I despise the period every year between roughly October 25 to U.S. Thanksgiving. The grounds are multitude: Dampness, falling temperatures and leaves, and moronic clock changes designed to appease farming practices from the steam-engine era. For this reason I decamped for Colombia and Panama last month, and while the sun still sets at 6 p.m. near the Equator, I was at least able to enjoy $1 beers outdoors. The historic counter to my hatred for November was that upon my return, December usually brings at least a small dose of festive merriment before stage two of hell begins in January.
This year, however, a dampening of this holiday mindset has come from the trolling of Donald J. Trump, even by the admittedly elite trolling standards of Donald J. Trump.
On Nov. 25, the American president-elect posted on his “Truth Social” platform that he would slap Canada with across-the-board 25 percent tariffs on our exports to his country. The Canadian dollar immediately dropped to 71 cents U.S., where it’s been hovering ever since (unless it’s dropped to below 70 by the time you read this). To demonstrate how urgently the Canadian braintrust viewed these uniquely stupid developments, within days a country known for the efficiency of plate tectonics slathered in maple syrup and molasses dispatched a Challenger jet containing (immaterial if lame-duck-or-not) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others to Mar-a-Lago for a gathering over well-done steaks and Trump’s iPad playlist.
A proactive tete-a-tete with a garrulous cousin, one could be fooled into believing. But then Fox News “scooped” that Trump wondered aloud at dinner if Canada should simply become a U.S. state (or maybe two).
A few days later, either Trump or one of his interns was on the A.I. machine again, concocting a fantastical image of The Donald gazing atop a mountain vista (featuring what was clearly Switzerland’s Matterhorn, next to an only-A.I.-could-deform-it-that-way Canadian flag), posting it on social media with the caption “Oh Canada.” Then, last Sunday, Trump again opined to NBC’s Meet the Press that Canada and Mexico should become states if their trade deficits with the U.S. can’t be closed (interestingly, he is now categorizing Americans purchasing foreign products as “subsidizing”).
There is a good chance, of course, that the aforementioned cornered market on trolling is just Trump’s classic leverage play. Maybe it even gets a little more questionable than that: say for instance, he’d rather wait to negotiate with a more presumably politically friendly Pierre Poilievre-led Conservative government – something that appears to be all but a certainty by next Halloween. But the fact is, no one knows. Like a manic George Costanza once exclaimed about late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, “Nobody knows what this guy is capable of!”
And because the mind also darkens a little easier when the sun sets at 4:30, I started thinking about various scenarios. I’ll spare you the most problematic, potentially horrific nearer-term theories about what could happen – at say, I dunno, just spitballing for instance, the Rainbow Bridge, if Trump moves to deport 11 million people—and go instead to an old story I was once told. Strap in.
A long-deceased person who was in a potential position to know such things once theorized to me that the U.S. Army increased the troop strength at Fort Drum – a major military installation about a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Pelham, and 40 kilometres south of the Canadian border along the St. Lawrence River – directly because of the Quebec sovereignty crisis and its associated violence in the early 1970s. The logic, supposedly, was that if civil war were to break out in Canada, the American military would have quick access into this country’s key political and economic corridor in order to tamp it down.
Let that sink in.
Founded or unfounded fears of a U.S. invasion of Canada date back to the War of 1812. In the last century, War Plan Red detailed “operational zones” within Canada. All of that is (maybe) moot now, given a century’s worth of military cooperation between the two countries and further integration through NORAD and NATO.
Of course, successive Canadian governments of both Liberal and Conservative stripe have been notorious since the 1960s for not keeping pace with military expenditures, repeatedly falling well short of NATO’s two-percent-of-GDP minimum stipulation. While this may well reflect a typically Canadian naïveté about how dangerous the world can be – and has always been – it was also an easy equation: even if Canada spent eight percent of its GDP on defence, with one-tenth of the population of the U.S. it was never going to build a fighting force that could come close to matching the most technologically advanced military in the history of mankind. It was just always assumed those guys would be our friends.
It was just always assumed those guys would be our friends
So armed with this completely unverified piece of intel about Fort Drum, I promptly emailed the base last weekend, asking them flat-out if it was boned up due to the Quebec separatist crisis of the 1970s, one of the more unstable moments in modern Canada’s incredibly privileged history. I knew there was no chance in hell they would admit it if it was true, but I knew from personal experience that American bureaucrats – and frankly Americans in general, with the possible exception of retired Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade – answer questions better than Canadian bureaucrats.
The response I got – within 12 hours – from Fort Drum public affairs director Julie Halpin ran 840 words. In it, she both admonished me for getting key developments wrong and ran through a detailed history of the base, from its origins as a New York National Guard training area in 1907 through today.
“I am at a loss of how to say this without being rather direct, so please don’t take offense,” Halpin opened. It was one of better emails I have ever received, even if technically she could not definitively answer my main question.
“While I cannot say definitively that the decision to reactivate the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum wasn’t in part motivated by non-disclosed factors, I can say that I’ve never heard any mention of Canadian politics from those who campaigned for it or from the United States Army,” she wrote.
Halpin did assert that Fort Drum’s buildup in the 1970s was more related to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
“In 1974, the installation was renamed Fort Drum and a permanent Garrison was assigned. This essentially means it went from what the US Department of Defense considered an as-needed training facility to a permanent asset. Significantly, assigning a Garrison meant that there was a relatively small group of permanent, full time civilian employees/soldiers on post to coordinate training, air space and land range use and ensure the security of facilities and ordnance,” Halpin said.
“While there was some increase in permanently assigned active-duty forces on Fort Drum in 1974 with establishment of the Garrison, there was no significant buildup of the installation or in permanent troop strength. Fort Drum was primarily serving – and continued to serve through 1984 – as a training location for Army Reserve component force and the New York Army National Guard (to include air assets.) You’ll note that Army Reserve and NY National Guard components are ‘inactive’ – meaning members train one weekend a month with two weeks additional training once a year.”
Content aside, my main thought reading this, was, try getting this many words in an answer from any Canadian bureaucratic institution. Consider the recent charges against fugitive former Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding, wanted by both the RCMP and FBI for drug trafficking and murder – including one killing in Niagara Falls. The FBI media release on the topic ran three paragraphs, the RCMP’s barely one and a half.
Clearly, some of this is Americans’ penchant for theatrics. Ever notice when a major crime or disaster goes down in the U.S., politicians and multiple law enforcement bosses crowd on stage for the cameras at press conferences? In Canada, you generally get one spokesperson, saying very little, and if it’s a crime, there’s a good chance you probably never hear about it again unless you really go digging for it.
Unfortunately, the dissemination of information in the U.S. is now under direct threat with a new Trump administration reported to be raring to replace bureaucrats with political loyalists. The disastrous trend in North America of public information being simply replaced with echo-chamber confirmation bias looks only to make this worse. Perhaps related, a survey out Tuesday suggested 13 percent of Canadians want the country to become the 51st state, maybe – or maybe not – rendering that Fort Drum theory moot.
Did I mention I hate January too? On that note, Happy Holidays!
