Trump's talk about Canada parrots Putin's claims on Ukraine

It took a while for Canadian politicians to figure out that Donald Trump wasn't joking with his talk about annexing Canada.

After Trump raised the idea at a dinner in Mar-A-Lago attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Nov. 29, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic Leblanc said the "joke" was actually a positive.

"The president was teasing us. It was, of course, in no way a serious comment," LeBlanc said.

"The fact that there's a warm, cordial relationship between the two leaders and the president is able to joke like that, we think, is a positive thing."

No one is calling it positive now.

Perhaps Canadian politicians can be forgiven their slowness of uptake, given that Trump's comments are entirely unprecedented in modern U.S.-Canadian relations.

But there is one strong parallel for his remarks. While Trump's words may never move past the talking stage, they resemble the claims, pretexts and justifications used by Russia's Vladimir Putin before and during his invasion of Ukraine.

"Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State," Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Jan. 6.

"The United States can no longer suffer the massive Trade Deficits and Subsidies that Canada needs to stay afloat. Justin Trudeau knew this, and resigned. If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them. Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!"

That post contained themes that would later become staples of Trump and his supporters' claims about Canada.

First is the claim that lots of Canadians want to become Americans. Some in Trump's Make America Great Again movement have explained the absence of a visible groundswell of support for annexation in Canada as a result of a harsh regime of censorship, as decried by Elon Musk and this week by Joe Rogan.

Canadians' supposed secret desire to be annexed might sound familiar to Russians who have heard their leader make similar claims about Ukrainians, says Maria Popova, an expert on Russian politics at McGill University.

"The whole argument is based on the claim that fundamentally and deep down, all Ukrainians want this," she said. "They want this unification with Russia."

In a long op-ed he wrote in July 2021, Putin laid out his claim that the Ukrainian people, in their hearts, aspired to be part of Mother Russia, but their voices were censored.