Conrad Black: And just like that, the Trump 'threat' disappears

 Mark Carney's visit to Washington has shown that American aggression was never a real concern to begin with

Mark Carney has returned from Washington and is taking a bow from the highly supportive Canadian political media for a very cordial meeting with U.S. President Trump. He set out to replicate his mighty but unsuccessful effort as governor of the Bank of England to terrorize the British public over the prospect of the United Kingdom departing the European Union, which Britain had never voted to enter, and squeaked into the minority reelection of an otherwise failed Liberal government of Canada as the man who could stand up to Donald Trump. President Trump heaped compliments on his visitor and with some justification took credit for Carney’s election victory, said that he (Trump) was the best thing that ever happened to him (Carney) and slapped him jovially on the knee. Readers will recall that I said at every stage that the hysteria about Trump was a nothingburger and that no more would be heard about Carney’s theory that “Trump is trying to break us” and that “This country’s intimacy with the United States is over, a tragedy but the reality.” When asked about this last week President Trump said “He was running for public office,” a gracious explanation of the ludicrous canard that Trump is any kind of a threat to Canada.

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The fawning political media of Canada could not accept being debriefed as abruptly as the prime minister was. In its otherwise unexceptionable cover story article about the visit, in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, May 7, the word “annex” or “annexation” was repeated six times. Every informed person in Canada knows that the use of that word in this context is dishonest. Trump never spoke of annexation, which implies an involuntary takeover, something the United States did not do even with Texas or California, which it took from Mexico to the great pleasure of the inhabitants. Trump never uttered one word implying an aggressive act against the independence of Canada. He said that he thought the Canadians would do better as Americans after a voluntary federal union, and it was refreshing to hear him repeat this past week that if Canadians were Americans they would not only benefit from lower taxes but better health care, as well as being able to dispense with the defence budget altogether, since it has come so close to eliminating it anyway. Two whole generations of Canadians have been force-fed the fraud that Canada’s health-care system is superior to that of the United States; 80 per cent of Americans receive a level of health care beyond the dreams of any Canadian who does not go to the United States for medical treatment.

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Some Canadian journalists even employed the word “Anschluss,” the German expression for annexation generally used in reference to Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938, as being Trump’s conception of the future of Canadian-American relations. And the media that touted Mark Carney as the virtuous and indomitable Dudley Do-Right to slay the American Goliath, when the whole scenario of total disruption of relations with the United States and American aggression was revealed as unutterable nonsense, have hailed his return from Washington as a triumph of the underdog. It is a triumph of political posturing and chicanery. In the abstract, Mr. Carney carried it off well and deserves professional commendation for selling a fable and then harvesting the credit for helping to banish the threat that never existed. The not-so-flattering aspect of this process is that where the British public correctly saw in 2016 that Carney’s Brexit ”Operation Fear” was a myth, as subsequent events have proved, Canadian voters were more gullible when presented with the new and much more implausible bogeyman of Donald Trump seeking to strangle the pure snow-maiden of the North. Trump this week repeated his well-known and oft-stated liking for Canada, had nothing but praise for Mark Carney and emphatically stated that Canadian-American relations would remain friendly and positive under any scenario. The Liberals’ monstrous electoral rodomontade, incredibly, saved a government which desperately deserved a punishing defeat on its record, and the Canadian political media that crooned the Liberal song sheet has justly praised the prime minister for elegantly disposing of the charade that he himself invented to save his party.

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Now that he can retire from his stirring performance as Canada’s Demosthenes, Canadians can only hope that Mark Carney will prove as agile and successful in the new role that he and his host in Washington promised to play in the positive renovation of our relations. There is some room for optimism. As an almost hallucinatory climate change fanatic he was an apostle of the carbon tax and an enemy of pipelines but the Liberal party polltakers induced the grace of mid-campaign conversion, and he joined the majority that had already seen the carbon tax as another confiscatory tax inadequately disguised by a lot of claptrap about saving the planet; an enemy of pipelines, he has become an advocate of them. The best hope for a successful Carney government is that its leader will continue to put expediency ahead of dogmatism and translate his support of great projects that historically have built this country, from the Canadian Pacific Railway to the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Montréal World’s Fair and will assist in projects already well underway to bring some of the most sophisticated resources of this country to the world that needs them at huge profit to Canada and particularly to its short-changed native peoples.

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Among these are the Ring of Fire chromite deposits that appear likely to supply the entire world’s consumption of that crucial metal required in making stainless steel for more than a century. There are similar prospects for the Magpie Mountain magnetite deposit of billions of tons on Quebec’s North Shore, with vanadium and titanium byproducts, and with the very large rare earth metals deposits on the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the Sussex New Brunswick potash deposits. The development and marketing of all of these projects are in advanced discussion and are supported by the relevant Indigenous groups. If the prime minister got behind these projects now, he would strike a mighty blow for the economic resuscitation of Canada and put an end to this foolishness about the 51st state, which Donald Trump described last week as “having fun with ‘Governor’ “Justin Trudeau.”

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The conjured spectre of an American Canada has returned to the ether. Canada for the Canadians: let’s get back to making this country the world’s next Great Power.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-and-just-like-that-the-trump-threat-disappears