RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2026. Here on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario (where the Indigenous Wendat “name Lacus Ontario was first recorded in 1660 by Francis Creuxius”), not far from a 17th century Seneca village, it is impossible to resist the thought that the USA USA in 2026 is in the presidential hands of an almost certifiable maniac, plain and simple.

And yet happily enough, in our ongoing In Search of Canadian Liberalism we the Canadian people have now fortunately landed on Prime Minister Mark Carney — former Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, and yet another Canadian “first among equals” with a relevant PhD. (Even if almost a quarter of us still do not believe in the good fortune.)

These also plain and simple preceding 120 words at least summarize my own feelings about and even analysis of the current moment in the politics of the Canada-US trade war, started by the second Trump administration for its own twisted reasons.

And these reasons have nothing at all obvious to do with the long-standing friendships and even (as I can personally testify) family ties between The United States and Canada (also the title of a Canadian political science textbook, first published in 2019 during the first Trump administration).

Strangely enough as well, I do continue to think that, whatever the ultimate world-history judgments about winners and losers, the Canadian future will be in one way or another enhanced by the Carney government in Ottawa’s current standing-up to the clear madness south of the border — clearly enough supported by a clear and even strong majority of the Canadian people.

At a time when no less a political pundit than Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, is reprinting poems by W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden as guides to the present, I can only return to one of my favourite lines from T.S. Eliot (from his “Gerontion” first published in 1920) : “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now/History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,/Guides us by vanities.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his absurd renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America — a reprise of his also unsuccessful effort to have the world beyond his immediate playpen call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America — does not deserve any further attention, in Canada or anywhere else.

Just what a Canada no longer quite so dependent on the United States ever again might look like, however, is an engaging and interesting thing for we Canadians to start thinking about, as we never quite have before, thanks to Donald Trump. That’s a real future worth looking forward to.
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(And on a very final note see this recent article on the blogTO site : “There’s a Trump Lake in Ontario and people want to rename it after Obama.”)