By the time you read this, I might be American. Probably not, but things feel frazzled and uncertain in Canada these days. Indeed, people inside and outside the United States are confronted right now—on a daily, even hourly basis—by an unprecedented version of life under the rule of Donald Trump. It has often been observed that Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally, while his critics take him literally but not seriously. These days, whether you live in Ukraine, Gaza, Greenland, Mexico, or, yes, Canada, it feels like you have to take him and his notions both literally and seriously. For months now, local and national conversations in Canada have taken on an unprecedented feeling of urgency, both in response to the hard fact of Trump’s threatened tariffs and his “taunty” tweets (as my teenaged daughters might put it) about making Canada the fifty-first state.
For as long as Canada has been a nation-state, it’s been prone to bouts of national identity-searching and identity-asserting. The identity-searching usually concerns national-unity challenges posed by separatist sentiments and movements originating in Quebec and other French-English, Catholic-Protestant tensions dating back to confederation in 1867. More recently, the identity-searching has been provoked by national reckonings with the legacy of Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples, and especially with its state-run residential school system, which involved significant participation on the part of churches and religious orders.
As for the identity assertion, it has three major sources. First is the nation-forming effects of Canada’s military contributions in the First World War, when Canadian troops who fought major battles in France—at Ypres in 1915, and Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele in 1917—forged a sense of purpose that was distinctly Canadian and not just another contribution to Mother Britain. The second source, believe it or not, is a set of major Canadian sports victories, including Canada defeating the Soviet Union in a 1972 hockey tournament known as the Summit Series and again, in the Canada Cup, in 1987, and just a few weeks ago, its defeating the United States in the N.H.L.’s “Four Nations Cup,” a Winter Olympics teaser that featured Montrealers booing the “Star Spangled Banner” before an early game, and then President Trump taunting “Governor Trudeau” in advance of the final. (The Americans lost, but the television ratings were great on both sides of the border, which is what really matters.) The third and most reliable source of national identity has been the fact that, no matter what else you can claim for or against the country, the one thing we all know for certain is that what it means to be Canadian is not to be American.
This is a matter of longstanding pride but also unacknowledged contradiction, given Canada’s de-facto protection under the U.S. continental security umbrella, its eager consumption of American goods and products, and its parochial excitement whenever a Canadian makes it big in America. When I was in graduate school in Boston, I used to amuse and annoy my New England roommates by pointing out a Canadian whenever one appeared on television. At one point, one of my roommates asked me “Dude, who cares that Leslie Nielsen’s Canadian?” We do, said a small Canadian voice inside my head. Once, when my Milwaukee-born wife and I were reminiscing about watching Space Shuttle flights as 1980s school kids in Wisconsin and Ontario, I pointed out that a lot of the shuttle’s important work was done thanks to the Canadarm. My wife snorted: “It’s not like we call it the America Shuttle.” But that’s because you don’t need to, I thought—it’s just assumed, by Americans and others, that the things on our screens and in the skies and everywhere in between and beyond are American unless proven otherwise. Now Canadians face a situation where this assumption has taken on an aggressive new dimension. Canadians who have always wanted more attention from the United States are now reaping a presidential whirlwind of it.
The literary critic Lionel Trilling once observed that we turn to novels because they have a particular capacity to capture and reflect “the hum and buzz of cultural implication” in the world around us. I’ve long admired that sense of things, both as a reader and writer, and I’m certainly noticing strange new hums and buzzes in Canada. After a recent Sunday Mass, I was politely, proudly corrected when I ordered an Americano at our local coffee shop. It’s now called a Canadiano. Taking my octogenarian father to do his grocery shopping in the east end of Toronto, I now hear repeated announcements of the store’s commitment to stock Canadian products. In a way that’s especially Canadian, these announcements end with a detailed, nearly apologetic qualification that this commitment is subject to continuous reassessment of the Canadian-ness of the products themselves. What if we find out that blueberries grown in Quebec or Nova Scotia come from bushes imported from Maine? How Canadian are those blueberries then? Apps now help shoppers make these determinations—Maple Scan, Shop Canadian, O SCANada. Five years ago, an editor would have made me take this kind of thing out of a short story because it’s too silly to be believable as satire. But this kind of patriotic scrupulosity is now real and feels necessary for many Canadians.
Politicians and journalists like to point to the multiple border crossings involved in the creation of car parts because of modern integrated manufacturing, or the downward pressure the tariff fight has been exerting on markets, but such facts don’t seem to have any bearing on Trump’s new trade policies. Never mind that only one percent of fentanyl imports to the United States come from Canada across the world’s longest undefended border; all that matters is that Trump believes, or claims to believe, otherwise. So far, at least, he is unresponsive to the kinds of pressure most politicians fear (removing U.S. liquor from Canadian store shelves, for example) or to the kinds of arguments that other politicians make. All those trips to Washington by Canada’s elected leaders to make the case against tariffs might be convincing governors and members of Congress, but so what? Such efforts assume shared norms of negotiation and reasonableness with the party one is trying to influence; these are no longer safe assumptions, as leaders around the world have now realized. And disappointed and offended as so many of us are, at some level we should not be surprised: Trump promised he was going to make big changes (BIG CHANGES! VERY BIG! YOU’LL SEE!) and now he’s doing it. It may be reckless, but, as a dramatic exertion of raw American power in service of its own prerogatives, this is what many Trump voters think America and the world need right now.
Because I’m a hopeful person, I want to end this dispatch by mentioning some of the positive aspects of the Trump effect in Canada. Three immediately come to mind. First, the Canadian political situation has been productively destabilized. For months, Canada has been slouching toward the election of a new Conservative government, to be led by right-wing culture warrior Pierre Polievre. The Conservatives have campaigned vigorously against the outgoing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, portraying him as a pretty boy with woke policies and woke socks. Trudeau announced his resignation earlier this year and the race to succeed him has just ended. Former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney won the leadership of the Liberal Party and becomes, as a result of Canada’s parliamentary system, Prime Minister-designate. With a federal election in the offing, polls are suddenly and dramatically shifting away from the Conservatives. Carney’s alpha-managerial bearing and experience, though untested by electoral politics, makes for a strong and likely winning contrast of leadership options against the caustic, lifelong politico Polievre, who must now do more than just troll Trudeau, both because Trump does it so much better and because he needs to distance himself from Trump and Trump-style politicking. Beyond said electoral politics, Canadians are now reassessing longstanding barriers to interprovincial trade, which didn’t seem to matter when most of the stuff we produced was going back and forth to and from Rust Belt States. Finally, Canadians are feeling more tied to one another because of their shared resistance against the United States. National—that is, Canadian—sentiment is being felt and expressed in Quebec in ways consistent with other parts of the country. (Merci, Monsieur le Président.)
The Globe and Mail recently published a poem titled “What Is Canada?” by the Canadian writer Claire Cameron. With typical Canadian self-deprecation, Cameron shrewdly reflects on her country’s perpetual self-questioning of its identity (Trudeau’s oft-quoted observation that Canada could be the world’s first “post-national state” hasn’t aged well), but she assures her readers that this is the way it’s always been for Canadians—and likely the way it always will be. In any case, Cameron suggests, it’s the Americans who should do some self-questioning now.
We’re the lobster capital of the world
back bacon and beer
brat actors turned rappers
you hear lots of languages spoken
Hockey? Yoga pants?
How would 25% tariffs affect this
there’s no Canada becoming the 51st state
economic ties don’t erase sovereignty
you’re trying to cut the pie up differently
he’s going to want the biggest piece
In this moment
I have never felt prouder
qu-est-ce que le Canada?
a better question is:
what is the United States?
This isn’t a question we’ve posed very often, because we always thought we knew the answer, whether we liked it or not. Now we Canadians no longer know the answer. Do you?
