Canada is a haven for pleasing myths.
One agreeable caricature in style nowadays is of a land and a individuals united in comfortable solidarity to withstand an unpopular president clamouring so as to add Canada because the 51st star on the celebs and stripes flag.
Uncomfortable reality be advised, various Canadians usually are not wishing Mark Carney all that nicely as Canada’s Harvard-trained technocrat-turned-prime minister meets at the moment for the primary time the domineering commander-in-chief of the US, Donald Trump.
A fair proportion of Canadians – nonetheless smarting from the Liberal Celebration’s exceptional revival on election night time final week – shall be rooting for the opposite man who retains speaking about erasing the “synthetic line” that separates the 2 bordering nations.
Whereas Carney insists that Canada’s sovereignty is non-negotiable, I think Trump will proceed to bellow privately and publicly that his ungrateful northern neighbour, having mooched off the US for a lot too lengthy, finest be part of it to kind one “lovely nation”.
Regardless of broad expressions of new-found Canadian nationalism, together with the boycott of US-made stuff and journey south of the forty ninth parallel, Trump has good cause to pursue his fever dream of a swollen empire.
The prickly truth Carney and firm are loath to confess is that in components of Canada, the thought of becoming a member of the US just isn’t as radioactive because it should be.
The proof is within the polling.
A latest survey revealed that 18 p.c of Conservative voters could be keen, apparently, to swap O Canada for a rousing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Allow us to pause to think about the jarring significance of this fantastical sentence.
Many modern-day ideological descendants of the occasion of Sir John A MacDonald – certainly one of Canada’s founding fathers, in addition to a drunkard and racist – are content material to commerce of their Canadian citizenship to declare an oath, hand-on-malleable-heart, to America.
The sobering story will get much more alarming the additional West you enterprise.
In line with the identical ballot, a halting 21 p.c of Albertans would say “sure” to being absorbed into Trump’s ugly, disfiguring imaginative and prescient of America, the place cruelty and vindictiveness are the defining governing ethos.
This isn’t the petering, verging on irrelevant sovereignty motion that has, at instances, traumatised Canada for the reason that late Fifties. This isn’t Quebec nationalists shielding and asserting their id, language, and cultural survival.
No, this can be a loud, disconcerting swath of the West – perpetually offended, remoted, and nursing a decades-long grievance – flirting not simply with separation, however pining, it appears, for annexation.
For Canada’s cockeyed annexationists, Trump represents salvation from myopic politicians in Ottawa beholden to the stranglehold exercised in election after election by smug voters in Ontario and Quebec.
On this cussed context, Trump’s crude, imperial designs are being handled as a chance, not a risk.
His pugnacious picture of America, with its love for deregulation, muscular independence, and rejection of each stifling ounce of progressiveness, resonates with scores of Canadian Conservatives who really feel deserted by politicians extra focused on currying favour with city, “woke” constituencies in Toronto, Montreal, and past.
Trump’s flamable rhetoric – couched within the language of “injustice”, exceptionalism, and disdain for “globalist elites” – calls to a brewing sense of disillusionment with the prevailing state of Confederation amongst a rising variety of Canadians.
The president’s calculated provocations – amplified by social media and sympathetic “different” information retailers – have bolstered the notion that Canadian federalism is “damaged” and that the powers-that-be usually are not listening.
On this corrosive local weather, defeated Conservative chief Pierre Poilievre should lastly reckon together with his function in selling a story, grounded in estrangement and dysfunction, that has deepened divisions and eroded belief in public establishments.
In his parochial pursuit of energy, Poilievre disparaged the nation he sought to guide, echoing – usually virtually verbatim – Trump’s seething resentment and polarising bombast.
The US president’s cynical efforts to undermine an erstwhile ally’s independence have been abetted by a preening politician anxious to declare, time and again, that Canada is crumbling from inside.
The possibly dire, unintended penalties are actually turning into obvious.
Like all demagogues, Trump is adept at sniffing out vulnerability and weak spot. And whereas most Canadians stay loyal to the Maple Leaf and are offended to their core by his oafish overtures, fissures are displaying.
Trump, predictably, is exploiting them with, alternatively, bouts of performative menace and a grating grin.
Though she is going to dismiss the appellation, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is, by phrase and deed, the patron saint of the province’s emboldened separatists.
Smith’s “Alberta Sovereignty Act” just isn’t the benign assertion of provincial rights her allies inside and outdoors the legislative meeting declare it to be.
That is, in impact, Alberta declaring, sotto voce: “We’ll decide and select which legal guidelines to comply with.”
It’s a blatant rebuff of federalism and an affront to the structure itself.
Smith’s broadsides, denouncing central Canada’s betrayal and management, parallel Trump’s noxious modus operandi.
This isn’t about constructing pipelines or slashing taxes any extra. It’s about fomenting a way of Alberta-as-victim, grooming a citizenry to view Canada not as dwelling, however as an unyielding straitjacket.
It’s Trumpism in oil-stained cowboy boots.
A coalition of nationwide leaders – alongside what constitutes Canada’s slender political spectrum – should take critically the disaffection animating within the West.
Meaning embracing compromise and a wholesale dedication to the crucial that Canada’s all the time delicate unity can’t be taken with no consideration.
If the curse of alienation spreads, if increasingly more Westerners see themselves as outsiders in their very own nation, then the absurd will turn into the conceivable.
Maybe not annexation, however fragmentation. And with that, the very notion of Canada as a coherent, inclusive nation might quickly be at stake.
Trump’s pernicious prescriptions usually are not solely a portal into an unsure future, they pose an existential hazard. Canada is confronting the distant, but conceivable threat, of breaking not with a bang, however by invitation.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
