Canada’s Mistake Was Believing the Border No Longer Mattered | The Walrus
If you’ve noticed more national flags adorning Canadian streets, even in Montreal where the fleur-de-lys is far more common, you’re not alone. Every day is Canada day. Annexationist rhetoric will do that to a country.
Since taking office, United States president Donald Trump has repeatedly mused about making Canada the country’s “cherished” fifty-first state, claiming Canada is not economically or militarily viable without the US. The economics underlying the president’s argument were fabricated and fantastical, but this was the world’s most powerful country, helmed by an unpredictable and appetitive man, threatening Canadian sovereignty.
But sudden patriotism can’t obscure the fact that Canadians were caught flat footed. Over nearly forty years of ever deepening economic, security, and military co-operation with the US, Canada had abandoned what was once its axiomatic principle: its separateness from America.
For the first century of its existence, Canada defined itself in opposition to the US—a necessary unifying narrative for a country so vast and diverse. But it abandoned that narrative in 1988, when the country voted in an election widely understood as a referendum on a sweeping free trade agreement with the US. The economy of Canada changed dramatically as companies reoriented to serve the massive market to their south, now largely free from protectionist barriers. As one writer put it, in 1988 the promise of American-style prosperity came to supersede concerns for preserving a distinctly Canadian model of social democracy.
This was a mistake. Canada’s national purpose is rooted in what some have called the “heroic delusion” that underpinned modern Canadian nationalism: that it can be insulated politically from the influence of the superpower next door. Maintaining that collective suspension of disbelief is necessary to making the imagined community of Canada cohere: Canada was founded in deliberate defiance of the Manifest Destiny of the US to control the entirety of the North American continent; losing sight of that North Star opens Canada up to dissolving into a mess of its own contradictions.
If I can claim any special insight into Canadian identity, it has been acquired through a familiar route. I immigrated from Ireland in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2010 and, through a mix of accident and good fortune, ended up teaching Canadian politics in Montreal. In my classes, I focus on Canada’s origins and its political culture. Nationalism, I should say, comes easily to me. I was educated, in Irish, by stiff-spined cultural nationalists who espoused highly selective but enthralling tales of the Irish people’s fight for self-determination over the centuries. Now, pulling at the nationalist threads of Canada’s history, I’m especially captivated by its founders’ desire to craft a bulwark against American expansionism.
Even today, university-age students carry with them a certain concern for excessive American influence over Canada, despite living their whole lives in the era of continental economic integration. A nightmarish cartoon of the excesses of Bible Belt America—God, guns, Confederate LARPers—is pregnant in their imagination. The forty-ninth parallel is the barrier that keeps all that at bay. They know, somehow, not to take Canada for granted.
Almost all instinctively approach the question of Canadian political culture by setting up a dichotomy with the US but quickly pull back from that framing, feeling as though it is insufficient—maybe even pathetic—to define oneself in relation to a neighbour. Something compels them to suggest that there must be more to Canada than not being the US.
I make it a vital part of my classes to disabuse students of this notion.
Canada has always been a fragile political construction. When Canada was founded, on July 1, 1867, it was not a nation in the traditional sense but rather a diverse population of anglophones and francophones, Catholics and Protestants, beset by stark regional differences in economy and culture. Both formal and informal institutions, like our party system and practices of federalism, took shape around this reality. Most of the territory felt a strong desire to maintain a close connection to the monarchy and the British empire, but the colonies of British North America were otherwise far apart from one another, geographically and psychologically.
The country’s first prime minister, the hard-drinking political pragmatist Sir John A. Macdonald, was all too aware of the fragilities this entailed, stating in 1872 that Confederation “is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone.”
One of Macdonald’s key partners in drumming up support for a legislative union, the Catholic Irish émigré Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was among those who most starkly framed the project of Canada. “When the three cries among our next neighbours are money, taxation, blood,” McGee insisted, “it is time for us to provide for our own security” or risk making easy pickings for the 1 million troops of the Union army.
McGee unified communities across the country through shared hostility to the “universal democracy doctrine” of the US; they uncharitably understood the US political project as intractably mob like and sectarian, atomistic and materialistic—a country of witch hunters and lynch mobs. There could be no Canada without this concerted and consistent rejection of what America came to represent.
Macdonald knew that Canada was still a “mere geographic expression” rather than a fully realized nation-state. His government undertook massive nation-building projects, like the continental railway, and slapped high protective tariffs against the US to force economic integration among the still-disparate Canadian territories and keep Uncle Sam at bay. These fears were not unfounded, as there was no shortage of annexationist schemes from US politicians.
But the lure of American markets remained. The Liberal Party, in the early 1900s, wanted to move past protectionism and toward the prosperity of continental trade. After all, the reciprocity treaty between the nations—in place from 1854 to 1865—had produced an economic boom. The flows of commerce, capital, and communication, per American journalist Samuel Moffett, were creating a single North American culture by sheer force of geography. Food, natural resources, jobs, ideas, and people all traversed a border that was barely monitored for large stretches. “English-speaking Canadians,” he wrote in 1907, “protest that they will never become Americans—they already are Americans without knowing it.”
In the decades that followed, Canadian politics kept its nationalistic bent. The Liberal Party went on to abandon its advocacy for free trade and ascended to electoral dominance in part by vowing to keep Canada’s unique bicultural identity safe from erosion by US influence.
Still, maintaining constructive relations with US administrations was imperative. After all, the two countries share the world’s largest undefended border. Canadian governments negotiated an agreement on defence co-operation in 1940 and an auto industry pact in 1965. The defence agreement permanently tethered the foreign policies of the two countries together, decisively shifting Canada away from its long incorporation in the British empire.
Canadians could now piggyback on the military might of Washington for national defence, and the US took up strategically valuable positioning in the Arctic. The Auto Pact of 1965, for its part, generated an integrated cross-border supply chain for car manufacturing, a significant degree of economic integration that highlighted how easy and lucrative it could be to erase the border between the nations in the name of trade.
The late twentieth century was perhaps the most decisive in carving out Canada’s modern identity. In the 1960s, Canadians hungered for public intellectuals pontificating on the distinctiveness of their identity. Among a flurry of nationalistic musings was a surprise bestseller: 1965’s Lament for a Nation, by an academic named George Grant. Like McGee a century earlier, Grant saw the US as a warehouse of dangerous amoral ideas that threatened Canada’s communitarian underpinning.
A caricature of the US as authoritarian, jingoistic, racist, and retrograde—especially in contrast to a tolerant and orderly Canada—had already been forming throughout the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the brutal racism of the final days of the Jim Crow South drew Canadians to sharpen their perception of the differences between the two countries.
Many left-leaning Americans agreed, endorsing this new sense of Canada as a more enlightened safe haven. An estimated 40,000 draft dodgers crossed the border between 1964 and 1975 to avoid military service in Vietnam. Progressives threatening to move to Canada after the elections of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump became a familiar (and often cringeworthy) trope. Canadians, for their part, deeply enjoy occupying this role in the collective continental imagination, and precious few liberal Americans follow through on their talk.
Grant had pessimistically concluded in 1965 that the buccaneer capitalism and technocracy of the US had already penetrated the True North beyond repair. Canadians were less sure. The ascension of Liberal Pierre Elliott Trudeau to prime minister in 1968 cemented an optimism that Canada’s distinctiveness could be saved. The charismatic Trudeau staked his legacy on creating a national narrative that was self-consciously progressive and pluralistic. Trudeau achieved a legislative commitment to bilingualism, the constitutional entrenchment of multiculturalism, and the defeat of the first referendum on Quebec separation.
The Liberals, alongside the New Democratic Party, had also overseen the creation of the country’s national socialized medical system; these measures all became crucial points of contrast with the US. A soft left-leaning cultural nationalism became etched into Canada’s self-conception. It won Trudeau no admirers in Washington: Richard Nixon thought Trudeau was a self-satisfied and smug intellectual; to Reagan, he was a woolly-headed peacenik.
Although Trudeau’s overall impact on the country’s identity was enormous, the economy suffered under him, with the stagflation of the 1970s and a horrific recession in the early 1980s. Voters punished Trudeau’s party in the polls, and the new prime minister, Progressive Conservative leader Brian Mulroney, won the largest governing majority in Canadian history, in 1984.
Mulroney, who grew up in a small Quebec town, had an ideological affinity with the emerging trends of privatization and deregulation in 1980s Anglo-American conservatism. In 1986, his government opened free trade talks with the Reagan administration, forcing a national conversation that would put the cornerstones of Canadian political identity to the test. It became the defining issue of the subsequent 1988 election.
Mulroney’s team was intensely aware of the electoral risks associated with free trade. The American political consultant Arthur Finkelstein, drafted to help, determined the task was “to convince Canadians to drink pig piss.” Mulroney ingeniously framed the free trade agreement as a nation-building project. His rhetoric rose to the challenge. “Be bold, be daring,” he urged during the campaign, essentially flipping the script on Canada’s traditional ambivalence toward its relationship with the US.
John Turner’s Liberal Party represented the anti–free trade side. Its election platform declared that the Mulroney trade agreement “turns Canada into a colony of the United States.” One memorable Liberal television advertisement from the campaign depicted shady backroom trade negotiators erasing the Canada–US border as the “one line” in the agreement that needed to be changed.
In an election debate faceoff with Mulroney, Turner stunned viewers by forcefully accusing the prime minister of selling Canada out and unleashed one of the great speeches in Canadian political history: “We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years, we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that.” And then he delivered this warning: “When economic levers go, political independence is sure to follow.”
In his response, Mulroney said that the free trade agreement was nothing more than a commercial document, and cancellable at that, with six months’ notice. “Commercial document?!” Turner incredulously fired back. “That document relates to every facet of our life!”
Turner was right, but the Liberals lost the election. Pro–free trade business groups spent millions to flood the zone with advertising in the weeks following Turner’s debate-night heroics. Voters delivered victory for Mulroney, whose party won 43 percent of the vote—enough to secure a parliamentary majority in Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.
As such, Canada chose the gravitational pull it once resisted. The long-established national narrative began to muddy.
The free trade agreement did not immediately turn Canada into a US colony. But Canada was now tethered closer than ever to its neighbour. The Canadian economy was transformed, and the promised economic prosperity duly arrived. Between 1988 and 2004, American goods increased by more than 40 percent and made up a much larger slice of Canada’s domestic market. “It had taken Canada 125 years to generate a GDP of $850 billion,” Mulroney said in an interview in 2024. “And under free trade and NAFTA, in the next twenty-five years, it totalled $2.6 trillion.” He remained proud, to his final days, of the free trade deal he helped strike, calling it “the most astonishing thing that’s ever happened in the economic history of Canada.”
Perhaps Turner’s last stand in the 1988 election debate can be read as the final moral rejection of what became the unstoppable juggernaut of globalization. Turner laboured under that “heroic delusion” that Canada could be fully sovereign from the US, sustained by the civic virtues of federalism, bilingualism, and multiculturalism. Like all national narratives, at its best, this is little more than a persuasive fiction. Yet giving up on it creates a chasm that is not easily filled, even by growing trade with the world’s most powerful economy.
By the time Turner’s successor as Liberal leader, Jean Chrétien, became prime minister in 1993, his party’s once firm opposition to free trade had little practical purchase on the world stage. A new dawn had indeed broken, just as both sides in the 1988 campaign had argued it would. When bureaucrats warned that bilateral trade talks between the US and Mexico could result in Canadian businesses losing their preferential access to American markets, Canada found itself a seat at the negotiating table and the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.
Canada’s first Walmart stores opened that same year. Deindustrialization affected parts of Canada, with 334,000 manufacturing jobs lost between 1988 and 1994. Net employment increased on paper, but full-time unionized positions declined. The free trade agenda sought to deregulate the labour market and prioritize market efficiency, strengthening the hands of employers and severely weakening union and social movements, as anti–free traders had predicted. In February 2005, the workers of a Walmart in Jonquière, Quebec, voted to unionize. The store was shut down immediately. The same fate befell Quebec Amazon employees who unionized in 2024.
Trudeau-style left-leaning Canadian cultural nationalism had gone out of style. In its place emerged a shallow commercialized patriotism of multinational corporations dolloping maple leaves on their logos.
A certain kind of facile feeling of Canadian superiority toward the US remains. We look on agog at the uniquely American prevalence of mass shootings and the influence wielded by arch-conservative legal and religious groups in public life. But it can be hard for Canadians to put flesh on these bones and form a coherent narrative of what truly differentiates us from our neighbours. In my classroom, students often struggle to explain what makes up Canadian identity—beyond Canada’s socialized medical system, Tim Hortons, and hockey.
Canada’s alliance with a relatively benign Washington always entailed some risk. Being tied to the mast of a regime defined by cruelty and graft is a problem of another magnitude entirely.
Among the predictions of what a second Trump presidency would look like, few, if any, had imagined calls for the annexation of Canada. Canada’s April 2025 election hinged on the question of who was perceived as best placed to defend Canada from Trump. The prevailing mood was one of righteous patriotic indignation, expressed in the form of slogans like “Elbows Up” and “Canada Is Not for Sale.”
The Liberals, led by former central banker Mark Carney, and the Conservative Party of Canada, led by populist Pierre Poilievre, offered essentially identical platforms for how to deal with the economic protectionism and annexation threats emanating from Washington: Trump’s tariffs are unjustified; Canada will never be the fifty-first state; now let’s put this all behind us and swiftly return to the status quo ante bellum.
The crushing reality was that the country had minimal leverage in a serious trade war with the US: per the Canadian government, $2.5 billion (US) in goods and services cross the border every day, adding up to nearly $1 trillion (US) annually. Close to four decades of integration have chipped away at Canada’s political options. When the economic levers go, political independence isn’t too far behind, after all. And so, despite some emotionally satiating patriotic rhetoric on the campaign trail, Carney was deferential and complimentary to Trump on his courtly visit to the Oval Office shortly after winning the election. Trump was similarly glad-handed by Carney when he set foot on Canadian soil for a G7 meeting last June, never mind that tariffs were still in place, and Trump’s full-frontal assault on US liberal democratic norms continued apace.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. The United Kingdom and the European Union came to trade agreements with the Trump administration later that summer, locking in baseline tariffs. Both jurisdictions pursued trade peace as quickly as they could, fearing economic ruin and political calamity. The indignity of Trump’s threats of annexation has given Canadians a higher appetite for pain, at least in the short term. Polling showed that 69 percent of Canadians agreed with “refusing difficult concessions even if it means a worsening of trade relations with the US.”
Canadians may have responded to the threat of tariffs and annexation with the muscle memory of nationalist pride, but Trump’s bluster has laid bare an unavoidable truth: Canada’s forty-year-ago embrace of free trade with the US has come back to haunt it.
A version of this piece appears in The Dial’s essay collection How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. Reprinted with permission.
Dónal Gill is a professor in the political science department at Concordia University.
