By Bruce Gilley
Disparaging the United States has been a Canadian tradition since the War of 1812. Now that an American leader has, for the first time in memory, offered some gentle ripostes, Canadians are playing the victim.
Unless they pull out of the national nosedive, the country may never recover.
I grew up in Calgary and am familiar with the deeply woven forms of anti-Americanism that define the national identity. The joke goes that Canada is the world’s oldest continuous civilization of anti-Americans.
Until the end of the Cold War, most of this was merely the constructive friction of a close partnership. However, the safety brought by the Soviet collapse freed Canada to display its anti-Americanism more openly. “I like to stand up to the Americans. It’s popular,” then-prime minister Jean Chrétien said in overheard comments in 1997.
The George W. Bush years pushed Canadian disdain to a whole new level. When Harvard academic Michael Ignatieff returned to Canada to run for prime minister as the Liberal party leader in 2006, he established his bona fides by condemning the country that had made his career.
The anti-American invective from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., meanwhile, echoes the anti-British bombast that poured forth from the Voice of the Arabs radio in Gamal Nasser’s Egypt. The CBC also produces a steady stream of anti-American cultural elites, such as former governor-general Michaelle Jean, whose husband in 2006 made a conspiracy theory documentary that accused the U.S. of colluding with Iran’s hostage-takers in 1979.
Canada’s high priestess of literature, Margaret Atwood, fires off anti-American volleys knowing that her left-leaning readership in America with accept them with their famous good-naturedness. Her dystopian 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, describes a fundamentalist Christian society in New England that forces women to bear children. It is an unabashed hate letter to the American founding.
Disgusted Canadians often migrate, today accounting for 821,000 American residents, enough to fill a major Canadian city.
“I don’t think we can keep sticking our finger in the eye of America and somehow feel that they won’t react,” warned Liberal Senator Jerry Grafstein in 2002. He had proposed a national day celebrating the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks as a way to combat “endemic” anti-Americanism in the country.
The following year, future Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper described the Liberal government as “driven by a petty jealousy of American power. Over and over, we hear a stream of small-minded, undignified, anti-American comments passed off as foreign policy.” His moderation was abandoned after 2015 under Justin Trudeau, whose father, Pierre, wore his anti-Americanism as proudly as the roses in his lapel.
The younger Trudeau’s ascension could not have been more ill-timed. After a national love affair with Barack Obama, Canadian elites foamed at the very idea of Donald Trump. “Perhaps Canadians who are in the habit of blindly signalling their contempt for a duly elected president should consider the fact that they are insulting the American electorate every time they make another tired Trump joke,” wrote retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht before the 2020 election.
The plea fell on deaf ears. So, as Trump prepared to take office for the second time in 2024, he finally let loose. Liberal mismanagement of the country, and the bilateral relationship, he charged, had rendered the country “not viable.” It was as if 200 years of Canadian identity was finally coming home to roost.
The subsequent meltdown in Canada has been alternately endearing and enraging. If it continues, it could fuel a catastrophic break with the United States.
I’ll be in Canada this summer, as usual, visiting the family cottage in British Columbia. In years past I have never worried about my Oregon plates, since there are plenty from Washington state as well. But for the first time, I may back the car into the boatyard lot and conceal my origins.
Meanwhile, I hope my former countrymen will spend some quality time in front of a mirror.
First published in the Calgary Herald
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4 Responses
Let’s hope, because Trump is right. Without our largesse, they are not viable when insisting on the course they’re headed.
I do wonder. I am 54 and grew up in Canada before the original FTA.
It was fine.
The FTA was something we sought, albeit with concerns, and was also pursued by the Reagan Administration and we felt we needed to buy into that agenda as well. Many sectors in Canada were hurt, others gained mightily. The lives of most ordinary people as citizens and consumers looked exactly the same. In the US, similarly, some sectors may have suffered to a modest degree as befits an economy ten times larger, some sectors definitely gained, and probably the lives of most Americans didn’t even notice.
So to date, binding ourselves more closely and deliberately to the US economy than even was inevitable by geography was a net positive or net neutral and it aligned with US policy goals anyway. Only now that US policy goals toward us have shifted so suddenly and radically does it look, just possibly, like it was a nearly 40 year long mistake we should have strived to avoid as hard as we could.
I’m assuming that these arrangements were what you meant by “largesse”, so I mainly aim to emphasize that these trade agreements were part of US policy too, we felt no little pressure as well as possible gains, and the economic impacts on both countries were probably net positive and heavily based on which sector one had holdings in. If it hadn’t benefited so many American sectors, it would never have passed. It has always been about the competing interests of American economic players and their congressional representatives.
Otherwise I’m not sure to what largesse you were referring. I’m not aware we were getting USAID money, at any rate. That would be funny.
I wasn’t sure what you meant by the course we’re headed. I could do with a Conservative government, one that moved the needle more than Harper managed [which was hardly at all], on everything from social issues to defence policy. I’m 54 and I don’t think I’ve been living in the country I inherited for most of my life. Any pushback welcome. But on the whole the problems we face are the problems of the entire west, and I’m not sure Trump’s efforts to push back on them in the US can be expected to get the job of reversal done, quite yet.
Most of us understand it was trolling.
Many of us, as do many Americans, regard trolling [and also beloved equivalent leftist behaviours like snark and sarcasm], pranking and so on as deviant behaviour, not to be tolerated even among friends, family or acquaintances without punishment. Hence we do not think it covers any head of state or government in glory to practice it.
But that’s just the general, social norms element to it. And there are many in both countries who regard these inferior personality traits as normal, so we do have to tolerate their existence to some degree. Our people do them to.
Some random additional notes:
On the international level, it is not normal or acceptable for a head of state to “troll” another nation. It’s just not. So if he could act like a grown man and president that would be appreciated. Comments about annexing other nations are right out. Unacceptable even as jokes.
And all that is coming from a pro-American Canadian well to the right of PP. I just appreciate acknowledgment that I have a country and don’t want to give it up. One of my concerns with the US is actually because I’m well to the right of PP. The US is many things, one of which has for generations been the fount of Marxism and Critical Theory and all that flow from them. Complete openness to American culture is dangerous.
You won’t ever have heard me or my parents disparaging the US in general, though, nor now, we’re from the camp that always disdained the Canadian left on that as on everything else. Inferiority complexes do not dignify a nation, and are not needed anyway.
But then we were never going to invade the US or make it an economic colony. We’re Belgium to its France. That’s a key distinction between American and Canadian reactions to any exchange of insults.
Plus American pop culture does include more than a few insults to Canada, to which we have not hitherto reacted, of course, because they’re in sitcoms, cartoons, tv dramas, and so on. Occasionally from congressmen pretending not to be aware all the major threats enter the US directly from outside North America, about 1% of the time maybe through Canada.
Last one is about my only positive note about Chretien- he declined to take part in the invasion of Iraq. That was smart. Harper would have taken us in. That would have been stupid.
I agree almost entirely with Trump’s policies – DOGE, DEI, Israel, immigration, lower taxes, dismembering the deep state, USAID, defunding Jew hating universities, to name only a few. I disagree completely with his tariff policies. Every rational economist from Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat, Cobden, Friedman, and Sowell, have condemned them as counterproductive. The archetypal Smoot-Hawley tariffs are a prime example. Tariffs will hurt Americans even more than Canadians in the long run.
Trump’s trolling of Canada is unbecoming of a great American leader. It is inexplicably nasty.