Concert of the Canadas 3: The Maple Leaf Forever
Original Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, February 22 2025
I just got a note from Doug Ford: “Help me stand up to Donald Trump to protect our jobs and economy.” All I can offer him is advice: Stay home. Stand down. Your service as premier of our province does not include moonlighting in the Washington lobbying industry.
There are better ways to respond to Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda than a reciprocal "Canada First"or “Protect Ontario” isolationist stance.
Tariffs are walls. They protect domestic interests from foreign competition. For a developing economy, they function in the same way a greenhouse shelters tender plants while the weather is uncertain. In a mature economy, paternalistic protections are a sign of weakness. That’s especially true in what is, in strictly materialistic terms at least, the most affluent society that has ever existed in the history of the human race.
What the new administration in Washington is offering is security against threats from within and without. This kind of protection, coming from a commander in chief, is almost always something of a scam. This is especially true where there's actually little or nothing to fear beyond the insecurity generated by half a century of insurgent Republican resentment mongering.
Tariffs are also taxes, similar to the kind of taxes that settlers started objecting to in the 13 colonies that seceded to become the United States. Somewhere along the line it appears to have become acceptable for the president to impose this special kind of tax by executive order. In doing so, he may have found a way to work around one of the checks and balances that define the post-revolutionary order set in motion when the U.S. Constitution was ratified: separation of the “power of the purse” in the House of Representatives from the “power of the sword” held by the executive.
Either way, this is a dangerous game. Accepting protection can deprive people of their freedom, and bilk them of their wealth. Convincing citizens they need protection discourages, demoralizes, and consequently weakens them. Intentionally or unintentionally, the result is to undermine their capacity for taking care of themselves and each other.
There was a time when a president considered it his duty to reassure U.S. Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. Franklin Roosevelt spoke of that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
FDR was saying that, although he was ready to take command during the most severe economic crisis the modern world had ever seen, his capacities as a leader, and the strength of the nation, depended entirely on the hopes, courage and confidence of its citizens.
U.S. Republicans and their Canadian counterparts have taken the opposite approach: “Be afraid,” they say. “Your country is broken.” Fostering doubt, division and resentment erodes hope, courage and confidence. The purpose is to convince people they need strong leaders to protect them.
“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you” is the core message of the Ontario Progressive Conservative promotional ads I’ve been seeing. Meanwhile, the new fangled Conservative Party of Canada is promising to protect us, not by calling out the president’s populist nationalist bluster, but by flattering him with imitation. This “me too” kind of “Canada First” confirms that, from the outset, with the emergence of the Western Reform movement’s fascination with U.S. American practices like recall, the referendum, a “Triple-E” senate, states rights, phobia about taxes and “government is the problem” anti-federalism, the trajectory of this peculiar blend of political ill will has been towards a full alignment with MAGA Republican ways, means and purposes.
OPC and CPC counter-protectionism is the very opposite of Canadian citizens “standing on guard,” as in the national anthem, or remaining steadfast in our loyalty, as in the motto of Ontario. It is lining us up with the U.S. American Republican trajectory towards disaster.
Donald Trump was able to persuade voters to put him back in command by conjuring indictments against enemies from within -- the neo-Marxist woke, the godless corruptors of family values, fake news from legacy media, the deep state. Now he’s targeting enemies from without: Canada, Mexico, China, the European Union, India, the Republic of South Africa.
U.S. Americans may have to learn the hard way that this is not the way to restore lost greatness. As Canadians, we can view their predicament with a certain detachment. The best response is to transform their president’s threats into an opportunity to think about what it means to live in the “True North strong and free.” How did Canada come into existence? What does our history reveal about our purpose, our essential character, or, as people used to imagine, our “destiny” as manifested in how our story has unfolded?
No one knows what is actually going on in that muddled mind of the successor to Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan (including, most likely, POTUS 45-47 himself). What matters is the direction that the U.S. American people will choose to take over the next two, four, six years. The time will go by quickly. The danger, however, is clear, omni-present and immediate. Mistrust is likely to remain part of U.S.-Canada relations for the foreseeable future. We’d best not wait for them to make up their minds to begin asserting ourselves.
In some ways, clinging to a feeling of security provided by barriers and distance is the Republic returning to its origins 250 years ago. We should always remember that the United States began as a separatist movement rooted in paranoia, resentment, doubt and division that quickly turned to violence. “Move fast and break things” has been the revolutionary republican way from the start: “Minute Men,” they used to call armed resisters ready to fight at a moment's notice.
The colonial Americas began as outposts of the various powers of Atlantic Europe. Independence severed ties across the waters that had carried commerce, migrations and cultural patterns. Choosing separation was an about face that transformed a range of coastal settlements with maritime ties into continentals, facing west.
Separation also severed ties with the past. The end result is an artificial political entity, cobbled together out of various remnants of what they had broken mixed with some ideas that were fashionable at the time.
Once the disruptions of rebellion and separation ended, and the various arrangements were put in place to allow the 13 former colonies to carry on together, the policy became, as the first president and commander in chief put it, to “steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.”
It wasn’t until the “foreign world,” including Canada, became engulfed in war in 1914 and again in 1939 that the republic abandoned isolation and neutrality to join, and eventually lead defensive alliances, albeit reluctantly and belatedly. The turning point came with the peace of 1945, and the new world order established and sustained primarily by the United States.
The “America First” of 2025 can be seen as a determination to return to the isolation that prevailed from 1783 to 1942, following the path laid out by the affluent, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant founding fathers of the new republic.
During all those years, the United States of America served the world as a model for what a modern, self-determining nation state should look like. The storyline Canadians applied to our development as a sovereign nation tended to follow the same pattern: July 1st, 1867 as Canada's “birthday;” separation as progress; unity as paramount; sea to sea expansion as manifest destiny; a flag, a bill of rights, a constitution.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those elements, but Canada’s essential nature doesn’t lie with such trappings of modern nationhood. Canada signifies continuity, not disruption. We are exceptional in our capacity for harmony, not for unity or conformity. We are plural, not singular. Diversity is our foundation, our strength, our destination. Our outlook is global, not inward or continental. When we chose to put up tariff barriers with the separatist states of North America, it was to nurture an economy built around exchanges with all parts of the world, not shut us off from foreign influences.
Canada is not an invention. Our story does not begin as an experiment based on a few abstract ideas. July 1st, 1867 was a provisional step along the way, not the birth of a nation state with a big revolutionary bang and a series of conferences. We are the product of circumstances, mostly beyond our control: encounters, claims, conquests, exchanges, adaptations, expulsions, deceptions, betrayals, abandonments. Our path has been one of organic transformation, always building on what came before, but also looking steadfastly forward.
In significant ways, especially in relation to the land itself and to the Indigenous peoples and nations of the land, Canada has always existed. In that sense, Trump is right: the border that separates Canada from the U.S., like the republic itself, is artificial. But so is the border along which POTUS 45-47 is determined to build actual walls, not just a tariff barrier: the line that distinguishes the United States of America with the United States of Mexico, along the Rio Grande.
As a people and a modern nation state, Canada is, and has always been, day after day, year after year, a work in progress. In the U.S., where everything is fixed in accordance with an explicitly defined order designed for life in a colonial backwater more than two centuries ago, they often have to break or bend the rules to get anything done. The fact that we’ve never been tied to a definitive set of foundational rules allows far greater scope for improvisation, experimentation and innovation.
The purpose of the outrageous and offensive behaviour of the Trump administration is to generate rage and throw us off balance. If we panic, we’re playing into his hands. But we can't just carry on as though nothing has happened: Over the first weeks of his restored command, he has damaged, possibly beyond repair, whatever trust in and good will towards the United States as a power in the world we may have had previously. But we do need to remain firm, confident, resolute. And our stand must be together, side by side, not under the protection of our own petty provincial potentate walking around with a modified MAGA hat on his head.
Now that the United States of America is putting up walls, betraying allies, tearing up agreements and cutting their union off from the world at large, the door is open for Canada to do what we have never done before, at least not consistently: Follow our own course on this continent, in this hemisphere and in relation to the world at large.
It is time to start playing a leading role rather than a supporting one. This would not be to fulfill a desire for greatness, but as a manifestation of where we come from, what has shaped us, and what we’ve become: Our time is now.
This time around, it’s not a resurgent left standing up to a new dispensation of right, or liberal democracy versus reactionary obstruction and control. This new strain of fiercely Red U.S. Republicanism has gone off the charts. The political spectrum as it’s been understood for the last 200 years is no longer a useful tool for meaningful understanding of what’s happening here. Treating this crew as a kind of opposition gives legitimacy to what is in reality an outlaw impulse. It’s not freedom; it’s not anarchy they’re reaching towards: They are dismantling the federal government of the United States of America as we’ve known them to give free reign to stateless landlords, warlords, skylords, pirates, gangsters, counterfeiters and freebooters.
If it weren’t for the association with an old anthem expressing outmoded British imperial sentiments, the phrase “The Maple Leaf Forever” would be a much better expression of defiance than applying the language and mindset of America First isolationism to serve Canadian ends. How about “Canada Forever” as our response to “America First”? Or “Canada Now” as the answer to “Make America Great Again”?
As for Doug Ford, the best thing he can do is return to private life and launch some made-in-Ontario, U.S. import replacing business venture -- manufacturing a really good electric golf cart or club car designed to run along bike lanes with urban seniors in mind, perhaps.
At this point, a “Maple Leaf Forever” or “Canada Now” vote can be Green, Orange or Red. Just make sure your vote is in alignment with a plurality of your neighbours and fellow citizens, riding by riding. For true-hearted, “Loyal She Remains” Ontario Blue stalwarts, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and find a way to relegate all those flagrantly Red Republican strains that have infiltrated Canadian Conservatism to the dustbin of history.
see also:
Concert of the Canadas 1: Little March
Concert of the Canadas 2: Peace - Prosperity
Advice for Canada's Liberals 1: Forward, Step by Step
Advice for Canada's Liberals 2: Stand Up for Canada
Advice for Canada’s Liberals 3: Bon Courage; Take Heart
Advice for Canada’s Liberals 4: Don’t Rush
Advice for Canada's Liberals 5: Little March Towards a Concert of the Canadas
Food for thought. Thank you.