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I quoted William Shatner telling Van Zuylen Wood “Canada should say to President Trump, ‘You are the head of a rambunctious country, very difficult to govern at this point. We can ease your pain. Canada is calm, settled, successful. Clean air, clean water, pleasant people. Why don’t you become the 11th province?’�

I added what I considered the best part of the piece: “It takes a special kind of belligerence to piss off the nicest people on the planet. With friends like us, who needs enemies? And if our enemies now include Canada, we probably don’t have any friends left at all.�

I then watched 300 plus comments unspool into a surprisingly revealing tableau of North American psyche.

This was no scientific poll. It was an unscripted, self selected slice of professionals stepping to the mic. Three themes emerged.

The beaver is back, and now has fangs.

The largest bloc of Canadian commenters responded with humour and a rediscovered patriotism. Florida trips have morphed into Prince Edward County wine tours; cross border shopping lists have become “buy local� pledges; one poster even suggested invoicing the White House “$150 billion a year� for NORAD airspace. Underneath the jokes lies something serious: after years of quietly leveraging the U.S. market, Canadians are flirting with economic self reliance not due to policy papers but out of pique. Trump’s tariff talk has become the perfect activation trigger. Nothing stirs loyalty like an external threat.

Americans aren’t monolithic; they are, however, perplexed.

U.S. voices in the thread split between breezy self deprecation (“If we wanted calm, we wouldn’t have invented NASCAR or the filibuster�) and wounded counter punches about defence spending or dairy quotas. What they share is surprise at the ferocity of Canada’s response. One consultant who crosses the border monthly confessed that most Americans “don’t know or care about Canada� and thus have no idea a trade dispute has morphed into a national psychodrama. The lesson? If the target doesn’t know there’s a problem, Ottawa’s earned media campaign and its billboards haven’t caught many Americans’ attention.

The pragmatic middle is quietly anxious.

Buried beneath meme wars and conspiracy riffs was a seam of sober concern. Logistics managers wondered aloud what a tariff spiral would do to integrated auto plants; policy wonks asked how NORAD works if the leaders won’t share a dais; one Alberta commenter lamented that Ontario blocks B.C. wines while Canada demands U.S. free trade. These are the unsexy questions that impact jobs and elections.

Why does any of this matter? LinkedIn has become the C suite’s barometer. Executives scroll between quarterly calls; policy advisors lurk for mood swings; media pros mine it for narrative tension. You’re staring at an unfiltered focus group of the economically engaged. The methodology may be messy, but the stakes are real.

Captain Kirk was only one voice among many in Simon Van Zuylen Wood’s article, but his quip was the pull quote and the lightning rod. That’s the nature of storytelling: a single vivid line can eclipse a hundred policy paragraphs. My LinkedIn experiment proves the inverse is also true. One vivid image, an indignant rodent clutching a defeated raptor, can summon a chorus of real world stakeholders eager to explain what the line missed.

And there’s another lesson: humour travels farther than outrage. The most-liked comment was a mock-Southern drawl praising “maple scented diplomacy.� It beat every profane rebuttal by a country mile. If you want to cut through on a divisive issue, reach for wit before you reach for pitchforks.