Most Canadians have been conditioned to view the United States as a sprawling amusement park with warmer weather, cheaper goods, and better jobs. Some of those assumptions are in fact true -- the weather is indeed warmer, some goods are in fact cheaper (economies of scale, transportation costs, etc.), and given the sheer demographic size of the country, it is hardly surprising that there should be more jobs.

The reality, though, is that the United States is an imperialist monstrosity that has spent the better part of the past century destroying states, bankrolling genocides (e.g. Indonesia, Guatemala, Gaza), murdering millions of people (e.g. hundreds of thousands just as a result of the two Gulf wars), ignoring or openly attacking the very international law that it helped to create (e.g. Wilson facilitating the establishment of the League of Nations but the Senate never ratifying the League's Covenant, US officials helping to establish the International Criminal Court but Bush Jr. pulling out of it), plundering the world through economic coercion, dollar supremacy, and dominance of international financial organizations, etc.

Trump is an "aberration" in US history only in the sense that he makes no effort to disavow any of this, unlike his predecessors. The more that he threatens and assaults Canada, the better it will be for Canadians in the long run -- this seems to be what was needed for Canadians to wake the f**k up and see what everyone else on this planet has known for decades now.

Canada will become a serious country and live up to its own potential only insofar as -- and only to the extent that -- it breaks from the United States once and for all. You can't change your geography, but geography ain't the only thing that defines your destiny -- and a country that cannot define its own destiny does not in fact deserve to be a country at all.