Seeing Stars

Canada is under attack. In their more than 150-year history, Canadians have never faced a president of the United States whose goal is the destruction of its northern neighbour. Donald Trump is different from what he was in his first term, and different from any other president whom Canadians have experienced.

No other president has publicly belittled Canada. No other president has openly declared that Canada should be made into an American state. No other president has questioned Canada’s right to exist. No other president has had as an agenda the tearing down of his own country. No other president has been so cruel, ignorant, and malignant.

The United States is inescapable. It’s loud, alluring, chaotic, powerful, and given to extremes. And it’s nearby — closer than nearby. A Canadian soldier once said that when a line was drawn between Canada and the United States, Canadians were bucking nature. He added that they’ve been bucking nature ever since.

Canada has also been bucking the United States. The great national challenge lies in the search for identity and independence when pitted against the forces of North American integration as well as the political, economic, military, and psychological power of the United States. The dynamic works best when Canada is not noticed in Washington. Being in the spotlight of an American administration is almost never a good thing.

Canada was born as a nation-state in 1867, but not because of an explosion of nationalism of the kind that we are seeing today. Canada was alone then, abandoned by the British and not wanting to be part of a United States that had been through a bruising civil war and had ended its trade agreement with British North America. Canadians huddled together and made a tiny country, consisting of Ontario and Quebec, each about a third of its current size, and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It was not an affair of the heart. It was simply that Canadians were better off together than apart.

There were prominent Americans, then as before, who thought it inevitable that they would possess what was still part of the British Empire. Yet they were not prepared to do the hard work of making it so, especially because Canada gave them few problems. It was stable, grey, good.

Americans were apt to regard Canadians with condescension. Canada would come America’s way soon enough. As my teacher Charles Stacey once quipped, “Who would not be an American if they had the chance?”

The political scientist Richard Maass offers another explanation. He argues that domestic factors and opinion blocked Washington from moving to make Canada into a state — or many states. A late-nineteenth-century newspaper map of North America carved Canada into twenty-eight states. But annexation didn’t happen, because the Americans did not want it to.

It also didn’t happen because Canadians did not want it to. In early times, invasions were thwarted. In 1775, the French Canadian militia took a crucial role in defeating what proved to be the final assault on Quebec; in 1812, French and English colonial militias and Indigenous warriors supported the British regular army.

As Canada was in the process of becoming, annexationist ideas and movements cropped up, mirroring homemade insecurities and the sense that across the border prosperity and success were in abundance. Yet these were never majority opinions.

The government of John A. Macdonald went in a different direction. Canada’s first foreign policy was a tough nation-building strategy developed as a means of survival on the North American continent. Canada’s leaders, in the words of the historian Robert Craig Brown, saw the United States as “much less a friendly neighbour than an aggressive competitor power waiting for a suitable opportunity to fulfil its destiny of the complete conquest of North America.” Canadians negotiated hard and more than held their own.

As Canada made a country, the United States made an empire. In the 1890s, a country of 70 million people completed its transcontinental journey and looked outward. The U.S. built a modern navy, defeated Spain, took control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, annexed the Hawaiian Islands, and extended its reach into China. It asserted that it had special rights, privileges, and responsibilities in the western hemisphere. It was exceptional.

American power — the American Empire — was bound to bear down on Canada. In the early 1900s, armed American ships patrolled the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, contravening the agreement that limited what could be deployed in those waters. At the same time, Theodore Roosevelt sent 800 soldiers to Alaska and threatened to “get ugly” if Canada persisted in its claims to own the water routes inland to the Yukon goldfields. The case went to an arbitration panel. Canada deserved to lose because its legal case was weaker than that of the U.S. But that didn’t matter. The president was going to have his way.

Canada felt bullied. The Toronto News imagined that Canadians were being told that they were “entitled to the temporary use of all air not required for United States purposes.” The Canadian government’s response was to move toward self-reliance. Steps were taken to assert law and sovereignty in the North and to assume responsibility for the defence of the coastlines.

Wilfrid Laurier, who as prime minister was on the losing end of the Alaska decision, saw in it an “evident American wish to acquire further territory.” Hudson Bay and the Arctic were possible future targets of a “decidedly dangerous” power. Decidedly dangerous but also unavoidable, not least as a major destination for Canadian commerce.

During the 1891 election, as leader of the opposition, Laurier had proposed an overarching free trade arrangement with the United States. Macdonald wrapped himself in the flag and successfully made the case that getting that close to the Americans would be the end of the Canadian national experiment. Laurier was made to seem a traitor.

Laurier won the next election and the three after that. In 1911, he returned to the people with a Canada-U.S. deal that protected Canadian business while promising that the products of the farms, the fisheries, the mines, and the forests would find easy access to the southern market. It was the apparently perfect bargain, but it too was defeated because Canadians were made to see it as a threat to their sovereignty, their national economy, and their still powerful tie to Britain. Laurier was again made to seem a traitor.

It didn’t help Laurier that Champ Clark of Missouri told his colleagues in the House of Representatives, “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole.” And we know from American historians that it was Washington’s aim to turn Canada into their country’s economic backyard: a state of the United States in all but name.

The first part of the twentieth century saw the similarities between the two countries intensify. The U.S. became Canada’s leading trading partner and the key investor in the Canadian economy, while Canadians and Americans attended the same plays, ate the same breakfast food, and used the same slang. People moved back and forth almost as if there was no border. Populations mingled. One out of every ten people a Canadian met on any given day was likely to be an American.

The two countries resolved the disputes that threatened their relationship and invented the International Joint Commission, consisting of three Canadians and three Americans. Established in 1909, the IJC would advise on the waters that Canada and the United States shared across a long frontier. It became a symbol of the way Canadians and Americans solved their differences collegially and peacefully — in stark contrast, North Americans boasted, to blood-soaked Europe. The IJC is part of the carefully conceived border-sharing network that Trump is now threatening.

In 1923, Warren Harding, the first U.S. president to set foot in Canada while in office, spoke to a large Vancouver crowd about the parallel paths that the two countries were walking at their own pace: “you helping us and we helping you,” as he put it. So long as Canada and the United States maintained their independence and recognized their interdependence, those paths could not “fail to be highways of progress and prosperity.” Harding assured Canadians that the “ancient bugaboo of the United States scheming to annex Canada” had long ago disappeared. He added that Canada should desist from thinking that it would be a good idea to annex the U.S. Not recorded, so far as I know, was the look on his face when he said that.

The president who knew Canada best was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Canadian counterpart for a decade from the Depression through the Second World War was Mackenzie King. Before he became prime minister, the Harvard-educated King worked in the Rockefeller business empire. Opponents called him “the American.” FDR, also Harvard-educated, welcomed King as an old friend. Mind you, Roosevelt could say “my old friend” in thirteen languages. Theirs was a political friendship of the highest order.

In August 1938, Roosevelt travelled to Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, to receive an honorary degree. In words he had written on the train trip north, the American president pledged, with King nearby, not to stand “idly by” if Canada was under enemy attack. King told Roosevelt that he had “dropped a bomb” and hastened to issue a statement that said, in effect, Thank you, Mr. President, but no thanks. Canada would take care of its own defences. Rearmament had already begun, opposed by almost all of Canada’s politicians but led by King.

Roosevelt wrote to the governor general after the Queen’s speech to say that the pledge was “so obvious” that he didn’t understand why an American president had not made that promise fifty years before.

According to a King biographer, Bruce Hutchison, who was an Ottawa insider, the prime minister told a friend that of course Roosevelt would like to annex Canada. “I would, too, if I were President,” King said with a laugh. “Such notions, detected at the back of Roosevelt’s mind,” wrote Hutchison, “did not disturb King in the least. They were not practical politics and could be ignored.” King told the American representative in Ottawa that annexation would be bad for both countries. “Certainly you have enough troubles of your own without wanting to add us to them.”

King and Roosevelt met again at Ogdensburg, New York, in August 1940. Canada was at war, and though the United States was not, Roosevelt was leaning as hard toward a beleaguered Britain as he thought public opinion would allow. With France defeated, Hitler held most of Europe in the palm of his hand. Britain was in peril, and who knew what was next? Minds turned to ensuring the safety of North America.

At Ogdensburg, Roosevelt and King agreed on a military alliance to defend the continent. The accusation quickly came that King had turned Canada into a protectorate of the United States. From colony to, briefly, an independent wartime nation and back to being a colony again.

With Ogdensburg, Canada was clearly moving away from Britain and toward the United States, but King was taking care of Canada’s defences so that he could give more to the British war effort. Britain was where King’s heart lay and where he thought Canada’s interests lay if Canada was not to become a state of the United States. Nor did King’s Canada allow Washington to dominate efforts to keep the Atlantic Ocean safe from the German enemy.

Ogdensburg was the beginning of a Canadian-American military understanding that came to include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the North American Air Defense Agreement. Links between the two militaries accumulated as Canada and the United States fought the Cold War together. Trade with the U.S. grew to half of all Canada’s exports. American investment poured into the country. But not free trade. Mackenzie King, in his last days as prime minister, cast his mind back to the 1911 election and scuttled a Canada-U.S. trade agreement.

Opinion surveys showed that Canadians identified themselves positively with the United States: its leadership, its international aims, and its values. Polls taken between 1948 and the early 1960s demonstrated that at least half of the Canadian population did not think that the United States exercised undue influence on Canadian life. A 1964 poll revealed that 29 percent of Canadians were willing to join the United States.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Canadians sided with John F. Kennedy, rather than with John Diefenbaker, who supported the United States only reluctantly. Yet a short time later, during the Canadian election campaign of 1963, the Chief could make inroads with his declaration that Canada would never allow itself to become a place where JFK’s Americans could store their nuclear weapons. Diefenbaker declared it was “me against the Americans,” and he nearly won an election that seemed sure to be a victory for the opposition Liberals.

That was a hint of what was to come. From the mid-1960s into the 1980s, the United States seemed to Canadians to take a wrong turn: the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X; denials of civil rights; corporate scandal; and political corruption.

It was easy to think of the United States in those years as a wayward empire, led by irresponsible people who threatened world peace, and to hope that Canada could keep it and them at arm’s length. There was a skepticism about the impact of American influences on Canadian life and an unwillingness to follow along inevitably after the United States. Polls demonstrated that Canadians felt more distinctive and were concerned about who controlled the levers of their economy. The public enjoyed government rhetoric directed at the United States and the promise of policies that would enhance the country’s independence.

The government of Pierre Trudeau responded to Canadian nationalism with a series of expedients to deal with the giant American economic and cultural appetite and to shore up support in the now strong nationalist constituency. Ottawa set out three options for living with the United States: the status quo, getting closer, and establishing distance. The Third Option was the choice, and trade diversification in the direction of Japan and Europe was the aim. The U.S. was bemused and amused. “Lots of luck, Canada,” was the response of one senior American official. And so it proved.

A new mood in Canada thought that Trudeau had been too unfriendly to the United States and asked for a prime minister who would be less so. That’s what Canadians got in 1984. Brian Mulroney promised “good relations, super relations” with the United States. The next year, Mulroney greeted Ronald Reagan in Quebec City on St. Patrick’s Day. The dozens of Americans who formed the official party moved into the Château Frontenac, which was designated the Quebec City White House. The spectacle of the two leaders in lockstep led nationalists like Jack Granatstein to the conclusion that the United States had annexed Brian Mulroney.

The bruising negotiation of a comprehensive Canadian-American free trade agreement followed, as did the 1988 election that came down to a vote for or against the unreserved leap into the U.S. market that had been long resisted. The Liberal leader John Turner and the New Democrats’ Ed Broadbent used the rhetoric of the fifty-first state. They weren’t alone in doing so. The Toronto Star asked, “A sovereign nation — or the 51st state?” A Liberal campaign button read: “51st state: Mulroney for Governor.”

In the leaders’ debate, according to the historian Stephen Azzi, Turner found the words to tap into English Canada’s perennial fear of falling into Uncle Sam’s grasping hand. “We built a country east and west and north,” he declared. “We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States, because when the economic levers go the political independence is sure to follow.”

The forces against free trade won the day but lost the election. Mulroney secured 43 percent of the vote, the Turner Liberals 32 percent, and the NDP 20 percent. More than half the ballots were against free trade — but to no effect. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was expanded with Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was renegotiated under and signed by Trump in 2018. Now back in office, he regards it as the worst trade deal ever done.

It’s tempting to draw a straight line between the warnings of then and the calamity of now. Almost four decades of history and the time-honoured patterns of cooperation and conflict get in the way of that. Even before 1988, we were too reliant on the United States economy.

Canadians have been brought to a reckoning. Free trade seemed to work so well that even Trump’s first presidency couldn’t stop the momentum. NAFTA brought prosperity — uneven prosperity, yes, but prosperity. Those supply lines chugged along and seemed even, in the late 1990s, to promise a borderless future. Nationalism went into hiding. Canadians became complacent. They didn’t pay enough attention to our alliances and the multilateral institutions that were the bulwarks of Canada’s postwar success.

Canada didn’t think through a foreign policy for the twenty-first century or the implications of what an ever more intolerant United States meant for our place in the world. The Canadian military, once one of the best anywhere, was allowed to atrophy. Pierre Trudeau’s government was the last to spend 2 percent of GDP on defence. Somehow Canadians let themselves become alone in the world, apart from the United States, yet relying too much on the United States. Canada became a vulnerable country in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.

But let’s not take the analysis too far. Canada’s three decade-long governments were good partners to the United States: during and after 9/11 under Jean Chrétien, serving at America’s side in Afghanistan in the Stephen Harper years, and cooperatively rearranging the NAFTA terms under Justin Trudeau and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland.

Trump and Trumpism are not Canada’s fault. No one could have imagined the cruelty and ignorance of a leader who cares not at all about America’s friends and admires its enemies. We are on new ground in Canadian-American relations. We cannot know whether the patterns of independence and interdependence that have for a century and a half defined the shape of northern North America are gone for now or gone forever. Or maybe they are not gone at all.

There is no doubting Trump’s malevolence toward Canada and the seriousness of what we now face. But perhaps Trump is overreaching: Canada as the fifty-first state, Ukraine as the same, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza. Perhaps the interdependence of Canada and the United States will defeat Trump’s menace. And perhaps he’s made a mistake by reminding Canadians what their country and their independence mean to them.