Under the first PM Trudeau, who was deeply tormented by those actions, further allowances were made to help ensure French culture could exist unmolested in Canada. All things considered, it really is quite a remarkable relationship.

Quebec separatism may never be an impossibility in Canada, but I hope I never see that day.

EDIT: Pardon the awkward last sentence, you know what I mean.

Damn, those Canadians are just too damn civilized for the likes of us. Even the French speakers.

In the days of relatively expensive muzzle loading firearms and life on the farm and frontier, gun ownership by individuals was not seen as a threat to public order. Guns only became dangerous when owned by large groups of people under unified command–armies, armed insurrections or warlike native tribes.

Although ownership of firearms was not specifically forbidden by Federal Law, gun ownership by private individuals was never a constitutional right until it was determined as such by the Supreme Court in 2008.

That why we have a Supreme Court, so the Constitution can be interpreted in each new age. In that sense, it is a Second Amendment Right now, today, legally, whether we like it or not. It may not be a good idea, but its the law. Even so, SCOTUS left plenty of leeway to the States to regulate trade and use of firearms.

But it ain’t got shit to do with the founding fucking fathers.

I think it’s also worth noting that Canadians also decided against a revolutionary war; they just went about their business until the British got bored with them.

And of course they neglected to enshrine the ownership of weapons in their constitution. Silly Canucks.

Hemingway once said he loved Canada because no one there was either too rich or too poor.

Nuclear weapons make it unlikely that the major nations of the world will ever be invaded by a neighboring superpower.

You know that Canada doesn’t possess nuclear weapons, right? Based on a quick wikidive, it looks like there’s never been an anti-WMD treaty Canada hasn’t been eager to sign, going back to the 1930 Geneva Protocols. Good on them.

There’s more than one kind of power in the world, and the US used to posses both hard and soft power. We once wielded a carrot alongside the stick. And Canada’s a fine example of a country that’s gone far based mostly on being the world’s Mr. Nice Guy. The carrot works pretty well alone.

But repudiating the carrot as fit only for rabbits, and relying solely on the testosterone squirt of the big stick is the key indicator that a society has begun an irrevocable decline. We’ve thoughtlessly discarded the leadership you can only gain through soft power.

Because of Trump, the 21st century will belong to China and Russia. And everybody’s good friend Canada.

Nuclear weapons make it unlikely that the major nations of the world will ever be invaded by a neighboring superpower. No matter how much you’re outgunned and outnumbered, a nuclear shotgun under the bed will deter even the most reckless intruder. As for pushing your weight around the world arena, 70 years into the nuclear age and no one has yet been able to use one offensively to any effect, not us, not the Russians, not the Chinese. Not the Brits or Frogs, either. Its only little countries with the Bomb that are a cause for worry, and they will only be tempted to use it offensively against other little countries.

But big, powerful, well-armed industrial powers will still be able to dominate the world through trade and intimidation: economic imperialism. But that’s the way it has always been. We’ve been doing it for almost a century now. So what else is new? Maybe its someone elses turn.

Maybe its China’s turn, now. She has the population and the economic growth, maybe its Russia, it has the strategic location and the resources. Maybe we’ll start beating up on Latin America again. We were always pretty good at that.

This kind of thinking is called Geopolitics. It was all the rage in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. Look up Mackinder and Mahan. They got it all wrong, too.

So maybe it is a good thing that Trump is popping the bubble, and maybe we’ll eventually feel relief at not having the burden of the world on our shoulders any more…and the even heavier burden of imagining ourselves the world’s saviors. It might do us a lot of good to shed that egotistical notion.

But hank’s right too, that we’re going to miss the perks that come with being The Leader of the Free World, and we might not like our new overlord(s) so much.

Once upon a time I’d have said we should look to Britain to see how to adjust to losing an empire and a permanent place where the sun never sets. For a while it looked like they’d made the adjustment with good grace, but now, with Brexit and a rampaging right wing, I don’t know, Britain’s prospects of survival don’t look so certain now either. But I’d emigrate to an independent Scotland in a heartbeat, so maybe at the end of the day this whole disintegration of the anglophone world might be a blessing in disguise.

A really cunning disguise.

You can be sure it ain’t going to be some Progressive Social Democrats from Scandinavia.

When I was growing up in Canada, I heard quite a bit of grumbling about the excessive influence of the neighbors to the south. A smaller American footprint will sit just fine with a whole lot of people.