Has Canada burned its last bridge?
Politics, in its original understanding, is the art of securing the happiness of a people through reasoned deliberation about justice and the common good. In modern democracies, however, it is increasingly the art of manipulating passions that obliterate reason and obscure the common good. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is a striking example of this degeneration. He has ascended to power by pandering to his citizenry’s lowest and most convenient resentment: anti-Americanism.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Gordie Howe Bridge affair, which lays bare the contradiction at the heart of his rule. Having ridden this wave to victory last year, Carney now discovers that the very passion he inflamed has become a tyrant over his own judgment. He confronts a hard truth: his personal electoral interest is now at war with the national interest, even the self-preservation, of Canada itself.
To understand the gravity of the problem, one must begin with first principles. No political order can endure if it deliberately miseducates its citizens to hate the very conditions of its existence. Canada’s geography, economy, and security are inseparable from its friendship with the United States. To pretend that Canada can flourish while treating the United States as a permanent enemy, a perpetual object of contempt, is to deny the truths upon which Canadian peace and prosperity rest. Yet Carney’s political genius has been to transform that denial into a badge of national honor.
Any prudent statesman might criticize particular American policies that conflict with Canadian interests. But this is not what transpired. Rather, Carney’s campaign invited Canadians to define themselves against America. He courted and inflamed a virulent anti-Americanism that treats the United States as a principle of corruption: culturally vulgar, economically rapacious, politically decadent. Canada, by contrast, was painted as the purer North American nation, morally superior, more compassionate, more enlightened. It was a flattering tale, and flattery is the great solvent of good judgment in democracies.
The teaching implicit in this rhetoric is simple: whatever comes from the United States is suspect; whatever separates Canada from the United States must be inherently virtuous. Having accepted such a teaching, the electorate is now predisposed to see any close cooperation, any agreement, any “deal” with the United States as a betrayal.
But a nation cannot sustain itself on the proposition, “We are what we are not.” Canada does not become more truly itself by hollowing out its own material foundations in order to maintain a heightened sense of moral indignation. Pride is not a substitute for prosperity, and contempt is not policy.