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Canada’s Mistake Was Believing the Border No Longer Mattered

Free trade with the US made us wealthier. It also left us vulnerable

If you’ve noticed more national flags adorning Canadian streets, even in Montreal where the fleur-de-lys is far more common, you’re not alone. Every day is Canada day. Annexationist rhetoric will do that to a country.

Since taking office, United States president Donald Trump has repeatedly mused about making Canada the country’s “cherished” fifty-first state, claiming Canada is not economically or militarily viable without the US. The economics underlying the president’s argument were fabricated and fantastical, but this was the world’s most powerful country, helmed by an unpredictable and appetitive man, threatening Canadian sovereignty.

But sudden patriotism can’t obscure the fact that Canadians were caught flat footed. Over nearly forty years of ever deepening economic, security, and military co-operation with the US, Canada had abandoned what was once its axiomatic principle: its separateness from America.

For the first century of its existence, Canada defined itself in opposition to the US—a necessary unifying narrative for a country so vast and diverse. But it abandoned that narrative in 1988, when the country voted in an election widely understood as a referendum on a sweeping free trade agreement with the US. The economy of Canada changed dramatically as companies reoriented to serve the massive market to their south, now largely free from protectionist barriers. As one writer put it, in 1988 the promise of American-style prosperity came to supersede concerns for preserving a distinctly Canadian model of social democracy.

This was a mistake. Canada’s national purpose is rooted in what some have called the “heroic delusion” that underpinned modern Canadian nationalism: that it can be insulated politically from the influence of the superpower next door. Maintaining that collective suspension of disbelief is necessary to making the imagined community of Canada cohere: Canada was founded in deliberate defiance of the Manifest Destiny of the US to control the entirety of the North American continent; losing sight of that North Star opens Canada up to dissolving into a mess of its own contradictions.

If I can claim any special insight into Canadian identity, it has been acquired through a familiar route. I immigrated from Ireland in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2010 and, through a mix of accident and good fortune, ended up teaching Canadian politics in Montreal. In my classes, I focus on Canada’s origins and its political culture. Nationalism, I should say, comes easily to me. I was educated, in Irish, by stiff-spined cultural nationalists who espoused highly selective but enthralling tales of the Irish people’s fight for self-determination over the centuries. Now, pulling at the nationalist threads of Canada’s history, I’m especially captivated by its founders’ desire to craft a bulwark against American expansionism.

Even today, university-age students carry with them a certain concern for excessive American influence over Canada, despite living their whole lives in the era of continental economic integration. A nightmarish cartoon of the excesses of Bible Belt America—God, guns, Confederate LARPers—is pregnant in their imagination. The forty-ninth parallel is the barrier that keeps all that at bay. They know, somehow, not to take Canada for granted.

Almost all instinctively approach the question of Canadian political culture by setting up a dichotomy with the US but quickly pull back from that framing, feeling as though it is insufficient—maybe even pathetic—to define oneself in relation to a neighbour. Something compels them to suggest that there must be more to Canada than not being the US.

I make it a vital part of my classes to disabuse students of this notion.

Canada has always been a fragile political construction. When Canada was founded, on July 1, 1867, it was not a nation in the traditional sense but rather a diverse population of anglophones and francophones, Catholics and Protestants, beset by stark regional differences in economy and culture. Both formal and informal institutions, like our party system and practices of federalism, took shape around this reality. Most of the territory felt a strong desire to maintain a close connection to the monarchy and the British empire, but the colonies of British North America were otherwise far apart from one another, geographically and psychologically.

The country’s first prime minister, the hard-drinking political pragmatist Sir John A. Macdonald, was all too aware of the fragilities this entailed, stating in 1872 that Confederation “is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone.”

One of Macdonald’s key partners in drumming up support for a legislative union, the Catholic Irish émigré Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was among those who most starkly framed the project of Canada. “When the three cries among our next neighbours are money, taxation, blood,” McGee insisted, “it is time for us to provide for our own security” or risk making easy pickings for the 1 million troops of the Union army.

McGee unified communities across the country through shared hostility to the “universal democracy........

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