U.S. President Donald Trump’s imbecilic and unnecessary suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state has led some of my own family members — on my wife’s side, who are Canadian — not to travel to the United States, even in the midst of winter. Now this is personal.

The dislike that some Canadians feel toward Trump, and America in general, is something I experienced at a wedding of one of my wife’s cousins, shortly after Trump’s first term. At what should have been a non-political event, one of the speakers attacked the United States with such vehemence, it made me want to leave the room — and I’m no Trump supporter.