Canada, the Northern Outpost of Sanity

When I was a boy, the company that my father worked for transferred him from Los Angeles to Toronto, so I lived in Canada for most of my elementary-school years, attending the Northlea public school, where I remember boys and girls entering through separate doors after taking off our hats in deference to the Queen. (As a clueless émigré, I was sent to the principal’s office on my first day for not showing this particular form of respect.) This was the mid-nineteen-sixties, when Canada was coming out of that provincialism and into its own. The dashing Pierre Elliott Trudeau ruled Ottawa as an echo of J.F.K., and one of the first songs I learned in school celebrated the country’s 1967 centennial. (“It’s the hundredth anniversary of Confederation / Ev’rybody sing together!”) My family had returned to the States by the time I was ten, but I’ve always been grateful for those years in a nation with a tighter sense of community than my own, exemplified by its national broadcaster, the CBC, and by its national health-care system.

Canada’s democracy has frayed and strained in the years since, but always held—Quebec’s independence movement was subdued by real concessions from the rest of the provinces, for instance. Canada has not always been a model global citizen—its determination to export oil means that it bears outsized responsibility for the climate crisis—but, on balance, it has been a good and decent country, not to mention a firm ally. America’s craziness has drifted north across the border in recent years, though, producing out-there influencers, such as the psychologist-podcaster Jordan Peterson, and Foxish stunts, such as the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers that briefly paralyzed the Canadian capital with demands for an end to vaccine mandates. Indeed, the bilious mood that’s gripped the planet, post-COVID, seemed almost certain to set the stage for the election of a Trumpian figure, Pierre Poilievre, who has delivered the same kinds of broadsides about “utopian wokeism” and who delights in calling the sitting Prime Minister—Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin—a “wacko.”

But Donald Trump’s tariff attacks on Canada—and, even more, his insistence that the country should be incorporated as the fifty-first state—may halt this slow drift into the United States’ baleful orbit, at least for now. The threats seem to be producing the country’s finest recent hour, stirring a kind of patriotic resolve that is showing itself in everything from widespread scorn for the hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s truckling visits to Mar-a-Lago to a rekindled affection for Justin Trudeau after he delivered a truly remarkable speech on Tuesday:

Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator.

Make that make sense.

Canadians are reasonable and we are polite, but we will not back down from a fight—not when our country and the well-being of everyone in it is at stake. At the moment, the U.S. tariffs came into effect in the early hours of this morning, and so did the Canadian response.

He added, addressing Americans, “We don’t want this. We want to work with you as a friend and ally. And we don’t want to see you hurt, either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.”

Trudeau, who had been polling badly—owing to, among other things, concerns about the economy and immigration—stood down in January as the leader of the Liberal Party. He has been serving as a caretaker Prime Minister until his party chooses a new leader, on Sunday (who will then stand in the federal election, which could be called for any time before October). That seems to have liberated him to take on America’s ridiculous “policy”; theoretically, the reason for the tariffs is to stanch the flow of fentanyl across the border, but, as Trudeau pointed out, there really is no flow to stop—less than half an ounce of the drug was seized by Canadian officials on the northern border in January, even after Ottawa had made a number of showily expensive efforts to bolster border defenses.

All Canadian politicians, in fact, are joining in the patriotic defense—Poilievre said this week that Trump had “stabbed America’s best friend,” and Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, a conservative in the Trumpian mode, who won election in 2018 on the inflation-fighting “Buck-a-beer” ticket (bringing the floor price of a beer down to a dollar), threatened to cut hydroelectricity supplies to the U.S.and to do it “with a smile.” But the polling indicates that Trump’s absurdity may have roused Canadians to something like normalcy. In recent weeks, the Liberals have closed a twenty-point deficit and are now running level with Poilievre—they’re most likely to choose as their standard-bearer Mark Carney, a calm technocrat who, as governor of the Bank of England, shepherded the British economy through a Brexit that he himself had opposed.

As of Thursday afternoon Trump seemed to be wavering on his tariffs on both Canada and Mexico. The stock market’s reaction seems to have spooked his advisers, who look ready to claim some kind of victory (fentanyl repulsed, half an ounce at a time!) and retreat—at the urging of the auto industry, Trump backed off the tariffs on cars for a month, and farmers seeking fertilizer seem to have won some grace for potash. Trudeau, ridiculed repeatedly as “governor” by Trump, appears to have fought the giant with some success. If Carney or someone like him succeeds Trudeau in Ottawa, he’ll have a heavy role to play during the Trump years, of course, but he’ll also have a natural ally in the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, another progressive centrist. As our self-proclaimed king and his billionaire courtiers do their best to break America’s system, the English-speaking (and, in the Canadian case, proudly bilingual) sentinels of democracy will be in those royalist capitals that America once fought for its freedom.

I live in Vermont now, not far from the border—it’s odd but comforting to gratefully sniff the air of sanity that drifts down across the forty-fifth parallel. Long may the maple leaf fly above a sovereign and unbowed north. ♦