A Wretched Motley Crew

For six or seven unprecedented decades, Canada and its allies shared three powerful assumptions: that democracies would multiply, trade would grow, and borders would stay open. NAFTA and an enlarging European Union were poster children for these megatrends. Sadly, in the age of Trump, Brexit, and COVID‑19, all three comforting nostrums — signs of history’s seeming drift toward better times — have hit the buffers. According to Freedom House, an independent watchdog based in Washington, the world has seen fourteen consecutive years of democratic decline since 2006. The Brookings Institution reports that exports as a share of global GDP peaked in 2010. And since 2015, a global migration crisis, a series of travel bans, a smaller EU, and now a pandemic have brought hard borders back with a vengeance, over­shadowing the scores of fences, barriers, and walls erected in the decades since 1989.

With many land crossings closed and democracies tottering, now is the right...