The Editor,
I am an elderly gentleman long retired and with a great deal of experience living both in Canada and the United States. My wife, in fact, is an American, descended from an old and honourable Southern family.
The present conflict between Canada and the States, initiated by the USA’s current president, is very disturbing to me. What rattles me the most is that Mr. Trump keeps on making mistakes that are never corrected.
For example, he refers to Canada as the 51st state. We even echo this back when we say we will never be the 51st state. This is essentially wrong. What is the error here?
The error here is thinking that, politically, Canada is the same as Delaware, Iowa or Georgia, which are indeed States. Evidently, we are not. We are not a simple state. We are a federation. “Canada” is not the name of a state. It designates a union of ten provinces, which are politically the same as states, as well as three territories. Since every province, to my knowledge, has the right to secede (and I know that because I am a former Montrealer who went through both referendums), Canada as such could never join the States. Each province would have to join individually and quite certainly at least one would never.
To politically equate a federation with a population of 41 million, whose land mass is larger than that of the entire United States, to a Rhode Island or a Delaware is ludicrous.
Furthermore, Trump says that the Canada-US border is “artificial.” How about the US-Mexico border that, for some 600 miles from El Paso to Tijuana, is equally artificial?
There’s no talk of doing away with that border because it is “artificial.” In fact, he is putting up a fence along that “artificial” border. The Canadian border is as legitimate as the border that divides the USA from Mexico. Why does he want to erase one and put up a “Great Wall” along the other?
Trump might say that, contrary to Mexicans, Canadians are just like Americans. Really? Is one-third of the USA French-speaking? Amongst America’s founding fathers there was only RC (Charles Carroll). We have universal medicare. They seem unable to pull that one off. We have gone metric. They remain the world’s lone wolf in not having the metric system.
I’ve lived in both countries and, quite frankly, Canada and the United States are similar but far from identical. All three countries are now distinctive nations and to think otherwise is to be quite unrealistic.
And, by the way, note that, even though my wife and I met and were married in the States and I worked and lived down there, we ended up here and my wife, descended from a family where the women qualify for DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and a former candidate for Outstanding Young Women of America (1972), has been long been a Canadian citizen, loves it here and would never move back. She finds it different and she loves the difference.
I love Americans and even married one but I am completely sickened by the ignorance now pouring out of the White House. We are not a simple state and our border is no more artificial than any other.
Rev. Lawrence Don-Elysyn, Cornwall
