Regarding the issues Canada has with the US and Trump, he is playing a game that is designed to make Canadians and Europeans upset so that they act in a manner that allows them to weaken themselves while the US grows stronger.
There were two purposes to Trump’s game: 1) Scare Canadians and Europeans into finally paying what they committed to spend on their own defence – or pay a price that amounts to vassalage until the US gets that money anyway. 2) Renegotiate trade deals until US currency drops in value in relationship to others so as to foster the US population to buy from itself first, or create a US-internal tax burden — tariffs — that achieves the same results. This second activity very much destroyed a lot of wealth in the world, and was therefore quite harmful. In this case though, the goal was not to hurt Canada and Europe, but to hurt China to stop its ascendancy.
There was, in the case of Canada and Mexico, a second goal to disrupt the absolutely insane amounts of organized crime that was fuelling the Fentanyl trade that at one point was killing 70,000+ Americans a year, with total overdose deaths topping 110,000. The deadly side of that trade was actually getting disrupted even before Trump 2 – basically because Fentanyl addiction had already killed the vulnerable, and the remaining hard-core addicts knew how to do drugs more safely.
Canada has handled this incredibly badly though, mostly because Canadians are literally the most uppity people I have ever encountered on the face of the earth. They will “posture wounded dignity” until they literally starve to death before they will actually structure themselves into any kind of a solution to their own problems. This is hardly a new problem and was not originally caused by Trump, but if Canada had done anything about its productivity problems in the past 20 years, Trump’s actions would not be nearly as damaging as they are.
Even the Europeans have handled productivity in general — and Trump in particular — more wisely than Canada (I have no possible worse insult to offer my homeland.)
But, Canada has not been totally useless: Canada finally reached is promised 2% of GDP on military spending in 2026, much higher than the ludicrously pathetic 1% it hit at its worst (2014), but it also promised to go to a very reasonable 3.5%, so let’s see if it ever gets there!
Now, if Canada truly wanted to fight back against Trump, it would do things like commercialize its own academic and AI research instead of giving it away on the level of Israel giving away its “goods” to its neighbours as described in the book of Ezekiel. It would stop trying to cut carbon on a purely local level, and instead exploit more of its energy resources because Canada’s energy is cleaner than the alternative (coal) (see this for a counterargument), and so would help the whole world reduce carbon instead of just looking good to itself and its own people.
Canada would much more aggressively exploit its own potential miracle of plastic recycling from Aduro Clean Technologies. It would, owing to being the best miners and frackers on earth, be first into Venezuela. BC would re-adopt a Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) to foster industrialization… All these things would allow Canada to use heavy resources internally (apart from oil/gas) and sell high-value lighter things externally.
But Canada has systematically destroyed its own education system replacing civic knowledge with civic feeling, and it doesn’t have the least clue how to truly dig itself out of this hole. Instead, it squabbles disproportionately over largely useless topics like gender identity, renaming monuments and grading mechanisms, pretends to care about Indigenous people while simultaneously never fixing a damn thing, fosters personal self-care over productivity (which destroys both as self-care can’t happen without productivity), eliminates the broad base of historical, scientific, and literary education needed for critical thinking (as critical thinking isn’t a skill you can teach, but one that comes from understanding), and otherwise cuts itself down at every turn.
So yeah, I also don’t like Trump much, but he has acted as a force like the Gracchi brothers of Rome, exposing and accelerating more than creating our national problems – the solutions to which I have described in this rant.
