Remember … most of them didn’t do it.

Almost 90 million didn’t vote – 36%.

49.8% of those who did, voted for Trump.

That’s 77,284,118 of 244 million eligible voters.

More people did not vote than voted for either candidate.

The Trump junk rattles along, arriving at now, April 2025, where tariff insanity rules the headlines and the Chinese playing down of the trade war helps position the Chinese in the “world middle” as America slides all the way over, it seems, to corporate crazy.

        In Canada, three-quarters of Canadians are nervous about travel south, investing, buying from Americans – and recession talk bubbles away*. There’s a general reaction, not at all helped by campaigns in the upcoming election, away from ordinary Americans and ordinary American business. This despite the fact that the two economies are powerfully intertwined – car parts, for example, going back and forth over the border to be completed – and let’s remember the St. Lawrence Seaway, built in partnership – and that all business everywhere is scrambling to adjust and is paying a price as chaos or hegemony or something looms.

        Canadian social programming, already a mess in the semi-inept Trudeau era, may well be set further back as homelessness climbs and services for the vulnerable freeze or even drop on the list of priorities. In provinces like Ontario, Conservatives already reign and a local Trumpdom is established, with people with disabilities, for instance, already set aside.

        While the general sense for Canadians is that costs will rise, products will be less available, jobs will decline, contracts will end ,,, ambitious opinion flies to things like “avoid Trump’s America.” Basic spending on items like travel and booze has long-since declined. Travel to “down there” is expected to be down 20% for the year.

        At the same time, longer-term and bigger picture talk wonders what comes after Trump – “liberals” putting it all back? – and then what comes after that … what kind of seriously right-wing America is a little further down the road as the right-left pendulum swings? Is there a left-wing extremism set to emerge as well?

As the world re-orders itself and the United States ultimately pays the price, the rest of us, ordinary Canadians and Europeans, should be concerned with that long-term stuff. Our children and theirs will have to live in the world we make today. This includes not just the climate, but now the laws and the institutions – health and education.

        We Canadians should remember that what happens in America sooner or later trickles up to our string of big cities and our mostly dependent financial culture. It wears a cowboy hat in Alberta, can’t stay away from ugly TV, has very little science in its big newspapers, and belongs to Wall Street by way of Bay Street.

        Keeping in mind that more than 50% of foreign-controlled assets in Canada are controlled by Americans, and that almost a million Americans live here … and that many of us have American relatives … and that not just sales, but investing too, is intertwined … and that American tourists bring in a big part of our income here and there … it makes sense for us to pause and to take a good look at what we’re doing, what opinion and politics writers are prompting us to do (by telling us hockey and all that is who we are or what we do), along with the psychology of reaction and populism, and our own policy.

The first thing to consider is: it’s about the future. It’s not about “Canadians” burning the White House (note that the legal entity “Canada” didn’t exist). It’s not about the various times some people wanted to invade or annex. It’s not about trade imbalances and who owns whose debt. It’s about people now, soon and later. As much as we talk about power, institutions and the state, it’s also about society, culture, history and the human interaction inside of all that. So the question becomes how can we, along with ordinary Americans, maintain a humane basis that is scientifically responsible and lets us all return to international standards and practices of well-being and sustainability in a timely fashion, when the absurdity dies down?

        The next thing, perhaps, is realism: Canada is or has ten percent, at most, of America’s capability in general terms like the economic kind. In military and world influence terms we have much less presence and ability to get things done. A “diplomatic” crisis overseas has Canada renting those rescue planes. This is not to suggest nonsense like the United States would actually invade Canada, but it is to put forward a concept of the world dealing with and for the U.S. well before they consider little old stuck too-nice overly financial Canada. We should certainly increase working ties with Europe and put real effort into adopting their standards.

        The next piece is economic realism: our ability to be self-sufficient across the range of goods and services, to disentangle ourselves from the Americans, to thoroughly link with the UK and follow the CANZUK model … in a way that can really meet basic and general need in a timely framework … the simple truth is that Canadian innovation is nearly the worst in the Democracies, it’s been let slide because we did so well just selling goodies and just processing cash … the likely near-future is a deep economic shock as retaliation piles on retaliation and longer-term declines in standard of living set in, with our vulnerable population even more vulnerable and “conservative” governments able to impose yet more program-ending cut-backs.

Political realism at the nation level looks like this: in our party system, where parties more or less represent interests and identities, the actual will of the people or public choice is manipulated and filtered. The parties mean that internal and external actors can get easy access to national control, simply framing “emergencies” and “solutions” like the people running Donald Trump are putting in front of us. It’s a hard thing to even think about, but unless the people change the system deeply and permanently, perhaps setting the parties aside and re-designing economy and institutions, the slide to conflict and loss through the adversarial system that includes the justice system, will continue and grow.

        This point is made here because it may not be possible to reverse the trend toward conflict and isolation – and not simply back toward an economic globalism – without fundamental change and reformed or completely new institutions.

        In terms of crisis, famously, Canadians helped Americans. In the 9-11 crunch and during the Iran Hostage Crisis, Canadians assisted like good neighbours and allies. This is sometimes flagged in going over the neighbourliness the unguarded border, military cooperation, the Seaway and the trade pacts have maintained.

The challenge for the Canadian people in assisting and understanding the American people is much deeper than we’ve run into so far. It would mean Canadians, and arguably the rest of the world, understanding what Americans are facing day-to-day – including all that stuff most of us don’t talk about, like the use and abuse of religion, the culture war at the level of the sex war, the problems inside an elected judiciary, 50,000 police departments, those fifty little countries and their own complexities.

        That doesn’t mean Canadians would all become New York Times subscribers or strong audiences of PBS Newshour, but it does mean public interest information, maybe a publicly-driven system of that, capable of giving us realism about ourselves – we’re not nice, we’re passive and ignorant and often merely “institutional” – and some of the good stuff about the folks down south.

  * My apologies if some sources are behind a “pay wall.”
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