5 times Canada crashed the 2016 U.S. presidential race

[ABC News]

Despite the U.S. presidential election still nine months away, Canada has already managed to spring up on the campaign trail several times.

Canada made waves in the presidential race this week when a Marco Rubio campaign ad was outed as trying to pass off footage of Vancouver as America. A Rubio spokesman didn’t seem to think much of it and found the catch funny.

“We hadn’t noticed that. We are not going to make Canada an issue in this election,” he told BuzzFeed.

However, if history is any indication, it will be hard to keep our country out of the election. Here are four other times Canada found itself in the middle of the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

1. The great Canadian-American wall
One of the first and most notable antics Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pulled on the campaign trail was when he said he’d build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, some began to wonder if we’d see a wall at our border, too.

Scott Walker, who was also running as a Republican candidate, said at the time a wall at the Canadian border was a “legitimate issue” to look at in a part of an interview that was cut from a broadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press.

Days later, fears of a wall at the U.S.-Canada border subsided as Trump said to CBC News that he loves Canada and wouldn’t build a wall at the Canadian border.

Canadians didn’t have to think much about Walker contemplating building a wall at the Canadian border as he dropped out of the race less than a month after speaking with Meet the Press.

2. Ted Cruz, the Canadian?
In yet another one of the bizarre campaign trail twists provided by Trump, the businessman-turned-politician has repeatedly questioned if Ted Cruz can run for president because Cruz was born in Calgary.

While Cruz is considered a U.S. citizen because he was born to a U.S. citizen, the constitution says that to run for president you must be a “natural-born citizen,” which is why Trump has questioned if Cruz could even run for president.

Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2014 after a 2013 Dallas Morning News piece brought to light that his dual citizenship may become a problem if he wanted to run for president.

While most legal experts agree Cruz can run for president, Trump has still taken a number of swipes at him, such as offering to debate in Canada, calling him an “anchor baby” and threatening to sue him over his eligibility to run if he doesn’t retract ads Trump feels are false.

3. Cheap Canadian drugs
Many Americans are aware they can get prescription drugs for far less from a Canadian pharmacy, and it has been in the public consciousness for so long that even The Simpsons show used it as a plot for an episode over 11 years ago.

Last September, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton jumped on the cheap Canadian drugs bandwagon calling for the legalization of importing prescription medication from the Great White North.

Clinton isn’t alone in her support of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. Her chief opponent Bernie Sanders voiced his support for the same policy around the same time, and in 1999, he went as far as taking a bus of seniors to a Canadian pharmacy so they could buy cheaper drugs. He has been quoted in the media as saying, “I will never forget the tears in the eyes of women who were able to buy the breast cancer drug Tamoxifen at one-tenth of the price that they were paying in the U.S.”

4. Keystone XL
Legalizing Canadian prescription drugs wasn’t the only big Canadian-related campaign promise Clinton made last September.

After putting off making a decision on the TransCanada project, Clinton finally announced she was against the proposed Alberta to Gulf Coast Keystone XL bitumen pipeline and had in mind a North American-wide climate-change plan instead. Sanders has been against it well before he decided to run for president.

Clinton’s decision came as Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper and Tom Mulcair were on the campaign trail at home. While the Liberals supported the pipeline, the party soon came out in support of Clinton’s plans.

Her opposition to the pipeline shouldn’t have surprised many, though, as many Democrats are opposed to the pipeline, while Republicans tend to favour it.