Opinion | O Canada, Come Join Us

My great-great-grandmother was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and first saw the United States as a 10-year-old. My great-grandfather was an Irish Canadian who married a Maine girl. My wife’s father was born in Ontario, descended from a long line of Newfoundlanders, and a print of skaters on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal decorates our pantry even now.

I offer these bona fides, proofs of a current of maple syrup running through my children’s veins, as a preface to a controversial claim: that Donald Trump’s kidding-or-is-he suggestion that Canada belongs inside our union is not a threat but an opportunity, that Canada might be better off joined to our continental Republic, with the wintry 1775 defeat of Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold finally reversed.

Today Canadian sentiment is extremely cool to this idea, with polls showing at best about 10 percent of Canadians open to membership in a Greater United States. And for understandable reasons, since Canadian identity is so bound up in absolutely not being the U.S.A. that, “Well, we’re not American” is literally the first thing Justin Trudeau came up with to explain Canadian pride recently on CNN.

This has held true across multiple transformations in both countries. When the 19th-century United States was seen as a radical democratic power, Canada was the conservative, Anglo-Tory alternative, offering “peace, order and good government.” When the late-20th century United States was seen as a land of libertarians, cowboys and evangelical preachers, Canada was the sensible, secular, socialist alternative.

I suspect that Trudeau imagined his own premiership extending this tradition, contrasting a globalist Canada with Trumpian nationalism. But instead his rule may be remembered as the period when not-Americanness finally ceased to be a plausible basis for a nation-state.

On the one hand, Trudeau’s reign deliberately abandoned both Canada’s Anglo-Protestant past and the cautious multiculturalism that succeeded it — the quest for balance between the Anglophone majority, the French-speaking minority and a carefully recruited immigrant population. Instead he positioned his country as the first “postnational state,” with “no core identity, no mainstream.”