Don’t Look to the ‘South Park’ Movie for Insight About Canada-U.S. Relations

With the U.S. president waging a trade war, and repeatedly threatening to annex Canada, the relationship between America and the Great White North is the worst it’s been in quite a long while — in real life, that is. 

Pop culture has, on more than one occasion, mined the idea of a Canada-U.S. conflict for laughs. There was, of course, Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon, about a president who manufactures a war with America’s Northern neighbors in order to distract from his own unpopularity.

But the go-to reference point for Canadian-American hostilities (other than the War of 1812, I guess) is South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. 

And now, given the current turmoil, people have been frequently referencing the movie that gave us the song “Blame Canada” — even on CNN. “It’s a South Park idea!” guest Touré said of President Trump’s threats toward Canada during a recent episode of CNN’s Table For Five. “To go to war with Canada?! This is not a serious concept!” 

This wasn’t the first time that the South Park movie has been brought up in a modern political context, a lot of social media posts have highlighted the similarities between recent headlines and the ‘90s movie that also gave us “Uncle Fucker.”

But it should be noted that there are some pretty major differences between the plot of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and what’s happening now. For one thing, in the movie, the conflict didn’t originate with the White House. The president (Bill Clinton) only picks a fight with Canada after being pressured by Kyle’s mom. The war in the movie isn’t motivated by economics, it’s purely cultural; Sheila Broflovski blames the entire nation of Canada for two Canuck comedians’ fart jokes. 

The comparison would be more apt if Trump started a trade war because he didn’t care for the cast of Letterkenny.

But at least that would kind of make sense? Trump’s justifications for launching a trade war with Canada have ranged from stopping the laughably minuscule amounts of fentanyl being smuggled across the border, to enabling the U.S. government to abolish the federal income tax. As Reason Magazine argued, the rationales for why the U.S. goes to war with Canada in Canadian Bacon and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut are actually “more grounded in reality” than anything the Trump administration has offered. 

That said, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were never attempting to make a commentary on North American politics with the South Park movie, they were more interested in satirizing the public reaction to their show, building on the Season One episode “Death,” which similarly found Sheila leading a protest against Terrence and Phillip that goes way too far.

Since the flatulent duo were revealed to be Canadian by Season Two, Parker and Stone’s big screen reworking of “Death” naturally included a war on Canada. They even claimed that the basic outline for the story came to them in just 20 seconds.

So really, the South Park movie didn’t predict anything about our current moment. Although, maybe Martin Short and Ryan Gosling should avoid being interviewed by Conan O’Brien for a while, just in case.