Trump’s talk about Canada parrots Putin’s claims on Ukraine [Video]

It took a while for Canadian politicians to figure out that Donald Trump wasn’t joking with his talk about annexing Canada.

After Trump raised the idea at a dinner in Mar-A-Lago attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Nov. 29, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic Leblanc said the “joke” was actually a positive.

“The president was teasing us. It was, of course, in no way a serious comment,” LeBlanc said.

“The fact that there’s a warm, cordial relationship between the two leaders and the president is able to joke like that, we think, is a positive thing.”

No one is calling it positive now.

Perhaps Canadian politicians can be forgiven their slowness of uptake, given that Trump’s comments are entirely unprecedented in modern U.S.-Canadian relations.

But there is one strong parallel for his remarks. While Trump’s words may never move past the talking stage, they resemble the claims, pretexts and justifications used by Russia’s Vladimir Putin before and during …