Woe, Canada

Ahhh…. April in Canada.

The true spring has come. Both the “Third Winter” and the “Spring of Deception” have passed. Like many places that experience harsh winters, summers in Canada are a blast and Canadians know best how to exploit the season. May I recommend Jazz Fest in Montreal this July?

April also means the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Apologies to the NFL, MLB, and the rest but the NHL has the best postseason in all of sports. Especially with the tradition of “playoff beards.” The fact that what appears to be scruffy lumberjacks hoisting the greatest championship trophy in ice hockey in cities where the only ice is found in drinks (Vegas and Miami) during the month of June is besides the point.

I should also add that the greatest “Spring of Deception” was during the 1987 Cup Finals when it snowed in Edmonton on May 31.

The other big highlight for Canada this April? A national election!

First, a quick primer. We have a problem in the United States in that we believe “conservative” is a term that roughly translates as a concept across all Western countries. It does not, and not just because the past 20 years have shown “conservative” parties such as the CDU in Germany and Tories in the UK to be utter crap weasels given their stances on economics, personal liberty, and national sovereignty.

Canada is a left-of-center country and all of its parties are to the left of, say, Joe Manchin, so don’t let the party names fool you. The Conservative Party is sort of like a Josh Shapiro. Liberal Party? Gavin Newsom. New Democrats? Bernie. No heroes in this bunch; even Mitt Romney would be called “far right” in the “True North.”

Second, the theme that is ever present in Canadian politics is the United States. Part of that is a matter of geography. Canada shares a land border with only one country, and that just happens to be a country with 10x its population, that has more guns than people, and is perpetually in need (in Canada’s view) of a nursery school style time-out.

The other part of it, though, is cultural. Canada is primarily defined as a negative — that it is not the US. A quick and dirty way of looking at it is that Canada was the “14th Colony” that refused to join up with the rest of the continent in cocking a snook at George III. We also invaded it a few times and deported a whole bunch of Loyalists there after the Revolution. You cannot help but think that the line in the Canadian national anthem that states “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee” is about standing on guard against us. I cannot blame them.

It used to be that Canada’s identity was rooted in its relationship with the UK — that is, within the Empire and then the Commonwealth. Well, after 60 years of dissolving that identity into some sort of multicultural mush, the best Canada can say about itself is that it’s not the US (or at least is a kinder, gentler version of the US) and NATIONAL HEALTH CARE.

When people point to the Canadian health care system as a model they also fail to mention that 1) it takes six months or more to get treatment from a specialist, 2) There is a flourishing trade in the US of firms offering medical services to Canadians who don’t want to wait the better part of a year to find out if the tumor they have is cancerous and 3) It is often a shorter period of time to get MAID (medical-assisted suicide) than an MRI. (That’s one way to cut health care costs.)

So the best we can do as Americans to assist Canadian identity is to threaten to make Canada the 51st state — even though we find actually making it a state presumptuous. Why should Canada get statehood before Guam or Samoa? I would say territorial status would suit Canada just fine for a while. As Jonah Goldberg wrote, long, long ago (back when he was last interesting), we should just do Canada a favor and declare war on it in order to bolster its national unity.

Donald Trump with his three months of cracks about making Canada part of the US and threats about tariffs has done more for Canadian identity and unity than 10 years of Justin Trudeau as PM.

To be quite cruel about it, I have a nagging suspicion that Canada is becoming the Fredo of the English-speaking world.

So, as you can imagine, Donald Trump is a big issue in this month’s Canadian election.

The candidates?

Justin Trudeau, the Liberal PM for the past 10 years, is gone. He has been replaced by Mark Carney, a man who has never held elected office and is best known for not only holding three passports but also for having served at various times as Governor for the Bank of England. A central banker with the personality to match. A rootless technocrat from Davos central casting made for Canada’s nationalist moment against the Trump Evil Empire.

Seriously.

The person who was the saddest to see Trudeau go was Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who was cruising in the polls until Trudeau quit. Much like Canadian national identity, Poilievre had pinned his political identity on a negative – that he wasn’t Trudeau. His best political moment was when he ate an apple two years ago. With Trudeau gone, Poilievre lost his reason for being and is viewed as someone who cannot stand up to Trump.

Right now it looks like the Liberals will return to power with a majority government.

Who should we root for?

I don’t want Canada to be the 51st state. All Canadian provinces, even the “conservative heartland” around Alberta, are pretty lefty. I also like having Canada around.

Having said that….

Canada is slowly circling the drain. Its economy has underperformed for several decades and its most powerful province (Ontario) would rank among the 10 poorest US states in terms of per capita income. Could Poilievre reverse that trend? I doubt it. He’s for affordable housing and a tax cut, in other words he’s slightly less liberal than the Liberals and certainly not the guy to address a decades-long slide.

Liberals? Trudeau ran the country into the ground by strangling growth. Also he institutionalized a thugocracy with his crushing of the 2022 Trucker Convoy and mandatory gun confiscation. No wonder he’s so beloved by many in the US. Carney appears to be little different, a bland technocrat with no political experience LARPing as a national leader. Not a man capable of turning the tide.

An under-reported aspect of Canadian politics is regionalism. Americans are somewhat familiar with the various attempts at Quebec independence, but there is also a latent Western secession movement leveraged against the dominance of Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec), that could be rekindled by a Carney victory.

Canada has reached an inflection point in terms of its future. If the Liberals win, Canada will have bought the ticket to take the ride. Let’s see what they find.