President Donald Trump lamenting Canadian shoe smuggling during a recent speech to a small-business group sounds like the plot of the farcical 1995 movie called “Canadian Bacon.” Its premise wasn’t much stranger than Trump’s complaint that Canadians cross the border, shop for shoes, then “they wear them” and “scuff ’em up” as they head back home to Saskatoon or Halifax. It’s a common way to avoid duties on foreign purchases.
In the movie, a U.S. president was battling low popularity. America had run out of genuine enemies, so the president ginned up a phony conflict with our neighbors to the north. One of the movie’s rare funny scenes was when actor John Candy insulted Canadian beer during a hockey game, thus starting a riot that gave the president the cold-war idea.
It would all be so politically incorrect, except the whole joke was based on an obvious point: Canada is one of the most peaceful nations in history. Even Trump has to realize that if the biggest problem we have with another country is that its citizens come and—gasp!—spend money at U.S. shopping malls, then it’s not a particularly big problem, eh?
Sure, it’s hard to grasp the president’s rude remarks toward Canada as he praises a guy who runs the world’s largest concentration camp (North Korea’s Kim Jong Un). But few Americans get too upset because we know there won’t be any serious repercussions at the northern border. But, of course, most of the president’s ire has been directed at the other border, and problems in our less-developed and more troubled (but still friendly) southern neighbor continue to spill over, writes Steven Greenhut.
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