The following texts are diaries I wrote while working as a medical courier, contracted by a generous and understanding company to transport STEM cells around the world.
Visiting Canada in this historic time is indeed very interesting. Trump has spent the last few months threatening to annex this vast northern nation, and they just had a national election. Prime Minister Trudeau, a disgraced excuse of a politician, a weak little liberal "man" and laughing stock around the world, recently resigned in favor of an all-round more reasonable person, former central banker Mark Carney. Trailing over twenty points behind the Conservatives in opinion polls up until recently, Mark Carney's Liberals regained enough ground to pull off an astonishing victory on election day, largely at the expense of the New Democratic Party, Canada's leftist political outfit, which was decimated and left for dead. Moreover, the leader of the Conservatives (a man so forgettable that I won't even mention his name) lost his seat outright in a humiliating defeat for him and his party. Most commentators agree that it was Trump's imperialistic threats, such as referring to his northern neighbour as the 51st state, that turned the polls around and gave Carney this historic victory over his Conservative rivals. The good news for the Conservatives, however, is that they seem to own the future. Following worldwide trends, young people tended to lean toward the Conservative Party this election cycle while older people voted Liberal.
Trump's claim that Canada is the 51st state, however, isn't far from the truth. From what I can see, everything here is the same as in the US. People speak with the same accent, have similar attitudes toward life, and are generally overly polite and friendly like Americans. The licence plates on cars and street signs are the same font, people dress in the same style, and the political ads on TV are nearly identical. I even see the yellow school busses that used to take me to school in the US driving around Toronto's streets.
Nevertheless, Trump's threats have invigorated a sense of patriotism in Canada. Lots of people here are wearing Canadian flags on their shirts and bags and hats and so on. Much like in South America, when a sense of national pride sweeps Canada it tends to lean left rather than right, which is what helped the Liberals survive the recent election.
What I didn't truly understand about Canada, I now realise, is that a huge chunk of it speaks French. I always knew that, of course, but I really thought of French Canada as a backwater city with no impact on the nation as a whole. But no, in Québec the street signs are in French, people all speak French as their main language (some of them even have a hard time speaking English, or at least pretend to - another truly French custom), and immigrants tend to be from French-speaking parts of Africa. To my surprise, it wasn't just England and the Iberian nations that imprinted themselves onto the Americas; the French did it too, though their part of the continent is now under Anglo-Saxon rule.
As always, my double-mindedness regarding multiculturalism is at the forefront of my attitude toward this. On the one hand, it is undoubtedly beautiful and fascinating and interesting to have such deep and rich cultural diversity across Anglo-Saxon civilisation. But, on the other hand, diversity can lead to separatist sentiments, which certainly has affected Québec's identity and relationship to the Canadian state. Maybe this new wave of patriotism that is sweeping Canada will crush such separatist tendencies, but, even if it did, how long would it be before patriotism is forgotten and discarded for demagogic separatist drivel?
As a devout Pan-Saxonian (meaning someone who believes that the Anglosphere exists as one single civilisation which has been illegally and sinfully divided into various political entities), the spat between Canada and Trump has given me much to reflect upon. There are many who have asked me, shamelessly, if I, as someone who supports the unification of the English-speaking world into a system similar to the European Union, would be in favour of the United States annexing Canada. Let me be clear: any conflict between Anglophone nations is fratricide!
The unification of the Anglosphere must take place not as one country incorporating another into its borders through force, but rather as a consensual merging of equal nations over several generations. Outright conquest, apart from being morally wrong, would be too easy, too quick and simplistic, and occupation of the conquered nation would be unpopular and unstable.
Far from advancing the idea of a united Anglosphere, Trump is creating unnecessary frictions and hostilities between brother nations, damaging the Pan-Saxonian cause.
On a separate note, I will concede that there was one good thing about former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and that was his acknowledgement of the British (and Canadian) monarchy. The respect that he paid to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II upon her passing and his very public recognition of the newly crowned Charles III as Canada's head of state truly fixed a bond of strength and unity between our two Anglophone Commonwealth countries.