Fact check: Trump keeps making stuff up about Canada | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump keeps attacking Canada with fiction instead of fact. Throughout his on-again, off-again trade war with Canada, which has erupted again this week, Trump’s criticism of the US neighbor has been filled with lies – a remarkable variety of assertions that either wildly distort a kernel of truth or are just plain made up. Among other things, the president has falsely claimed that the Canadian public likes the idea of becoming the 51st US state, which is overwhelmingly unpopular with the Canadian public; that Canada is one of the world’s highest-tariff countries, though it is actually low in world rankings; that Canada prohibits US banks from operating there, though more than a dozen US banks operate in Canada; that Canada doesn’t accept US agricultural exports, though Canada is the world’s second-largest purchaser of those exports; that Chinese and Russian ships are “constantly surrounding” Canada, though that never happened; and that “they don’t, essentially, have a military,” though Canada’s very-much-existent military jointly operates the North American Aerospace Defense Command with the US and fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, agains