By Bill Lider / Herald Forum
While Donald Trump opines on the ludicrous idea that Canada should become the 51st state, what about Washington state becoming the 11th province of Canada?
While Trump is serious in his illegal fever dreams of annexing Canada, Greenland, Gaza, and any other county he can bully, I am being purely facetious. But consider this:
The Oregon Treaty of 1846 with Great Britian gave the United States sovereignty over the Washington territory. Canada, the successor to this treaty, has the same legal right to reclaim Washington state as its own, as we do to reclaim the Panama Canal by reneging on our 1977 treaty with Panama.
Washington shares a 300-mile contiguous border with Canada making transit to and from our state a matter of simply crossing an imaginary line. You wouldn’t even need a passport to drive to Point Roberts or the north end of Ross Lake.
Canada has a social health care system that is the envy of the developed world. This is why many seniors in the United States flock to Canada to purchase prescription medicines to avoid price gouging by Big Pharma.
Canada does not resort to unnecessary tariffs or threats of trade wars with its allies, simply because their dear leader feels slighted, or has had his ego bruised by facts. Lame excuses of massive amounts of fentanyl being smuggled in from Canada are as fake as Trump’s orange glow.
The Columbia River originates in Canada, and we flooded a portion of British Columbia with the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. If Washington state became part of Canada, they could better manage the entire Columbia watershed to restore salmon runs.
Canada’s parliamentary form of government allows it to hold elections on short notice if the public loses confidence in its leader, or if their leader turns out to be a delusional, narcissistic, paranoid, pathological liar with tiny hands.
About a third of the nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal are located at Bangor and Indian Island. We could give up these weapons of mass destruction, making our state a far less inviting target during a war.
On whole, Canadians are polite, intelligent, tolerant of diversity and different ethnic groups, and certainly not Trump’s type of people; as are Washingtonians. It is a sure bet that a majority of Canadians would never vote to elect a convicted felon and sexual molester as their prime minister.
So who wants to be a Canadian, eh?
Bill Lider, a professional engineer, lives in Lynnwood.
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