I don’t totally get how Gov. Janet Mills thinks having a soccer team from Halifax come all the way to Portland to play the Hearts of Pine is going to strengthen Maine’s ties with Canada, as she claimed it would in announcing the Aug. 6 “friendly” match against the Wanderers last week.

Is it to let the Canadian Premier League team beat up on our third-tier, rookie-year club to show that, unlike our president, we don’t feel the need to exert dominance over their country?

Is it to wine and dine them and introduce them to Hearts fan Patrick Dempsey so they go back and tell all their friends?

It’s not like we can impress them with our seafood. They’ve got all the same stuff, some of it better.

Maybe the whole point is to publicly show that Canadians can cross the border and get back home safely without being detained. If so, that’s a pretty weak tourism campaign.

I think we can do better.

For one, we could take a cue from our mutual French cousins and gift them a statue, our version of Lady Liberty: Bangor’s 31-foot-tall fiberglass Paul Bunyan, whose various origin stories cross our countries’ border.

Or we could reuse a proven political tactic from more recent history and rename french fries. We’ll call them French-Canadian fries and require school districts to serve them with cheese curds and gravy, which will be much easier now that Michelle Obama is busy podcasting.

And if we market poutine for its high protein content, our nation of fad dieters will surely pay a premium, allowing for the ingredients to be imported, tariffs be damned.

We can take more renaming inspiration from President Trump and start calling the body of water at our border the Gulf of Canada, though there could be a cost involved in the form of reimbursements to Brunswick’s Gulf of Maine Books for its rebranding.

But while we’re in Brunswick, we can pressure Bowdoin College to use its pull with alum and Netflix founder Reed Hastings to renew “Anne with an ‘E,'” the TV series about the Green Gables redhead that it coproduced with CBC then canceled after three seasons to widespread outcry.

We could go even bigger and back off of Machias Seal Island, ceding the disputed surrounding waters to Canadian lobstermen.

But that would be a real concession, and it seems we’re more in symbolic-gesture mode.

Still, there could be a happy medium — something practical, like giving them Maine resident rates at state parks or waiving their highway tolls.

If we really wanted to make them feel at home on our roads, however, we’d scrap those service-plaza talks with Shake Shack and Chick-fil-A and start courting Tim Horton’s.