Canadians know that we need less America in our lives. In a recent poll for CNN, ninety one per cent of Canadians agreed that they wanted “to reduce their reliance on the U.S. as a trading partner.” In polling terms, that’s as close as you’ll ever find to unanimity. Later this month, we are promised, insofar as promises mean anything in the second Trump administration, a restored trade and security arrangement with the United States. But any such arrangement will, inevitably, be unstable and temporary. American chaos is deepening, and the questions that face us are bigger than tariffs and trade agreements: What does it mean to reset, not just away from the current American government, but away from America altogether, away from the American system?
The answer to that question will not be found in traditional capitalist or socialist approaches. In the current moment of crisis, left and right mean almost nothing. In the most recent election, the Canadian “left” selected for their leader, with enthusiasm, a former central banker and board chair at Bloomberg, in order to salvage the international free trade system. That’s not exactly Karl Marx. Suddenly, people on the “right” are discovering their support for protectionism, which was the focus of their deepest opposition as recently as a decade ago.
The traditional economists’ solutions for Canadian business — turn on BNN if you want to see it — is their old favourite, the reliable standard: Cut taxes to promote growth. But making our business environment more competitive with the United States misses the point. We need to become less like America, not more. America’s pure form of capitalism, while hugely productive, has led to a social instability which has led to a political instability which has led to an economic instability. Their unprecedented levels of inequality are a major source of the violence and xenophobia overtaking their country. Look at them. Why would we want to be like that? Why would we want to play that game?
But what other game is there to play? Since Trump’s inauguration, I have been working on a podcast called , about the threat to Canada’s sovereignty and what can be done about it. I spoke to Canadians who do not fit the traditional left-right dialectic, but are ferociously patriotic and understand that practical rather than ideological answers are now required. They’ve shown me that there are, indeed, other games to play.
After many years in the tech space in America, Zita Cobb returned to Fogo Island, where, in 2013, she opened the Fogo Island Inn. For Cobb, The Fogo Island Inn was more than a business; it was an experiment on connecting economics to a particular place. That experiment matters more than ever in determining what an economic nationalism might look like today. “ I remember listening to Paul Lavoie many years ago, the fellow who founded Taxi, and he started his talk by saying, ‘why is it that Canada has trees and Sweden has Ikea?’” Cobb told me. “ I just think we have to start by believing in ourselves a little bit more. ”
Self-belief would be a significant transition. We tend to prefer success on others’ terms. Since 1965, and the auto pact, each successive Canadian government — Liberal and Conservative — has sought deeper economic integration with America. That integration was predicated on an assumption that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, that American values and Canadian values were fundamentally aligned, and that those values would spread throughout the world of their own accord. That dream has soured into a nightmare. “There’s another Canadian kind of bad dream that we have to get over, that we’re going to be saved by big companies moving here,” Cobb told me. “Eighty nine per cent of the people who work in the private sector in this country work for small- and medium-sized enterprises. If you’re thinking about a resilient economy, you have to be thinking about a distributed economy, different-sized organizations across different communities.”
Canadians have already figured out, on a granular level, the value of what Cobb is talking about: Place matters. One of the most amazing aspects of living in Canada over the turmoil of the second Trump administration has been to see how implicitly Canadians understand their own economic interests. They started turning American products upside down on grocery shelves before the government advised them, before anyone told them to. By instinct they knew that sovereignty was intimately tied up with trade.
For Cobb there is an enormous distinction between a country that fosters investment and a country that develops itself. ɫɫ today is full of empty condos built as investment vehicles, whose values are now plummeting. Meanwhile, the homeless crisis continues to spread. This is not a sensible arrangement. It helps no one except the people who turn real estate into financial instruments. “The promise of Canada is, first of all, we should fall in love with who we actually are,” she says. That ethereal love takes the practical shape of national infrastructure.
At the same time, there is no going back into some fantasy of self-sufficiency that no longer exists and probably never existed. Isolationism is not in Canada’s nature. The question we face is how do we stay who we are while engaging with the world?
Jon Shell is the chair of Social Capital Partners, an organization that, in part, invests in social enterprises. Before that, he worked in private equity. For him, Trump has done Canada a backhand favour by wrenching us out of their orbit. In the broader sweep of Canadian economic history, our attachment to the United States has been, at best, a mixed blessing. “Prior to 1990 when we were signing free trade deals, Canada was doing better than the U.S., Canada was growing faster than the U.S.,” Shell told me. “In the 40 years since we’ve signed those trade deals, Canada has grown slower than the U.S., while at the same time Australia, which is the closest country in the world to Canada, in terms of population and resources, has outperformed the U.S. since that time.”
Shell’s explanation is that Canada’s geographical strength soured into a weakness. “The major difference between our two countries is our financial ties to the U.S. We have gotten really tied to this behemoth south of us, and that was supposed to be good, right? New markets, higher growth,” Shell says. “And it hasn’t worked out that way. Is it because they buy all of our companies before they have a chance to grow? Is it because they’re monopolizing our IP? Is it because it’s too easy for us to use Amazon? We don’t build anything of our own.”
For Shell, pulling away from the United States is a massive opportunity. The path forward is to align ourselves with the countries whose values we share. This goes beyond the idea of strategic trade deals. “The real way to think about it is not replacing all American trade with something else. I mean, Germany bought Russian gas for a long time. There are trade agreements between countries that make sense practically, from a business perspective, that don’t require the type of military and social connection that currently exists between Canada and the U.S.” What Canada needs is trade agreements that protect it from the world’s superpowers, from the world’s largest economies, from China and the U.S., while engaging with all opportunities.
An alliance of middle powers is the path Shell sees. “What happens if a bunch of other people get together and put an alliance together that excludes the U.S. intentionally?” Shell asks. Canada with the European Union and Japan and Korea are a larger economic bloc than either China or the United States. “It doesn’t mean we don’t trade with the U.S. They need our stuff, and we need their stuff,” Shell said. The key is in choosing to trade with people whose politics aligns with our national survival.
But for Shell and Cobb both, the truth is that there’s not much choice in the matter. America, once the ultimate aspirational country, now offers a warning rather than a model. The United States has been more than a market 10-times larger than our own right beside us. It was the essence of success, it was the dream. Now? “It’s very difficult to imagine America leading us to a future that we’re going to like,” Shell said.
We have been playing America’s game. And there are several problems with playing America’s game. The first is that the Americans don’t want to play it anymore. Any trade deal that we make with them, like the USMCA in 2018, they can just tear up on a whim. The second is that we can’t win because it’s their game. They invented the international trade network. But third, and maybe most important, is that the game itself is rotten. It’s decomposing. It’s becoming putrid. Completely outside of ideological questions, or matters of fairness and justice, this system no longer functions.
We move on as much as we can because we have to. A future without America is not a choice that Canada has made. It’s just a fate we have to endure. In the meantime, what you love, you develop. You love your children; that’s why you send them to school. Zita Cobb loves Fogo Island, that’s why she built the Fogo Island Inn. If we love Canada, and we do, it’s time to build it.
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