Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 7, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 7, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Trump is not the first American to covet Canada L ET’S start by stating the obvious: there is ab- solutely no reason for U.S. President Donald Trump to levy a 25 per cent tariff on Canada and start a trade war. There is no fentanyl crisis at the U.S.-Canada border and the so-called U.S. trade deficit of $US64.3 billion in goods with Canada is misconstrued fiction. As for Trump’s musings of Canada becoming the 51st state, that, too, seems absurd, despite warnings by political commentators that we should take the threat seriously. The fact is that Trump is not the first, nor like- ly last, American political leader to covet Canada. Bigger in size, wealthier and with a much larger population, it seemed to Americans going all the way back to the end of the American Rev- olution in 1783 that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. occupied all of North America. Former president Thomas Jefferson predicted that it would become a reality at the start of the War of 1812 (1812 to 1815). He told a Philadelphia newspaper editor that “the acquisition of Canada … will be a mere matter of marching.” Except the conflict between the Americans and the British ended in a stalemate. Thereafter, the U.S. expanded across the continent and south to Mexico, while in 1867 John A. Macdonald and the Fathers of Confederation maintained control of the British colonies, Que- bec, and with a national railway extended Canada to British Columbia. During the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), the American unionists in the north were more than a little annoyed that agents of the southern Con- federacy found sympathy for their cause among Canadians. Once the war ended and the Union Army was at its peak, annexation of Canada again seemed possible. As a first step, in 1867, a few months before Confederation was celebrat- ed on July 1, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward finalized a deal with the Russian Empire in which the U.S. acquired Alaska for US$7.2 million (about US$148 million today). Still, that did not lead to a U.S. takeover of Can- ada. In advice that resonates to the present day, Lord Kimberley, the British colonial secretary, told Sir John Young, Canada’s governor general, in 1870, that, “When you have to deal with a pow- erful and unreasonable nation such as (the U.S.) … the first requisite is to keep one’s temper.” Macdonald and his successors heeded those words and, in the decades that followed, the Americans were somewhat more respectful of Canadian sovereignty, though they still harboured the same dream. “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America before I am 60,” Theodore Roosevelt, who became president after the assas- sination of William McKinley in 1901, comment- ed to Sen. Mark Hanna. Roosevelt, who travelled throughout Cana- da, liked the country and its citizens, whom he viewed as nearly identical to Americans. A believer in eugenics and the racial superiority of white men, Roosevelt felt that Canadians would want to join the U.S. because the U.S. was more advanced as a civilization. Annexing Canada became a public and con- tentious issue in 1911 following negotiations for a reciprocity agreement (partial free trade) between Republican President William Howard Taft and Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. The deal was signed in January 1911 and many U.S. politicians saw it as the first step to Ameri- ca’s acquisition of Canada. “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole,” declared Champ Clark, the new Demo- cratic speaker in the House of Representatives. Another congressman added: “Be not deceived. When we go into a country and get control of it, we take it.” At the time, such jingoistic statements were received in Canada no different than Trump’s menacing comments have been. And just as Canadians recently booed the U.S. national anthem at NHL games, Canadians in 1911 booed the American flag and insulted Amer- icans visiting Canada. Conservative newspapers ominously warned that “reciprocity was the first step to annexation”; 77 years later, during the fed- eral election of 1988, Liberal party Leader John Turner offered the same foreboding assessment about the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement. In a reversal of the current situation, Canadian businessmen in 1911 — including many Liberal party supporters — refused to give up the pro- tectionist tariffs that supported their enterprises and denounced the reciprocity agreement as an existential threat to Canada’s future. They helped defeat Laurier and his government and killed the agreement, which even Taft privately conceded would eventually have made Canada “an adjunct of the United States.” Trump’s caustic comments, too, have rallied Canadians to defend the country. As Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, said recently in an interview on Fox News: “We are not the 51st state, we are a sovereign independent country. Our leader deserves to be treated with respect and we deserve to be treated with respect and that’s the way we want to proceed.” It is highly doubtful that such tough and sensible talk will make one iota of difference in dissuading Trump’s grand plan for a greater America. But some things need to be said out loud — as long as you keep your temper. Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. Setting a clear path forward as thinking, considerate citizens I WOULD like to think that I am not a pessimist. I would like to think that I am not just an old man getting grumpier by the moment. Ten years ago, I retired happy and grateful, content with the reality that I was becoming more and more irrelevant to the affairs and work- ings of the world. Today, I find myself becoming more despondent, more angry and more fearful about the immediate and the long-term future of humankind … and not content with just fading out! I can’t stand the hateful, divisive rhetoric I am constantly bombarded with by some of our so- called democratic leaders who seem to have not the faintest notions about the joys of making sure everyone is included and respected, who don’t understand that freedom is an ideal meant for all human beings and that democracy requires steady vigilance, nurturing and protection by and for all of us. Democracy is the ideal of a way of life where our coming together is greater than any one of us, a kind of family of families, and a communi- ty of communities where everyone matters and belongs for who they are and might be. Therefore, it is more than a system to organize our living together. Ideally, we’re sad if anyone goes missing or is shut out, and sorry if anyone is treated badly. Put another way, democracy requires the highest form of human freedom; we individually choose to care for everyone and live in human solidarity. Solidarity results from human intentions and goodwill, not from presi- dential executive orders. Hannah Arendt, in the first edition of Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote about “radical evil” mak- ing human beings as human beings superfluous, a condition caused by not “thinking.” There are at least two differing aspects to Arendt’s notion of superfluousness. In the case of Jews as the Holocaust developed, they were robbed of their individuality, spontaneity and ini- tiative. Their most noble sacrifices during purg- es, including willingness to die, changed nothing for their families or neighbours. They simply ceased to be humans — no longer people whose presence and interventions make a difference in the world. They were made superfluous, unable to make sense of their place in the world and unable to take meaningful action. In the second sense, Jews were meant to feel less than human, treated like vexing pests to be exterminated. The Nazis developed conspiracies, propaganda, strategies and technologies to do just that in the most unfathomable, cruel ways. Jews were considered expendable and therefore extraneous to society. They became stateless non-citizens, considered detriments to the social, economic and political life of Germany and later, most of eastern Europe and beyond. They became superfluous simply because they were born into the Jewish community. Later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil.” She posited that when “thinking” became unnecessary or superfluous, evil resulted. Thinking, in the case of the Nazis and their collaborators, was eliminat- ed by strict submission and willing compliance to orders from above and enforced by threats and fear from the same source. The potential for critical thought and dissent was taken away. Today’s technologies that encourage non-think- ing — social media and AI — and today’s politics of extreme division and intolerance threaten us with both kinds of superfluity. Is human history reinventing a sordid past? Social media offerings so often seem like ran- dom, unwelcome intrusions into the world. There appears to be little or no prior thought about the content or consequences of a steady flow of one-way exchanges back and forth or who gets them. Social media’s “friends” are not friends in any real sense of friendship — often unknown people, just names on a list. They do not form a community. In communities, human beings matter — whether they be Indigenous children and women and girls, or whether they be Black lives or disabled people or any other life for that matter. In democratic communities, “citizens” matter. In the worlds of Facebook, X and Instagram, the competition is over “followers,” the number of readers, fans or adherents a user has. Followers most often are faceless “hits” on a “site,” each counting merely as additions to a lifeless, soulless number total. Who they are matters less than the fact that they add numbers to the sum, a mild form of superfluousness. Today’s superfluousness has many sides, un- scrupulously sponsored and nurtured by leaders with totalitarian inclinations, our most familiar one being U.S. President Donald Trump, an en- thusiastic and avid user of social media. When all are counted, he has well over 100 million “follow- ers” who are bombarded by an unending barrage of dehumanizing language. He is not alone, per se, in his willingness to flout the law and find scapegoats (immigrants, gender-diverse people, minorities) for people’s perceived grievances and the country’s fabricated ills, but very much alone in his solitary pursuit of totalizing control. Trump’s script and path are eerily and frighten- ingly similar to Nazism’s and Hitler’s evil past. Anyone who is not a Trump follower — his devotee or admirer — becomes superfluous to his agenda, deliberately and consciously removed from participation. And this includes duly elected members of both houses of Congress, whether Democrats or Republicans. Even a church bishop who prays for mercy is subject to his condemna- tion. His adherents are not a coherent community brought together by mutual goodwill and reci- procity — they are people brought together by fear and negativity. It’s hardly the stuff to build a community or a country upon and, if history does repeat itself in some form, it will not treat him well. The greatness he predicts will never materialize. Nevertheless, Trumpists, the media giants like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg and platforms like TikTok (recently granted temporary reprieve) who remove fact checking from their sites in deference to and appeasement of Trump must not be given a free ride. Even when so many political leaders and their billionaire followers have put their morality (thinking) on hold, and even when they try to convince us, through their words and actions of our superfluity, not all hope is lost as long as some people continue to disturb their flights to private entitlements, selfish indulgence and insatiable greed and power. And thinking is available to all of us — we can give it up, but it cannot, like citizenship, be taken from us by innuendo, insults, threats and lies. And that’s where the hope for the future lies. If we think carefully and generously, Cana- dians will not attempt to placate the U.S., as appeasement usually only results in an escalation of demands. What we can do, as is now being considered by our federal politicians and our premier, is express our solidarity not through re- taliation but through supporting those negatively affected by punishing measures and threats. And we can work with countries willing to recognize our sovereignty and respect our leaders, without our becoming ultra-nationalists and isolationists. Let thinking “Canada Strong” be Canada’s brand. I am encouraged when people collectively get together for humanitarian reasons like so many community groups and non-profits do, with noth- ing to gain except a sense that they are helping right an injustice or just supporting someone in need. I am hopeful when people co-operatively over- come ideological differences to dissent against arbitrary political decisions which harm people. I am encouraged when people “think” about the hu- manity we can share. I am thankful for the many people who use the Free Press to express their wishes for a kinder world. In a world inundated with negativity, human beings can still matter for who we can be — re- sponsible human beings and privileged demo- cratic citizens whose task it is to think and work together to create a common world for ourselves, our children and grandchildren! John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba. ALLAN LEVINE STEVE HELBER / ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson also felt that Canada should be part of the United States. This statue of Jefferson stands in the main lobby of the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Va. JOHN R. WIENS ;