Letter: Trump may have inadvertently set in train a rediscovery of cultural pride in some countries
A letter from Professor John Wilson Foster:
Here in Canada we got an eleventh-hour reprieve from president Trump's blanket 25 per cent tariffs on products exported to the US.
The tariffs would be injury added to the insult of Trump's hallucination about Canada as the 51st state - trumping, shall we say, the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
The 47th president in his day job is basically a developer and deal-maker, as his bizarre plans for Gaza prove once again.
In reality, serious damage has already been done to Canada-US relations. The economic threat has morphed into the social and cultural as well as the political.
My friends have agreed to boycott American goods. They have exhumed forgotten reasons for resenting Uncle Sam.
The somewhat twee slogans ‘shop local’ and 'locally sourced’ have taken on urgent meaning. Canadian firms are re-configuring their supply chains to bypass the US. And since the equation of Canada with Mexico in this tariff onslaught seems offensive, Canadians are re-thinking their frequent travel to our neighbour to the south.
The merit of Canadian economic self-reliance is suddenly on the menu. Trump is the trickster of tradition who offers both mayhem and transformation. His reprieve for Canada and Mexico is another example of his destabilising and effective whimsy.
His earlier initiatives might have similar knock-on benefits for Canada. His Blitzkrieg on federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes might open up a much-needed front in Canada.
Ideally this would include the Canadian Armed Forces which have succumbed to DEI wokery and are woefully ill-prepared to meet the threats the democratic world faces without America's now undependable protection.
The tariffs levied on Canada (the country that has half my allegiance) might help regenerate Canadian unity, self-respect and patriotism.
These virtues have been eroded not just in Canada but in the UK and Australia by a combination of wokery and the more outlandish requirements and blatant downsides of multiculturalism and illegal immigration.
The UK, including Northern Ireland (which has the other half of my allegiance), has been gaslighted for years into believing British and Northern Irish histories are shameful and their culture deplorable
The wayward Trump may have inadvertently set in train a rediscovery of cultural pride in those countries I've mentioned and an awakening from their recent mass zombification.
Professor John Wilson Foster, British Columbia