[Editor’s note: This satirical opinion piece was originally published in the Halifax Examiner. Editor Tim Bousquet was prompted by the Washington Post editorial board’s apology for President Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, ‘to the point that I could lift entire paragraphs and just change a few words.’]
August 5, 2026
Washington Post
The Editorial Board
Monday night’s U.S. raid to arrest Canadian leader Mark Carney is the culmination of President Donald Trump’s ambitious policy to bring peace, prosperity and freedom to North America.
From a purely legal perspective, the justification for capturing Carney is as sound as January’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The objective of both operations was to arrest, rather than kill, people suspected of a crime, who are now receiving due process in the U.S. court system.
The Trump administration has carefully framed the Ottawa raid as a domestic U.S. law enforcement operation rather than a military attack, unveiling a new criminal indictment of Carney after he was seized. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff emphasized that federal agents were on the ground in Ottawa as well as soldiers, and he referred to Carney and his wife as “the indicted persons.” Vice-President JD Vance posted, “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a mansion in Ottawa.” During a Tuesday arraignment in a federal court in New York, Carney and his wife pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors have indicted many foreign leaders for U.S. criminal offences, including Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989 and Maduro in January. There is nothing novel about the arrest of Carney.
The case against Carney is strong. As Mr. Trump declared last year, the United States is experiencing a “public health crisis caused by fentanyl and illicit drugs flowing across the northern border into the United States” and Canada had failed to do anything about it. In fact, tens of thousands of Americans die each year from fentanyl-related overdoses, and Mr. Trump has said the amount of fentanyl seized at the northern border was enough to kill 9.5 million Americans.
Despite this, Carney’s government has downplayed the crisis, and his federal police force has denied there is a crisis at all. “There is limited to no evidence or data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. or Canada to support the claim that Canadian-produced fentanyl is an increasing threat to the U.S.,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokeswoman Marie-Eve Breton defiantly.
Carney’s government has proved itself either incapable or unwilling to address this crisis. Mr. Trump first attempted to force Canada to respond responsibly by imposing high tariffs on the nation, but the Carney government proved intransigent. So Carney’s arrest was needed for the protection of innocent Americans.
But as the court process plays out for Carney, let’s not lose sight of the broader geopolitical benefits of bringing Canada into the American governance system.
The United States was born of a war against European imperialism, yet despite victory in the War for Independence, European empires maintained a hold over most of North America. But with Mr. Trump’s bold capture of Nuuk in May, Greenland has been freed from Danish imperialism. Now, with the arrest of Carney, the continent can be freed of the last vestiges of British imperialism.
There is a long history of the Canadian Supreme Court, a holdover from the medieval monarchial courts of England, interfering with elections and local governments, most recently with its decision to void the results of the independence referendum in Alberta. The court ruled that the referendum was invalid because of the advertising purchased by oil companies, a clear attack on the rights to free speech that free people everywhere hold dear.
However, the referendum wasn’t really about creating an independent nation of Alberta; rather, it underscored the failure of the Canadian government, the moribund child of empire, to hold together as a cohesive polity that could serve the everyday needs of people across the vast and varied northern stretches of the continent. Despite its enormous mineral and oil wealth, Canada has failed to perform economically, and its people are the poorer for it.
And here is the opportunity. As with the once-independent countries of Texas and California before it, Canada rightly should become a state under the flag of the United States. With the help of Washington, a post-Carney Canada could finally see free and fair elections and the establishment of a secure and prosperous economy integrated with the rest of North America.
Let freedom ring. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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