Canada: Extra American than the USA?

[ad_1] I’ve at all times discovered one thing charming about Canada Day, the July 1 nationwide celebration, touchdown simply three days earlier than America’s Independence Day.

The 2 holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the nation’s 1867 confederation beneath British legislation, whereas July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution in opposition to the crown. But after centuries of peace, with the 2 international locations now sharing the longest undefended border in the world , the timing usually feels much less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint celebration.

So go away it to Donald Trump to reintroduce rigidity to the vacations.

Final Friday, simply as Canadians had been preparing for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that the USA is renewing hostilities within the briefly suspended commerce battle. “We're hereby terminating ALL discussions on Commerce with Canada, efficient instantly,” he wrote on Truth Social , including that “we'll let Canada know the Tariff that they are going to be paying to do enterprise with the USA of America inside the subsequent seven day interval.”

After which, in a Sunday interview on Fox News , he renewed the rhetoric that the majority infuriated Canadians: his declare that Canada needs to be annexed by the USA. “Frankly, Canada needs to be the 51st state. It actually ought to,” he informed anchor Maria Bartiromo. “As a result of Canada depends completely on the USA. We don’t depend on Canada.”

In considering via all of this, I’ve discovered one voice particularly clarifying: the Canadian conservative thinker George Grant.

In 1965, Grant printed a brief e book — titled Lament for a Nation — arguing that Canada’s rising integration with the USA was a sort of nationwide suicide. This was, partially, a political matter: By hitching its financial system and protection to these of a a lot bigger neighbor, Canada successfully surrendered its potential to set its personal political course.

However it was additionally a sort of non secular dying: By embracing free commerce and open borders with the USA, Grant argued, Canada was promoting its conservative soul to the American ethos of endless revolutionary progress. It was, in impact, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth.

Given the Trump risk, Grant’s argument feels extra very important than it has in a long time — prompting a spherical of mental reconsiderations. Latest items by Patrick Deneen , a number one American “postliberal,” and Michael Ignatieff , a number one Canadian liberal mental (and Grant’s nephew), have highlighted parts of the argument that really feel particularly related within the present second.

But Lament for a Nation can also be notable for what it failed to foresee. Whereas Grant predicted America’s liberalism would swallow Canada, it's, in actual fact, essentially the most philosophically intolerant administration in trendy American historical past that threatens Canadian sovereignty.

And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied beneath the banner of Liberal Celebration Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who totally embraces Canada’s trendy identification as essentially the most tolerant and multicultural nation on the planet.

A conservative Canadian’s Lament

Lament for a Nation takes, as its central occasion, the 1963 defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. His defeat, per Grant, was the second that Canada’s destiny was sealed.

Diefenbaker was the chief of the Progressive Conservative Celebration (now extra merely referred to as the Conservative Celebration). Grant writes about him a bit the best way that some on the mental proper discuss Trump right now: as an imperfect however mainly essential bulwark in opposition to the depredations of the liberal elite.

A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the standard energy elite in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. These elites, per Grant, believed that Canada benefited from rising financial and navy interconnections with the US, corresponding to eliminating commerce boundaries and joint participation within the North American Aerospace Protection Command (NORAD).

Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a distinct strategy — one which valued Canadian self-determination over the fabric advantages of commerce and safety cooperation. On key points, most notably the 1962–’63 debate over stationing American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Diefenbaker resisted the mental and political elite’s “continentalist” strategy — as an alternative elevating issues that an excessive amount of integration with the USA would threaten Canadian nationhood.

It's this hesitancy, Grant argues, that introduced the wrath of the elite class down on his head, in the end resulting in the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat within the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was not any barrier to a coverage of financial and political integration with the USA.

“Lamenting for Canada is inevitably related to the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His lack of ability to control is linked with the lack of this nation to be sovereign,” Grant writes.

It’s simple to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. In spite of everything, Canada stays standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he simply fallacious that integration with the US meant nationwide suicide?

However to take this line is to misconceive Grant’s argument. His place was not that the mixing with the USA would actually result in Canadian annexation. Relatively, it’s that Canada would lose the power to chart its personal course, surrendering its efficient sovereignty and, extra essentially, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from the USA.

The US, per Grant, is the bodily avatar of Enlightenment liberalism: a worldview that he described as celebrating the emancipation of the person from no matter fetters society may placed on them. The American ideology of capitalist freedom was a solvent dissolving native cultures and nationwide borders, homogenizing every thing right into a single mass of contemporary technological sameness.

Canada, in contrast, took its core identification from British conservatism — a way that politics isn't about particular person freedom however quite conserving and incrementally enhancing the traditions and cultural inheritance that outline its essence and preserve its good functioning.

In Canada, Grant says, this conservatism was “a sort of suspicion that we in Canada could possibly be much less lawless and have a better sense of propriety than these in the USA.” Partnering with the French audio system in Quebec ( Lament for a Nation made scant reference to indigenous Canadians), the brand new nation was in opposition to the American imaginative and prescient of frenetic capitalist change.

But this conservative identification, Grant feared, was weakly rooted — and susceptible to American imperial affect within the absence of a political class keen to wield nationalist insurance policies in its protection. He narrated its ideological decline in three steps:

First, males in all places transfer ineluctably towards membership within the common and homogenous liberal state. Second, Canadians reside subsequent to a society that's the coronary heart of modernity. Third, practically all Canadians suppose that modernity is nice, so nothing distinguishes Canadians from People. After they oblate themselves earlier than “the American lifestyle,” they provide themselves on the altar of the reigning Western goddess.

Diefenbaker was, per Grant, the final gasp of genuine Canadian conservative resistance to this course of. His defeat marked the second that Canada’s non secular dying at American arms turned inevitable.

Grant within the age of Trump

Right this moment, Canada is dealing with a nakedly imperialist American president who's making an attempt to weaponize Canadian dependence on American markets into political submission. Grant, the liberal Ignatieff writes, was “the primary to warn us that this was how continental integration would finish.”

But the circumstances are very totally different from what Grant might need anticipated. Whereas Grant warned that American ideology was seductive, that Canadians risked voluntarily submitting to a liberalism that might subtly alienate them from themselves, they're right now dealing with a brash American illiberalism led by a right-wing populist most Canadians revile.

“Even within the fury of Lament for a Nation , America was seen as a benign hegemon — no less than to us — who revered the fiction of our sovereignty. Right this moment’s President disdains his allies and may’t cease telling Canada he needs we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes.

Because of this, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives however by the Liberal Celebration.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals received Canada’s April election on the again of anti-Trump resistance. This was not solely as a result of Carney took vocally anti-Trump positions, however as a result of his chief rival — Conservative chief Pierre Poilievre — was a right-wing populist whose political style seemed far too close to Trump’s for Canadian comfort .

Carney received, briefly, as a result of Canadians noticed conservatism as too American — and Carney’s liberalism a greater illustration of Canadianness within the present second.

This irony owes itself, partially, to Canada’s nationwide reinvention since Grant’s authentic publication. Prior to now a number of a long time, Canada has engaged in a collective nation-building project to redefine its nationwide identification round concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been terribly profitable: Canada has a notably larger share of foreign-born residents than the USA, but faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash.

Grant would absolutely see this as vindication of his thesis: Canada has deserted its conventional identification in favor of a Canadian copy of America’s Ellis Island narrative. But what Grant didn’t foresee is that this sort of liberalism may kind an efficient resistance in opposition to Yankee imperialism.

Canadian nationalism right now isn't just about symbols, just like the flag or the crown, however a couple of sense that Canadians are not looking for their politics to tackle the bitter ugliness of Trumpified American politics. Their attraction to what Grant recognized as too-American liberal beliefs of freedom and progress types a key a part of the exhausting ideological core uniting Canadians in opposition to American stress.

On this sense, and maybe this sense solely, Canadians have turn into extra American than the People. This 12 months, July Fourth could have come three days early.