A sampling from Canada Is Not The 51st F**king State!
It seems only fitting that the first title in this series that I call Readin’, ‘riting and Ravin’ about CanLit is Canada is Not the 51st F**king State!
Edited by John F. Hughes of Cosmic Cranium Press and published in the fall of 2025, the choice of this book would seem self-serving. After all (and in full disclosure here), yours truly is one of the 10 authors who contributed essays to this collection which is subtitled: “Everyday Canadians face off against Donald Trump’s worst idea ever.”
But bear with me please. I’m not going to write about my essay, “Canada the 49th: The True North, Strong and Free! The View of America from Windsor, Ontario.”
Instead, I am offering up some morsels from each of the other nine writers, who I have had the good fortune to be bound together with in this volume.
Also, this isn’t a review per se. Rather, I’m presenting some choice selections from each writer’s work in the hopes that you, dear reader, will want to read more.
“A Freight Train Full of Canadiana”
by John Francis Hughes
The editor offers an introductory essay to the volume in a wide-ranging and rollicking way. He recalls stories about hopping boxcars in Reno, Nevada in 1998 and hitchhiking across Canada in 2001, including some harrowing adventures and encounters with Americans.
The memory, the New Westminster, B.C.-based writer reflects, shows “the American paradox: adventures there could thrill you to the marrow if they didn’t kill you first; time spent there also had the power to drive pangs of homesickness like no other place. Today I refuse to cross the border. A short drive across the line into Washington State could easily make me vanish into the fascist vortex.”
“The Other Side of the Tracks”
by James ‘Blue Sky’ Groening
Interview with the artist
Hughes asks Groening what resistance might look like in Indigenous communities if the Americans were to invade Canada. The artist’s response:
“During the World Wars and other wars, the Indigenous population in Canada has always had a very high volunteer rate — always high representation by the Indigenous population. Indigenous people in the Armed Forces also tend to be very accurate shooters. What I’m getting at is, there is a certain amount of military competence among a lot of Indigenous people…What I can say for sure is there would be resistance. That resistance would not be something like the United States military and its force of 10,000 invading troops — let’s say in Alberta. It wouldn’t be met with a 10,000-man force to try to repel them…How would it play out? It would definitely play out in legal terms and resistance, and one of the old forms of blockades.”
“Never Join”
by C. Ryan Hoskins
An emergency room doctor in Port Alberni, B.C., Hoskins draws an analogy between health care and guns in America saying, “Firearms policy is unquestionably a manifestation of health policy.
“When I did my medical training, there was little to no clinical time spent on bullet wounds. They occur incredibly infrequently in Canada. Our knowledge as generalist emergency room doctors is mostly restricted to textbook presentations. I have seen in my career more cases of bites from bats than I have of bullet wounds. Yet, for my colleagues who want to learn about bullet wounds, there are special programs at Henry Ford County Hospital in Detroit, or Parkland Country Hospital in Dallas. More gunshots wounds can be seen in a day there than in a career here. It is gruesomely efficient learning.”
“As Sure as Eggs is Eggs”
by Michael Chouinard
The author grew up in Saskatchewan where his father was a doctor. He recounts an experience 15 years ago when, after touring a number of American ballparks and eating too many hot dogs, he came down with a severe case of gallstones and had to have them removed in a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. He stayed there five days. Fortunately, for Chouinard, his surgery and recovery were covered by insurance but he was astonished at the costs. For weeks and months, he writes, he received bills.
“I don’t remember what the first bill was for, but I made a copy and mailed the original to the insurance company. Then it happened again, and again, and again, for months and months. I can’t remember all the services, but the hospital itself had a billing company. I think the ER, or at least the ER doctors had a billing company. The imaging department had a billing company. So did the anaesthesiologist. I think there were six, seven, eight, maybe nine billing companies sending bills for the different services required to remove my bum gallbladder. I recall them coming from multiple states like Kansas (which kind of made sense as it was right next door to Missouri) but also Indiana and North Carolina. I can’t remember them all.”
“Mind Your Ts and Qs (and your own damn business)”
by Krista Wallace
The fantasy writer from Port Coquitlam, B.C. has little patience with the Trump administration’s trampling of the rights of Americans based on gender.
“Why is there such a fixation on other people’s choices about their own bodies? Why this obsession with the choices of others, which have no effect on anyone but themselves? Who is behind it? Is it entirely Christian nationalism, or is there something else? In the case of the current scapegoating of immigrants in the U.S., and the erasure of trans people, it has a lot to do with the government’s desire to encourage people to vilify marginalized groups; to blame anything or anyone but the government for homelessness and poverty; to distract the population and keep the focus off policies whose goal is to line the pockets of the wealthy.”
“An Old Soldier’s View on That Man”
An interview with Neil Dancer
Dancer is a retired Master Corporal with the Canadian Armed Forces. He grew up in Halifax, moved to the west coast in the mid-90s, joined the army in 2006 and served in Afghanistan.
Dancer fought alongside soldiers in the U.S. Army, where discipline was very low, as well as with U.S. Marine Corps officers who were “a very different bunch: smart, motivated,” he writes.
Some of the former became part of a group of thrill-seeking soldiers convicted of the drug-addled sport killing of civilians in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province in 2010.
“I recognized some of the names and realized these guys who we had been working with had been murdering people in the district next to us, and that they were now serving long sentences in prison for war crimes. I can’t say I was surprised, like I said, discipline among the U.S. Army troops was poor, their leadership was weak, and they had a dismissive attitude towards the Afghans. And when you dehumanize your opponent, it is so easy for that sort of stuff to happen. I think it is essential to respect your enemy, in a strange way, that respect stops war crimes from becoming the norm, allows you to have compassion within the immorality of war.”
“A Canadian Teacher’s Perspective on Why Our Schools ‘Trump’ the American Education System”
by Tara Olchowy
The B.C. public school educator asks us to consider what happens when the “core competencies” are not taught in the schools. Core competencies are defined as “sets of intellectual, personal, and social and emotional proficiencies that all students need in order to engage in deep, lifelong learning.”
Olchowy writes: “Would the U.S. have citizens who are not empathetic towards others? Would they have students who don’t know how to get along with other people? Would they have citizens who think might makes right and don’t know how to use their words instead of their fists? Would they have citizens who don’t know how to critically analyze information presented to them as facts and therefore just accept, at face value, the volume of misinformation and fake news that is so prevalent on social media platforms today? Lately, it seems that these citizens are found everywhere in the U.S., and a low-ranking education system might just be to blame.”
“Americans I Have Known”
by Peter W. Gribble
The author of fantasy novels recalls the first time he met an American his age during his second year in school in France as one of the children of NATO and diplomatic corps parents. That American, Allan, attended class for several months before his family moved back to the United States.
“It was said Americans never stayed long in any one place; their fathers’ tour of duty seldom lasted more than a year and a half, tops, reputedly because they were afraid of being compromised by the country’s language, culture, and politics — despite living on the base.”
“A Letter to Our Southern Neighbour: It’s You, Not Us”
by Rohini Sunderam
Sunderam recalls living in Bahrain in the 1980s where she met one Canadian who she describes as a “nutter, the type who sang silly impromptu songs, holding a mop as a mic. And he was a wonderful, kind, and helpful person, who often offered to drive some of the service staff to their homes. He slipped into our lives, first in the office, and then in our homes. But he left us with a remarkable insight, one that I shall never forget.”
The author recalls she was one of several parents of young children who would gather and socialize at each other’s homes while children played in a separate room and one night when the adults played a board game:
“It was just such an evening when my husband threw out a challenge to the group to define a civilised society. Some of us came up with answers like skills, or culture, or history. When it was his turn, the Canadian first asked, ‘Is this a trick question?’ My husband assured him it was not, he then said, after a short pause, ‘A society in which the least of its members has a voice.’”
Rohini, an Indian who has since moved to Canada, said, “As a definition and an ideal, it was perfect. To our group, the Canadian’s point held as much power as a sentiment voiced decades earlier, allegedly by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, which states that the first sign of a civilization’s development from a primitive state is the evidence of a healed femur bone — an indication that someone cared enough to stop, help, and nurture a defenceless member of society. To us that day, our Canadian friend’s comment struck us as equally powerful. It has stayed with us ever since that evening in 1985.”
Canada Is Not the 51st F**king State! is available to order at groovecatbooks.com and on Amazon.
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for about 40 years and has published a book of short fiction, Stories in the Key of Song. Visit him at claudiodandrea.ca or read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Bluesky.
Claudio D'Andrea 