President Trump has come out like a Tasmanian devil, with a level of productivity nothing short of astonishing. His new policies, directives, and orders span the entire spectrum – from HR issues to crime to historical injustices to everything in between, and are being implemented with mind-bending speed. From the most personal to the most geo-significant, he’s changing everything.
And across this entire spectrum, one item in particular seems to be agitating him like no other, that causes his red mist to go from pinkish to crimson in a heartbeat: Canada.
Canada!?!?!?!?!?!? What in the living hell…Canada?
Hey, I’m a Canuck and have to admit: is there anything more benign than us? A country that prides itself on being nice as a national identity? A country without a functional military (LOVE our military – but able to defend the second biggest country on earth? More below)? A country that runs around the world handing money to anyone that looks at us, through foreign aid, or peacekeeping, or just to show we’re nice?
Yes, Canada is driving Trump nuts, in part for that very “niceness”, and in part because it offers him an opportunity to become not just a name but a chapter in every history book from here forward.
Actually that frame of reference needs a little clarification. Canada may appear to be driving Trump nuts – he acts insanely annoyed at the Great White North, and brings us up at every single freaking speech as being problematic.
But what if he’s not actually bothered by Canada, and that out of all the policies and demons he’s chasing, he wants nothing more than a piece of Canada to love, honour and cherish, forevermore? A very big piece…
We’re all taking Trump’s anger at Canada as a trade irritant, or a drug problem…but maybe those are just supporting arguments for his main goal. A little math work will make a very good case for all this madness (#s from the Brittanica site).
Three numbers that are more important to Trump, in the long term, than anything else. Using American units in case I have to get used to it again:
3,797,173 + 3,855,103 = 7,652,276
6,592,850
7,652,276 > 6,592,850
Those are the areal sizes, in square miles, of three countries.
Canada + US equals ‘bigger than Russia’, currently the largest country on earth.
To the most powerful man on earth, nothing is more important than that the sum of the first two numbers is bigger than the second.
Canada + US = biggest country on earth. Biggest country on earth. Does that phrase sound like it would hold a certain appeal to a certain president? What do you suppose he would like to leave as his ultimate legacy to the world?
Every other Trump sentence includes or ends with a few catch phrases: “…biggest in the world” or “like no one’s ever seen before” or “like no one has ever done before”. That is his mindset – everything must be grander than the world has ever known before. I am not making a judgement call here; it is the mindset necessary to engineer the sort of changes he is looking to do.
Almost everyone is in a tizzy, analyzing what Trump’s tariffs might mean for this sector or that sector, wondering if the issue is drugs or illegal immigrants or trade deficits, wondering how it can be possible for Trump to push and pull a string at the same time…and we’re all going crazy trying to figure out the nuances, what it might mean for this industry or that, tossing around ideas like “well he couldn’t possibly target this” or “how will he deal with that without causing inflation” or endless speculation.
Does he really care about a trade spat with Canada? He treats the numbers with supreme irreverence; one day the US is “subsidizing Canada” by $100 billion a year, then it’s $150 billion, then a few days later he says $250 billion. It’s not subsidies and it’s not $250 billion, and he knows that. He says the US “does not need Canadian oil.” That is demonstrably false and easily proven; even the American Petroleum Institute says so, and you’d think they would be happy to see diminished competition. The fact that they are not says much about the value of which Trump dismisses so easily. There is a game afoot.
Does he really care about illegal immigrants and drugs coming over the Canadian border, compared to Mexico? Ha. Yes it is a problem, a single kilo/criminal is a problem, but look at how he is treating Mexico, which sends to the US an almost infinitely large amount of drugs and people relative to Canada. Trump has stated that he is ‘happy with what Mexico is doing’, and yet last week the White House Twitter account showed US marines arriving at the Mexican border to begin sealing it up. No such armada is making its way towards Canada. So his Canadian ire is not because of drugs and immigrants. There is indeed a game afoot.
The other week I mused that Trump was looking to create Fortress North America by uniting Greenland, Canada and the US. Apologies to those that have adopted the phrase (you have impeccable taste in writing, btw) but it needs an update. Already. If Trump were really looking to build a monolithic entity from the Panama Canal to Greenland, he would be interested in Mexico and Central America as well. But not at all. Not even considering the fact that Mexico is more of a thorn to Trump on all three big topics: drugs, immigrants, and trade – Canada’s trade surplus with the US may be larger than Mexico, but it is through Mexico that various nations including China can access the US market in one way or another due to the USMCA trade agreement.
So why is Trump relatively uninterested in Mexico or Central America even though the Panama Canal is on his to-do list? Because he doesn’t need them for what might be his ultimate goal. He needs square footage, the kind that only Canada can provide. Only via Canada can Trump achieve his crowning glory: to step into the center of a ring and have an MMA announcer lean into a microphone and shout, “Presenting the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, President and Creator of the Largest Country in the World…..Donald…..J…TRRRUUUUMMMMPPPPPP!”
Even his biggest fans have to admit, the guy’s aims are larger than life.
But, if that is indeed the case, it is only one part of the equation. There is a very serious reason for wanting a shotgun wedding, more than a trade deficit, more than a few semi-frozen immigrants struggling across the Canada-US border.
Put yourself in Trump’s shoes, or rather, make an attempt, because I’m not sure anyone can. While his battle against wokeness might dominate the headlines, his overarching geopolitical vision is to secure the US.
Obviously the US is a military powerhouse, and not scared of much, but it has one major area of vulnerability, for a nation that sees its military strength as an absolute global necessity: the longest undefended border in the world, and on the other side of that undefended border, the world’s second largest country with an utterly laughable ability to defend itself. Canada could be invaded from the north and the only resistance on the way to the US would be US customs. Canada’s leaders seem to base our entire defense on the fact that the terrain is too large and too hard to navigate. Sure, go ahead, invade us from the north, see if we care. If the bears don’t get you the blackflies will.
Surprise surprise, not everyone takes national security so flippantly – particularly not when paying the bill for North American defense. Canada has simply not been a good partner, security wise. We refuse to spend to our pledged NATO commitment level, which is just openly insulting to the US because we both know Canada is simply relying on the US to not be invaded. It’s like asking your neighbour to not just install a home security video system but could you make it big enough so it covers my yard too please and thanks.
And we don’t even say please and thanks, which brings up the most salient point in the discussion. It is clearly evident that Trump retains a mental record of those that slight him (her his book, The Art of the Deal: “In most cases I’m very easy to get along with. I’m very good to people who are good to me. But when people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard.”). So when our Prime Minister states, in public, in front of a microphone, as reported on by the CBC of course, “We were supposed to be on a steady, if difficult, march towards progress. And yet, just a few weeks ago, the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman president.”
For icing on the cake, consider this: Trudeau made the above comments on December 10, 2024. Two weeks prior to that, Trudeau was sitting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago dining facility, guest of the newly elected president, a meeting that Trump summed up as a “very productive meeting” where they discussed “many important topics that will require both Countries to work together to address.”
For a leader of a significant economy to refuse to even try to work with Trump, to be nice to his face but catty to his back, to imply that Harris should have won because she was a woman…
Does anyone in government understand the meaning of the word ‘consequences’? A few weeks after Trudeau’s slam – of not just President Trump but the American people (instead of voting for progress, the United States ‘chose not to elect’ a woman) – Trump began posting images of a United States that includes Canada (here and here). Going through his Truth Social account, no other country has attracted his attention anywhere near Canada. Not Mexico. Not China. Not Russia. Not even the United Nations.
Just Canada.
We have done this to ourselves, largely. We have been complacent, only moving expeditiously on unproductive things. Building anything big in Canada (except battery plants) is unwelcome. We are a resource-rich economy, and any resource producer needs to get its product to markets. It is challenging enough to move goods across vast distances of very challenging terrain, but we’ve gone out of our way to make it even more difficult by blocking infrastructure projects that would have allowed Canada to diversify markets and remove a significant piece of US leverage. The whole cadre of the Ottawa brain trust of the past decade, no point in naming names…not a single one of them seems capable of strategic thinking. They think they are doing just that, marching jubilantly back from Davos to implement ‘post-national’ whims and causes (as Trudeau not-so-sagely described the very country he was elected to run). No sense of Canada as a nation that needs to work to its strengths, stand on its own two feet, control its own destiny.
While we spend time on such concepts, and throw ourselves into the fire in support of the rapidly fading western-ethnocentric “environmental” agenda – a forced and phony binary situation where to be “for pipelines” was to be “against the environment”, while we pitted region against region, here is the view of the arctic from the White House, per a recent Financial Times article: “I’m talking about protecting the free world,” Trump said. “You have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”
Let that sink in. The US feels vulnerable due to increased Chinese and Russian arctic activity, with Canada being the guardian of North American interests across that great swath of the north. We are tragically outgunned, in any military situation. Consider this: Sweden, with a population of 11 million people and territory of 450,000 square kilometres, has approximately 88,000 personnel in the Swedish Armed Forces. Canada has a population of 40 million, covers a staggering 9,985,000 square kilometres, more than 22 times the size of Sweden, and has armed forces totalling…70,000 people. God bless ‘em, but yeah there’s trouble on the horizon. Canada’s own defense chief states that “Canada must take responsibility for Canada’s territorial integrity”, indicating that defense has not been a priority in Ottawa, and that Canada actually has a 16,500-member personnel shortage to return to full capacity. Last year, in a statement that surely caused heart attacks in Washington, Canada’s Defense Minister, the freaking Defense Minister, said that Canada’s military was facing a “death spiral”.
Now, knowing that Trump watches the news, what do you think he thinks when he hears Canada’s military is in a death spiral, that Canada can’t spend to our NATO commitments…and then he hears that the federal government is pouring tens of billions into battery manufacturing plants? Would Trump be crazy for musing “Hmm, maybe if you put a fraction of that to your military and border security things would be different…”?
We’ve put our head in the lion’s mouth. Maybe Trudeau was right about Canada being a “post-national state”, but most definitely not for the reasons he was thinking.
The positive silver lining is that this critical situation is pulling Canadians together in a certain way, and in the past few weeks the change in direction of discourse is mindblowing. One of the leading opponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline now wishes it to be constructed. Nova Scotia’s premier wants Energy East to be constructed. And in the strangest turn of all the CBC is now arguing that Canada needs more pipelines, in a somewhat enfeebled way, but still in favour nonetheless. It really is remarkable. But unless Canada declares an emergency state of some kind by which to blow through regulations and catfights, no new pipeline will appear for a decade no matter if every single Canadian wants it.
Such is the hole we are in. Comfort feeds complacency. That party is over.
What we do know is this: The world is morphing rapidly. Trump is bringing down a big ruling structure, virtually around the world, and shifting everyone’s focus. The AI world is bending everyone’s brain; the race is on, and it is an international one, and week by week developments happen that blow everyone’s mind (Including, over the past two weeks, China’s shocking Deepseek AI model that runs much faster and much cheaper than cutting edge US models, with equivalent results). The world is dividing into several blocks – Trump’s version of North America, whatever that winds up looking like, and BRICS.
All that stuff is crazy and unpredictable, but a few truths underline it all, ones that trump (pun intended and not) all conversations: Energy is everything. Reliable, affordable energy is everything. Listen to what Trump says in this clip: “The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth…and we may be a very substantially enlarged country in the not too distant – isn’t it nice to see, you know for years, for decades, we’re the same size, to the square foot, probably got smaller actually…but we might be an enlarged country pretty soon, and one of the things we’re going to be doing is Drill Baby Drill, and that’s going to bring everything down.”
Notice the sequence of his thoughts: he goes from talking about oil and gas, to an enlarged country, to the size of the US geographically, to his desire to increase that square footage, then back to oil and gas and how great it is. He is one transparent dude.
And therein lies Canada’s hope: Trump (mistaken about the US having the largest reserves on earth, but moot) clearly sees the value of Canada’s oil and gas, and he clearly wants to create the largest country on earth. Canada has a window here to do something Trump does not want, that would weaken his bargaining position: to immediately, and I mean immediately, begin construction of more pipelines to the coast, or coasts, for both oil and gas, and immediately advance as many LNG export terminals as can be found partners for.
That is our only leverage. If we do not move with warp speed on those goals, Trump might just bring Canada to its knees, and bring us to the bargaining table at the absolute weakest moment.
It’s all happening as expected, more or less – an energy transition isn’t quite so simple. Find out what readers knew years ago in The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity – the energy story for those that don’t live it, and want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.