Canada Is Spooked
The country is desperately trying to learn how to share a continent with an out-of-control superpower.
We can give ourselves far, far more than Donald Trump can ever take away, but it will—it will take extraordinary efforts. It won’t be business as usual. We will have to do things we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible. [...] I know, I know that these are dark days, dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust. We are getting over the shock, but let us never forget the lessons: we have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other. We need to pull together in the tough days ahead.
These lines, spoken by Mark Carney on Sunday moments after he was chosen to lead the governing Liberal Party of Canada, paint a startling picture of a suddenly unrecognizable relationship with our giant neighbor. For a leader on the cusp of becoming Canadian prime minister to just matter-of-factly assert that Canada can no longer trust the United States is geopolitics through the looking glass. Managing the fallout from this impossibility will now be the thing a Canadian prime minister has to do.
Americans, in their endless self-regard, have always vaguely figured Canadian politics must be largely about the United States. When you live in Canada—as I did from 2009 to 2024—you soon learn how silly that is. For the fifteen years I was there, Canadian politicians spent the vast bulk of their time dealing with Canadian problems: even during Trump 45, the psychodramas just south of the border seldom merited more than a glance from politicians worried about hospital wait times, taxes, infrastructure—the normal work of running a large country.
Hearing Carney’s speech, I barely recognize the country I left six months ago. Faced with an extraordinarily damaging trade war as well as direct, repeated threats against our sovereignty, Canadian politics have become what Americans imagined them to be all along: centrally about the United States. At some point over the last few weeks, as it sunk in that the bluster was different this time, the mood turned.
The stakes feel higher—much higher—than they ever seemed before. The dark sense that, looking north, Donald Trump sees Canada as America’s own Ukraine now hangs like a sword over our national conversation. Suddenly, there’s only one question that matters on the political scene: how on Earth are we supposed to share a continent with an out-of-control superpower?
The Liberals—left for dead by pollsters just a few weeks ago—suddenly have a real shot at retaining power. After ten years in office, Justin Trudeau had plainly outlasted his welcome. The government came to be seen as clueless about Canadians’ economic concerns, paralyzed by a housing affordability crisis it had no credible ideas to solve, overwhelmed by a huge wave of temporary migration that was rocking the country’s longstanding pro-immigration consensus, rudderless in the face of rising prices, and generally ossified in place. Canadians had come to see Trudeau as an empty suit: perfectly polished, but a leader of no substance.
In voting in Carney, the Liberals have given themselves a fighting chance. Nobody’ll ever accuse him of lacking substance. He’s the ultimate grown-up in the room: a hyper-experienced central banker in both Canada and the UK with a well-earned reputation for absolute cool in a crisis.
Suddenly, the Conservatives’ choice to plonk down for Pierre Poilievre, a populist right winger with unmistakably Trumpy flair, looks like a bad miscalculation. Having made a career posturing against the Liberals’ woke excesses and needling the gatekeeper elites at the CBC—Canada’s still-powerful public broadcasting corporation—Polievre had positioned himself as the populist alternative to the vacuity of Trudeau’s airhead Liberals. It was, to be sure, a bit of an unlikely act: Poilievre is every inch the career politician, with exactly zero experience in the private sector. Still, he is certainly a digital native, and, in normal times, his tough-on-crime fulminations and anti-Davos Man rants played great on YouTube.
Poilievre was the perfect Conservative leader for the campaign he thought we were going to have. Then came the Trump threats. Now, with our national back against the wall, Canadians are craving the mix of gravitas, old-time patriotism, and crisis management chops that Carney is uniquely positioned to offer.
For Carney, Poilievre’s populist streak makes for a target-rich environment. “Donald Trump,” Carney said, “thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer. Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered, because a person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him.”
Six months ago, anyone suggesting that at this year’s election we would be seriously discussing who was best positioned to prevent us being conquered by the United States would’ve come across as properly deranged: it was a hack plot fit for a dime-store pulp fiction thriller. Now, Carney and Poilievre will face off in an election unlike anything Canada has ever seen.
Just like Canadians, American allies across the globe are getting over the shock of finding in the United States an ally they can no longer trust. France and Germany are seeing blooms of anti-Americanism from across the political spectrum—and in public opinion polls—that would have been hard to imagine before January 20. They are groping, clumsily, towards a new way of speaking to and about their unrecognizable ally. The world that will emerge from this process is one we can only guess at.
But while the trend is global, Canada’s exposure makes it unique. With 70% of its exports flowing south, it is vulnerable to pressure from the United States in ways its European and Asian allies just aren’t. Carney, if he does get elected, will be positioned from Day One as a determined antagonist to an autocratic leader with an unusual degree of leverage as well as a nasty vindictive streak. There is little limit to the economic havoc Donald Trump can cause in Canada unless American institutions and American public opinion rein him in.
Please, American reader, do what you can to rein him in.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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"(Canada) is desperately trying to learn how to share a continent with an out-of-control superpower."
You're characterizing the country that de-banked and suppressed a massive anti-Covid lockdown movement as somehow civilized, decent, and in control? "Persuasion" is becoming less persuasive with every passing day.
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What a crock of globalist corporatist regime propaganda. Hey Canadian ruling elite, just drop YOUR tariffs and everything with the Trump and the American working class will be fine. Oh and also charge the US market rates for your oil.