Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

JAMES P. PINKERTON: Man Up, Canada

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Heckuva headline in Canada’s National Poston March 7: “Invading Canada would spark guerrilla fight lasting decades, expert says.”

That expert is Dr. Aisha Ahmad, who studies counter-insurgency at the University of Toronto. She was talking about a hypothetical American military occupation, concern having been stirred by President Trump’s talk of Canada as a 51st state.

“Canadian ‘niceness’ is a myth,” she declared, “that would vanish overnight in the face of invasion.”

To which X-man Kurt Schlichter responded with a snort, “They turned in all their guns.” He was referring to Canada’s many gun-control laws, which were tightened as recently as March 7.

So while Canadian hockey players are full of fight, if the fighting requires weapons greater than sticks, the outcome might not go well for Team Maple Leaf.

Hopefully, there’ll never be an actual American-Canadian combat. And I’ll admit, at first I was amused by the idea of Canada fighting back.

After all, Canada was once led by the oh-so-woke Justin Trudeau, who in 2015 said of his country, ‘‘There is no core identity,” adding it was “the first post-national state.’’ That hardly sounds like the stuff of patriotic resistance.

In the words of Bloomberg News, Trudeau presided over, “An economy centered on record immigration, expanded government spending and green ambitions.”  Yet Trudeau, progressive soy boy that he is, fits in well up there. He has, in fact, been re-elected twice — although after a decade in power, he has hit the exit.

Canada, similar to the West Europeans, has been on a holiday from history, believing that the old determinants of national power — economic and military strength— have been replaced by the preening of wokeness and greenness.

Yet then came the Russian attack on Ukraine, as well as Trump’s dismissal of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Now Canadians, exposed to the Russians across the North Pole, and to the Americans along their southern border, have to think about getting tough. The cliche is that Canada vs. anybody would be like Bambi meets Godzilla.

Yet then I remembered: Not so long ago, Canadians fought hard. In World War Two, 45,000 Canadians died, and in World War One, 66,000 gave their lives.

Indeed, the Great War monument to Canadian valor in Beaumont-Hamel, France is one of the most moving in Europe: “At the heart of the memorial stands a great bronze caribou (the emblem of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment). Its defiant gaze forever fixed towards its former foe, the caribou stands watch over rolling fields that still lay claim to many men with no known final resting place.”

The centennial of the opening of that grand cenotaph comes this June 7. For the coming ceremony, the size of the crowd — and the tone of the speakers — will be an indicator as to whether or not Canada’s martial spirit is truly making a comeback.

As Trump says about so many things, we’ll see what happens, but it’s safe to say that if Canada is to continue as a country, it has no choice but to stand.  As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed 2,500 years ago, “War is the father of all and the king of all.”  That is, whatever happens, good or bad, is because a war was won, or lost.

More recently, in 1862, the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck made the same point: “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided . . . but by iron and blood.”

Whether stated by Heraclitus or Bismarck, these are the hard realities of national power — of national survival. Woke words won’t stop the wolf. Or the bear, or the eagle.

Man up, Canada.

James P. Pinkerton, a former White House domestic policy aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, is a former Fox News contributor.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.