Commentary on Canada’s anti-Trumpian election result missed a key point, which is that it was due to many Canadians being anti-American bigots.
I say this startling thing despite being blessed with Canadian relatives and friends whom I love, despite admiring and liking many others, and despite (perhaps because of) having for decades visited, lived in, and worked in Canada.
Familiarity with our northern neighbor casts light on the comeback of the Liberal Party, which was reelected to a fourth term despite 10 years of misgovernment and a stagnating economy.
The reason Canada’s deep and long-standing anti-American prejudice has not been mentioned much is probably that doing so might diminish the blame that attaches to President Donald Trump, which is real enough. He snatched conservative defeat from the jaws of victory by alienating voters from candidates linked to him whom they had recently seemed likely to elect.
As a result, Canada will not be led by a sensible conservative populist, Pierre Poilievre, who would have been a staunch American ally, but by Mark Carney, a man committed to pugnacious anti-Americanism.
This debacle, involving a 20-plus point swing in sentiment, was stimulated by Trump goading Canadians, telling them their nation would become America’s 51st state, and by insulting former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor.”
But the central and abiding question is: Why was Trump’s bleacher-style jeering determinative? It’s true that any people might be riled by a foreign leader mocking their insignificance, but that is not the answer. Why was it decisive? Trump wasn’t on the ballot. Poilievre would not have countenanced infringement on Canadian sovereignty any more than Carney would.
The answer, sadly, is that many Canadians — enough of them to justify seeing it as a national characteristic — define themselves by being not American. They flatter themselves that they are not as pushy, not as materialistic, not as brash, generally nicer.
This self-regarding myth is clasped to the Canadian bosom because it soothingly compensates for the fact that Canada is an insignificant and underachieving country compared to the United States. The resentment that this measurable inferiority engenders has been lovingly nurtured by an increasingly anti-American Left.
As a small boy in Canada, I was aware of a widely held view that Canadians were “better” than Americans. I took this at face value, as children tend to do. As a young man, I noted that Canadian travelers sewed their national flag onto their backpacks to avoid the thin-skinned horror that their accents and highly American culture might prompt strangers to mistake them for Americans.
WILL TRUMP MAKE BAD DEALS WITH CHINA, IRAN, AND RUSSIA?
When living and working in Toronto over the turn of the millennium, I became accustomed to hearing “American” used casually as an insult. I helped run a Canadian national newspaper that was founded with the explicit mission of broadening national political discussion to include some conservative ideas, of freeing it from its throttling confines between the far Left and middling Left. This effort and the entrepreneur who backed it were deprecated as being “rather American” and “too American.”
I’m sorry to report that Canadians tend not to like us on this side of the 49th parallel. Trump’s trolling gave them permission to unleash their deepest-seated antipathy. Now they’ll get leftist government good and hard. A great pity.