RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2026. Robert Reich, Democratic President Clinton’s secretary of labor, 1993–1997 and retired UC Berkeley professor, is far from the only eminent US commentator who has been raising deeply serious questions about President Trump’s mental health in the early spring of 2026.

Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW, as just one example, has called Trump’s recent social media pronouncements (which among other things used the word “fuckin” for the first time in any US presidential public utterance) “ranting like an unhinged madman.” A “growing list of lawmakers, all Democrats” are “calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked against President Donald Trump.” (The amendment provides that a majority of Congress may remove a “President … unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”)

Meanwhile, in President Trump’s undeclared US war on Iran, CBC News is reporting : “Status of U.S., Iran ceasefire in limbo as Strait of Hormuz remains unopened… Dozens reported killed in airstrikes on Lebanon, as Israel, U.S. say country is not included in ceasefire plan.” Who knows just what is most likely to happen over the alleged next two weeks of ceasefire in Iran ????

Veteran progressive Canadian public figure Bob Rae has wisely urged : “We’ve got to stop normalizing the Trump administration. It’s not a normal administration. It’s corrupt.” And conservative US anti-Trumper Bill Kristol has declared : “The misconduct of Trump, in terms of his corruption and his associates, is unparalleled in our history. His abuses of power leave Nixon in the dust.” Yet unlike in Richard Nixon’s 1970s Watergate scandal Republican politicians in the USA today still feel obliged to support their conservative president — who even if he has “really, seriously, frighteningly lost his mind” does at least remain ostensibly conservative.

Meanwhile again, whatever the future may or may not bring in the USA, the geographically second largest country in the world in Canada next door has, for those of all ideologies, smaller but more attractive current prospects.

To start with, according to recent conservative media reports in Canada, President Trump himself has been backing off his earlier view of Canada as a potential “51st state of the USA” — especially since he’s learned that British monarch Charles III is also still (officially at least) the King of Canada. As a confirmed Canadian republican (much different from a Republican in the USA) I have always been skeptical of this kind of argument from the minority of Canadians who still support the mere symbolism of the British monarchy in Canada. And my scepticism endures.

Ultimately who cares what Donald Trump thinks of Canada?? PM Carney has shown that does not matter. Canadians can have their own bold future without Trump’s America.

Moreover, the current NASA space mission to the moon (which includes one Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen) underlines how Trump’s America is not the only America. As Canadian pundit Andrew Coyne has wisely observed : “NASA is the best of America, what America used to be: professional, science-based, dedicated to excellence, idealistic, and dazzlingly ambitious. May America one day recover its NASA soul.”

In Canada itself PM Carney’s government has moved one step closer to a workable majority in parliament with : “Former Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu crosses floor to Liberals … Ontario MP’s defection brings Liberals up to 171 seats.” If the Liberals win at least two of the three by-elections this coming Monday, April 13 (the two “safe” Liberal seats in Toronto, say, if not quite the one in the Montreal suburb of Terrebonne), they will have 173 seats in a federal House in which 172 is a bare majority.

At least equally striking, I think, Marilyn Gladu, MP for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong in Southwestern Ontario’s “Chemical Valley” since 2015, has traditionally been a notably conservative member of the Conservative Party of Canada. Her ultimate interest in moving to the “big tent party” of the Carney Liberals, in a challenging time for the country, suggests a reassuring degree of bipartisan (or even in Canada multipartisan) political unity, or at least broad agreement, in the true north strong and free.

And that kind of unity is what is exactly and so sadly (and even so alarmingly and tragically) lacking in the USA today. The progressive (if also in some ways conservative) North America that came out of the mass public sacrifices of the Second World War is arguably enough still breathing in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada.

And (especially if you are Canadian) that is at least something to be greeted with good cheer, in what increasingly do seem like very troubled times in the global village of 2026.