It’s probably just bluster and nonsense, but it has already taken down Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister for the past nine years. His resignation on Monday was the delayed consequence of a row with his deputy Chrystia Freeland last month over his ‘weak’ response to Trump's threat to slap a 25% tariff on Canadian exports to the US.

The actual annexation threats came a bit later, and most Canadian journalists assumed that they were just a way of scaring Canadians into accepting the new tariffs or making other concessions. They’re probably right, too – but what if they are wrong? This is Donald Trump we’re talking about here.

The Panamanians, by contrast, just shrugged. They have been invaded by the United States before, most recently in 1989, but only around 500 Panamanians were killed that time and after a while the Americans went home again, as they usually do in the Caribbean (Grenada, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua).

And the Greenlanders were simply bemused by Trump’s offer to buy their country, as was the Danish government, which looks after the island’s defence and foreign affairs. It has been a long time since countries bought territory from other countries, and seizing it by force is illegal. Nevertheless, Copenhagen increased its defence spending on Greenland by $1.5 billion.

The threats may all be empty, and they certainly reveal an ignorance so profound that it may qualify for ‘protected cultural status’ with UNESCO. However, what seems faintly comical viewed from abroad is taken seriously by some people in the United States, and they are thicker on the ground in the circles around Trump than anywhere else.

For example, Official Presidential Sidekick Elon Musk has just tweeted that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” He posted it as a Yes/No poll, and so far 73% of his fans back his idea of invading the United Kingdom to free the British from the tyrant Keir Starmer.

It’s not enough to say that they’re just yanking our chain. That’s probably the right answer, but you’d feel really stupid if they really did mean some of it and you woke up one morning to find American troops in your street. On the other hand, what could you do to lessen that possibility that wouldn’t look equally stupid?

It’s the same dilemma you always have when dealing with the threats of madmen real or fake. Let’s just look at the bright side, which is that Trump’s threats have finally forced ‘Governor’ Trudeau, as Trump mockingly calls him (implying that what he governs is just an American state) to resign.

That is good news because it opens up a faint possibility that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre will not be the next prime minister of Canada. An election is due no later than October, and so long as Trudeau was in the race Poilievre was the sure winner.

Poilievre (not a francophone despite the name) is not really a Canadian Trump, though he shares most of the same ideas. He’s smarter and more presentable, more like US Vice-President-elect JD Vance but just as much a part of the extreme right.

Here’s his take on Canada’s governing Liberal Party, as middle-of-the-road as it could be. “First they were communists, and then they became socialist, and then they became social democrats, and then they stole the word liberal, and then they ruined that word. They changed their name to progressives, and then they changed their name to woke.”

As long as ‘crypto-Communist’ Justin Trudeau was in office, Poilievre seemed bound to win, not so much because ideological rants are the Canadian style but because Canadians had really come to loathe Trudeau. The intensity of the hostility to him in otherwise calm and reasonable people was astonishing.

People found other, more sensible-sounding reasons to dislike Trudeau, whose government did as poorly as most other elected Western governments in coping with Covid and the subsequent runaway inflation. However, I have long been convinced that they really hated Trudeau because he was irredeemably smarmy.

Now that he’s gone and the Liberals will have a new leader, there’s at least a small chance that Poilievre will not be the next prime minister of Canada. Otherwise, by the end of this year all of mainland North America will be ruled by the hard right – except Mexico, of course.

Author

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Gwynne Dyer