Canada is back, baby. Since Mark Carney’s election as Prime Minister in April last year, he’s projected an image of brawny, swaggering capability – another silverback statesman in a new, multilateral world. He’s tussled with Trump over tariffs; hobnobbed with autocrats including Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi and strongly criticized the US attack on Iran. In fact, the anger that many Canadians seem to feel at their cousins across the border is startling – on a recent trip to the Yukon, I found almost every public toilet tagged with “Trump Tower” graffiti.

This newfound assertiveness is surprising. Canada, as the South Park movie astutely pointed out in 1999, is the eternal scapegoat of international politics. “It seems that everything has gone wrong since Canada came along,” runs the song “Blame Canada” in the film, as placards reading “Mothers Against Canada” are held aloft. Meek, polite and earnestly handwringing, for most of the 20th century it seemed to be Canada’s fate to be pushed around by its bigger, less right-on neighbor.

Well, no longer, apparently – but how much can we buy this pose? I’ll leave economists to argue over whether Carney can genuinely decouple from a country to which it sells 75 percent of its goods and shares a nearly 6,000-mile border. But a country’s reputation isn’t built on numbers alone. And that’s perhaps where Carney’s posturing rings most hollow.

Unlike the US, Canada has singularly failed to produce a national literature. Of course, America’s global cultural hegemony is unassailable. Yet even relative to its size, Canada punches far below its weight. Both France (population: 69 million) and Britain (70 million) have a vastly larger impact on global culture than Canada, with its 40 million people. The “Great American novel” is a cliché of first-year college courses, while the “Great British novel” or a “Great Nigerian novel” could be the subject of a lively discussion. The “Great Canadian novel” is a hollow joke.

Literary quality, or even basic popularity, become subservient to demands for equality

Literary quality, or even basic popularity, become subservient to demands for equality

This isn’t for lack of trying. For much of the past 70 years, the Canadian government has, in the words of the critic Nicholas Bradley, tried “to incentivize a national literature into being.” It is notably open-handed when it comes to supporting writers. As in the US, many working writers support themselves by teaching at colleges; but, unlike in the US, Canadian writers can also keep afloat via a raft of grants, book prizes and publishing subsidies. Canada Reads is an annual “Battle of the Books” broadcast on the country’s public broadcaster, CBC, in which five........

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