Congratulations to Donald Trump. It is almost solely thanks to his exertions that Mark Carney, the incarnation of Davos man, is now victorious in Canada’s general election. The Euro fanatic now wins on a ‘sovereignty’ ticket. If Trump had not intervened to lay claim to Canada, almost as if America were Russia and Canada were Ukraine, it would have gone Conservative. The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the ‘honour to be a friend’, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse. P.S. Nearly 3 per cent of Canadians are of Ukrainian heritage. I bet that they, accidentally encouraged by Trump, helped Carney over the line.
The Canadian situation is making me pay more attention to the war of 1812. It was an American attempt to drive the British out of Canada. The American national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, was written on 16 September 1814 to celebrate the heroic defence of Fort McHenry against British attack. In a verse not usually sung, the author, Francis Scott Key, asks: ‘And where is that band who so vauntingly swore/ That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion/ A home and a Country should leave us no more?/ Their blood has washed out their foul footstep’s pollution.’ The refrain, famously, celebrates ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’.
America was also, however, the home of the slave, as Key, perhaps literally to his cost, knew, being himself a slave-owner.
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