O Canada!

The Canada of the American political imagination isn't a real country. The Canada that does exist, however, deserves better from the United States.

The Canada that American political junkies discuss doesn’t really exist.

For a certain kind of left-wing American, Canada is a magical ideological paradise where consensual left-wing politics produces a prosperous social welfare state, and everyone is united around the onward march of social justice and the battle against global warming. It’s a place where college-educated people in Toronto can worry about the ethics of yoga and cultural appropriation and no one ever rolls their eyes about virtue signaling because everyone is so nice, progressive, and virtuous. In the Trumpian imagination, on the other hand, Canada is a totalitarian hell hole where woke health officials are bent on creating political gulags for anti-vaxers, and rabid protectionists impoverish the American working class.

Neither of these countries is real.

Canada is actually just Canada. It does have a more generous social welfare state than the United States. It also provides fewer legal protections for certain kinds of constitutional rights. Contrary to the Trumpian imagination, Canada isn’t particularly protectionist. (One of the big problems with Trump’s tariffs as an anti-protectionist negotiating tactic against Canada is that there is very little protectionism for Canada to negotiate away.) Over the last decade, it’s had chronically low growth and run large deficits. From time to time, there are nasty cultural fights, such as the various efforts of Quebec to create a Canadian-style laicity through banning religious garb by government employees, a rule that would seem to impose burdens only on Muslims and Sikhs. The oil-producing west of Canada, which has borne the economic brunt of the climate-change-fighting center of Canada, has often been more than a little hostile toward the federal government in Ottawa. Canada has the same problems with the overregulation of construction and high housing costs that afflict much of the United States. And so on. In short, Canada is neither utopia nor dystopia. It’s an actual country dealing with the reality of trade offs, policy successes and failures, and cultivating a sense of shared identity.

Earlier this week Mark Carney emerged as the victor (of sorts) in the Canadian general election. He succeeds Justin Trudeau, who is the kind of politician on whom NPR-listeners in the United States are likely to develop a starry-eyed crush. He is a good looking nepo-baby (his dad was PM twice in the 1970s and again in the 1980s). He is articulate, reliably progressive on culture and climate, and has the kind of TED-talk intelligence that people with degrees in cultural studies imagine as constituting policy acuity. I never liked him. He has always been a bit too precious and a bit too economically feckless for my taste. I am happy to say that as of February of this year, I was joined in my assessment by the majority of Canadian voters, who looked set to deliver a drubbing to Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

Then came Donald Trump’s asinine tariffs against Canada and his unconscionable dreams of annexing our neighbor. It turns out, that Trump’s political genius extended to accomplishing what looked just a few weeks earlier to be impossible: He made the Liberal Party popular again in Canada. Carney, who succeeded Trudeau, found that by running against Trump he didn’t have to run on Trudeau’s legacy, and by tacking away from some of the Liberals’ more unpopular economic policies he could achieve a plurality in the parliament. Presumably he will create a government by picking up the votes of the New Democratic Party — a tiny party that exists to outflank Liberals on the left — or by putting some Conservatives into his cabinet.

I suspect that Carney’s biggest problem going forward will be that he is still the leader of the Liberal Party. He sits atop the same apparatus of activists, politicians, and policy experts that governed under Trudeau. Carney has a marvelous villain in Donald Trump, but the reality is that Canada can no more escape the need for the U.S. economy than Brexit Britain can economically decouple from the EU. The emotional appeal of telling the United States to ____-off is understandable, but it’s not really an economic option. Furthermore, there are limits on Carney’s ability to move away from the policies that made Trudeau unpopular. The only difference is that Liberals now get to pursue those policies in an even less economically favorable environment. Good luck.

All that said, a part of me cheered on Monday when Carney won. With all my caveats above, it seems to me that the only way of understanding his victory is as a rebuke to Donald Trump. A very smart Canadian friend warned me against viewing Canadian elections through the lens of American politics and of course he’s right. But I can’t really help myself, because it seems that I also have a Canada of the imagination.

On my mother’s side, I am descended from United Empire Loyalists who fled the United States after independence and settled in Upper Canada, what is today Ontario. I am named after a Canadian — Nathan Staker — who converted to Mormonism in the 1830s and emigrated to Missouri just in time to be beaten by the anti-Mormon militia, dispossessed of all of his property by the state government, and forced across the Mississippi River by Governor Lilburn Boggs’ order that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.” A number of years ago, I found a reference by anti-Mormons in Missouri to the Latter-day Saints as a band of “Canadian banditti” and I thought, “My ancestors!” Nor are my Canadian connections purely on the distaff side. My father was literally in the very first group of Latter-day Saint missionaries sent in to Quebec. He was called as a missionary to Ottawa. After a few months in Canada, he was given a dictionary and grammar, sent to Montreal, and told to learn French. Some of my earliest memories as a child are of the Quebec flag that was displayed from time to time in my Salt Lake City living room.

I have other connections to Canada. Much of my professional life has been shaped by the so-called “New Private Law Theory” that has its origins at the University of Toronto, and I have been hosted by Canadian colleagues in Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. A number of years ago, I was involved in public affairs for the LDS Church and got to know marvelous church public affairs volunteers in Toronto, Montreal, and Nova Scotia. It turns out that I even have chunks of Canadian history — Cartier, Champlain, the Hudson Bay Company, the Dieppe Raid, and the storming Juno Beach on D-Day — squirreled away in my memory.

All of these associations came flooding out of me when Trump announced his idiotic tariffs and his creepy desire to make Canada our “beloved 51st state.” He made me very angry. Canada does not deserve such treatment. It turns out that I had a far deeper affection for Canada than I had realized.

Hence, acknowledging the risk of filling in the space north of the border with imaginary countries and realizing that Canadian politics is also just about Canadian politics, I am going to enjoy — at least for a moment — the resuscitation of the Liberal Party and Mark Carney’s unlikely victory as a rebuke to our president’s unconscionable treatment of a friend and ally.

O Canada!