Canadians fume over Donald Trump’s ‘humiliating’ annexation taunt
The US president-elect’s jibes spark debates on national identity, patriotism and Ottawa’s relationship with its neighbour
The political circumstances that surrounded the publication of Ultimatum, once a bestselling novel that imagined an American effort to annex Canada, may ring familiar to anyone following recent headlines.
A US leader announces tariffs on Canadian imports, signalling a more confrontational relationship, and a prime minister named Trudeau scrambles to respond.
But the American, in this case, was former president Richard Nixon and the Canadian leader was Pierre Elliott Trudeau – father of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Nixon and the elder Trudeau are long dead, but the author of Ultimatum, published in 1973, is D-Day veteran Richard Rohmer, the honorary lieutenant general of the Canadian armed forces, who recently turned 101.
Still an avid news consumer and writer, Rohmer said that remarks by president-elect Donald Trump implying that Canada could be absorbed by the United States should not be laughed off.
“This man has to be taken seriously,” he said. “He is a man with great imagination who has ideas about what he can do and what he cannot do, and as far as Canada is concerned.”