What’s the nature of our relationship with the USA

When the women’s Olympic hockey final was on, CBC showed packed bars in Canada, teachers rolling TVs into classrooms, and people staying home from to watch. Canada stood still and breathless at the prospect of maybe finally this year getting one over on the Americans in the sport we are most likely to beat them in.

We lost in overtime and the nation mourned. Meanwhile south of the border, most of my friends didn’t even know there was a game on.

We are a small country, one tenth the population of the United States. We are in many ways the closest two nations in the world. But right now we are in a tough time and the appreciation of it is asymmetrical.

For the past year Canadians have been confronting existential questions about whether our country will have a future. The current US administration is a bully and a chaos merchant and seems comfortable ignoring well held norms of behaviour, partnership and legality. They are now openly declaring that law doesn’t matter at home or in international relations. This is terrifying.

The domestic chaos wrought by this state of affairs perhaps clouds Americans’ perception of what we are going through. Like the women’s Olympic hockey final what matters deeply to us seems like a mere passing thought to most.

Today in the Walrus, the headline writer went full bore: Canada is Already at War with the US — We Just Don’t Know It Yet

If we step outside the twenty-four-hour news cycle and try to make sense of the pattern in the longue durée, there is something more sinister that we appear to be missing.

At the level of rhetoric, Trump and his administration will continue to belittle us by calling us the fifty-first state, mocking our sovereignty (claiming Canada “lives because of the United States”), making false claims about the extent to which communist China holds influence over the federal government, even claiming they are going to somehow put an end to hockey. These insults and threats are designed to normalize a condition of enmity between the US and Canada. They are designed to delegitimize the idea of Canada. They are an absurdist denial of our independent statehood—on repeat—until it begins to ring true.

The rhetorical psy-ops have combined with a very real and targeted form of trade warfare designed to destabilize and ultimately cripple critical sectors of our economy, like auto manufacturing, aluminum, steel, and softwood lumber. This is the weaponization of interdependence. As the subordinate state in the continental hierarchy, Canada now finds itself in a very precarious position. We have been forced to rapidly attempt to eliminate our interprovincial trade barriers and diversify our global trading partnerships in order to unwind decades of increasing trade and investment interdependence with the US.

Beyond overt trade actions, the Trump administration has engaged in discussions with members of the Alberta Prosperity Project in an ongoing effort to coordinate the breakup of Confederation.

I’m just returning home from a week in the States working with kind, tired and frustrated people. My people. And still it seems very lonely. There is very little understanding and appreciation of what is happening north of the border. That’s understandable when a new secret police force is ransacking cities and disappearing people.

But spare us a thought. And if it might help, Have a word with your Congress members. There are many ways the US administration can, and is, setting back some of the great gains of history in the service of peace between nations. Throwing Canada-US relations on the dung heap would rank up there as among the dumbest.

I feel like we are not at war with Americans. But we might already be at war with the worst one ever to occupy the highest office.