Montana

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 22, 2019

‘Just tell them it has beavers’: Montana might sell itself to Canada.

It was brought up a joke. But some politicians are seriously in favour

Montana’s politicians have failed to rule out the possibility of selling the state to Canada for $1 trillion.

The purported benefits would include having Justin Trudeau as leader.

“My pages, at special request, wanted to let everyone know that they’re strongly in support of having Justin Trudeau as president of the country,” Jessica Karjala told her fellow legislators at the Montana House of Representatives on Wednesday.

An online petition posted last week to Change.org is calling for the sale of the state to Canada. “We have too much debt and Montana is useless. Just tell them it has beavers or something,” the petition says.

As of Thursday, nearly 13,000 people — it’s unknown how many of them were actually Montanans — had signed the petition.

The tongue-in-cheek proposal has received some attention locally. In the Great Falls Tribune, the daily newspaper in Great Falls, reporter Kristen Inbody asked: “Would Montana still be named Montana or would we be Southern Alberta? Better Saskatchewan?”

There were other big questions standing before Montanans, too.

“Would we have to drop our speed limits to match the achingly slow pace of Canadian travel? Because that might be a deal-breaker …” the column asked.

Good question. And, of course, the French issue: “Bilingual, blah, blah. Do we have to learn French?”

At a vote on Wednesday, the House State Administration committee considered the petition (albeit jokingly). But it failed to receive the 75 per cent vote needed to draft a bill to reject the proposal. (Source: The National Post) 

Meanwhile in Ottawa, the SNC-Lavavin affair which prevents former Attorney-General Jody Wilson-Raybould from speaking on allegations of political interference, due to solicitor-client privilege, rages on in the form of a headline grabbing scandal.