Canada ditches divisive culture wars for focused hyper-nationalism — thanks to Donald Trump

‘What your country needs is a race war.”

This is what Daily Maverick correspondent Kevin Bloom advised a room full of Canadian journalists, about 15 years ago.

He wasn’t wrong. Front-page that morning was news of a dog that died in a park after ingesting a poisoned sausage. Canada, Bloom implied, was a nation of 35 million people squatting on a vast piece of ice at the top of the world, contributing almost nothing in terms of blood-soaked copy.

Polite, unassuming and huge, Canada was the national equivalent of lukewarm, sauceless penne.

Well, someone — of some lurking, latent spirit — paid heed to Bloom’s entreaty. Shortly after the 2015 election that voted in a walking shampoo commercial named Justin Trudeau, matters started to take a turn. More PR machine than political party, Trudeau’s Liberals began shilling social progressivism to a population that had long ago settled in favour of big issues like abortion and gay marriage. Insisting that he would repair the relationship between the government and Canada’s Indigenous people, a series of liturgical pieties were introduced to daily life — any event worthy of the name begins with a land acknowledgment to the First People, who must somehow content themselves with verbal gestures rather than, you know, collecting rent.

The problem, of course, was that Canada’s Indigenous people were screwed by tricksy words — they were cheated by legal documents written by liberal-minded lawyers and politicians, most of whom professed fine intentions and quoted from John Stuart Mill. The whole Trudeau project was corrupted by exactly this form of bullshit — self-interested self-righteousness masquerading as grovelling, self-flagellating humility.

Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.(Photo: Thierry Monasse / Getty Images)

It didn’t help that Trudeau’s professed feminism didn’t extend to the actual women in his Cabinet; it helped even less that the establishment’s delirious embrace of Black Lives Matter didn’t extend to the matter of actual black lives; and it helped not at all that the unbroken record of sweetheart deals for the Canadian financial and extractive sectors remained intact.

Addicted to oil, Canada became Nigeria with better manners and a worse work ethic. Trudeau even managed to disrupt Canada’s carefully maintained immigration programme by taking a knee to Business, which demanded cheap labour following the pandemic. In just a few years, well over a million people were allowed into the country on temporary work and student visas, resulting in a housing crisis. Life grew more difficult and expensive.

No question: the libs had fudged it.

If Canada didn’t exactly get its racial conflagration, it got social discord, regional divisions, a growing rupture between rich and poor, and a bargain-basement version of US-style culture wars — with pearl-clutching Wokies facing off against frothing red-pilled lunatics over the precise meaning of the term “birth”. The country melted down from an economy that no longer served anyone except Drake, while normal people grew increasingly angry and anxious.

Bloom would have loved the place.

Had elections been held in 2024, Trudeau’s Liberals would have been swept from the face of the Earth by the same wave of political loathing that drowned so many incumbents globally (including the ANC and its 30-year majority). Canada’s stolid Liberal centrists were about to be sent back to the golf course or to lucrative board appointments and speaking engagements.

Take that, Wokies!

And then, Donald J Trump won an election. Among the first targets in his global belligerence campaign?

Canada.

In an instant, everything changed.

***

As president-elect, Trump made two promises, neither of which formed part of his campaign platform. The first was that he would impose punitive tariffs on a number of allies, focused on Mexico and his neighbour to the north. In both cases, this was allegedly due to the number of migrants and the amount of fentanyl crossing illegally into the US. Perhaps after learning that the Canadian contribution to this scourge was infinitesimal, he changed tack: it was now about “trade imbalance”. Or maybe an undersupply of maple syrup for his morning pancakes? A randy moose?

Or, justifiably, Drake?

And tariffs wouldn’t be enough. Trump also insisted that it was time for Canada to assume its rightful place as the US’s “beautiful” 51st state. He then referred to Trudeau as “governor” (which, frankly, was by that point a promotion). Throw in Greenland and Orania, and you started to get the picture — this was a new age of American Empire, and Canada was just another outpost.

History went into overdrive. Trudeau promised to step down following a campaign for a new leader in the Liberal Party. (It was won by the former head of the Bank of England, a prickly arch-liberal named Mark Carney.) Support for the Conservatives, led by a Trump-mimicking replicant named Pierre Poilievre, plummeted. All previous discussions of the country being a genocidal charnel house for everything from Indigenous people to drag queens were put on hold to deal with an ancient bugbear: A rude, dumb, fat, rich American.



Outside of Alberta, Canada’s oil-producing province (and ersatz Alabama), nothing unites Canadians more than hating Americans. After all, these were the assholes that tried to invade the country in 1812. The result? Lots of dead Americans. Then, in 1890, Trump’s hero, William McKinley, sponsored a bill called the Tariff Act, which placed duties of 50% on Canadian exports.

As Prime Minister John A Macdonald said at the time, “The fact is that the United States covet Canada.” McKinley would become president, and just before he was assassinated several years later, he had transformed into a tariff dove, preaching the virtues of open borders. No one wins a tariff war, but the Americans lost worse.

All of this said, for all its occasional animosity, the US/Canada frenemyship has been remarkably successful, but only if you’re already rich. Canada sends raw materials south. The US turns those raw materials into half-made stuff that is then sent to China to become actual stuff. (The gunk from Alberta’s vast bitumen fields isn’t even processed in Canada but in Louisiana.) English Canada barely has a cultural industry — it’s Netflix, or worse.

Drake.

In the 1980s, Canadian economic and cultural nationalists warned against signing free trade pacts with the Americans, insisting that it would erode Canadian cultural and economic sovereignty. And that’s exactly what has happened. After the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in 1987, and following the wider North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, neoliberalism suddenly became the Canadian house style. At first, it was the left that decried the very obvious harm to workers that would result from capital fleeing to the cheapest and most unregulated labour markets. And then, as time wore on, the right came to see that the raving lefties were correct: Not fear, but Free Trade, was the mind killer.

A sign that used to indicate Canadian and American wines at the Quebecois state-owned liquor store, SAQ, has simply crossed out “The United States”. The SAQ no longer stocks American beverages.

Canadian GDP rose, slightly. But wealth distribution tanked, and so did productivity. Canada stopped making even the things it still made after the death of the Rust Belt in the 1970s. It revisioned itself as a consumption market for cheap goods in a zero-inflation environment and became an adjunct of the US economy and a small but necessary component of its war machine. (Kudos to the then prime minister, Jean Chrétien, for not signing on to the Iraq insanity in 2003, but that’s about it in terms of independent policy.) It allowed the global hard rock extractive sector to list garbage companies on its two corrupt stock exchanges and, despite its insistence on hugging anything that resembled a tree, refused to hold environmental vandals to account.

The Trump tariff programme has a point. Sadly, his administration is a DEI programme for drunks, ketamine freaks and nepo babies. We are told that the flip-flopping is the point, meant to keep both friend and foe on the back foot. But who is friend, and who is foe? The only thing that seems clear is that Trump and his minions have a primitive view of nineteenth-century great power relations and see Canada — or, the parts of Canada that won’t become Russian — as within the US sphere of influence.

Time will tell if Trump is a strategic genius or a foolish chancer. For now, it’s all about the LOLs.

In Canada, the memes are not on his side.

***

Like a top-end Tesla, Canadians went from placid to pissed off in 2.4 seconds. Even Trudeau, terminally feckless, seemed to instantly grasp the gravity of the situation. In private comments, he noted that the Americans were serious about annexing Canada; in a heroic coda to his lousy premiership, he set the tone early: the Americans were coming; and Canada needed to prepare.

While the biggest indicator of Canadians feelings towards the Trump regime’s tariffs and other threats against Canada has been to simply remove US goods from the shelves, more products are indicating that they were made or packed in Canada. Consumers in the country are boycotting American goods.

The US has had two main rupture points in its history as a union: first, the revolution in 1812, then the Civil War. This is the third, and it may end up being the most significant. What remains of the country when it is stripped down to the last working PC? Likely just guns and nukes and avarice. Canadian culture is different, and already the surge of patriotism has disrupted — perhaps permanently? — Canada’s trajectory toward a flirtation with 21st-century conservative lunacy.

Make no mistake: decoupling from the United States will be perhaps the severest test to Canadian sovereignty in its history. But, despite a few backward baseball cap-wearing podbros and a genuine streak of crypto-fascist oil-adjacent executive-types, this appears to have put a stop to the internal bickering and the culture wars, all in service of a united front.

We’ll see how long it lasts, and we’ll see how much of a mandate Mark Carney and his refashioned warrior Liberals win in the coming election, scheduled for 28 April. But in the final reckoning, and as far as the Trump administration is concerned, it doesn’t matter who is in charge. A Vichy Quisling is always better, but annexation is never a pleasant process, certainly not for the annexee.

Already, Trump’s trade war is starting to bite, and Canadians are speaking with their wallets. Trips south have plummeted, Tesla dealerships collect cobwebs, and “Buy Canadian” campaigns are in full effect. The New World Order is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

And what does one say about a country that has transitioned so rapidly from divided culture war to focused hyper-nationalism? Perhaps that it is a new country, a small country in a big space, fumbling forward into the future, still trying to find its way. Canadians seem to know only one thing: that their country will survive only as a democracy, and on its own terms. The latent fascism burbling under the US is, and always has been, an existential threat.

Poisoned dogs don’t make the front page any more, but one gets the sense that Canadians miss the malevolent sausages. Even a relaxing race war would be nice at this point. What comes next will reverberate for generations. But as Margaret Atwood has noted, the central Canadian myth, perhaps inherited from the First People, is survival. It has proved remarkably persistent over the years. DM