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Conrad Black: In search of a distinct Canadian identity
If we can turn our economy around, there would be no more question of why we are not Americans
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Canadians, and especially all English-speaking Canadians, have lived all their lives intermittently explaining to themselves why Canada should be an independent country and not part of the United States. Apart from the many abrasions of his public personality, the greatest grievance in Canada against U.S. President Donald Trump is that he explicitly stated the same question. Like most Americans, Trump thinks all foreigners wish to be American, and like most foreigners familiar with Canada, he fails to find any significant difference between English-speaking Canadians and Americans from northern states of the U.S. This question arose when former prime minister Justin Trudeau told him that Canada’s economy would “collapse” if subjected to sizable American tariff increases. To Trump, it was perfectly logical, and more a flattering than an insulting question, given that Canada had not paid its way in national self-defence for decades, to ask why it did not take the logical step to eliminate any question of tariffs or any worry about national defence and simply join the United States.
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The irritating part of the question was his use of the expression “51st state,” as if a country of 41-million people in nearly 10-million square kilometres should have the status of Delaware or Wyoming. Until the 1980s, Canadians were British subjects and Canada was overwhelmingly a branch plant economy of the United States. As a child, I remember audiences in cinemas watching the news and sports film before the feature, bursting into applause when we won a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics. We had a formula for a prosperous country with a low crime rate and political stability that performed admirably in crises such as the world wars, and was a comfortable and endearing place to live. But the absence of any real political identity has always gnawed at our consciousness. I believe most separatist sentiment in Quebec comes from English Canada’s national ambiguity.
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The British connection as a distinction from the United States gave way to the French fact, but the gripping struggles of the two Quebec independence referendums and the accompanying controversies indicated that there is no overabundance of goodwill between English and French Canada in either direction. There was also the “kinder and gentler” theory. Canada is a gentler country than the United States, because America is a jungle, which is its strength and its weakness. The America of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney and Grandma Moses exists, but it is essentially a facade. The United States is a jungle inhabited by an unprecedentedly motivated, productive and creative workforce with intense competition and extraordinary achievements in almost every field. Like all jungles, it is ruled by the 600-pound cats and the 20-foot constricting snakes and an unbecoming share of the American population is ground to powder in the ruthless Darwinism of that society, including levels of violence and corruption and civic discord, some of which stems from its legacy of slavery, which are repulsive to most Canadians. (It must also be said that the United States has made the greatest effort of any country in history to raise up a previously forcibly repressed minority from servitude to complete equality.)
In furtherance of the tenuous theory that Canada’s raison d’etre was as a kinder and gentler place than the United States, we swaddled ourselves in our supposedly more generous social programs and universal health care, even as that system, which purported to exclude private health care altogether, accumulated frequently lethal waiting lines, rationed medicine, forced the closure of clinics, clogged emergency rooms with non-emergencies and has almost broken down in many places. Inordinate tax burdens were placed on the richest provinces, especially Alberta, to buy federalist votes in Quebec.
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Our foreign policy conformed to domestic posturing. In 1962, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who had virtually destroyed the Canadian aerospace industry by cancelling the development of the Avro Arrow warplane, announced that he had had a divine revelation that persuaded him of the evil of nuclear weapons and as a result he would not agree to nuclear warheads in Bomarc surface-to-air missiles. This was a leap too far and we changed governments.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau withdrew Canadian forces from Europe, ardently courted the communist powers, including Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and was effectively a neutralist. When U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to protect Canada if it were attacked from other continents in 1938, Prime Minister Mackenzie King promised that Canada would do all it could to prevent any country in another hemisphere from traversing Canada to attack the United States. No prime minister after Brian Mulroney remotely honoured that undertaking or made any effort to be self-sufficient in national defence. Justin Trudeau proclaimed a post-national era, and purported to wield soft power, oblivious to the fact that this concept only exists for those who have a hard power option.
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We have slowly settled into a national identity that is in large part a fantasy and in some measure a fraud. More than half of our GDP is trade with the United States and we now have a prime minister who has been an authoritarian socialist, a high priest of the debunked Davoisie, a credulous adherent to the rank fiction that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, who believes that Canada’s civilization is superior to that of the United States and borrows Harold Macmillan’s claim that we are Athens to America’s Rome. This is just delusional claptrap and our hope must reside in Prime Minister Mark Carney recognizing unpleasant facts and executing a radical course correction, or being quickly replaced.
We have to become a tax haven like Ireland, begin a gradual but irreversible shrinkage of the public sector, cut corporate income taxes well below the American level, permit private health insurance, make up our shortage of doctors and break loose from a decade of economic stagnation. Our productivity has flat-lined and the public sector employs 10 per cent of the entire population, 4.1-million people.
We remain a magnificent country. An end of delusional public policy and 10 years of unquestionable competitive success in the world and there would be no more question of why we are not Americans.
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