Donald Trump’s library of failure: Chris Selley

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The “Team Canada” approach against Trumpism 2.0, ostensibly sealed in ink in January after a meeting of the premiers, looked good on paper — at first glance, anyway. Only Danielle Smith failed to sign, insisting on Alberta’s particular interests and causing many palpitations among learned folk in the eastern time zone, but François Legault’s commitment to the team was hardly any more compelling for his having signed it. Le Quebec politicians have been roughly as enthusiastic about limiting hydroelectricity exports to the U.S. as Alberta politicians have been about limiting oil and gas exports.

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Smith was again taking it on the chin this week for her Alberta-firstism, after meeting with new Liberal Leader Mark Carney and issuing “a specific list of demands to the prime minister, regardless of who that is.” It boils down to a case for a totally unfettered oil-and-gas industry, with some other stuff thrown in as well. Andrew Leach, the University of Alberta energy economist, called it “effectively a separatist manifesto,” and he’s not wrong.

But there are far worse fates awaiting countries out there than being a stable federation of 10 provinces fighting Ottawa and each other for their best and biggest piece of the pie. Canadian jurisdictions need not be united in their economic or sociopolitical goals to still cohere into something much stronger than Trumpism.

Speaking of which: America’s Orange Wave has come, perhaps inevitably, for one of the less consequential but more symbolic artifacts of Canadians’ hundreds of years of mostly friendly relations with Americans. Effective immediately, Canadians will no longer be able to visit the historic library that’s split between Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Que. — the border being demarcated inside with a freely crossed black line — without going through customs first.

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If you hadn’t heard of the library before, you might have recently when Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, paid a visit last month. Deborah Bishop, the library’s executive director, told the Boston Globe that Noem made a little pantomime of stepping back and forth across the border. “She stood on the American side and said, ‘USA No. 1.’ Then she crossed the line and said, ‘The 51st state,’” Bishop told the Globe. “She did it at least three times.”

It’s best to avoid negotiating with petulant vandals unless you have to

These, I submit, are not the sorts of people Canada should be allowing to dictate our national conversation.

It would be nice to say no one has ever tried to use the library’s Can-Am status for nefarious purposes. But in 2021 seven people drove across the library’s lawn from Canada into the U.S., only to be nabbed by U.S. Border Patrol moments later and sent back to Canada — unsurprisingly, since that’s one of the stupidest ways to cross the border illegally. Why not just call ahead and tell them where and when?

In 2010, meanwhile, the library — specifically its men’s washroom — was the scene of an equally idiotic scheme to smuggle significant numbers of guns into Canada. As it turns out, that’s difficult to do without a librarian noticing.

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But the Haskell Free Library and Opera House is clearly not a threat to border security. Inasmuch as it entices moron border criminals, it seems to be a boon! What it is is perhaps the greatest symbol of an era of Canada-U.S. that doesn’t just predate Trump or 9/11, but that you probably have to be Gen-X or older to remember. You didn’t even need a passport to drive to Buffalo or Detroit for a day’s shopping in a country where they actually sold all those things you saw on television.

We may not have had free trade in goods and services, but travelling was a breeze compared to nowadays. Trump wants to blow that up for his own reasons, whatever they are — if he even knows. He’s a petulant vandal, and it’s best to avoid negotiating with petulant vandals unless you have to.

We, alas, do have to. But that’s no reason for us not to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over Canada’s immediate and longer-term political future. Politesse and patriotism be damned, for once let’s see a proper election campaign about real things.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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