Canada is living through an era of acute, sustained, profound and abiding rage. The source is President Trump; the object is the United States.
More than two-thirds of Canadians say they plan to buy fewer American grocery products this year. Canadian travel to America continues its steep decline, although that may have less to do with political resistance than with the fact that the United States has made spectacularly clear that foreigners within its borders may be subject to detention, and possibly even violence, without recourse.
The president, has declared repeatedly that he intends to soften up the Canadian economy in preparation for annexation. Americans, from what I can tell, don’t seem to take this possibility seriously, even though he undertook the task in earnest last week by imposing a 35 percent tariff. The American threat to our sovereignty, so sudden, so foolish, is reshaping Canadian life.
All over the world, as the United States retreats from the global order it created, nations are reforming their priorities, changing their institutions and, as a result, changing their identities.
There are drastic changes in how countries exist, in who they are. But perhaps nowhere is the change more profound than in Canada.
In response to America’s threats, Canada is in the middle of the greatest explosion of nationalism in the country’s history.
People on both sides of the border hope that this economic antipathy is temporary. But the second Trump administration has established a more enduring truth about the United States: It is no longer a country that keeps its agreements. One should do business with such people only if you have to. According to a poll from February, 91 percent of Canadians want to rely less on the United States as a trade partner.
The system of open global trade anchored by the United States — a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that while not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades — is over. Canadians say that they just cannot be in a position in the future where they can be threatened in this way.
I understand that Americans at this point considered the possibility of annexation too outlandish to be taken seriously. But the United States has shown itself capable of the most outlandish possibilities. A year ago, the idea that the U.S. Marines would be deployed to Los Angeles in support of masked agents who don’t always identify themselves would have been seen as dystopian fiction.
When countries backslide out of democracy, invading neighbors is typically the kind of justification autocratic leaders use to suspend their own laws.
The mind-set of Canada is changing, and the shift is cultural as much as economic or political. Since the 1960s, Canadian elites have been rewarded by integration with the United States.
The question is no longer how Canadians should stop comparing themselves with the United States, but how to escape its grasp and its fate. In several surveys, the overwhelming first choice for what Canadians think makes the country unique is multiculturalism. This, in a world collapsing into hatreds, is the distinctly Canadian national project.
Canada still has one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. This country has always been plural. It has always contained many languages, ethnicities and tribes. The triumph of compromise among difference is the triumph of Canadian history. That seems to be an ideal worth fighting for.
In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 59 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s top threat, and 55 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s most important ally.
That is both an unsustainable contradiction and also a reality that will probably define Canada for the foreseeable future. Canada is divided from America, and America is divided from itself. The relationship between Canada and America rides on that fissure.
Large groups of people in Canada, and one assumes in America, too, hope this new animosity will pass with the passing of the Trump administration.
Canada is far from powerless in this new world; they are educated and resourceful. But they are alone in a way they never have been. Canada serves as a connector between the world’s democracies. We should treat our neighbor with respect and reset our shared values.
Source: Stephen Marche is the host of the “Gloves Off” podcast and the author of “The Next Civil War.”
