We Canadians are normally plain and sensible, but sometimes a wind of madness blows in from south of the border. When the United States went crazy, during the Vietnam years, the editor of the University of Calgary student newspaper did an editorial for Remembrance Day. He said our soldiers in the trenches in WWI were (very bad people). He’s still living it down. Later, when Canadian troops were in Afghanistan, folks at home were perfectly sane about it because U.S. citizens, just then, were sane too.
When our cousins to the south killed George Floyd and then their stories began appearing of other Black people being killed by peace officers, well, I wasn’t about to be judgemental of another culture, because I’m as Politically Correct as the next man. Okay, maybe I was annoyed. Downright contemptuous. But I didn’t roll my eyes until the craziness spread to Canada with a front page story of Toronto police accused of throwing a Black lady out of her apartment window. The accusers were dreaming, the craziness was real.
My best image of President Trump in the White House, during his first term in office, is of a time he sat hunched over and asked, “How can I know about defence?” Folks told him his defence minister was just down the hall. Trump asked again, they told him again. Rinse and repeat.
Everybody knows the old Republican party has been transformed into the Trump party, complete with people wearing red hats for MAGA madness (Make America Great Again).
Canada doesn’t have a Trump hero, praise the Lord, but we do have people who have caught his madness on the wind. Here in Alberta, the old Conservative Party has transformed into the United Conservative Party. (UCP) At least they don’t wear hats. This came about because the UCP thinks people in our province feverishly want to go socialist—like how Republicans say they think the Democrats are all foaming leftists. Albertans voted the socialists into power, yes, but only for a single term, only as a protest vote.
Suppose there was a case of a “graphic novel,” a comic book, in a school library. Instead of hunching over like Trump, a simple phone call could have sufficed, by genuinely asking, “When librarians are getting their library degree, do they learn ethics about whether kids may read age-inappropriate books? May I alert you to a book?” No such call. The resultant UCP book banning made the international news. No word on whether off shore investors were discouraged.
Remember Trump’s fear of “waste, fraud and abuse”? Starving senior citizens in Alberta last year could not afford the Covid vaccine, because, despite our normal medicare, it now costs “well over a hundred bucks a shot.” The UCP government says this is because last year there was “waste.” Apparently nobody in the UCP could stop figuratively hunching over long enough to reach for the handset and dial a pharmacist. The spokesman for pharmacists says waste is very easy to prevent, if the government chooses to do so. But—? No call, nothing for old pensioners.
Everyone knows now that most of congress, and President Trump himself, is science-free. He claims the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” This after many vote recounts, and many court cases, at taxpayer time and expense, have produced zero evidence—but Trump still says “stolen.” He also believes there is massive voter fraud by noncitizens. Science says otherwise. A source on the web reports that out of a million voters in Philadelphia there were only 40 cases of ineligible voting. As the scientists put it, an “insignificant number.”
Alberta’s UCP? They want voters in the next election to “show proof of citizenship.” I ask, “Why?” Do they they think the science is any different up here? No, but probably, in their Trump-ian madness, the UCP remembers, and agrees with, Trump’s hatred of immigrants, and his saying of immigrants in Springfield: “They are eating the dogs.” Now the UCP is going to have a referendum on whether immigrants can access government services. So crazy. I’m not against Yankees, but truly it’s a mad wind that blows from the south.
Am I frustrated? Sure, especially when a retired friend is giving up and making plans to leave the province. Am I optimistic? Yes, I expect Trump-culture will dry up after the November elections of 2026. As for red hats, I don’t think you will be able to even give one away after the presidential election of 2028.
I’m guessing the UCP, although at present sanity-free within their iron bubble, will recover… before we need another protest vote.
Because if Yankees can get sane again, maybe we can too.
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Sean Crawford
Calgary
March
2026
