Canada is far from the only important country that seems to have lost its capacity for competent self-government. The great United States of America, which has been a relatively benign but traumatizingly imposing contiguity for Canada since the American Revolution 240 years ago, is now an unrecognizable shambles of misgovernment ostensibly presided over by a senescent, corrupt, spavined political wheel horse, who even in his prime had a tenuous relationship with the truth and was rarely on the right side of any strategic decision.