There’s a terrifying reason to avoid Trump’s America
President Donald Trump holds an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on April 9, 2025, in Washington.
By Bruce ArthurColumnist
Bruce Arthur is a columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur.
Geographically, the United States is a miracle. Warm weather in the winters, natural beauty of almost every kind, a constellation of iconic cities and vacation destinations and highways you could drive all day. Vacation home? My father-in-law had a place in Tampa. Favourite city? Say, New Orleans. A favourite drive? I once cruised the 120 north out of Cody, Wyoming at sunrise, and it felt like a road lost in time. And for Canada, America is so close.
That’s now a problem. Travel from Canada the United States is not just falling: it is plummeting. According to the flight information site OAG, year-over-year bookings of flights from Canada to the United States are vanishing: down over 70 per cent in each of the months between April and September. Airlines are changing routes. Canadians are changing their habits. And not just Canadians: all foreign travel is falling in real time.
And that’s good, but not just because the United States has declared economic war on Canada, led by a deranged President who wants Canada to become an American state. Yes, Canadians should vote with our feet, and our wallets. Buy local, buy Canadian, boo the U.S. anthem at sporting events, and think hard about which party and leader can best reimagine, advocate for, and create a Canada that remains sovereign and free.
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But it’s so much worse than tariffs. Avoiding the United States is not just a matter of patriotic principle; it’s a matter of simple safety. Canadians were willing to risk American gun culture, and more. But this American government does not recognize fundamental rights, and you are no longer protected by the law if you set foot in that country. Canada should join other nations in issuing stern travel advisories. We have not, yet.
We should. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Trump’s lawyers are using an 18th-century wartime law to evade constitutional protections around search and seizure, allowing federal agents to enter homes without warrants.
There was a sweep of Latino men with tattoos, allegedly Venezuelan, who were then sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador. One was sent because he had tattoos honouring his autistic brother. The ACLU said some were sent back to America because they were not Venezuelan, or were women. Some were legal refugees.
People are simply being disappeared off the streets for wrongthink. A Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil, in America on a student visa whose wife is a U.S. citizen, was arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. A Georgetown University researcher named Badar Khar Suri who was born in India, in America on a student visa, was arrested outside his home in Arlington, Va. A Turkish national named Rumeysa Ozturk, a student at Tufts in Massachusetts, was arrested in daylight by four plain clothes officials for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed in the student newspaper.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the move, saying, “if you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.” A ruckus. She was transported to a prison in Louisiana, and says she has been borderline tortured.
Then there was the Russian dissident, Kseniia Petrova, a scientist working at Harvard Medical School, who may be deported back to Russia, which sounds like a death sentence. The French academic who was asked for the contents of his phone, to look for anti-Trump content. And, of course, there was the case of Canadian Jasmine Mooney, who was detained in terrible conditions for two weeks by ICE over questions about her visa. Canadians born in Iran and Afghanistan have been denied entry at the US border.
It gets worse still. Judge’s orders are being ignored, so people can be shoved on planes and used as the backdrop for an Instagram-style, influencer-modeled fascist mode of cruelty porn. Or too-online AI-as-the-aesthetic-of-fascism taunting. Or a more cinematic version of the same. Friday, the U.S. government resisted implementing a unanimous Supreme Court order to return a wrongly deported man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. It’s a truly dangerous moment.
It is a flailing rage, a puny cruelty, from bullies who know they can’t win a moral or legal argument. It is a vicious bludgeoning racism that will make America poorer, smaller, dumber, weaker. The people in charge are ghouls and trolls and torturers, and the United States as you knew it no longer exists. This could happen to anybody.
When Prime Minister Mark Carney said last month, “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation, is over,” it undersold the point. Now, the government should warn Canadians: it should level with them.
If you must go, you need to register if you will be there more than 30 days, or face criminal charges. But otherwise, go to Europe. Or Costa Rica. Visit other parts of our great country, and the world, where it should be an absolutely bustling tourism year. But the United States is not a safe place anymore: it is a wild and predatory wilderness, filled with rattlesnakes and wolves and a brand of cruelty that wasn’t as obvious before. Don’t go.
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