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Notes -
Self-Immolation as Civic Nation-Building
To demonize another person, we first have to self-canonize.
Envy and hatred try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body.
In recent news of culture-war-as-trade-war, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney inflicted retaliatory 50% tariffs on many goods traversing the Canada-US border. This will obviously have the effect of scalding his own nation, but both Carney and his countrymen appear to gleefully accept this masochistic act in the hope that the US might also get singed a little bit (75% of Canadians supported a withdrawal from negotiations - negotiations which solely existed in the first place to try and lessen the cost on Canada’s economy). Indeed, the issue appears to be so universally mandated up north that Carney’s nemesis, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, has primarily attacked Carney for… not being antagonistic enough towards the US, particularly in regard to said tariffs. Obviously Poilievre is falling into a classic bear trap tendency of conservatives: fearing the social isolation of a strongly differentiated viewpoint and therefore gradually moulding himself into “Liberals but sensible”. We saw how this played out for the Republican Party from 2008-2016; I wonder if Canada is capable of producing a brash enough figure to fill the crucial life ring role played by Trump, which we now recognize as having been the only solution for the prolonged political life of conservatives in the US.
There is another angle here which is even more fascinating. It is often observed that citizens who despise their own country while at home will become surprisingly patriotic and defensive of their nation when traveling abroad and facing criticisms from foreigners. But there is a stronger, deeper version of this phenomenon: that of a nation which either failed to establish territory in the modern world or which ceased to exist as wars were lost and maps were redrawn. The zealous identity of these “invisible nations” can be seen everywhere from Eastern Europe to Kurdistan to American Indian reservations to the Pacific islands. No flag is raised with more patriotism than those flags which have been erased from the map.
With Canada facing a crisis of existence in its ethnic makeup and self-belief, with its only guiding light being burning resentment toward its big brother, what can save the nation? What can transform a postmodern, puritanical nowhere place into a beloved homeland to be fought for, to be boasted about, to be made great again?
In their recent actions and polling numbers, it appears Canadians already know the answer to these questions. So, in their own mind, they might as well go down swinging.
You make it sound as if this is silly and irrational. It all boils down to which flavor of decision theory one favors.
Causal decision theory says that you should pick whatever decision leads to the best outcome in your particular timeline. However, it has the failure mode that it is really easy to rob CDT adherents at gunpoint.
For example, consider Ukraine getting invaded by Russia. Purely from a citizen QALY perspective, a causal decision theorist would probably have advocated for an early surrender -- Putin was unlikely to murder a lot of Ukrainians, and life under a puppet regime installed by him would probably be bearable for most.
If rationality is systematized winning, and CDT makes it profitable and riskless for another player to fuck you over, then blindly following CDT is not rational. By being willing to suffer to inflict costs on Russia, Ukraine has turned Putin's war from a short "special military operation" into a long war of attrition which is net negative to the aggressor.
Same for Trump's trade wars (and kinetic war). The goal of Canada should be to make the trade war net negative for the US. If they were to bend over and not retaliate, what would likely happen is that Trump would decide to push the defect button again.
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I genuinely don't understand the right-winger position here. What's so funny?
I asked before, and the answers were something to the effect that Canadian citizens, in their personal capacity, are much too smug online and look down on Americans as uncivilized boors, which is unbearable since Canada is a small dog and America is a Big Lion, so the Lion's gotta do what it does. This is simply childish. But fine, I can acknowledge childishness. What I don't get is why you go out of your way to misconstrue the Canadian perception here. Do you really have no theory of mind for other people believing that their nation ought to be treated with dignity by foreigners at least on the official level? Is this an extreme case of Hottentot morality?
And no, their internal issues (like ethnic relations or immigration policies) are not a carte blanche for you, outsiders to treat their state with contempt and expect them to join in on the fun. Try to think about this by analogy: do you feel that any nation is entitled to offer you unequal treaties and expect them be signed, just because you have fat people in Walmart/fentanyl problem/school shootings/BLM/wokes or whatever you believe is problematic and shameful? This is a pretty asinine approach, right? OK, now consider that people in other countries have a similar philosophy. This is called patriotism.
Speaking of their perception, this is how Trump's terms look up there. This is rubbing it in, I can half-believe it was written to be indignantly rejected because he just hates Canada for some reason, maybe precisely because he's a boor and feels status anxiety. But seeing his supporters' takes, I'm not sure it wasn't done with sincere cluelessness.
Then again, the median position now seems to be even simpler: "we can afford to rape them so why the hell not". The stuff about "not a real country" is, of course, veeeery Russia-Ukraine too. But people mostly don't believe their nations ought to have a "real locus", a telos, or anything like this, they just want sovereignty, respect, and the ability to make deals in their self-interest.
Nations can choose whether they are real or not. Unreasonable external hostility is one way to forge a nation. Ukraine is more real now than it was in 2021, which was more real than in 2013, which was more real than in 2003 or 1989 – even in the Russian eyes. Maybe Canada will earn its reality too, reality it traded away a generation ago by signing what became NAFTA, assuming it's worth nothing since no unreasonable hostility is forthcoming. John Turner foresaw this exact outcome that @Shakes celebrates today. Canadians remember Turner-Mulroney debates for a genteel dunk on a relatively minor domestic mishap by Turner. Maybe they'll remember his lines in this one too.
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No, PP is responding to incentives.
Trump's response to the chance of having a potential ally as Canada's PM was to go out of the way to be so needlessly insulting and toxic that the Tories lost the election. The Canadian people are not offering a road to political power if you appear servile to a bully who keeps going around threatening to annex the country.
It's almost trolling to write an entire piece about the lack of Canadian nationalism and to opine on how conservative leaders in Canada should act and ignore the very thing that triggers nationalistic fear that makes it impossible.
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Which flags are those supposed to be?
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Alternative thesis: Poilievre lost a slam dunk election because he was seen as the bootlicker candidate at a time when the US under Trump was trying to bully and humiliate Canada, and is now trying to correct for that perception. He has - almost certainly correctly - identified that he needs to be seen as willing to stand up for Canada harder than Carney is if he wants to have any patriotic credentials whatsoever.
Alternative thesis: Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
There's a very real problem right-wingers have modeling the beliefs of others, where if they don't subscribe to very specific elements of right-wing mythology and engage in performative flag-fondling then they must hate their country. It is not mystifying why Canadian resentment of the United States has abruptly skyrocketed, and the fact that it has does not reveal some prior hollowness in Canadian national identity.
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What would Canada have to do regarding fentanyl for you to be in favor of taking the trade situation back to 2024?
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I feel like 5% of Americans and 95% of Canadians know that there is a current trade war between the two countries. And this bodes very poorly for Canada.
In pretty much every conflict, the winner is the one who fights it with the fewer hardships incurred. In the Civil War, there were gentlemen attending Harvard whose life was barely touched by the war. And meanwhile, essentially the entire student body of the University of Mississippi enlisted and almost all of them were killed or injured.
On the extreme end, the US can destroy the entire Air Force and Navy of Iran, drive their entire economy into ruins, and only spend like 0.2% of GDP to do so with like two dozen casualties.
Which I guess is to make the trite point that Goliath always wins, as long as he doesn't even have to try very hard. The Don Draper meme "I don't even think about you at all", encapsulates the situation perfectly.
I know the US military says this but is it actually true? Is the war currently in a state you'd expect if the Iranian navy and air force are destroyed?
Why doesn't the US head back into its Gulf bases? Or sail into the straits of Hormuz with the fleet and have the 210 civilian ships waiting there head on through off to make more money rather than sit around anxiously?
If the Iranian economy is in ruins then why has the Trump administration switched tactics back to sanctioning/threatening Iran's trading partners. Why a financial D-Day and not a real one?
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Do you actually believe the Trump admin's sole goal with these negotiations are to lessen the costs on Canada's economy? The Trump admin created those costs! The US are so, so obviously not acting in good faith in this dispute, and it's plainly obvious to most Canadians. The last minute addition of obviously improper demands is not what you do in a normal good faith negotiation. If Canada gave in to Trump's demands, he'd just make new ones, all they way up to fully annexing the entire country.
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Canada is, in the nicest sense, not a real country. It is literally an economic union of varied colonies and provinces to resist conquest by or incorporation into the United States. Canada has attempted many times to forge an identity greater than the sum of its parts -- Westward Expansion, colonialism, railroads and national corporations, media, allegiance to Britain and the Crown, the flag... But Canada remains officially multicultural, which is to say Canada has no locus. Canada is not a real country.
At best Canada has achieved a kind of balance. Canada is a large compromise between Ontario and Quebec, which have mostly made peace with each other. But that compromise alienates the East from the West, which has its own issues completely unrelated to the French laws and Ottawa. And the West itself is split by the mountains between the Prairies and the Coast, which also hate each other at least a little. Somehow when you put it all together it vaguely hangs together.
So what Canada has succeeded at, in a sense, is that it's better than the alternatives. It's totally dependent on America and can't exist on its own at all. (A very simple military operation north of Minnesota would divide Canada into at least two pieces, since even Canada's energy networks already pass into America to connect East and West.) However... -- it's more expensive to destroy Canada than America is willing to pay. It's generally been much cheaper to let a few ten millions put up some trade barriers and regulations than it would be worth figuring out the headache. Besides, nobody in America wants to think very long about what to do with Quebec.
That's all changing now that America is realigning everything everything about China and its security posture for the 21st Century. Charitably, it looks like America wants Canada to lock down its ability to serve as a dumping ground for foreign goods that can use Canada to sell more cheaply in America. And Canada would prefer to maintain its strategic ambiguity.
And, well, it seems like Carney and the liberals (remember Trudeau before Carney) want to use Canadian opposition to America and Trump to boost their political position. Realistically that's all this is, Canada is so dependent on the United States they can't really, genuinely, actually make a break. The people don't really understand what they're asking for, it's a little delusional, so probably it can be assuaged in an irrational manner too.
The likeliest outcome after everything is that, eventually, maybe this year, maybe in five years, maybe in 15 years across many agreements over may governments -- Canada and America continue along more-or-less as they have before, America gets Canada to get with the program, Canada gets America to wear a condom and take it out to dinner first. America will continue to subsidize Canada's existence, possibly even at greater cost than before, but Canada will, essentially, continue to exist as a basket-case to manage several problems that the Americans will never want to have to deal with.
Realistically, nothing.
Canada last had a meaningfully independent foreign policy and manufacturing base in the 60s under Diefenbaker. For a lot of reasons Diefenbaker lost and the liberals came in and integrated Canada deeply with the United States. The term "Branch plant economy" was coined to describe what happened. Canada became an appendage of the United States. It no longer had a foreign power like the United Kingdom to serve as patron and buffer. The Canadians wanted this. And at this point there is no other foreign power that can step in: The United States will not allow Canada to become a client state of China. A fantasy about a great Canadian-EU alliance is even more impotent. (Actually, something like this could be kept as a face-saving fiction for everyone to come away feeling like a winner, given that Europe and Canada will both remain firmly within the American orbit.)
What would it take for Canada to achieve meaningful independence? They can't appeal to a foreign power. It would require Canada achieving meaningful industrial sovereignty by building an independent economic and commercial base. What would that look like? It would require a massive push of deregulation and new economic policy that would, frankly, destroy the consensus around which Canada is built. The Quebecois won't go for it, the West and East would have to meet and agree to put aside their differences, and at every step it would simply be easier for any one party to simply integrate with America and be done with it.
Otherwise, without that, Canada is simply a media fiction. And those can always be changed. After all, Canada's government has consistently found it much easier to negotiate sovereignty to the Indian Tribes to give judges and the federal government ultimate supervisory power over the actual democratic will of the people.
The Liberal Party is probably the natural governing party of Canada for the foreseeable future. People will say that it could have gone another way if Trump hadn't had been Trump, and that Trump should have been more sensible and Canada could have been run by the conservatives and everything would be better. But, realistically, the Liberals always had the power to engineer an escalation with America, even if Trump had never said "51st State" at all. In fact, Mark Carney engineering today's episode for political purposes is probably the most likely explanation.
Perhaps Trump should not engage in tariff brinkmanship with countries that aren't real if it ends up costing real dollars and real congress seats in midterm elections.
Probably true. Do you expect that to happen? In my experience the median American view of Canada is something like "that place with all the beavers?"
I'm slightly expecting a deescalation and some type of trade agreement soon, like within 2 weeks, but I'm not willing to invest or gamble on it.
Whatever trade concessions Trump may win from Canada, or national security concerns, he probably could have waited 70 days until midterms finished to make this an issue while the Iranian secondary sanctions are just starting.
There is also a risk that both Canadian tariffs and the Iranian conflict annoy voters all the way into November, which is just unwise timing when senate control for the next 2 years has coinflip odds on kalshi right now. The house is probably already lost, so not much to gain or lose there.
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Any predictions on the trade war outcomes? I'm always kind of unpleasantly surprised when I see random stuff around that's made in Canada, but by the numbers the amount of canadian stuff on us store shelves is small. Meanwhile American exports to Canada seem like a small fraction of the overall economy.
I guess as long as Canada keeps selling oil, the overall effect of the trade war may just be a nothingburger. Might push up the price of goods marginally but not in any huge way.
Short term: Nothingburger.
Long term: War, or to quote Victoria Nuland, "Fuck the EU." Let us not forget that it was turning down a trade agreement with the EU that set off Yanukovych's downfall in Ukraine.
It's not a perfectly clean comparison (Canada is a lot more united, and the US less so, compared to Ukraine and Russia respectively circa 2013.) but I don't see any future US administration being overly tolerant if Canada seriously orients itself to the EU (because military alliances follow economic ones) or China, and "fighting for sovereignty" can be used to excuse any number of bad outcomes of antagonism with the US for Canadian politicians.
To be clear, I do not advocate this. I doubt anyone in Russia or Ukraine expected to be in a shooting war back in '04 either, though.
Canada cannot substantially reorient its trade relations away from the U.S., for obvious geographic reasons. Whatever changes occur will be minor or even cosmetic. But it is striking that a U.S. regime that seems determined to insulte, belittle and antagonize its allies is surprised that those allies seek to recalibrate.
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