(Chris Wattie/Reuters).

Good news fellow Canadians. In last night’s Republican primary debate stateside Donald Trump was asked by a moderator from Spanish-language Telemundo : “You have said that you will not build a wall in Canada… Isn’t that like closing the front door, and leaving the back door open?”

The aspiring world leader replied : “With Canada, you’re talking about a massively long piece. You’re talking about a border that would be about four times longer …  It would be very, very hard to do – and it is not our biggest problem. I don’t care what anyone says. It is not our big problem.”

Some will say this just shows that Donald Trump can in fact be reasonable. He is really not as crazy as the others, etc (ie former fellow Canadian Cruz and Cuban refugee Rubio). He did make “a similar statement last summer to the CBC.”

Last night he even admitted : “We have far less problem with that (northern) border than we do with our southern border …. You go to New Hampshire, the first thing they talk about is heroin and drugs pouring in… They’re pouring in from the southern border.”

But I’m just not buying it. He still apparently wants to build a wall on the southern border of the USA. And as no less an authority than the Pope has recently stressed, that is just as crazy.

Moreover, the reasons he’s giving for drawing back from the northern option – the distance is just too great, and it’s not that big a problem (Mexico has three and a half times more people than Canada, eg) – are also just as crazy.

Lake Metigoshe State Park in North Dakota abuts the Canada-US border in Manitoba. A wall here would have to pass through a number of lakes, including Ross Lake and Lake Metigoshe itself! (And then there’s the Great Lakes in Ontario too.)

It is hard not to conclude that we up here in the northern woods (and on the uniquely wonderful Canadian Prairie, etc) are at risk of great harm at the hands of a few too many and a little too seriously crazy people, if Donald Trump is elected president next door.

As the Trumpet himself might say, it is time to stop all the nice-nelly pointless chatter that just gets nowhere, and get down to brass tacks. Many of us have actually dealt with Donald Trump supporters in American bars that are all too easy to reach on our current – as President  George W. Bush put it – “unfortified border.” Maybe it’s time to start thinking about some real fortification, from our own end!

* * * *

We know that Trump nation beliebers are not nice people and they are not kidding around. They are enraged over various recent cunning passages of history, at home and abroad. They are seriously crazy and they intend to do some seriously crazy things just to make the point clear.

Personally, I am almost ready to write a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his new miracle machine in Ottawa. At least entertaining propositions equally ridiculous to those Mr. Trump advances might help us prepare for what may or may not lie ahead.

Anyway, in my mythical letter to PM Trudeau, I would argue that we should be starting, right now, to set aside some of that promised new infrastructure spending for our own wall along the Canada-US border – that we’ll pay for ourselves – just in case Donald Trump somehow does wind up President of the United States of America by this time next year.

Of course, here’s hoping we’ll never have to use this particular infrastructure fund to implement our own Canadian Federal Border Fortification Plan (CFBFP). Here’s hoping the remarkable and inspiring President Obama is right (again), and “Donald Trump will not be president.”

But history has shown that such accidents can happen. We have survived up here in our small numbers in this hostile environment by taking care to set in enough to make it through the winter and so forth. At least getting started on designing a border fortification plan could also employ architects and  engineers hard hit by the latest oil and other resources bust, and so forth.

It will be difficult, of course, as Mr. Trump alludes to. But so was building a railway across the lakes and rivers of the fur trade, etc, etc. We are not crazy (even as conservatives), but we do work hard … (well, there is Rob Ford and … and yes, of course we have crazy people too … but not trying to run the whole country!)

In any case I think myself of  the remarkable short paragraph at the end of John Gunther’s “Foreword” to his Inside USA, first published in 1947, just after the Second World War  :

“But enough by way of introduction. So now with California, we begin this circumnavigation of the greatest, craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grown-up, and most powerful and magnificent nation ever known.”

Derby Line, Vermont, USA is on one side of this building and Stanstead, Quebec, CANADA is on the other. Building a wall here might be tricky.

At the bottom of everything, Donald Trump wants to go back to the future of 1947. That’s what he means by “Making America Great Again.”

He is seriously crazy, in my book at any rate, because he thinks you can actually manipulate human history in this way, if you just have enough willpower. Just like if you bully enough people with your uniquely strong personality, you can get the economy moving again.

Whadda I know. (I’m just Citizen X, etc.) But history does seem to me to suggest that quite this much craziness never comes to a good end, in one unnecessarily appalling way or another.

And if crazy Donald Trump does become president (which, again, I take from both the President Obama so many Canadians love and  my own lapsed Baptist prayers, will probably not happen), Canada just might want a wall of its own, on the northern border of the USA.