"The times that try men's souls"
We Canadians will now learn who are the summer soldiers, and who the real patriots
In November, 1776, George Washington and his army were in grave danger. The British had defeated them on Long Island and only a miraculous nighttime evacuation to Manhattan — possible thanks to winds that kept the Royal Navy at bay — saved them from complete destruction.
Then the British took Manhattan and drove the rebels to New Jersey.
Washington’s army suffered defeat after defeat. Three-quarters of his troops were gone. Desertions accelerated. A long, dismal winter lay ahead.
Defeat lay ahead.
It was at this moment of supreme peril that Thomas Paine, an Englishman who sided with the rebels, wrote a pamphlet to rally supporters of the beleaguered cause. “It was necessary” he later wrote, that “the country should be strongly animated.” Paine’s words became one of the most famous calls to arms in history.
On January 16, 2025, I thought it would made sense — for those with a taste for irony — to repeat the most renowned of Paine’s passages.
I am Canadian.
My country is in crisis.
Without a whiff of justification, the incoming President of the United States of America has turned on America’s old friend and ally, threatening Canada with brutal tariffs that would savage our economy, drive us into a deep recession, and throw millions of my countrymen into unemployment and poverty.
But he offers us a way out: We can surrender to what he himself has called “economic force” and hand over our country.
We can submit.
Among Canadians, there is dismay and confusion. This can’t really be happening.
Can it?
Yes, it is happening.
Some see that clearly. And they urge Canadians to do what we must: To unite and fight, to meet economic force with economic force, answering tariffs with tariffs and pain for pain. If the President insists on being a fool, let him feel the sting of his folly.
But there are other voices, too. It’s too costly to fight, they say. Let’s do whatever he asks. Surely we can placate him.
One premier, having already flown to Mar-a-Lago to join the long queue to kiss the ring, has announced she will attend the inauguration in Washington DC, where she will presumably clap and cheer and smile for a man who wants to wipe Canada from the map. She also announced she will oppose any Canadian action that costs her province.
At least we can say we know now who she truly is.
The following passage was written by an Englishman who wanted Americans to demand their independence. But today, it is for all Canadians.
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
I don't understand the level of ODD displayed by the Laurentian Elites, and those striving hard to join them. Trump's request was pretty simple: secure your border and beef up your military defenses. Canada should be doing this, anyway, whether Trump had asked or not. The fastest, easiest, and cheapest way we could have averted the tariffs would have been to make concrete steps to secure our border and increase defense spending before Trump's inauguration. (Maybe we should have done that instead of giving $60billion to foreign EV battery makers.) Instead, the little emperors in eastern Canada puffed up their little chests, stamped their little feet, and threw a temper tantrum like toddlers. The big fish in a small pond don't know how to act on the world stage, where they are small fries in a big pond.
It's the same ridiculous ODD reaction as the European leaders showed Trump in his first term when he warned them not to be dependent on Putin's oil and gas. They hovered over him with arms crossed and heaped scorn on him for daring to tell them how to govern their territories. But he was right, and Europeans have lived to regret not listening to Trump. Canadians are in a much more vulnerable position; we should learn something from history - right Dan?
Dan epitomizes all of the Laurentian Elites' blind spots. It is rich for easterners - those living roughly from Toronto to the Atlantic - to suddenly want Alberta to be a "team player." Nobody in the rest of Canada was a "team player" when Alberta wanted to develop overseas markets for our O&G sector. There wasn't a "business case" for it, according to the most economically illiterate leader in Canadian political history, remember? Nobody in the rest of Canada wanted anything to do with Alberta's "filthy oil" - except to take $13billion every year in wealth we created from it in equalization transfers. Eastern Canadians made Alberta a captive seller to American oil refineries, forcing us to take a steep discount to world prices for our resources; now they want Alberta to take another hit for "Team Canada" by raising export tariff money on the backs of Albertan oil in order to prop up eastern industries that will suffer from Trump's tariffs. Sorry, but Albertans have suffered enough economic abuse from eastern Canadians; if you do this, you will have a serious national unity crisis on your hands. I would not be at all surprised if you drive Alberta into Trump's arms to become the 51st state.
Dan got his Peloponnesian analogy completely wrong a month or so ago. A better fit would be this: Athens = the colonial masters in eastern Canada; Alberta and Saskatchewan = the satellite Greek colonies that Athens extracted tribute from; and the USA = Sparta. After robbing the colonies blind for decades, now the easterners want the colonies to pay more tribute to fight a stupid trade war with the USA. The presumption is astonishing in its level of ignorance.
Maybe "Team Canada" should start with this idea: Quebec could cut off their electricity going to the American NE. Cold turkey. A few weeks of rolling blackouts or worse might bring Trump around. Quebec could use some of the $13.6billion it gets from Alberta in equalization this year to fight the tariff war with Trump. But cutting off Alberta oil is stupid in the extreme, given that it is shipped back into Ontario via Line 5 and on to Quebec via Line 9. Line 5 traverses Michigan, so cutting off Alberta oil will entail cutting off Ontario & Quebec supplies, too. Doug Ford is still too stupid to understand this. It's to cry for.
I was just skimming some of the comments, particularly those from the Trump apologist(s), and realized that perhaps this is the point of the exercise - sorting the real patriots from those who live in Canada for other reasons. The exercise is obviously divisive. In previous times we could more or less all muddle along together in our separate political spheres and occasionally bump into one another for commerce or around our kids' soccer games. Maybe that muddling is no longer an option.
If it were possible to continue muddling it would likely be the most Canadian thing possible for us to do so. Still, I'm curious if the current circumstances necessarily sharpen the contrast - not between left and right, or statists versus libertarians - but between those whose primary loyalty is with Canada and those who are either antipathetic or indifferent to the Canadian project.