Oh, Canada! A Vision of a Marriage Between America and Our Neighbor to the North
As the Earth warms up, so, too, should our friendship
Ezra Levant and I had a rather lovely lunch at what’s quickly becoming my favorite D.C. restaurant — Ruta — which serves Ukrainian fare in Eastern Market.
I hadn’t realized that Ezra’s wife was born in Lviv or that Ezra’s family hails from Dnipro so that was a happy surprise. My own family has White Russian roots. My mother proudly flies the Ukrainian flag from my childhood home. And I, of course, came to Washington DC to be of help during that conflict. I’m particularly proud that several companies I backed have been deployed there.
Ezra says Canada will make his friend Pierre Pollievre its next prime minister and I said that America will make Kamala her next president.
Ezra was a bit shocked but I said, “Well, this might surprise some of you but I have known Harris a long time and I like her. We have some of the same mentors in California politics — which as you know is where I have my roots.”
Ezra and my politics have departed considerably in recent years and I certainly cautioned him about all the crazies that I think oftentimes get him in trouble. As soon as I said that Tommy Robinson — an associate of Ezra’s — was charged in the United Kingdom for terroristic associations, raising the obvious question if Ezra might be charged or harmed as an accessory. We mused that he might be banned from traveling to the United Kingdom — a place he knows well.
I encouraged Ezra to tamp down some of the excesses of the people around him and to consider winding down some of his operations.
Still, Ezra is a friend and I will break bread with anyone if it’s in the spirit of peace — if only to warn them.
We marveled at how interesting it is that Pierre has a birth mother living in North Carolina of all places and how Kamala Harris had spent some of her formative high school years in Quebec.
In my studies of the Knights of the Golden Circle I’ve come to believe that there are lots of secret maps in America — maps which more accurately reflect the political and social realities of the world than the conventional map of the United States of America. Admittedly this idea isn’t entirely a novel one and I often encourage people to read books like David Hackett Fischer’s Albion Seed: Four Folkways in British North America (1989) and Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011) which tease out some of these regional differences.
To the extent I run this substack it’s to give you a sense of how this stuff really works — to give you frames so that you might also see the world as I see it. I’m not trying to mesmerize you but to help you see things that I see.
Why do I do that? To train a bunch of people so that I can focus on other things. Our world, dear reader, is a deeply broken place and I want so desperately to fix it.
Anyway my family and I would travel often to Canada, especially the maritime provinces where my mother’s grandmother had grown up and where our family friend Charles Brockunier owned a number of properties.
Brockunier and I were close — he used to have me call him Aunt Mildred — and he would often visit me when I worked in Harvard Square first for my parents’ business and later for Alan Dershowitz. He was always giving me books and new ways of seeing the world.
A polyglot, Brockunier traveled often in Afghanistan where the CIA once listed him as kidnapped. He was released and went right back to it.
I remember him and my father sitting and discussing the life that they had led and how proud they were of the choices that they had made and lamenting all the things they hadn’t quite gotten around to.
He sensed me listening at the stairwell and came out. He encouraged me to be useful—just as he had been. I said I would and he said how important it was for young men to honor their promises to older men so that the older men could die happy.
Charles died a few years ago and I never got to tell him how much I loved him but I know he knew. He is buried with so many of the other Boston Brahmins who made the city of my birth a magical place in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The crown jewel of Brockunier’s properties were in Prince Edward Island or what Charles called Ile Saint-Jean. I loved it. The red sand, the mussels, the clean air, riding bicycles and reading Anne of Green Gables, Hemingway and Steinbeck.
Of course the museums revealed that the place had a rather tragic history as so much of North America does. The British call it merely the “Expulsion of the Acadians” but the French has it correct: Le Grand Dérangement. Learning about this history made me really think ill of the British.
My then-wife and I took a trip to Toronto and Montréal in 2016 and I have been to Canada maybe a dozen or times in my life. I learned in Montréal that I was to become a father and our child’s name was Canada-inspired.
Of course I grew up French and it was a great place to practice French, if what the French Canadians speak can be called that. Years later a company I helped cofound solved the Christine Jessop case.
I started early — I couldn’t have been more than eight when I went the first time — and I still remember having frog legs for the first time, going skiing, and eating French Canadian food.
On one of these trips my father and I walked the Plains of Abraham where there had been a great battle to determine whether the North American continent was to be French or British. The French, we’re told, lost but I have never believed that. Did DeGaulle surrender when the Nazis took Paris? Never! I have never known a Frenchman in any country to accept an unjust defeat. Je me souviens indeed.
I sometimes wonder if Louis XVI's offer of support for America had more to do with trying to protect Quebec than in helping the Americans defeat the British.
How sure are we that the American invasion of Canada failed? Might there have been a secret peace between the wily Ben Franklin and the king?
Which brings me to this map of Nouvelle France down below.
I want you to consider that it’s a map of the future as well as of the past.
A friend of mine recently went to Indonesia where they are moving their capital from Jakarta to Nusantara on Borneo.
If the Indonesians are moving their capital maybe other countries are as well? Maybe there are secret capitals in America!
For what it’s worth I suspect the new secret capital of Franco-America will be in Minneapolis.
Maybe the solution wasn’t so much for America to invade Canada as Franklin and the colonists initially tried only to be stymied at Ville de Quebec but for Canada and America to unite through marriage.
One of the theories I have that I don’t think is totally crazy is that people’s personal lives track the macro economics of the country they are genetically related to.
This is, by the way, a major reason why Trump is going to lose. He’s German and Scottish. Too weak for the moment. The current moment is a softening of the power of German and Russian Jews and a strengthening of the power of Polish and French Jews.
When you see Kamala I want you to consider the possibility that she’s French Canadian — which is to say secretly Jewish — and that her husband Doug is Polish. Polish-Lithuanian Jews are on the rise.
The closer the alliance with America, the better the economic growth.
Prime Minister Trudeau has no vision for Canada other than importation of people but that really won’t do as we’ve seen with the increase in Indian terrorism.
Canada’s future like that of the Louisiana territory isn’t going to be found in a commodities driven economy but in a value added one. You could imagine a world in which the Canadian pensioners were working with American tech companies to fix the food, power up our country, and protect our shared treasure — the Great Lakes.
To the extent that Pollievre understands that his government will do very well. I suspect that he will be secretly pro-Chinese deep state and that the Chinese deep state will pursue the Chinese mafia and the Indian criminals.
I outed myself as secretly a little bit Jewish earlier in the week but really I’m a Canadaphile. I am so grateful for Canada being a place where my ancestors could arrive en route to America.
It’s a place I know well and it’s a place I love dearly.
Je me souviens.
Now I would never fly another nation’s flag — my family has given up too much for that — but I certainly appreciate the friendship and protection of my French-Canadian friends.
Here you’ll find that Eric Garland knows well what’s up. I recommend you go see him in St. Louis, Missouri. You’ll know it by its flag. Can’t miss it.
It’s on Lafayette Square because of course it is.
Maybe we don’t need to invade Canada if it’s already ours. Maybe we don't need Canada to invade us if we’re already them.