Just after the onset of the pandemic, my friends, a married couple with two young children, put their Indianapolis house on the market, threw all their stuff on a utility truck, and moved to British Columbia. Forever. I admire them. They left behind successful careers, family, friends, and all the roots that one lays down by age 40 or so for the sake of their kids, who are thriving. In their school, they go hiking by the mountains every day. They are immersed in the French language. And they don’t do active shooter drills. Why would they? That’s an American thing.
The adjustment has been harder on the adults, as it always is. One of them was born in Canada, so it’s a little easier for her. The American half, however, is a trial lawyer from New York who landed in Trump country a few years back. “There’s not enough fighting,” he says. “Not enough conflict. Everyone’s too nice. It’s fine, I guess.”
I, too, am used to constant trauma and stupidity as a way of life, and so I find the dispatches from my Canadian friends almost offensively charming. They describe a sanitized, Bizarro America, a Norman Rockwell painting drenched in maple syrup, an idealized version of human group life that only ever existed in the fever dreams of our upper-middle-class liberals. Democratic Socialists are in a dead heat for parliamentary seats against Liberals, with Greens not too far behind. Conservatives would never dare suggest getting rid of universal healthcare, which now includes pharmaceuticals and birth control. People are able to live without the use of money at all. The big policy debate in my friend’s new hometown is what to do with the unhoused population — set them up in abandoned hotels, or build something nicer for them? The most violent thing that ever happens is that occasionally an orca will snag a stray moose from the beach.
In this setting, a twenty-first century American is like a rabid bull on methamphetamines in a shopping-mall Swarovski. We don’t know how to comport ourselves in the face of all this empathy, civility, and decency. An example: my friend caught a couple of neighbor kids shooting off fireworks too close to his house, and they wouldn’t stop after being asked. So he did what any of us Indiana folk would do: he went out with a chef’s knife and told them to FUCKING CUT IT OUT or ELSE you GODDAMN little MOTHERFUCKERS. The Mountie from down the street came and knocked on my friend’s door. “Hey, uh, is everything alright? Kids said you had a knife out…? Oh, gosh. We don’t do that here, okay? You folks have a good night!”
A society this nice is bound to tip over and catch fire at some point, especially when its nearest neighbor is on a constant cocaine-whiskey bender. Nearly thirty years ago, my friend says, his eighth-grade science teacher told a class full of American kids that the U.S. would someday invade Canada. That sounded preposterous at the time — hell, it might have sounded a little nutty even a decade ago. But now it seems inevitable.
Think of the civilizations that kept to themselves but were nonetheless gobbled up by Alexander, or the Romans, the Ottomans, the Aztecs, or whoever. The Portuguese, British, Spanish, and Dutch traveled entire oceans to steal the resources of people who posed no threat and didn’t see it coming. Why wouldn’t America do the same to its nearest neighbor? Our long list of prior offenses strongly suggest that we will.
Even if we assume that we’ve diluted enough of our barbarian DNA over the last century to resist the biological impulse to conquer, some basic resource math hints at impending annexation. Conservative luminaries, the kind who used to make policy for the U.S., have known for a while that we will have to do something about our water shortage. What’s the easiest “something” to do? Take it from Canada. I am not the first to point this out, and I guarantee I won’t be the last.
The Reaganites might have whispered about this sort of thing, and eventually come up with a deal to quietly enrich some billionaire ghouls by diverting water from a few Canadian communities. But that sort of political maneuvering distorts when cast through the lens of QAnon-paranoiac conservatism. Amoral capitalism doesn’t sound as nice a moral conquest for the “liberation” of Canada, and that’s what the turds who pass for right-wing intellectual soothsayers are saying out loud now. Lauren Boebert said two years ago that Canada “needed to be liberated.” Around the same time, Candace Owens got her required megadose of attention for the week by tweeting “Send American troops to Canada to deal with the tyrannical reign of Justin Trudeau Castro.” Most recently, Kremlin toady Tucker Carlson announced that “we are coming to liberate Canada.”
Like it or not, these dunderheads are the true forecasters of political winds in America. The stupid shit they say today becomes the GOP platform in just a few short years, and eventually on-the-ground reality. It is now the official position of the Idaho Republican party that Canadian Marxists are crossing the border to somehow vote in American elections, and Trump himself has called Canada a nation of “left-wing fascists.” Thus, the supposed takeover of Canada (by, uh, Fidel Castro? I guess?) becomes the flimsiest version of a Gulf of Tonkin incident in recent memory, but still enough to justify a righteous occupation of the entirety of the Great White North (which, coincidentally, is rich in natural resources).
World history in a sentence: a bunch of idiot hegemons, brains callused by normalized violence, displace docile, peaceful people upon some sham reasoning or no reasoning at all. And so it must be with the U.S. and Canada. Apologies to my friends, but when you headed north, you played yourselves. We* are coming for you. We will eat your caribou. We will turn your Tim Hortonses into gun shops. We will cut down all your trees to make way for billboards. We will convert your syrup into soft drinks and vape cartridges. And we will do it in the name of freedom — or whatever we want.
*When I say “we” I don’t mean me. If the U.S. actually invades, MAGA types will have long since run the academics and anarchists out, or put us in camps, or dropped us out of helicopters.
