RIP Canada's special relationship with Britain

Starmer didn't disavow Trump's 51st state plan; he invited him to London to meet the King

When then British prime minister David Cameron told Queen Elizabeth about Mark Carney’s appointment as Governor of the Bank of England, she is said to have responded emphatically: “Oh, jolly good. The Canadians are very reliable.”

That reputation was hard won, as Her Majesty well knew.

Canada has been a steadfast ally to Britain when the mother country most needed friends: during the Boer War, World War One and, most crucially, World War Two.

Ottawa declared war on Germany seven days after the U.K. and France in September 1939 (not, you will note, December 1941). The country paid the price in blood and treasure - 45,000 Canadians died and 55,000 were wounded.

Canada provided essential goods and services in the form of food, ammunition and raw materials. It also made two financial grants worth $3 billion, or $55 billion in today’s money.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

That special relationship counted for little when the current prime minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Washington to pay tribute and kowtow before America’s new imperial president.

At a joint press conference, Starmer was asked about Donald Trump’s threats to use economic force to annex Canada and turn it into the 51st state.

The prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland regressed half a century and looked like a scared little boy denying all knowledge of a friend in the face of a bully.

“You mentioned Canada. I think you’re trying to find a divide between us that doesn’t exist. We’re (Britain and the U.S.) are the closest of nations,” he said.

He was given the chance to correct the impression that Britain is fine with its former dominion being absorbed by Trump when he was interviewed by Fox News.

He was asked what King Charles, who is also Canada’s head of state, thought about Trump’s ambitions.

There were any number of ways to answer that question that did not involve putting words into the sovereign’s mouth - but Starmer didn’t attempt any of them.

Instead, he gushed that Trump had agreed to accept an invitation from the King to visit Britain for a second state visit. “That’s unprecedented, it’s history in the making,” he said, before managing to weasel out of the initial question.

In short, he was the embodiment of Robert Burns’ “wee, sleekit, cowerin’, timorous beastie” - an unctuous, deceitful sell-out.

Canadian-British relations have not always gone smoothly. In 1903, Canadians felt betrayed by the Alaska boundary dispute negotiated between the U.S. and Britain that left the country without an outlet from the Yukon gold-fields to the sea.

In 1956, London felt let down when Canada refused to support the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt. Canada later engineered a face-saving exit for the British when its delegation at the United Nations, led by Lester B. Pearson, proposed a peacekeeping force to separate the combatants - a solution that won Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize.

We have grown up and apart since, as Canada moved economically closer to the U.S. and developed a separate legal nationality.

My friend Sean Speer wrote last night that allusions to a special relationship or the world wars are “naive and anachronistic”.

I disagree.

The two countries aren’t just friends; they are linked by the strong, interwoven bonds of family.

Opinion polls in both countries suggest we regard each other more positively than any other nation. The 2021 census showed that 30 percent of the population - 11.1 million Canadians - claim British ancestry. Nearly half a million Canadian residents were born in Britain.

I grew up in Scotland and virtually every person I knew had relatives in Canada.

The actions of recent days have put that intimacy in jeopardy.

The condemnation lies largely with the gutlessness of one politician interpreting Lord Palmerston’s dictum that Britain has no eternal allies: “(Only) our interests are eternal and perpetual”.

As an aside, I cannot fathom how it will prove to be in the long-term interests of a U.K. that has left the European Union to also abandon Canada.

You can be sure it will not be forgotten in Ottawa.

But there is plenty of blame to go round.

The King and his advisers have proven to be willing accomplices in the betrayal of Canada.

He has invited Trump to London but has no plans to visit Canada. He has made no comment about the president’s ambition to annex a Commonwealth country, beyond an anodyne statement on Flag Day earlier this month about the Maple Leaf being a symbol of a “proud, resilient, compassionate country”. Adding the word “independent” was apparently too provocative.

Constitutional scholars will harrumph that the King cannot intervene in foreign policy. But he has just done that by inviting Trump to Buckingham Palace to help make Starmer’s life easier.

The King has already visited France and Germany, and is heading to Italy in April. Yet a show of support, in the form of an expedited trip to the former dominion in its darkest hour, is apparently deemed too contentious.

I honestly believe that the late Queen would be ashamed at the recent turn of events and would have made clear where her sympathies lay.

But then, she was reliable.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash