Each day that goes by, the weirder the world feels.
On March 14, 2025, I read an article from the U.S. on Donald Trump and a presentation he gave to the Department of Justice.
In the article, Trump is quoted as saying that mainstream media outlets like CNN and MSNBC should be illegal because they write 97.97 per cent bad about him, and they should be considered a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
Canada dealt with its own political upheaval on the same day; Justin Trudeau officially resigned as Canadian Prime Minister and Mark Carney was sworn in as his replacement.
The scary part is, while it is most definitively weird times in North American politics, it's far from unprecedented.
Studying history shows us how familiar these times really are.
I'm currently concluding my latest university course, working towards my Bachelor of Professional Arts in Communications, and the course I am wrapping up is Pre-Confederation Canadian History.
The course follows North American history from the original French exploration and settlement of North America in the 1600s and 1700s, right up through to confederation in 1867.
My biggest takeaway?
It has been around 300-plus years since Europeans first stepped foot on North American soil, and in the grand scheme of things, not much has changed.
The court system, which was dysfunctional back when the Custom of Paris was the law of the land, hasn't evolved much since then.
There are still reports every day of head-scratching cases that come out of the Canadian legal system, and it remains a challenge to access for those without resources – though at one point during the 1700s, the colony even outlawed lawyers to make the system more accessible... but I digress.
While trade with the U.S. has become more enmeshed over the last several decades, the relationship between the two nations has always been on-again, off-again.
Pre-confederation, after the English had taken over New France, the British and Americans went to war in 1812. Yet several decades later, the colony of Canada had a full reciprocal trade agreement with the U.S. into the 1840s. It was a trade agreement that the U.S. ultimately tore up before levying significant tariffs on the colony again.
Sound familiar?
Writer and philosopher George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I believe I can safely say that many in the current generation don't remember the past. I'm not just talking ancient history, but more recent history as well.
I have seen way too many parallels between the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s and the rise of Trump and the Republicans over the last several weeks.
With Trump's latest comments about journalism that it should be illegal due to the negative coverage of him, one journalist has even commented that Trump has gone "full fascist." Decrying the media which criticized him is a play right out of Hitler's playbook.
Adding that to the rest of the moves, Trump has been making over the last several weeks since his inauguration, such as ignoring court orders and picking fights with allies, things can only be described as chaotic.
However, as chaotic as things are, there is hope.
The world survived four years of chaos during Trump's first term, and it will survive another four years of him in power, though I think everybody will be hanging on for the ride as he changes his mind seemingly at a whim, with the on-again, off-again threat of tariffs being just one example of this.
Eventually, this is going to end up just another chapter in the long history of our two storied nations, though I do fear that the damage Trump inflicts over the next four years will take decades for the U.S. to recover from.
The chaos and unpredictability coming out of the U.S. right now makes me appreciate the relative calm of politics in Canada.
-Kevin Sabo is the editor of the Stettler Independent and a journalist for Black Press Media.
