Why Are They the Way They Are?

We like Canada.

Seriously. We do.

I’ve been there. I like Canadians. I even like poutine. And Tim Hortons has rescued me on more than one occasion.

So explain something to me.

Why are they the way they are?

Start with trade, because apparently everything starts with trade now.

For years, Canada has enjoyed a pretty good arrangement with the United States. They sell us oil. They sell us lumber. They protect their dairy industry behind tariffs and quotas that would make an American farmer’s head spin. Then, when Washington finally decides maybe this relationship could use a little recalibration, Ottawa discovers the word “fairness.”

Funny how that works.

Canada responded to the latest American tariffs by matching them dollar for dollar — very tough, very defiant — and then started making exceptions when the consequences got uncomfortable at home.

Including seafood.

Apparently, the revolution will not interfere with the salmon.

That’s politics. I get it. Governments protect their industries. Prime ministers have voters, too. But spare me the wounded-neighbor routine when the United States finally decides to protect its own interests.

Then there’s the lake.

President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” on the American side of the border.

And Canada lost its mind.

Canadian officials called it “real foolishness.”

Maybe it is.

It’s also funny.

More importantly, it changes almost nothing. International bodies don’t suddenly have to call it Lake America. Canadian maps aren’t being confiscated at the border. Nobody from the United States Coast Guard is paddling across the lake with a Sharpie.

It’s a gesture.

And Ottawa seems considerably more offended by the gesture than by the trade policies that helped provoke it.

Want “Lake Ontario” back on American government documents?

Here’s an idea.

Come back to the table.

Negotiate.

That’s what neighbors do.

Which brings me to the part of this week’s Canadian news that isn’t funny.

The CBC.

Canada’s taxpayer-funded national broadcaster reportedly issued internal guidance ahead of the 25th anniversary of September 11, instructing journalists not to describe what happened that morning as “terrorist attacks.”

Instead, we’re supposed to talk about “hijackings” that “led to passenger jet crashes.”

Passenger jet crashes.

I had to read that twice.

Nearly 3,000 people were murdered on September 11, 2001. Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners. They deliberately flew two of them into the World Trade Center. Another was deliberately flown into the Pentagon. Passengers aboard Flight 93 fought back before that aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania.

That wasn’t a collection of “passenger jet crashes.”

It was terrorism.

If that doesn’t clear the bar for the word, the bar doesn’t exist.

And apparently, CBC’s concern is that “terrorist” is too loaded, too politically fraught, too compromising to the network’s impartiality.

Impartiality toward whom?

Al-Qaeda?

There are moments when our obsession with sanitizing language becomes so absurd that the sanitizing itself becomes dishonest.

September 11 is one of them.

Nobody needs a euphemism for what happened that morning. We don’t honor the dead by sanding the edges off the evil that killed them.

And this is where Canada loses me.

We’re not talking about some hostile country halfway around the world. Canadians are our neighbors. They’re our allies. They’re our friends.

Which makes all of this stranger.

You want to fight with us about tariffs? Fine. Let’s fight about tariffs.

You want to be mad about “Lake America?” Be mad. I suspect President Trump will survive the criticism.

But don’t tell me September 11 was a collection of passenger jet crashes.

That’s where the joke stops being funny.

Twenty-five years is long enough for children born after September 11 to become adults, get married, and start raising children of their own. It’s long enough for memory to soften. Long enough for people who didn’t experience that morning to know it primarily through photographs and documentaries.

Which is precisely why words matter now.

Those planes didn’t crash because of mechanical failures.

The towers didn’t fall because of an accident.

The Pentagon wasn’t struck because somebody made a navigational error.

Terrorists attacked America.

Say it.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about all three of these stories.

Not Canada itself.

I like Canada.

It’s the weird insistence that reality needs to be repackaged before anybody is allowed to talk about it.

A tariff becomes unfair only when America imposes it.

A symbolic name change becomes an international outrage.

And terrorism becomes a “passenger jet crash” because apparently the accurate word might offend somebody.

No.

Sometimes friends need to tell friends when they’re being ridiculous.

So Canada, from your neighbor to the south, with genuine affection:

Keep the hockey.

Keep the poutine.

Keep Tim Hortons.

We’ll even talk about the lake.

But September 11?

Leave that one alone.

We know what happened.

And we’re going to call it what it was.

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