Let's not Forget that the United States has been an Imperial Power For A Long Time

Jeff Green | Mar 12, 2025

As Justin Trudeau steps away from the role of Prime Minister, I’m reminded of a statement made by his father Pierre, 56 years ago in 1969, to US President Richard Nixon, with whom he had a fractious relationship.

"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant.” Trudeau senior said. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.

The US has been 'twitching and grunting' a lot, as of late, and not exactly “friendly and even-tempered” for that matter, leaving our national economy at serious risk, which threatens our local economies and ultimately, the well being of our own families as well.

Collectively, we seem to be responding well, a mixture of defiance towards the United States administration, and support for each other. The best we can hope is that the elephant will move on to other concerns as quickly as possible, before too much damage is done to us.

We are looking to make changes to make us less vulnerable to the whims of the US government in the future, and in looking in retrospect at how we came to be in this pickle in the first place.

We made that decision, collectively, in the 1980s, and even if the 1988 free trade election had gone against the Mulroney Conservatives who signed the deal, it is unlikely that some deal would not have followed a few years later anyway. Even though the Liberal Party in that 1988 election, under John Turner, campaigned with fervor against the Free Trade Agreement, the Chretien Liberals, who took power four years later, not only kept the agreement in place, but doubled down on policies directed at selling Canadian resources,  goods and services to the large, easy to access market to the south.

And our personal, local, regional and national economies have benefited from this trade for decades.

The United States is not like any other trading partner, however. They are an elephant, an imperialist power that wields power and influence around the world. The United States tells itself, and others, that it is a benevolent imperialist power, and it is in some cases, but not in many, with the bottom line being that everything it does, every bit of foreign aid, ultimately serves US interests in the end.

To a certain extent what we are seeing since the new regime took hold in Washington is the real United States. The policy towards Israel and Palestine, as baldly genocidal as it is, is the sharp edge of the policy under the last three US Presidents. They all ultimately provided support, grudgingly in some cases, for the war criminal Netanyahu.

And Canada has supported those policies for decades, even as US allies in Europe have not.

The only exception to this implicit policy of Canada to support the US, no matter what it got up to around the world, when Canada under Jean Chretien did not participate in the Iraq war, was seen as a huge risk at the time and is now touted as a brilliant, principled decision. It should be noted, however, that we did not oppose the Iraq war, we just stayed out of it.

Our strategy in the face of US tariff policies might seem like a break from the past, but it isn't.

Everything Canada is doing, from counter tariffs to tough talk in the face of a threat to our sovereignty, that must be taken seriously, is based on the understanding that the United States will always act in its own interest.

We are pointing out, at every turn and with every counter measure, that the tariff policy is counter to the short and medium term interest of the US, and we are hoping that is enough. We are hoping that the never ending election cycle down south will inevitably break the resolve of the current administration to do what Justin Trudeau, in the most effective and honest assertion of his political career, said last week, weaken our economy in order to take over.

The fear is that the United States will do to Canada what it has done in Central America and around the world with our unwavering support, take over in some way, in order to achieve complete access to the minerals, water, and whatever else is of value to them, on and under our vast landscape.

Canadian mining companies have left  social and environmental devastation around the world, while bringing profits back home. The United States wants to do that to us, and we want to stop them because we will be left poor and powerless if this happens.

That elephant is really twitching now, in our direction, and we are scrambling to distract it until it starts twitching in another direction.

And if we are successful, it is because we have been preparing for this moment, not always consciously and not always effectively, not for weeks, months or years, but for over a century.