Betting against Canada is dumb and dumber

A Canadian friend posted this warning yesterday. It seems about right to me. 

Growing up on the US-Canada border, our big neighbor to the north was simply an ordinary part of my youth. Cross-border Canadian TV stations were where I could watch the National Hockey League. The parkway along the Canadian side of the Niagara River was where I ventured for morning long flat runs; the river itself was where I sailed my Sailfish to a foreign shore. None of this seemed extraordinary.

Canada was another country, a nearby country, a different country, a country I liked and respected.

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has Donald Trump's number and calls him out:

“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

US demands on Canada are mere bullying, rooted in a Trump fantasy of imperial annexaton.

Per historian Philips P. O'Brien: 

Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.  

I bet on the moose; integrity and grit count and we've lost ours along with our brains. The Canadians, not so much.

How others see us: US democracy in decline

The British opinionater Timothy Garton Ash is not one to hold back his thoughts. He seems to have been on a visit to our shores. A long time observer of the condition of democracy in Europe, he has summed up where he thinks the US stands under the rule of the Orange Toddler. We don't look very promising... but just maybe ...

The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.

V-Dem analysts note that in 2025 Trump issued no fewer than 225 executive orders whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed just 49 laws, most of them on minor issues such as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the rules for postponing certain deadlines by reason of disasters”. ...

... As I saw in Hungary this spring, if the popular revulsion towards an incumbent is sufficiently widespread, and channelled into turning out to vote, it sweeps away all the obstacles that the would-be autocrat puts in place – and those obstacles were, taking all in all, larger in the Hungarian case than they are here. The election may not be fair; it may not even be entirely free; but the result is still irrefutably plain for all to see....

... As a European in the US, one keeps looking around and asking: “Where’s the leader of the opposition?” Where, to recall the Hungarian example, is an opposition figure like Péter Magyar, leading a disciplined, effective nationwide campaign, answering the widespread feeling that it’s time for a change with “and this is the change you need”?

Friends who study these things here at Stanford University tell me I’m looking for something that usually doesn’t exist at this stage. ... 

What’s at stake here is not the future of the Democrats; it’s the future of democracy. A normal midterm change in control of the House is the absolute minimum needed to start checking, if not actually reversing, the unprecedented erosion of liberal democracy under Trump. That check will come partly through Congress’s constitutional powers to control government funding, to investigate and to impeach. 

If there’s an electoral landslide, however, it will come even more through the psychological shift, as Trump begins to look like his own worst nightmare – being a “loser”. For that very reason, the man who would be king will try first to prevent, then to circumvent and delegitimate a Democrat-controlled House with all the means at his disposal. Nonetheless, this would be the end of the beginning. ...

We don't need a pretentious Brit to diagnose this. But perhaps it should be bracing to know this is how we look to a friendly observer of democracies.

They are good at standing around and being seen

 

To a bemused observer, one of the weirdest things about the regime in Washington is that most of its appointees in significant executive roles seem to spend so much time being props at various performative events. Don't these people have jobs to do? 

On the other had, when they do attend to the agencies and offices they've been dropped into, they mostly serve only as wreckers. So maybe we should be glad that they view their roles primarily as extras on a stage set.