quote:

Canadian proposals to absorb new territories usually have an air of whimsy to them, but it’s a playfulness rooted in a chauvinistic assumption that Canada is a country of such self-evident goodness and purity, virtually anything it could imagine doing in the realm of foreign policy would be morally justifiable.

Though Canadians may enjoy looking down at supposedly jingoistic Americans and their voracious president’s bumbled project to grab Greenland, it’s worth considering whether the biggest thing preventing Canada’s leaders from acting on similar fantasies is just a lack of capacity.