology, software, biotechnology, digital media, satellite, and numerous other companies dominate global rankings.
American GDP is roughly $10 trillion larger than either China’s or the European Union’s. Yet China has four times the population of the United States, while the European Union has 100 million more people.
The U.S. military is the world’s most lethal and is now being rebuilt with even greater defense spending.
Moreover, the United States has not been shy about warning its Western friends that their socialist paradigms and leftist policies threaten their very existence.
The EU suffers from unsustainably low fertility.
Massive and often illegal immigration threatens the very culture and values of Europe.
Green hysteria has nearly wrecked the German and British economies.
Until Russia invaded Ukraine and Trump began his harangues, European NATO members were de facto disarming.
Yet Canada—especially under the globalist prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney—has adopted much of this ossified European model.
The result is a sluggish economy. Also left unspoken is Canada’s growing reliance on the U.S. market, American continental defenses, and the general goodwill of the United States.
Until last year, Canada had refused to honor its NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense.
It has thrown open its border even as the United States is closing its own.
Some 45 percent of Canadian residents are either foreign-born or the children of immigrants.
The majority come from impoverished, non-Western countries and immediately depend upon a vast social welfare system that the present anemic economy cannot sustain.
Utopian think tanks speak grandly of a Canadian “Century Initiative” that would bring in enough immigrants to increase the population to 100 million. But sheer numbers will hardly remedy the country’s underlying demographic and economic stagnation.
How mostly non-Western immigrants are to be integrated, assimilated, and acculturated in a country that has forsaken anything remotely resembling the idea of a melting pot is never explained.
The tragic irony is that Canada once punched well above its demographic weight, with a formidable military and a dynamic economy.
Not anymore. Its per capita GDP is now among the lowest in the industrialized West.
Yet Canada has the fifth-largest oil and natural-gas reserves in the world, even as green restrictions and provincial infighting nullify those natural advantages.
In timber, metals, and mineral resources, Canada ranks among the world’s top five nations.
Apparently, Canada believes that opening its economy, insisting upon legal, meritocratic, diverse, and measured immigration, and fully developing its natural wealth would be a bitter medicine worse than even its present maladies.
For all America’s unsolicited advice and tough-love attitude, the United States would prefer a strong Canadian partner to a dependent one.
That growing asymmetry explains much of this otherwise inexplicable melodrama.
Has Canada really screwed itself up this completely? Based on Mr. Hanson’s analysis and his compilation of facts, it sure looks that way.
Now, what do we do about it? What can we do about it?
If what you just read is true, as long Carney or others like him are in control of our northern neighbor I doubt anything is going to change.
So when do Canadian citizens wake up, see the light, and elect different leadership????? That’s the key question; the one neither Victor Davis Hanson, me or you can answer.
