The U.S. Ottawa doesn’t want a 51st state either

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When Robb Hasty is out of town and tells people where he’s from, they often try to correct him. “You mean Ottawa, Canada?” they ask.

Hasty, though, is not from Ottawa, Canada. He’s from Ottawa, Illinois, one of about a dozen namesake cities, towns, villages and counties in the United States. Furthermore, he’s the mayor of the nearly 19,000 Ottawans in what is otherwise a rural area about a 90-minute drive southwest of Chicago. His Ottawa, he said, is a largely Democrat city in an overwhelmingly Republican county.

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Hasty is also among the Ottawa, U.S.A. residents I recently spoke with to learn: a) if they were aware of their president’s intentions to make Canada America’s 51st state; b) what they thought of the idea; and c) if they understood how much angst it was causing up here in the Great White North.

Were I to neatly distil their responses into a word or two, it would be “some,” “not much” and “not much.” If we’re hoping that our fellow Ottawans — the American kind — might come to our aid in a pinch, we might want to recalibrate those thoughts. For one, they’ve got plenty on their plates already. And secondly, they’re not taking the threat of annexation too seriously; that’s just Trump being Trump, they say.

“I haven’t spoken to a single person, Republican or Democrat, who actually believes it,” said Hasty. “They think it’s just Trump’s boisterous New York way of being a bully.

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“Unfortunately, his way of negotiating is to bully someone for 100 per cent and get away with 20 per cent. That’s just the way that he operates. So the question then is, what is he really after? It’s bait for something else, and the question is what’s it bait for? No one thinks that the 51st state is real, but they also know that there is something else in it, and he has not been clear as to what that is.”

They think it’s just Trump’s boisterous New York way of being a bully.

The Illinois Ottawans are well aware of their Canadian counterparts. When the Ottawa Senators play the Chicago Blackhawks in Chicago, the Ottawa (Illinois) Visitors Centre sponsors the games on WGN radio, urging listeners to think of, and visit, their local Ottawa.

Hasty is aware of the booing of the U.S. national anthem by Canadians; of the “Elbows Up” campaign and such tariff countermeasures as pulling U.S. alcohol from liquor store shelves in Canada; and of how tariffs and counter-tariffs affect area farmers.

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“But when we hear of (Trump) referring to Trudeau as governor, we just kind of roll our eyes,” he said. “Like, ‘OK, buddy, whatever. You’re being a jerk, but that’s who you are. Let’s move on.’”

Hasty believes that information on how annexation threats are affecting Canadians isn’t reaching many Americans, at least not those who get their news from right-leaning sources.

“But I am in full support of you guys, just knowing where our nation will be over the next four years.”

Derek Barichello, news editor at The Times newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois, said that while the U.S.-Canada tariff war concerns many residents in the area, particularly tariffs on agricultural products such as fertilizer, the notion of Canada being annexed is nowhere on their radar.

“The people I’ve talked to would probably say that’s not even a real thing. Even Trump supporters would say that.

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“I don’t think a lot of people have given that much thought other than to think that it doesn’t sound realistic.”

Barichello was upset about the anthem-booing — not so much that Canadians did it, but that the news coverage in the U.S. failed to contextualize the incidents and reporters didn’t speak with the booing Canadians to ask why they were doing it.

Meanwhile, two states to the east, in Ottawa, Ohio (pop: 4,456), about an hour southwest of Toledo, Mayor Dean Meyer says that none of his constituents, close to 80 per cent of whom, he said, vote Republican, has mentioned Canada’s pending annexation to him. He, however, is entirely dismissive of the idea.

“I think it has zero chance of ever happening,” he said. “Would I want it to? I’d never given it any thought.

“Most people voting for Trump knew who he was, you know, that he likes to talk. Most people would just like him to do his job and keep his mouth shut.”

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Except for a misplaced bomb threat that was phoned in to their municipal offices during the 2022 truck convoy occupation in Ottawa, Canada, Ottawans in Ohio, Meyer said, don’t have much of a sense about Canada or Canadians, let alone Canada’s capital. Additionally, while he’d heard of Canadians booing the U.S. national anthem, he was otherwise unaware of Canadians’ reaction to the threats of annexation.

“I’m sure they don’t like it. It would be my gut feeling that nobody in Canada cares much for (Trump) right now.”

In Ottawa, Kansas (pop: 12,625), Mayor Emily Allen was completely unaware that Canada was being threatened with statehood. None of her constituents, she said, has even raised the subject with her.

“I am assuming most have just dismissed the comments, if they have heard them at all,” she said in an email. “Personally, I don’t think that would ever happen — I don’t see how it could.”

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But she has other fires to put out, she said, including fighting executive orders that could severely impact how her city funds major projects. “We definitely have our focus elsewhere.”

That’s true for other Ottawas too. A woman who, as a municipal employee with the town of Ottawa, Wisconsin, asked that her named not be mentioned, said she’d heard Trump talk about annexing Canada, but assumed he was joking. “But maybe he’s not,” she conceded. Regardless, she said it’s not an issue that people there are discussing. “It’s more the bigger picture,” she said. “People either like what Trump is doing or they don’t.”

Artist Bobby Barnett, who lived in Ottawa, Kentucky for a dozen years before recently relocating elsewhere in the state, also doesn’t take the threat to Canada’s sovereignty seriously.

“I just kind of laugh it off,” he said. “I don’t think anything will come of it. (Trump) comes off as a threat, but we really think it’s more of a shock-and-awe sort of empty threat to get corporations to move back into the country.

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“We have a very limited world view here,” he added. “In Kentucky, everybody watches the news, everybody hears the rumours and sees all the posts. And then we turn our TVs off and close our computer lids, and we’re worried about making sure our paycheques are there at the end of the week.

“We’ve got enough problems here that I don’t understand why you’d want to take on Canada’s issues as well. Everybody’s got their own problems and we’ve got more than enough here to spend his four-year term dealing with.”

Maybe they’re right; maybe there’s nothing to all this annexation talk. Then again, it’s not their identity that’s being threatened over and over again. Perhaps I should call up residents in Texas, which was annexed in 1845, to see what they think. I couldn’t find an Ottawa there, but there is a city named Canadian (pop: 2,200). Stay tuned.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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