On Wednesday, July 2 -- Bryan Adams did not wait for a press conference or a diplomatic cable. He put it in a chorus instead.

the American president's repeated musing, on and off for the better part of a year, that Canada would simply be better off as a US state, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "When you're talkin' 'bout my home," Adams sings, "you better show some respect." It is not subtle, and it is not supposed to be.

The timing was deliberate. Canada's national holiday landed this year in the middle of the ugliest stretch of US-Canada relations in a generation, one day after Washington let the mandatory six-year review deadline on the USMCA trade pact pass without renewal, a decision that locks the continent into a decade of a...