His own morality

How are Canadians protected against Donald Trump if Americans aren't?

The day after airliners flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the National Post columnist Mark Steyn wrote, for the paper’s Sept 13 edition, that it was time to send U.S. troops into Canada. He based this advice on a rumour, later demonstrated to be false by the 9/11 Commission, that some of the terrorists who flew out of Boston had driven in from Canada.

“[Just for the record, I mean this entirely seriously,” Steyn wrote. “[T]he U.S. should exercise an admittedly broad definition of the international right of hot pursuit and send forces across the border to track down the terrorist cells that operate out of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere.”

It was a difficult time. Tempers were running high. We move on. But my question for today is: would Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and the amazingly adaptable Marco Rubio use a broad or narrow definition of hot pursuit if anything happened in Canada, or was rumoured by anybody to have happened in Canada, that caught their interest?

I ask because it’s less than a week since U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement sent 2,000 masked and armed federal agents to Minneapolis in what ICE’s latest acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever.” It’s certainly the most thorough: the day after the ICE surge, an agent put three bullets into Renee Macklin Good, who had immigrated to Minneapolis from Kansas City by way of Norfolk, VA.

Since then, Good has been accused of “domestic terrorism” by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Vice-President JD Vance has devoted himself nearly fulltime to ensuring that history remembers Good as a monster. In his first term, Trump was a big fan of Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial killing campaign against suspected drug pushers. It’s hard just to watch all the summary execution from afar; at some point you need a little of that action for yourself.

I know Canadians have been paying a lot of attention to the spectacle of helicopter gunships descending on Caracas, applying an admittedly broad definition of the international right of hot pursuit to Nicolás Maduro and dozens of his formerly living bodyguards. But to some extent, all of that is too lurid and distant, both from the US and from Canada, to offer many hints about the dangers Canada faces from the ever-more-emboldened Trump White House.

Maduro is a truly bad guy, and the Special Forces who flew him back for his arraignment were indeed looking for him specifically. Marco Mendocino, Mark Carney’s former chief of staff, likes the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York’s chances in court better than Maduro’s. (For an even more full-throated endorsement of the Maduro extraction, read Ian Brodie. I’m not used to disagreeing with Ian as much as I do here, but let 100 flowers bloom. He proposes a “head to head comparison” between Trump and Maduro to establish who’s the bad guy. Can we add the head of Juan Orlando Hernández, for a fuller comparison?)

But I doubt Trump would have sent helicopters north even if Justin Trudeau were still the prime minister. What’s easier to imagine is some variation on the Minneapolis scenario: the President finding some reason to send a couple of busloads of little green men into Pincher Creek or Leamington or some other border town. A President who only occasionally acknowledges Canada’s right to exist could hardly be expected to balk at any modest geographic and demographic distinctions between Minneapolis and its northern Donbas, Canada.

If any awkward wandering led to an extrajudicial early end for any posthumously promoted Canadian domestic terrorists, Stephen Miller would be on TV before sundown to explain that it’s his hemisphere, after all. The only constraint the President acknowledges, he told some New York Times reporters the other night, is “my own morality, my own mind.” Neither that constraint nor the border strikes me as sufficiently robust for my liking.

If the White House’s purifying mission ever did lead it to overlook niceties like an international border, I’m sure plenty of Canadians would line up to congratulate the president on his vigour. Including many who sided with the February 2022 protesters in Ottawa who were, back then, not fans of government overreach.

Would Mark Carney make any kind of fuss at all, with a trade deal to be saved and all? I can only hope the question remains hypothetical.