A flurry of satirical articles and angry comebacks followed U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s recent crack about making Canada the 51st state.

Last week, Fox News reported, citing anonymous sources, that Trump joked to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that if a threatened 25 per cent tariff would kill Canada’s economy, then maybe Canada should become the 51st state.

The bilateral relationship between Canada and the United States is rocky, and that is something I’m familiar with. I’m a citizen of both countries and the author of a 2014 book that predicted the two countries would merge by the end of the century.

Yet as I pointed out a decade ago in my book, no self-respecting Republican like Trump would ever support taking over Canada because it would mean that the GOP would never again take the presidency, as most Canadians fall on the left of the American political spectrum.

As a small-C Canadian conservative myself, I’m to the left of the Democrats. So there’s that.

But the two countries have increasingly integrated economically, as I predicted. Politically speaking, a drift toward an outright union is still unlikely in the near future, but Trudeau has made such a scenario more plausible.

In 2015, he described Canada as the world’s first “post-national state” in an interview with New York Times Magazine. He actually stated that, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” and has governed accordingly.

It was an inaccurate, offensive and belittling description, rooted in his attitude that there’s Quebec and then there’s the rest of Canada, which is a bunch of scattered regions without a common identity or shared values.

Unfortunately, Trudeau has pandered to Quebec, continued unjust equalization payments to subsidize the province and played one region against another, financially and politically, to stay in power.

His behaviour has done the opposite of uniting Canadians. It has exacerbated differences and ignored the organizing and uniting principles of the country. The fact is that Canada does have a “core identity”: Canadians are polite, democratic, tolerant and economically successful, and they believe in the rule of law, hard work and public health care.

But Trudeau and his government have damaged the country’s economic base through restrictions on resource development, overspending and overtaxation.

Before he came into power, Canada had nothing to be ashamed about when it came to environmental protection, but his biases and extremism have driven out investment and jobs without justification. Canada has missed the boat in terms of providing liquefied natural gas to the world in order to replace high-emissions coal, as the United States has done.

Trudeau has also damaged the country by allowing in a flood of migrants. Many provinces now suffer from house prices and rents that are unaffordable, increased crime rates, along with overburdened education and health-care systems.

Liberal economic mismanagement has caused great harm the country. Nationally, the unemployment rate is now at 6.8 per cent — the highest rate since January 2017, if the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 are ignored, according to Statistics Canada.

Most significantly, Trudeau has neglected our borders and national security. His government, in answer to Trump’s complaints and a threatened tariff, promised to deploy more manpower and equipment to the border, which is a clear admission of prior neglect.

Since 2015, Canada’s military has been neglected, the Arctic has gone undefended and Trudeau’s immigration department has allowed people into the country without proper screening.

Trudeau’s policies — not Trump’s — have undermined Canadian sovereignty. Canada has become weaker and more reliant than ever on the United States for economic and military assistance. Its international stature has been reduced and its NATO commitments  have been ignored.

Worst of all, Trudeau has failed to unite or celebrate Canadians and their culture and values, because he personally deemed Canada a “post-national state,” whatever that is. He was wrong in 2015 and he’s wrong now.

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