As I looked through my contacts to find people to share the petition with, I realized that this wouldn’t be as simple as sending an email blast.

I quickly found two people who have experienced racism at the hands of the Canadian government. For one of them, the situation is going on right now as we speak. I thought, “I’d better not mention this to her, she may not be happy with the Canadian government right about now.”

Joining in a fight for Canada’s economy isn’t something that would get her excited when she is being blocked from opening her small business and building wealth.

I carried on scrolling through my contacts and found a new immigrant to Canada.  I quickly remembered that there are two types of immigrants, type 1, and type 2.

An example of a type 1 immigrant would be my sister. After moving to Canada from Jamaica, she bought skis and gave skiing a good proper effort.

Type 1 immigrants will quickly sink into Canadian life, embrace Canadian culture and consider Canada Home. 

For Type 2 immigrants, whether temporarily or permanently, Canada is just a means to an end. It is just the place that you came to in order to get away from your country.  You came here to get something or get away from something.

I knew that the person I was considering asking sign the petition likely fell into the type 2 category and wasn’t going to be interested in protecting Canada.

I continued looking through my contacts.

Next, I came to a whole bunch of my Christian friends.  I know that for many Christians, Trump is seen as the only one who protects Christian values. So signing a petition that criticizes Trump would be seen as betraying their protector.

I moved on.

Then I remembered that I knew a couple people who are government officials. I already knew that for many politicians, there would be two issues. 

Issue 1:  They would have to wait to see what their party was doing and go with that.

Issue 2: Even when they have the power to do something, a politician may find it difficult to embrace a solution if the solution did not originate with them. 

It would be hard to convince a politician that this has to be a quatri-partisan effort.  This would be difficult because making the other party the enemy is prioritized instead of focusing on the fact that the tariffs are the enemy.

I continued looking through my contacts and came across some emails to some Indigenous groups I had reached out to last year. I had offered to create 365 conversations in their Indigenous language to preserve the language and teach it to new generations, just like I did for fluencyfix.com.

I realized that due to the ongoing strife between Canada and the Indigenous people of Canada, it may feel like fighting your enemy’s battles. How can you fight for the very person who is oppressing you? So, I did not reach out to my Indigenous contacts.

Part way through, I figured out that some people don’t want their name on the internet attached to anything an employer may search and find.

They may not want their name associated with this campaign for all of time.

Since online privacy is something I also value, I quickly adjusted my messaging to let everyone know that they could sign the petition anonymously. Even so, only one person that I sent the updated messaging to signed.

Then late at night, I received an email from my sister saying that a mutual friend thinks she may have received a message from some hacker/phishing attempt type message pretending to be me.

I told her that it really is me and I really am campaigning against the tariffs.

The friend thought it was a little suspicious because I am non-political and don’t usually do things like that.

So, as you can see, the last people I didn’t contact to were people like me, “people who just don’t get involved in things like petitions.”

When you have people who are hurt, bitter, uninterested and stay behind partisan lines, it is difficult to do something that requires national participation to work.

So, I will put the question back to you, the person reading this. Who will fight for Canada? When tariffs that would decimate the economy are being threatened, when the Prime Minister is being called the Governor, when the country is being called the 51st State, who will fight back?

Who is deeply invested in this nation? Who loves this country? Who values our sovereignty as a nation and our unique history, landscape and culture?

Who remembers how many wars the US fought and we went right along to war with them?

Who will stand up and say this attack against our economy is unacceptable?

Will it be you?

Find out here how to take action if the tariffs are implemented on January 20th, 2025.