Our northern neighbors are shell-shocked: they are even poorer than Alabamians. This follows a tough week for Canada, which has struggled at the Winter Olympics and has faced constant pressure from Donald Trump. In fact, it's the headline used on social media that's become the main source of mockery—"Out of nowhere, Canada became poorer than Alabama. How is that possible?” In December, Tommy Battle’s dream came true. The five-term Mayor of Huntsville is Alabama to the bone, born in Birmingham and a graduate of the state university in Tuscaloosa, but for the past 18 years he’s tried to distance his city from the state’s unsavoury stereotypes. Huntsville, in the north, is the home of the Saturn rocket program that took on the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. It houses the second-largest biotech research hub in the United States. And it has attracted high-end manufacturing investments such as Blue Origin’s rocket engine plant. But Alabama tropes are hard to shake: The state is backward and full …