Richard Rohmer, author of Ultimatum, in Toronto on Feb. 14.Ana Seara, Ann Rohmer/Supplied
More than 50 years ago, Richard Rohmer wrote a bestselling novel in which a brash U.S. president’s demands for access to Canada’s natural gas escalate into an alarming ending that eerily echoes current events.
The book is evocative of Donald Trump’s recent threats to annex Canada and turn it into the 51st state.
Hamilton-born Mr. Rohmer, a veteran pilot in the Second World War who later had a successful legal career, dictated a draft of that novel, Ultimatum, over six weeks. The 1973 result was a massive hit by Canadian standards, launching his career as a novelist. He has written 30 fiction and non-fiction books.
The 221-page Ultimatum, which was published by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, begins with an October, 1980 call from the unnamed U.S. president to Canadian prime minister Robert Maitland, who was a few months into the job.
As the U.S. faces a natural-gas shortage in the looming winter, the president lays out demands that include Canada providing access to all Arctic natural gas without reference to future Canadian needs. Canada is given until the next day to comply. The book ends with the president announcing U.S. military action against Canada.
“It’s a new relevance because, in effect, 50 years ago, I was able to write a script that is coming alive now with the President of the United States going berserk,” said the 101-year-old Mr. Rohmer in a telephone interview on Friday from his home in Toronto.
Mr. Rohmer was bemused at still being around to talk about the book decades after it was published. “I’m now 101 and I’m going to live forever, you understand,” he quipped.
“I was as surprised as anyone that I am as close in the book to the events that are occurring, including the declaration of the United States that they want to adopt Canada.”
Mr. Rohmer says it’s a creative accident. “I can tell you 50 years ago, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, but the reality is that book and time and events have caught up with each other.”
He’s not alone in being surprised. Writer Roy MacSkimming, who profiled Mr. Rohmer in 1974 for Maclean’s magazine, said the recent uproar over Mr. Trump’s tariff agenda has set him to thinking about Mr. Rohmer’s fiction.
“Some smart publisher should reissue Rohmer’s little classics from the ‘70s,” Mr. MacSkimming wrote in an e-mail exchange with The Globe and Mail, referring to Ultimatum and other fiction by Mr. Rohmer that followed the novel.
Mr. MacSkimming says that, back in the day, Mr. Rohmer’s fiction reawakened an ever-latent Canadian nightmare about being invaded by the United States. “The fantasy of American Manifest Destiny was alive in the mouths of American presidents for over a century,” he wrote. “And now, as we’ve discovered, it still is.”
Political scientist professor Stephen Azzi of Carleton University in Ottawa, says Ultimatum recalls a particular Canadian mentality from a couple of generations ago, but now speaks to the anxieties of Canadian readers today.
Prof. Azzi had been so interested in Ultimatum and other similar Canadian popular fiction of the era that he wrote an academic paper on the subject for a 2011 conference in Britain. The paper was entitled Canada’s National Mania: Paranoia about an American Invasion in English-Canadian Popular Novels of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s.
Referring to the 1970s, he writes about the Canadian concern that, “If the U.S. was violent and corrupt to the core, if it did not respect the sovereignty of other nations, surely it would follow that the U.S. would one day invade Canada.”
Asked about Ultimatum, Margaret Cannon, who reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Globe and Mail and has reviewed Mr. Rohmer’s work, says that good thrillers always have some kind of prescience, or view of the future.
“I think Rohmer has that talent,” she said in an interview. “He really did envision an invasion of Canada. In that sense, it’s worth listening to what he has to say.”
Mr. Rohmer picked up the Ultimatum story in a 1974 novel, Exxoneration, in which the U.S. invasion does not go as well as the Americans had expected.