TRUMP WILL NEVER BREAK US!

Mark Carney’s dramatic victory has exploded the idea of Canada quietly succumbing to the US president’s threats, but could the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with America be facing its toughest test yet as battlelines are drawn?

- Peter Sheridan In Los Angeles

CANADA gave a resounding two fingers up to Donald Trump in Monday’s national election. The US president’s months spent demanding that the British Commonwealth nation become America’s 51st state saw Canadians hit back at the ballot box. Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, who positioned himself as best able to fight Trump’s nationgrabbing ambitions, was swept back into power in a stinging rebuke of US aggression.

“America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” said Carney, condemning “American betrayal” as he celebrated victory. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so he can own us. That will never, ever happen.”

Canada’s Conservative Party, which had been leading by 25% in opinion polls earlier this year after 11 years of government by the beleaguered Liberal Party, saw Trump’s chaotic trade war and demands to annex Canada doom them to defeat.

Though Carney appears to have fallen short of winning an outright majority in the Commons, he is set to lead a coalition government that claims a mandate to fight back against Trump’s kleptomania.

The Liberal victory was a damning repudiation of the aggression displayed by Trump, who even as Canadians were voting on Monday bizarrely called on them to put his own name on their ballots. He promised to cut Canadians’ taxes, “quadruple in size” their steel, lumber, aluminium and automotive industries and enjoy “zero tariffs or taxes if Canada becomes the cherished 51st state of the United States of America”. He added on social media: “IT WAS MEANT TO BE!”

Trump’s obsession with annexing Canada has grown daily. “Canada only works as a state,” he recently said. “It would be one of the great states... this would be the most incredible country.”

Bellicose

He proposed that Canada’s prime minister become the new state’s governor and claimed that without massive US subsidies “Canada ceases to exist as a viable country”.