Letter to My Fellow Americans: About Canada

We lost our oldest friend on purpose. How we start deserving them back.

I’m an American writer in Baton Rouge. I spent thirty years inside this country’s institutions — utilities, audit agencies, the systems that only work when somebody keeps them honest.

This week a senator asked Canada to be nicer to us. This is my answer, addressed to the right people.

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The Letter

A senator from California wrote to Canada this week asking them to be nicer to us.

I read it twice to make sure it was real. Then I got angry, and not at Canada.

Do you know what we did? I’m asking honestly, because most of us don’t. It went by in the noise. Our president called Canada the 51st state. Not once, at a dinner, as a joke. Over and over, from behind the seal of our republic. He looked at a country of 40 million people — a country with its own flag, its own parliament, its own dead from two world wars it entered before we did — and called it a real estate opportunity.

Then we tariffed their steel, and their aluminum too — aluminum we barely make anymore. We shut our own smelters years ago, and then taxed the neighbor who kept our factories running. And he told us Canada would pay those tariffs. That was a lie, and not a complicated one. A tariff is a tax collected at our own ports, paid by our own importers, passed down to us at the register. Canada never wrote a check. We did — on every truck, every beam, every can. He taxed us, and called it punishing them. Then we shook them down over a bridge they built and paid for — his own words: he would not allow it to open until America was “fully compensated” for a bridge that cost us nothing. Then, when they quietly stopped buying our whiskey and stopped driving south, we sent senators to ask why they were being mean.

Nobody has talked to Canada like that in over a hundred years. It took us to do it.

Let me tell you what that border used to be. It was the longest undefended border on earth — our best brag. Not the aircraft carriers. The neighbor who never needed to fear us. My grandfather crossed it to fish. Theirs crossed it to watch a ball game. Nobody checked twice.

In 1979, when our embassy fell in Tehran, six Americans slipped out a back door with nowhere to go. Canadian diplomats hid them in their homes for three months, and Canada’s own cabinet secretly authorized real Canadian passports to smuggle them out — their government put its name on our escape. On September 11th, when our sky closed, a town in Newfoundland smaller than a college campus took in nearly seven thousand of our stranded and fed them for days without asking who would pay. When we went to Afghanistan, they came. They buried a hundred and fifty-eight of their own for our war.

That’s the country our president says shouldn’t exist. That’s the country our senators are scolding.

I’ve walked the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. Everybody who’s been to Washington has — it was a park with a famous house in it, and that was the brag too: the most powerful man on earth, and you could stand on his sidewalk. This week they proposed fencing it permanently — Lafayette Square too, the park where we’ve protested every president since Jefferson. There’s already titanium fencing around the new ballroom; he bragged a bulldozer couldn’t knock it over, and there’s a bunker going in six stories beneath it. I saw the photograph of that fence and understood something I’d been avoiding: men do not build compounds against people who love them. And I grew up being told we were the good guys — every movie, every classroom, every Fourth of July. So here is the hardest sentence I have ever had to write. Right now, today, we are the country other countries protect themselves from.

Canada figured that out before most of us would say it. Now let me tell you what their answer looks like, because it isn’t rage. Rage we’d know how to dismiss.

A woman in a liquor store in Calgary turns a bottle, reads Kentucky on the label, and puts it back. Somewhere in Bardstown, a man who’s filled bottles like it his whole working life watches the orders fall and wonders what he did wrong. The answer is nothing. A family in Mississauga cancels the Florida trip they’d taken for eleven years. The motel in Bangor sits empty. The outlet mall in Buffalo where Ontario plates used to fill the lot every Saturday is asphalt and echoes now. At hockey games, they boo our anthem — and if you knew Canadians, you’d know how much it costs them to be rude on purpose.

Here’s the part I need you to sit with. They aren’t angry at you. Ask any of them — I have — and they say the same thing, almost apologetically, like they’re worried we’ll take it wrong: it’s not the waitress in Bangor, it’s not the vineyard family in Sonoma, it’s him. Our trade representative filed them next to China — “the company they’re running in,” he said, of the people who forged our way out of Tehran. And still they keep separating us from the man behind the seal, more carefully than we ever separated them from anything.

Our oldest friend is boycotting us and apologizing to us at the same time.

It broke something in me.

They watched him threaten Greenland, shake down NATO, send masked agents into our streets — and they still made sure the quarrel was with him, not us. They use a word for him up there that our own senators are afraid of. I’m done being more afraid of the word than the thing. They’re right.

So here’s what I’m asking, and unlike Senator Schiff, I’m asking the people who can actually fix it. Us.

Stop waiting for Canada to get over it. They won’t, and they shouldn’t. The empty shelf isn’t a tantrum. It’s the last polite warning a polite country knows how to give.

And understand what they’re actually asking for, because it was never about wine sales. It’s respect. A sovereign country. An equal. Not the 51st anything.

This November, vote like the border depends on it, because it does. Not just the states that always decide things — all of them, down to the school boards. And if you already vote — you’re not who this paragraph is for. The person you bring with you is. One man is not stopped by one election in one place. He is stopped when a whole country stands up at once and takes Congress out of his hands.

Then make Congress use it. We tried impeachment twice. Seven of them were brave the second time. The rest decided their seats mattered more than their country. Send them home too.

And then let the courts finish it. He broke our laws in the open, daring us to care. So care. Try him. Convict him. Put him where a president who betrays his country belongs — in a cell, for the rest of his life, where he can never again reach across a border he didn’t respect.

Not vengeance. Precedent. Every strongman on earth is watching to see whether America punishes this or forgives it. So is every friend we have left.

Our grandparents crossed an ocean to stop men like him, and Canadians crossed it beside them. All we have to do is cross a parking lot.

And I’ll say the quiet part, because some of us are already whispering it at kitchen tables: what if he doesn’t let November count? Here’s what I know from thirty years of watching systems fail. Rigging works in the dark and in the margins. It cannot survive turnout so large the count is beside the point, and it cannot survive forty million witnesses next door who have already shown they’ll call things by their name. So don’t vote like it’s close. Vote like it’s watched — because it is, from fifty feet across the river.

And when he’s gone — because these men always go, never quietly, and never on their own — I want to be there the day the Canadian plates come back over the Peace Bridge. I want to hear their accents in the motels in Maine again. I want to stand in a bar in Ontario and buy the first round with our whiskey — the day it’s back on their shelf and they’ll take it — and tell them we’re sorry, and mean it.

They spent a hundred years being the best neighbor any country ever had.

It was never them.

It was us. So it’s ours to fix.

If this letter says what you’d say — don’t share it. Write your own. Then send it to your senator, signed.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

I love this country. I want that on the record before anything else, because the letter above is angry and grief reads as anger from a distance. I love America the way you love anything you’ve spent thirty years inside — knowing exactly where it’s cracked, and wanting it to hold anyway. What I hate is what’s being done to it, and to the best neighbor it ever had, by men who confuse the two the way I never will. The country is not the regime. That cuts both directions, and this letter leans on it from the first line to the last.

Now the facts, because the comments will ask.

Everything above is on the record. The president’s own post said he would not allow the bridge to open until America was “fully compensated” — for a bridge Canada paid $6.4 billion to build. The trade representative’s own words put Canada in “the company they’re running in” alongside China. The fencing proposal was reported this week; the titanium fence and the six-story complex beneath the ballroom come from the president’s own tour. In 1979, Canada’s cabinet secretly authorized genuine passports for our six diplomats in Tehran — the forged documents were our visas; their passports were real. Gander’s own count is nearly seven thousand. Canada buried 158 soldiers in Afghanistan. Seven Republican senators voted to convict in February 2021.

The tariff checks are written to U.S. Customs by American importers — that’s the law, not an opinion — and the Federal Reserve’s own researchers found the burden lands overwhelmingly on American firms and families. Four aluminum smelters still operate in this country, down from more than thirty. U.S. spirits sales in Canada have fallen 66 percent since the boycott began. Somewhere in Kentucky, that’s a shift.

The woman in Sudbury and the man in Bardstown are composites. Everything happening to them is not.

If the letter says what you’d say, the last line already told you what to do with it.

An Introduction to Open Letters
Flattery until it hurts.

Satire. Every letter, every word. If a compliment in here reads sincere, read it again.

These are open letters to the officials of the present administration, written in a spirit of appreciation. Criticism is everywhere, and criticism is cheap, and besides, these men have heard it and kept going, which tells you what it’s worth. It takes patience to thank a man properly. To congratulate a cabinet secretary for each family separated ahead of schedule, each rule enforced so thoroughly that the people it protected can no longer be found to complain. These are accomplishments, by the only measure the men themselves use. Somebody ought to write them down while the men are still proud of them.

Each letter praises one official for one accomplishment, correctly, completely, and on the record. Each carries a small story from down home, because Louisiana has always raised fine examples of men who did their jobs completely, and we still name things after some of them.

Nothing here but compliments. Every word is sincere. Read them slowly, the way you’d count change from a man who’s smiling.

Disclaimer

This is fiction/satire. The part about public figures and institutions is opinion and commentary — not fact, not allegation, just one citizen's view, dressed for company. Any reader sharp enough to find this page is sharp enough to tell fiction from a sworn statement, and I'm trusting you on that. The private individuals are invented. If one of them resembles you, that's a coincidence, and between us, a little vain of you to assume. Nothing here is advice — financial, legal, spiritual, or romantic. I make things up about the powerful for a living. I'm not about to start running yours.

One housekeeping note. This publication is speech on matters of public concern, written in Louisiana, where Article 971 of the Code of Civil Procedure lets a writer answer a nuisance lawsuit with an early motion and send the filer home holding both parties' legal bills. I mention this the way a house mentions its dog — not as a threat, just so nobody's surprised.