Why America wins

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has launched his adventure in EU "associate" membership - right along with his special deal with China - under which Canadians could end up being sent off to die in support of the Ukrainian NAZIs, China gets to control the north-west passage, and western agricultural producers exporting to China can go suck it.

Meanwhile he's also hosting economic development conferences and signing memoranda of agreement with provincial premiers while increasing the punitive carbon tax, egging on lawyers attacking land ownership rights across Canada, and busily removing barriers to further immigration from (mostly Shiite) Moslem countries - and all I can say is that the taxes are real, the loss of rights is real, and the invasion is real; but the large scale development projects and pipelines are not. Bottom line: Ottawa's current policies seem so insanely stupid I genuinely "can't even".

Luckily I don't have to: one of America's better known talking heads, the redoubtable VDH, has been doing a far better job than I could explaining the more superficial (and so, visible) issues here - see, for example, The Fantasy House of Mark Carney at American Greatness.

So how does Carney have any support at all in Canada? (and, yes, in many "blue" states too- but that's a different issue entirely.)

Pierre Trudeau, father of Carney's predecessor as prime minister, was Canada's Obama - beloved by the media but seemingly motivated largely by narcissism, fascist belief, and a hatred of anything American. When he came to power in 1968, Canada was a decent, middle of the road, country with a good record and people who, for the most part, were essentially indistinguishable from Americans. When he finally, sort of, left for the second time in 1984, the military, the judiciary, and federal-provincial relations had been hollowed out and much of the country's competitive advantage relative to the rest of the world destroyed.

There is a lot of momentum in a national economy, in national goodwill, and in a nation's image abroad, but by the late nineties the Trudeau social legacy was obvious in business and, by about 2010 equally obvious in society at large - descriptors fitting Canadians in the late 1960s: words like "honest", "trustworthy", "hard-working", and "educated"; had been replaced by the ascendency of the second Trudeau in 2015 by words like "complacent", "pride-full", "ignorant", and "uncommitted".

And, in that context, let me tell you a story about buying boots. My daily trail has some steep inclines so my boots have to bend just behind the reinforced toe when climbing - and my (otherwise great) Haix Scout II boots quickly developed large cracks in the leather there. For new ones my options came down to two: the Lowa Zephyr MK2 GTX HI from lowa.ca (which turns out to be a Quebec based distributor called sportdinaco.com) and the Garmont T8 Extreme EVO GTX - but, of course, I had some questions.

It took sportdinaco a day to respond to email - and another day to respond after I pointed out that their first response didn't answer my questions. That one didn't either, so I gave up on them.

The Garmont people, in contrast, are American - their response arrived in under an hour, answered the key question, and suggested a distributor who would have stock. That distributor (combatfootware.com) answered my remaining questions in less than an hour and does ship to Canada. Unfortunately they cannot take responsibility for what the courier service demands for customs clearance "services" or, for that matter, what Canada customs decides is the fee they want to charge that package that day, so I don't know how much risk I want to take in ordering them - although, I suppose that if the shipper stamped it "we hate Trump too" it might well go through untaxed.

But that's why America wins and why so many Canadians seem willing to go along with Carney: Americans, particularly in red states, have not changed much - and American businesses tend to be as customer focused and responsive as they were, and Canadians were, in 1968 - but the Canadian attitude now comes down to something like "you can buy from us, or you can F-off - I don't give a star-blank-star."