Last month in Boston, Canada won the Four Nations Faceoff hockey tournament with a 3-2 victory over the United States. Before an earlier game in Montreal, with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looking on, the crowd booed the American national anthem … but the USA went on to defeat Canada 3-1. For some fans, that outcome may recall the first World Cup of Hockey in 1996.

Canada and the USA emerged from the preliminary round and faced each other in a best-of-three series. In Philadelphia, the Canadians won 4-3, in overtime. In Montreal, the United States won the next two games to take the championship, and nobody booed either national anthem. Most of the American players were professionals from the National Hockey League. That was not the case in a previous USA victory, perhaps the greatest of all time in any team sport.

In the 1980 winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, the American players were all collegians with an average age of 21. They faced the mighty Soviet Union, a professional team by any standard. In an exhibition game, the Soviets trounced the USA 10-3, so nobody gave the Americans much of a chance for the gold.

In the early going, the USA faced a Czech team that featured the three Stastny brothers, future NHL stars. The upstart Americans defeated them 7-3, and as play-by-play man Al Michaels recalls in his memoir, You Can’t Make This Up, it was then that the “USA! USA!” chants first rang out in force.

The Americans were “skating faster than our players” and dominating play, said the Soviet play-by-play man, as noted in the ESPN documentary “Of Miracles and Men.” Buzz Schneider blasted a 50-foot slapshot past Vladislav Tretiak, perhaps the best goalie in the world. Mark Johnson picked up a loose puck and scored in the final seconds of the first period to tie the game at two.

With ten minutes left, Mike Eruzione scored to put the USA ahead 4-3. The swift Soviets had their chances, but defenseman Ken Morrow and goalie Jim Craig held them off. As the clock ticked down, Michaels famously said, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”It was as though Bemidji State had taken down the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl. But the Americans weren’t done…

In the gold medal game, the Americans faced Finland, a strong team featuring Jari Kurri, future teammate of Wayne “The Great One” Gretzky. The Americans came from behind to win 4-2. Chants of “USA! USA!” rang out across a country suffering through the Carter era, with its “misery index” at home and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran holding 52 Americans hostage. It was about geopolitics, not just about hockey, and that was also the case this year with the Canadian.

The booing of “The Star Spangled Banner” was attributed to Trump’s tariffs, but it really traces back to “the disastrous legacy of Pierre Trudeau,” as described by David Frum, the Canadian-American senior editor at The Atlantic, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and son of CBC broadcaster Barbara Frum. Pierre Trudeau remained a cult figure in Canada, so for Frum to call him “a bad man and a disastrous prime minister” amounted to blasphemy. In truth, Frum was being kind.  

Pierre Trudeau declined to serve in World War II and after the war, “traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities.” The full account of Trudeau’s duty for Stalin would make an interesting read, but in 1989 the fledgling Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) destroyed the dossier on Pierre Trudeau. So it makes sense that, as Frum recalls, that Trudeau “tried to reorient Canada away from the great democratic alliance,” a reference to NATO. The prime minister also regarded the United States as the major threat to peace and the USA as a threat to Canada’s national identity.

That absurdity spawned the virulent anti-American bigotry that dominates Canada’s ruling class, and was on full display in Montreal. The American players, after all, had nothing to do with any tariffs, which Canada also imposes on the United States. More deserving of boos is Justin Trudeau, a former blackface performer and, like Pierre, an orchestrator of economic disaster. As Canada’s Fraser Institute showed last year, “the median employment earnings of workers were lower in every Canadian province than in every U.S. state.

Consider also Justin’s record on Islamic terrorism. A 2016 attack by al-Qaeda in Burkina Faso claimed six Canadian lives and more than 20 others from 18 different countries. In April 2016, Muslim Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the Philippines beheaded Canadian hostage John Ridsdel of Calgary and left his head on the street in a plastic bag.

In 2017, the Trudeau government paid $10.5 million to Omar Khadr, a Canadian-born al-Qaeda militant who killed American soldier Sgt. Christopher Speer in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. The Trudeau government also issued an apology to the jihadist, whose father was a bagman for Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attack who took the lives of at least 24 Canadians. As it turns out, Justin also has a soft spot for Stalinist dictators.

“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” Trudeau said in 2013. “Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” China’s dictatorship wasn’t turning the economy around, but according to The Black Book of Communism, the PRC excels at murder with some 60 million victims, far more than Stalin’s USSR or the German National Socialists under Hitler.

On Sept. 22, 2023, the Canadian parliament hailed Yaroslav Hunka, who served with Hitler’s Waffen-SS Galicia Division, as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for his service.” That would surprise the Canadians and Americans who fought together in the First Special Service Force (FSSF), which swept the Nazis from Monte La Difensa and other strongholds, making way for the Allies to move north through Italy. That plus brilliant exploit was key to Allied victory.

Praise for a Nazi would also seem strange to the troops of Canada’s Eighth Reconnaissance Regiment. They liberated the Westerbork transit camp that sent thousands of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz. The Canadians fought under the Red Ensign, Canada’s official flag until 1967. The Trudeau government promotes a school guidebook that declares the Red Ensign “a symbol of hate promotion.” Speaking of actual hatred, anti-Semitism is now surging across Canada.

Justin Trudeau prefers to look the other way, and when Canadians boo “The Star Spangled Banner,” it’s music to his ears. That would sound strange to Canadian hockey great Gordie Howe, who starred for the Detroit Red Wings. Howe passed away in 2016 but the Pont International Gordie Howe connecting Detroit with Windsor, Ontario, is slated to open this fall. By then, Canada could have a new leader who recognizes the difference between friends and enemies. Someone who doesn’t is a more likely outcome. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.