(Thanks to Ben, who helped create this cartoon. But the responsibility for the copyright infringement is mine)

Donald Trump wants to make us part of the United States, and I know that is causing a great deal of anxiety for some people. Relax, people! It isn’t going to happen! And even if it does, it’s not all bad. Sure, there are some bad things we’d have to swallow, but as with every huge decision, you must consider the balance of pro’s and con’s. Let’s consider a few.

1. Try not to get too bothered by the stresses of the moment. Think of this as watching one of your favourite TV cartoon shows brought to life, with Elon Musk as Pinky, and Donald Trump as The Brain. “Pinky: “Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?” Brain: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!”
2. The good thing about joining the USA is that we no longer have to pledge allegiance to King Chucky. Many of my readers will know that I no longer support a monarchy, and would prefer to drop the house of Windsor altogether. Of course, the downside is that instead of lining up to kiss Charles’ bony ass, we’d now have to plant our kiss on Donald Trump’s fleshy flanks. I’d call that one a tie at the very best.

3) We can finally give up on three down football. (I gave up on it years ago. My pride and love of country couldn’t quell the suspicion that this was, in reality, just a minor league game.) Good football players will be coached in the American game from childhood, and the fortunate ones who avoid serious brain damage will have better access to that big time, 3.3-year average, NFL career.  Our universities can be turned into academically challenged football factories. And as a bonus, if the CFL does survive as a feeder league, Americans will discover that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, not the Green Bay Packers, own the chilliest football stadium in the world. Go ‘Peg!

And there’s more good news. It’s true that American football causes Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), but there is no reason for brain damage to stop you from having a lucrative position in the Trump administration. I offer Pete Hegseth and Marjorie Taylor-Green as evidence.

4) Here’s a big pro. Under the benevolent guidance of our American cousins, it will become much easier to own a death-dealing assault weapon of your very own. A well-stocked gun cabinet is an indispensable addition to the American living room décor, and the American annexation will make that much easier to achieve. Yes, I understand that people will complain about the death toll. I simply advise you to repeat to yourself at regular intervals “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. When you wake up mumbling that message you will have been fully assimilated into the American psyche. The only downside of this one is that we’ll need to put magnetometers and security guards at the entrances to all our schools. That isn’t all bad either – think of the employment opportunities!

5) I cannot say I’m happy with Trump’s climate policy, or lack thereof. It will lead to melting of a great deal of ice in the Arctic Ocean, which will imperil some unnecessary species like the polar bear and the Inuit. But it will likely open up the Northwest passage so that Canadian goods can go north and east to Europe instead of having to go down to the Panama Canal, or even worse all the way down around the Horn. It’s like a back door to Europe. Let’s call it Trump’s Back Passage, and regularly drive our wood through it.

Of course with Trump also annexing the Panama Canal and with his boys in blue patrolling both the northern and southern shipping lanes, we can get on with the serious work of mining all the oil and minerals this country holds and turning that wealth into American dollars to be absorbed by the American filthy rich. I look forward to being part of the nation with the world’s greatest concentration of wealth in the upper classes. We can all be part of the American dream – the one where you too can lie cheat and steal, and become a rich white fat guy.

6) Joining the United States will allow us to eliminate a lot of time-consuming and difficult tracking of water across the border. After all, if we’re all one big happy family, who cares which sock drawer the socks wind up in? For example, the two federal governments have implemented over 40 international agreements for the management and protection of environmental quality and ecosystems in the border area and there are over 100 additional such agreements between U.S. states and Canadian provinces. Wouldn’t it be great not to have to manage and control the use of Canada’s abundant water resources like that? Who cares if we can no longer irrigate farmland in southern Alberta? The farmers in Montana who get the water instead will be happy to feed us I’m sure.

Many people worry about water diversion projects. On the plus side, we get an increase in biodiversity as alien species make their way through connected rivers into destinations like Lake Winnipeg. I suppose that I have to acknowledge that some of those species might out-compete some of the existing fishies, but it’s a fish eat fish world, right? And a fish is a fish is a fish – so it all looks the same at the end.

7) There are, of course, many social aspects of becoming ‘Murrican. One of those is religion, and admittedly this is a bit of a sticky wicket. Religion, and specifically the Christian religion, is playing a big part in American politics these days. If you’re a bible-thumping southern Baptist kind of Christian who can quote the bible, and win at Jeopardy based on your knowledge of obscure biblical questions, and if you understand what  the heck John 3-16 has to do with football, you should be happy with annexation. You’ll fit in nicely with the herd.  

Furthermore,  as a bible-thumping Christian, you’ll be protected. Trump signed an executive order establishing a task force for the purposes of Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias and followed that up with another order creating the White House Faith Office. The purpose of those entities is to counter the anti-Christian activities of Joe Biden and all his evil woke followers. For example, activists who illegally blocked access to abortion clinics recently got pardoned. The Trumpster revealed today that their prosecution was not the lawful protection of a medical clinic performing legal activities, but was really evil Joe Biden’s suppression of the Christian faith. So you’ll be covered, under the newly created White House Faith Office, presided over by a total freaking religious kook named Paula White. 

Now the downside… If you belong to any other religion you need to get used to being treated as something of an alien minority even if your family has been here for three generations. If, like me, you think politics and religion don’t mix, then becoming American is problematic in this regard. But I’ll just have to learn to take the bad with the good, won’t I?

8) One of the great potentials of annexation is the possibility of new investment opportunities. For example, think of the incarceration industry. Harsher American sentencing practices and the “three strikes” laws that have been passed in many states offer ample opportunity to put more people behind bars and keep them there longer. The US holds the proud distinction of being the most incarcerated population in the world, and I guess we’ll be expected to do our part to help keep them number one.  But that’s OK – Canada offers a virtually untouched population to fill prisons, and so there’s a reasonable chance that it will be someone else, not you, joining the chain gang.

On the up side, there will be construction jobs out there for building prison facilities, and of course several large American corporations that offer privatized prison management, all of which open up opportunities for the savvy investor.

9) We’ll get RFK Jr! Remember how stressful it was listening to Dr. Fauci in the US and Dr. Lin in Canada coaching us on how to get through the Covid pandemic? “Don’t do this, and don’t do that. Wash your hands and wear a mask and no, don’t drink bleach because that was a little silly (that’s Donald, ha ha), and avoid other people like the plague”.  (See what I did there? That avoid like the plague thing? Neat huh?) Well that will be all gone. We won’t get any of that from little Bobby K. No, it will be “you’re an adult, so you decide. Do what you like, but be careful about getting vaccinated because that causes autism. And sorry but you might need to pay for the vaccines because we might cut funding for that sort of nonsense.” No more worrying about making your child cry by sticking a nasty needle in his arm for mandatory vaccinations. No more harassing you about nutrition, because he’s likely to close the nutrition department down altogether. Really, Bobby K will be a lot less stressful. I can’t wait.

Some of the more well-informed among you may have noted that the State of Kansas is now dealing with 76 confirmed cases of tuberculosis, with almost 400 other people being monitored and tested. Don’t worry, be happy! Bobby K will make it better by banning processed foods.

10) I have several times expressed my frustration with the Canadian government’s inability to make the decision, and just get on with the purchase of the best fighter planes available, the F-35. In fact the F-35 is just the tip of the ice-berg, as I’ve been troubled all along by the scarcity of tanks, submarines, howitzers and other kit needed if our people ever have to go to war. And now, we’ll no longer have to worry. Uncle Donald assures us that they’ll protect us.

It’s true that all that destructive power of the US military will reside at the beck and call of the former CEO of Concerned Veterans for America,  a right wing foundation funded heavily by the Koch family. Well yes, Hesgeth really is a total freaking alcoholic whack job who lost that job because of his drinking, his sexual harassment of staffers, and his indiscriminate shouting of the term “Kill all Muslims” in a public bar in a Sheraton Hotel in Detroit. But you can’t have everything.

11) It’s kind of a downer that if we join the USA, we’ll go from being stereotyped as gentle, polite self-effacing good guys to being hated by much of the developed world and all of the underdeveloped world. Whatever international goodwill the Americans have managed to stockpile in the first 8 decades since the end of WW2 will have been blown away in the first 8 days of Elon Musk’s assault on the mechanisms of government and especially on USAID which is (or was!) the department looking after international development. As vaccination programs and food security programs and medical assistance programs go swirling down the drain I’m guessing a little resentment will rise in the gorge of the abandoned poor. And because us annexed white Canadians will be indistinguishable from any other white American, then all those people will come to hate us even though it’s not our fault. Bummer. You’ll notice that I haven’t bothered to mention people of other colours and that’s because while they may have mattered in Joe Biden’s America, they’re never going to matter in Donald Trump’s America, so I have chosen not to consider them.

But it’s OK. Travel to the tourist hot spots of the world may be uncomfortable because we’ll have become “ugly Americans”, but we’ll be able to vacation on the sunny shores of the Gaza strip. It may take a little while to remove 50 million tons of rubble and 2 million Palestinians whom Trump has volunteered to displace (we know not where), but I’m confident that Musk and Bezos and Zetterburg will be happy to pony up half the cost in return for exclusive rights to casino’s and hotels in the happily liberated and totally vacated Gaza strip. And as proud Americans, we’ll be preferred customers, spending our new American currency. 

12) Currency – there’s another thing! No more having to remember that tens are darker blue than fives, and twenties are green etc. No, now all our currency will be the same colour. True, we’ll have to get used to examining the bill a bit more closely to ensure we’ve selected the correct denomination. But now we’ll be able to laugh along with that smart-ass stand-up comic when he refers to another country’s paper as monopoly money. That won’t be us any more.

13) You should consider how fortunate we will be to have an insider’s seat to witness these historic times. There’s a pretty good chance that Trump will get assassinated before his term is up, if the next guy trains a little harder than the last dickhead who shot and missed. Or possibly the House and Senate will finally get around to impeaching him. Lord knows he continues to provide reasons for that to happen. Or, alternatively, the houses of Congress could determine that he has become mentally incompetent and kick his ass back to Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll all be sitting here watching some state-approved TV station like Fox News and getting the inside track on Musk’s X or Trump’s Truth Social, and we’ll feel privileged to really know what’s going on. What are the chances that the CBC could ever possibly provide as much speculation, rumour and biased interpretation as we’ll get from our consumption of American media sources?

14) Here’s a sweet thought. As Americans, we’ll all get to vote. Based on population, Canada would command 54 electoral college votes, or enough to guarantee that the Republicans would never win another election, based on Canada’s voting patterns. So if Trump opens his gargantuan maw and attempts to swallow Canada, he may find that he has bitten off a great deal more than he can chew.

My final thoughts? All kidding aside at this point. First, I apologize for treating an important subject too lightly. It deserves a better analysis than this. 

I don’t think annexation will happen. But it might. Recent survey data tells us that only 6% of Canadians favour the idea, but that up to 25% are open to negotiation and that 25% segment is skewed to the young. My counsel is that you should not sit by silently if and when you hear someone speaking favourably of the idea. Have your reasons to oppose annexation ready and make your opposition clear early and often. Don’t let’s let this idea begin to gain credibility. When you hear it promoted, stomp on it. Stomp on it hard.

Your comments, as always, would be welcomed.

Dennis Curley