The Daily Show

By Lisa Van Dusen

March 15, 2025

First off, full disclosure: I love America.

I’ve loved America since I was a scruffy kid watching old Jimmy Cagney movies in the bilingual, bicultural town of Aylmer, Quebec. I loved its Big Bird, its palm trees, its dramatic breakfast cereals and its epic, Manichean conflicts: Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote, Tweety vs. Sylvester, Jan vs. Marcia.

My earliest memory of U.S. politics was the indelible image of Mo Dean’s hair, pulled back in a lacquered, platinum Barbie bun during the Watergate hearings. Back then, America was the place where all the things happened to which we compared our own things — film, television, music, fashion, sports (except hockey) and politics. Quebec provided the incomparable, intangible cultural asset that defied those comparisons by being French and therefore comparable only to France, which was too far away to matter as much.

As an adult, I’ve lived in Washington — where my daughter spent most of her childhood — as a diplomatic spouse, as a political and foreign policy columnist and wire service editor. I’ve lived in New York as an editor, and as international news writer for the late Peter Jennings. I returned to Washington as a columnist to cover Barack Obama’s first term.

So, when I think of America, I think of PTA meetings (“Grace refuses to put her hand on her heart when we say the Pledge of Allegiance….she says it’s because she’s Canadian?!”), friends and neighbours, play dates, Fourth of July parades, Canada Day cookouts and birthday parties.

When I think of America, I think of trying my best not to make a fool of myself at taxpayer’s expense while representing Canada, of holding my 3-year-old daughter in my arms at the top of the Empire State Building on a gorgeous day when she looked out at Manhattan and said, “Let’s live forever,” and of Sunday sunsets on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial. I think of the unheralded decency of New Yorkers and of a 98-year-old-woman voting in Harlem on Super Tuesday in 2008 in her finest purple church hat, saying, “Never did I think that in my lifetime…” I think of moments beautiful, wrenching, transcendent, and harrowing that never would have happened anywhere else on Earth.

The cliché exists for a reason: America is a country of extremes, good and bad, and Canada’s own clichéd characteristics of political moderation, politeness, and safety nets are often refracted through that prism. Like siblings, the roles we assign to each other, deserved or not, appropriate or not, are coloured by that refraction. To resort to a ludicrous but not entirely pointless thought experiment, Canada would not be Canada if it were located next to Bhutan.

Trump’s vision of spreading the ‘love’ to Canada, a country still classified as a full democracy, may also telegraph a power grab that has nothing to do with the stupefying ineffability of circles of latitude.

Which brings us to our current crisis. When Donald Trump first broached the subject (in this election cycle) of making Canada the 51st state, we all assumed it was a joke, like his line about being a stable genius, or his trademark Cheerios bit. It has been made clear since then that he may not have been joking, but that it may be a threat meant to serve as leverage in any number of cross-border interactions and processes, including the looming CUSMA negotiations. Everyone over the age of five knows that the 51st-state talk — like the tariff terrorism and “economic force” sabre rattling  — has next-to-nothing to do with fentanyl.

It cannot, however, in the context of our ongoing clash of the democratic vs. autocratic world orders, be entirely dismissed. We know that Donald Trump behaves like a chaos actor because he is a chaos actor. He has used fearmongering as a means of coercion and absolute BS as a change rationale and accelerant since 2017, all within a performative presidential reality show styled to make democracy seem not only eminently replaceable but downright dangerous. Trump is a much greater threat to America than he is to Canada, which goes to the heart of our non-dilemma dilemma.

Not all presidents are created equal. There are American presidents — a few non-predatory, less lickerish ones come to mind … Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Obama, Joe Biden — who, if they had expressed an interest in annexing Canada as an academic argument to fill a conversational gap during a state dinner, or as a joke during a normal bilateral pool spray, Canadians might have been entertained; flattered, even. When pondering any bilateral annexation reference, it’s always best to consider the source.

And, as always, context is everything. The United States is currently fighting for its own democracy against an insidious, operationally driven narrative war whose most destructive weapons include, but are not restricted to, this president. In that context, Trump’s vision of spreading the “love” to Canada, a country still classified as a full democracy, also telegraphs a power grab that has nothing to do with the baffling ineffability of circles of latitude.

So, this isn’t about Canadians vs. Americans. It’s not about Canadian values vs. American values. It’s not about our health care system vs. your health care system or Bordens vs. Benjamins. It’s about, at best, a democracy discrediting reality-show performer gaslighting Canadians because he has a quota of daily BS-generation to meet as a matter of propaganda utility and, at worst, an aspiring autocrat bent on destroying his own country, trying to turn Canada into collateral damage as a systemic, post-democracy bonus.

In other words, Americans are as much victims of this scenery-chewing, Marvel-villain lunacy as are Canadians. Any president who behaves like a perpetual psychological warfare dispenser against his own people has nothing to teach Canada about being insulted. Everything about this presidency is insane and the insanity doesn’t originate with Donald Trump; it betrays a much larger, uglier, political, geopolitical and intelligence-based problem. And it won’t be solved by economic nationalism, by isolationism or by giving into tactically fuelled bilateral hostility.

This can be solved either via concerted action with our allies in the rules-based world order, or, far more efficiently, by the 25th amendment.

Yes, Canada is different. We are defined by our history, by our geography, by our climate and by what one late prime minister who also loved America once described as “two peoples speaking English and French … united in a great national adventure.”

But that’s not what this is about. If Americans don’t want to live in Donald Trump’s America, why would Canadians want to?

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.