GranolaBox

It’s been a while sinced I waxed poetic about our beloved Canada. For those of you new to the ‘Box, the Queen of my Universe and I have an ongoing infatuation/obsession with Canada. After a trip to Niagara Falls last summer we were all but ready to expatriate.

Well, since we’ve dumped a small fortune in our house and finally determined that we can’t ever move from Naples. Besides, the economy and government are on the verge of collapse so we might as well stay put. It’s not like things will be any better economically in Canada because we’ve probably ruined everything for Canada too.

Lately though, we’ve had another idea that might enable us to have our latent Canadian nationalist cake and eat it too. Our latest hope is that Canada will at some point allow us to join them. Not the whole country, just the Northeast. Yes, I suppose I’m using the nasty word secession. It’s such an ugly way to look at it. Annexation is an ugly word when associated with United States history, so I don’t want to use that term either.

I think the best word to use is adoption. We’d like Canada to adopt the Northeast, and there’s compelling reasons why it would be in everyone’s best interest.

First, the Northeastern United States has much more in common with Canada than we do the rest of the country. In the War of 1812 (in which the United States again failed to conquer Canada) the Northeast was very much against the war and even threatened secession at the ill-fated Hartford Convention.

The Hartford Convention was a gathering of a few Northeastern states who’d had just about enough of westward expansion since it took away their power in Congress. To make matters worse, the Western States had declared war on Great Britain, the Northeast’s biggest trading partner who they, by the way, had no beef with whatsoever. The Northeast was quite content to just let Canada be Canada. So Northeastern politicians wrote down all of our complaints, with our veiled threat of secession and brought them to Washington DC.

The only problem was that news had just reached the capitol that Americans had been victorious at New Orleans, a battle that ultimately didn’t matter because we’d already stopped the senseless war. Thus whipped into a nationalist frenzy, the rest of the country laughed the delegates from Hartford and their resolution right out the doors of the makeshift capitol building.

From that point on, the Northeast pretty much grew up with Canada with a few notable exceptions. Canadians at some point, learned to care about each other and reflected that in their national policies. The rest of Canada even went bilingual as a sign of good will to the Quebecois. Do you see white Americans ever letting Spanish become an official language? And what about their national health care system, which, despite being much maligned by American propaganda does a way better job of taking care of a greater number of Canadians. Yes, Canadians are nice to each other.

I think these are values we Yankees are down with for the most part.

This doesn’t need to be a difficult split from the rest of the United States. When the economy and government collapse I can’t imagine that anyone in the rest of the country would mind, or even noticed if the Northeast just slowly wandered over to Canada. We could just move the border when nobody’s looking; another technique Americans have proven good at historically.

Our beloved Naples would surely prosper under Canadian rule. We’d eventually pick up on the gardening skills that seem to be a genetically inherited characteristic of Canadians. DOUG and Lappe would be able to get medical care and we’d all be much nicer to each other in general.

And QoMU and I would have the best of both worlds. If Granola Ideas Central can’t go to Canada, we’ll invited Canada to Granola Central.

Filed under: EWAKI, General Observations, Politics on May 23rd, 2008