Canada's New Identity?

[This was posted earlier to Facebook, originally an article from the G&M.  I'm posting it here verbatim and unedited.]

 

"This was in the Globe and Mail. Worth a read and some thought. Canada has been carving out a new identity, slowly but surely. What are we becoming?  Our bold declaration of sovereignty is just the latest signal that this country, long defined by cautious evolution, is both changing and being changed.

 

by Stephen Marche, author of "The Next Civil War" and the host of the podcast, "Gloves Off".

 

In the aftermath of the collapse of trade negotiations with the U.S., it has become clear that Canada’s refusal was so much more than a mere economic decision. It was an almost revolutionary statement of independence.

 

Canada is not, by its nature, a revolutionary country. A series of crises have forced our evolution, from colonies to Confederation to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, we’ve become a little more Canadian over time. Now, the global position we used to hold – sidekick to America in the liberal world order – has fallen apart. Some people are still managing to pretend, at least to themselves, that the old times will return, but there’s no going back. And nobody can articulate a sensible strategy that would rely on such misplaced optimism.

 

While it is hard, nearly impossible, to see past the current dumpster fire of moment-by-moment fury to see the larger picture, Canada is changing, fundamentally and permanently – partly because of outside events, but also because of choices we are making in how we react to those events. Canada’s refusal last week to be vassalized by the United States is one such small, vital choice.

 

So nearly two years into the second Trump administration, it is time to ask: Where is this all going? What is Canada becoming?

 

The world is changing so rapidly that any articulation of Canada’s place in it can only be partial and temporary. The second Trump administration is a global crisis as much as a Canadian one; after all, Mr. Trump’s neo-imperialist 51st-state rhetoric soon morphed into serious musing about an invasion of Greenland, which sent NATO members scrambling earlier this year. This complicates any effort to define what Canada is and is trying to be.

 

Since Mark Carney’s speech at Davos in January, Canada has become a leader. This country has always been quite popular – which is fairly easy when you don’t have a secret service or a taste for starting wars, and you have (until recently) an open immigration policy – but the reasons for our current prominence are mostly accidental.

For one thing, Canada was first to understand that the U.S. was curdling. We have the clearest eyes on America. As far as any country can know where America is heading, it’s us. For another, every country has strengthened their bonds with other countries as a natural defence against America’s retreat, and Canada is at the centre of those expanding connections. This strategy of variable geometry is well under way, and its progress has been stunning. When Gloves Off mapped all the connections that have been established since Mr. Trump returned to power, we found that 116 agreements had been announced between 31 countries excluding the United States.

 

When you change your relationship to the rest of the world, you change who you are. Our material reality is changing; our spiritual reality will change as a result, too.

One way to read this change is to say that Canada is turning toward Europe and away from the United States. “This fall we will begin intense discussions with the European Union, build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership,” Mr. Carney announced the day after the U.S. trade negotiations collapsed. Even minor distinctions, like the fact that we’re joining the Eurovision Song Contest, matter. But this political push and pull between Europe and the United States has long existed in Canada. We have always found a balance between the economic freedom, frontier mentality and general openness of the new world, and the social democratic values and more collective approach to politics of European states. Once upon a time, that balance was the basic value proposition of this country, and the political debate between liberal and conservative sides here were ultimately questions of emphasis – sometimes a little bit more American in style, sometimes a little bit more European.

 

In a sense, that political division remains more in force now than ever. Mr. Carney’s Liberals are seeking to make us more European; the Conservatives want us to remain more American in spirit. Their problem is that they have great difficulty in articulating in what sense, because the America that they want to attach us to has vanished, the America we all loved has vanished. And so they dwell with ghosts, or simply deny that the American threat is real, or argue that the variable geometry isn’t working, or cannot work, even when it is evident that it is working.

 

They also ignore this key fact: It is not Canada who has turned away from America. It is America that has become less like us.

 

Canada’s reaction to the threat from the United States, and the revelation that the networks that dominate trade have become vulnerabilities, has been twofold. The first is an absolute insistence on sovereignty. There has never been a time in this country’s history when that word has been used more regularly and with such vehemence. Sovereignty is not just some political status; it has become the essence of Canada’s economic, technological and military policy. Even though we have the most to lose, we have stood up against the new American threat more strongly than any other country in the free world.

 

The second is that, rather than shutting down, Canada has opened up. The path to more sovereignty comes from expanding our connections around the world. This double movement – toward sovereignty, by way of expanding connections – has defined the country over the past two years. And it’s what the world wants: That’s why our Prime Minister is the most trusted political figure in Australia right now.

 

But Canada reflects the current moment in another strange, almost depressing, way: Our natural hard-headedness is oddly well-suited to the geopolitics of 2026.

 

There’s been a quote making its way around the world since the advent of the second Trump administration: “The old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” It’s attributed to the Italian Communist writer Antonio Gramsci, and while he never actually said those exact words, whatever – it works. It sums up so thoroughly where we stand.

 

But what new world is struggling to be born? Gramsci was an old Communist, so he had a vision of a utopian future: a world where human potential was liberated into a collective freedom. Today, however, utopian visions have completely evaporated. We are obviously in a moment of breakdown, of grand failure.

 

Canada, though, has never been a country of utopias. It’s too damn cold, too rough. In fact, it’s a country in resistance to utopia in several senses.

 

The first came at its founding. While the Americans dreamed of a shining city on a hill, Canadians just wanted a garrison that made it through the winter. They had the Revolution; we had Dominion status. They had “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; we had “peace, order and good government.”

 

Soon, we became home to a bunch of diasporic communities fleeing from their own failed utopias, whether it was Italians from fascist Italy, Ukrainians from Stalinism, or Persians from the Islamic Republic. And through this, too, Canada became a place defined by simpler promises: common sense, common decency, a chance for your kids to have a slightly better life than you. That’s the idea, anyway.

 

In the Canadian ideal – radically distinct from the Canadian reality – there is no all-Canadian boy or girl. There is only a world in which every culture has something to contribute to the enrichment of the whole. Paradise on Earth is largely understood here as a contradiction in terms, though wilderness can be preserved. Government does not exist to realize the redemption of humanity, but to preserve the basic stability that enables people to build lives for themselves. The equality that the cold forces on us is its own distinct kind of social justice. These ideals are very different from dreams of the end of history as socialists or neo-liberals have conceived of it.

 

In short, Canada is the utopia of no utopia. It is not about the pursuit of some skewed dream of dominance or some false idol of historical greatness. Where the other countries of the Anglosphere – the U.S., Britain – have been consumed by their own sense of historical self-importance, Canada has retained its brute practicality. So it is little wonder that, with the world falling apart, it hired a greying banker to lead it.

 

Crisis shapes people and countries, and Canada has been in crisis since the beginning of the second Trump administration. The disorientation of the new world disorder has provoked an intense flurry of activity, but this moment will fade, and it is much too soon to know exactly who we will turn out to be.

 

But a few hints are emerging. Stubbornness appears to be a trait. Distrust of grand visions and get-rich-quick schemes is another. The Americans’ offer was an unprecedented attempt to end Canadian sovereignty – and its rejection was an equally unprecedented insistence on Canadian independence.

 

“Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity,” Marshall McLuhan said in 1963. He might have been right six decades ago, but his insight no longer applies. We are forming ourselves, even as we are being formed."