HANNAFORD: So it's to be the Canschluss?

So, it’s to be the Canschluss, is it?

Trump’s America takes over Trudeau’s Canada without firing a shot, as with the original Anschluss. Unlike Panama and Greenland, military action has been ruled out for us, but good old-fashioned dollar imperialism has not. (Better them than the Chinese, anyway.)

The jury’s out on whether this is just Trump being Trump. (My strong inclination at this point.) The CBC took the bait nevertheless and in the spirit of Queenston Heights, paraded the East's great and good through the panel shows to deplore Trump and all who sail in him.

More credibly, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says Trump may not be kidding. (In ten years, national unity has never been stronger if Smith and Rosie Barton can agree on something.)

Meanwhile, some Canadians are considering the advantages, although I suspect that there would be notably less enthusiasm if it was Biden making the pitch, than Trump.

But there are two truths lurking here.

The first is that Trump and those around him clearly find the person of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to be deeply ridiculous and it therefore becomes fun and easy to play him up. This wouldn't have happened with a substantial person as prime minister... Stephen Harper, for example.

As we also find the person of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to be deeply ridiculous, with his woke virtues unredeemed by a single vice that we could respect, it's hard to mount much more than a pro-forma patriotic defence of him. Murray Lytle writes elsewhere in these pages that things like that are best left to the likes of Andrew Coyne. So if that’s all this is, we’re in on the joke.

The other truth is this. When Trump calls out Canada as a free-rider, he is unfortunately dead right.

In the area of defence especially, we have been all the way back to the War of 1812. And so it continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Canadian sovereignty guaranteed by a sometimes despairing Imperial government that grumbled about the Canadian reluctance to pay for their own defence. Columnist Chris Champion mentions Canadian cheapness when it comes to defence, in a recent column.

It's not that Canadians can't fight, or won't. This country has risen spectacularly to every worthwhile war for the last 120 years, most recently in Afghanistan where whatever the favoured narrative south of the border may be, the Yanks were damn glad to have us there at the time. (Take a look at the faces of the men and women we lost. We weren't there to hold somebody else's coat.)

It's just that we continue to elect politicians who think they can save money by pretending the world's a friendly place and if it isn't... well, the Yanks would never let anything bad happen.

And they won't. But they've decided that if the Trudeau Government of Canada is going to treat its military like a finishing school for girls and a place for men with pink finger nails to be all they can be, well it's time to put in their chit.

Let's be honest with ourselves. Trump is not saying anything that hasn't been said by a dozen presidents before him, all the way back to Roosevelt who assumed responsibility for continental defence in the Second World War and never charged for it.

Canadians must accept the sad fact that they have chosen to give Trump his talking points. We are apparently content that if Russia or China are fooling around in the Arctic or off our other coasts, there is nothing we can do about it. (Or Denmark even... remember Hans Island?) And when a Chinese balloon floated slowly in full view across western Canada, we... well, we did what we alway do and left it to the Americans to take care of things. Why couldn't it have been a Canadian fighter that shot it down?

And the last straw? We don't even patrol our borders for drugs and illegal aliens. When Trump put us on the spot, it was provincial premiers — notably Danielle Smith — who were listening. The Trudeau-ites made excuses.

So yes, Trump's words sting. But, the proper response is not to say he's a blustering fool. It's to recognize that that there is merit to what he's saying and do something about it. And while the panzers aren't lining up at the border, the government of Canada needs to start acting like a state, not fostering the Trudeau-esque delusion that 'Canada is a post-national state.'

We're not. We're a serious country with a proud history and among the very few countries of the world that have a continuously operating system of government that goes back more than 150 years.

We'd better. Because for Canada there's no Paul Revere figure waiting in the wings. We're on our own. And this time, the British aren't coming.