“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard P. Feynman

*smiling grimly* Let’s be real: Canada is suffering from the tariffs imposed by the U.S., and may even be looking at recession. But what choice did the country have? It had to hitch its star to the American chariot — *keening anguish* — it was the only game in town…

America has every right to manage its trade relations however it sees fit. And Donald Trump is the duly elected president, given broad powers in his accession. But did ya haff to bring down the hammer on Canada? Your bosom buddy, your lifelong friend? What did Canada ever do to you? Why bother going to the trouble of signing the USMCA, successor to NAFTA, if you were going to piss all over it in the end?

Canada’s problem is that it’s too damn small. *annoyed, but with an undercurrent of amusement* Oh, not geographically — population-wise. America is always ten times larger. It’s like the old joke about being in bed with an elephant. You savvy?

And there’s always been a drain of population from Canada to the United States. My own sister Melissa lives in Atlanta and has 3 kids there. Canada’s loss was America’s gain, in that matter.

Canada seeks to define itself by being the “not-America” rather than having well-defined positive attributes. And hockey and health care are not positive attributes. Neither is the left-wing political philosophy, which is larger than any one nation.

Rather than forming a strong self-image, Canada absorbs the tidal wave of American culture and swallows it without a complaint. Quebec is the only exception, and even there the American presence is strong.

The Canadian aversion to boasting does it no credit. Huge swaths of America are falling into disrepair, places like Baltimore, Detroit, the inner areas of California… Canada is a clean and well-oiled machine by comparison. It has jewels like Toronto and Vancouver to its name, clean cities, prosperous, that do well on international ranking scales. Even minor-league places like Nova Scotia and Alberta have things to their credit.

In the Michael Moore documentary on Canadian gun control, he went to a Toronto “ghetto.” It was a pleasant playground in a decent setting, hardly a ghetto at all. He walked into people’s unlocked houses, proving that many live open to the world, without fear. When I was in Miami, I visited a house to get directions and no one answered the door and I’m pretty sure they were there. That’s urban America: paranoia and fear and I’ve-got-mine-get-lost-Mac. Only in West Virginia, a rural enclave, was I treated well and decently.

America will always have considerable power, as prosperity flickers from zone to zone, abandoning some areas and birthing new strength in new ones. The Rust Belt suffers; the Sun Belt booms. That’s the nature of America: to abandon things like ill-used toys and then pick them up again later and make them shiny again.

Canada has a tradition of valuing all its land. And perhaps that should be one of the positive attributes trumpeted by Canadian culture: we value *everything*.

saving money in government

It takes a permanent standing committee, reviewing spending plans, to bring down the costs of government. Any ad-hoc attempt, such as was spearheaded by Musk under Trump, is bound to fail because it is not entangled with the general threads of government and is separate from the general goings-on.

When you use your fiscal discretion as a hammer, you’re going to alienate a bunch of people. But when you’re a permanent committee, your approaches appear to be more like a scalpel, helping the patient rather than harming him.

The need to be a bit friendly is lost on vicious cost-cutters. Social niceties go a far ways in preserving human relationships. Remember we live in a SOCIETY not a state of ANARCHY and you’ll go far.