I once visited an old work colleague who went into business for himself after the company to which we had both worked had folded up. His factory seemed [to be] a thriving place. However, there was flaw in the business model. His company had only one customer.
I recall reading about suppliers in the Great Depression, whose only clients were Simpsons or Eaton’s. These flagship department stores had such greater leverage over their suppliers that they could literally dictate the price that they were willing to pay.
This lesson, learnt in adolescence, never left me. When I became self-employed as an IT consultant, I had six main clients with roughly equal revenues, such that the business could easily survive the loss of one or two clients.
All my life, Canadian politicos have permitted this nation’s economy and, indirectly, this nation’s sovereignty to be vulnerable to the caprice of American dictates. Currently, three quarters of our exports flow to the U.S., with exports constituting a third of our economy. In effect, over 20% of our economy currently involves exports to the U.S. Only 1.64% of the U.S. economy involves exports to Canada. While the collapse of all trade [to the U.S] would not result in the same degree of decline in GDP, that is one whopping economic leverage.
But while Canada has been vulnerable to the caprice of American dictates, only on rare occasions has this become a real crisis of modest proportions. We have generally benefited from the goodwill and prudence of multiple administrations since WW2. And when crises of modest proportions have occurred, it has been the policy of Canadian politicos to placate the U.S.
But as America has become a hubristically evil and unjust nation, we can no longer count upon the goodwill and prudence of their politicos. Nor has this nation the military and economic might, in of itself, to fight against the American behemoth, as impressive as the recent chutzpah and bravado may have been. Moreover, as one Globe and Mail pundit put it, kowtowing to Trump’s narcissism and rapine will only encourage more predatory feints.
This nation is left with but one alternative, which should have been deployed many decades ago. . . Canada must stop playing in the same sandbox as the Bully of the sandbox. Our trade must circumvent the Americans. Let us strike a balanced deal with the Japanese, Koreans, and/or Germans: An Auto Pact in exchange for the type of goods that the Americans are tariffing (i.e. aluminum). Place a cease and desist on all American car plants in this country and end all purchases of their cars. Most of our automobile employees could be transferred to the new Japanese, Koreans, and/or Germans plants that are built here. Car part plants are to be redirected towards these new auto chains. . .
This was written in February last year. Yet, it seems that another Canadian of far greater stature and political clout has thought likewise, independent of my nickel’s worth. Mark Carney went further than I, suggesting that our country should participate in a mesh of overlapping alliances based upon different shared interests and realms of concern. Taking my cues from Otto Bismarck, I am dubious about bringing such policy complication into government which requires a genius level of statesmanship to navigate and sustain. For after Bismarck was unceremoniously dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, his balancing act was left in the hands of that selfsame idiot.
Nevertheless, after one full term and one year of the Trumpian imbecility, the whole world appears to be navigating around the United States, a facet of natural socioeconomic law, hardly requiring a degree in political science to have anticipated. Trade agreements, inconceivable but a year ago, or having long been stagnating (i.e. EU-Mercosur, EU-India) have been hurriedly signed this last year.
One partisan pundit from the National Post scornfully compared Mark Carney to Willy Loman (re: Death of a Salesman, 1949). But Carney is doing what Canadian politicos should have been doing decades ago.
Carney’s Davos speech is not some fanciful aspiration. Carney has been operating upon this doctrine laid out in his speech this year. Hence, Carney is a conviction politician, something quite rare in our pedestrian politics. This has been especially true of Carney’s Liberal Party, whose pretentions to being the Natural Governing Party, have merely required placing their fingers into the air to discern the current direction of the political winds, and stealing and incorporating the ideas of the Right and the further Left.
A Radical Cultural Difference
The Davos speech shall not be properly understood by contemporary American narcissism which thinks that everything is all about them. American hyperbole on both Left and Right has also acquired the irksome habit of seeing every rhetorical ripple of discourse as constituting some crushing checkmate over their ideological, cultural, and sociopolitical adversaries. This habit appears to be a manifestation of a deeper longstanding cultural motif wherein the American must always be right, to victor, to dominate.
I noticed this when I backpacked around the Mediterranean in 1978/9. The Canadian psyche, on the other hand, appears to be one of just getting along; on reaching consensus. When I visited a suburb north of Pittsburgh in 1997/8 to network a branch office there, a naturalized American from Canada in that office voiced the irritation that his American colleagues had with their Canadian counterparts who delayed their decisions until everybody at their end got on board. For good or ill, this complaint confirmed my observation from twenty years prior. I am not particularly “Canadian” on this count.
Yet it is evident that this American need to victor and dominate contributes to the current profound schism which threatens civic conflagration. Our muddled moderation has so far served the common good by preventing our social fabric from tearing apart, although Trudeau Jr.’s divisive lurch to the Woke Left appeared to inaugurate that devolution that we observe in America and Europe.
Why can’t Americans and Canadians get along? More specifically, why hasn’t talk about a US-Canadian union ever really caught on?
The two countries have far more in common than might be expected. They share a common language, a common geography, even a common economic landscape. Both are nations of immigrants, particularly Scottish immigrants who in the nineteenth century served as “the shock troops of modernization,” in Bernard Aspinwall’s phrase, providing the first echelon of industrial labor for an emerging America — and for a unified Canada.
Given the commonalities, more than one commentator (including media personality and former Canadian citizen Kevin O’Leary) has raised the specter of a U.S.-Canadian economic union, even a North American monetary union, with Canadians retaining their national sovereignty while enjoying the benefits of integration into the much larger, and substantially more tax-free, U.S. economy.
In their general cultural ignorance, even of their own heritage, and an unquenchable avarice for Canadian natural resources, many Americans are conveniently deluded into thinking that our two peoples have much in common.
However, from the very beginning of our own history, Canadians have had a different mindset than the Americans, for better or worse. Beyond (1) the Québécois quadrant, the Anglo-Saxon colonials were largely made up of (2) those escaping or expelled from the losing side of the American Revolution. The (3) Second Great Awakening and other religious revivals largely escaped our borders, most of which were anti-intellectualist. Even as of 1971, (4) Blacks only numbered around 35,000 in Canada, constituting 0.2% of our population, mostly concentrated in Maritimes. Blacks do not figure in any national trauma. We never acquired, nor had opportunity to acquire, (5) an imperialist mindset through which the Americans have arrogantly lost their soul and their virtue. Although most Canadians dwell along a thin line which parallels the US–Canada border, (6) the extensive and barren north continues to figure in our cultural imagination. The American Frontier was closed over a century ago (c. 1890).
These half-dozen distinctions alone, each of which bear their own ideological/cultural imprint, should suffice to demonstrate the radical differences between our two peoples.
The radical, lift-yourself-by-your-own-bootstraps atomism of the American mindset finds little resonance in Canada except within a geographical stretch from the BC interior to the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. Few here consider the notion of the common good as equivalent to Communism, like almost half of American rubes do. (Nor were the American Founding Fathers and generation averse to the common good. Three of the thirteen original colonies had “commonwealth” in their nomenclatures. Oh! How the American mind and soul have fallen!)
No Canadian conservative, who values their reputation and livelihood, would boldly voice favor of the elimination of the minimum-wage laws (i.e. George Will) or the right of an employer to terminate an employee with impunity, without cause, even without compensation, as do many of the Red States. The radical economic disparities, which overflow into civic, political, and social inequalities and two-tier justice, which are historically known to contribute to social schism, civic conflagration, and the end of free civic polities (i.e. Democratic Athens, Republican Rome), are not yet as well developed in Canada as they are in the United States.
We have fought two skirmishes with the Americans. Our very Confederation is rooted as a response to the American Civil War. Why would any sane Canadian want to be a part of the American Woman, the American whore?
A Declaration of Independence
This country weaned itself off the teats of an imperious and duplicitous Britain after the First World War, officially in 1931. However, it seems that Canada merely replaced its mother, so to speak, with an American wet nurse. Canada has become an overgrown tweenager, still living in the attic, sniping about its effective lack of independence. If Canadians lack for an imperialist mindset, it is partly because we still think like provincial colonials.
So, while a solipsistic America, or portions thereof, saw in the Carney Doctrine, espoused at Davos, a surreptitious dig at their idiot emperor occupying the White House, I perceived a coherent, cogent vision and plan, one with general geopolitical ramifications, to be sure, yet ultimately a pronouncement, Maîtres Chez Nous!
As expected, a petulant toddler in his second childhood decreed a 100% tariff on all Canadian goods. It is doubtful whether this Narcissist-in-Chief sees in this seminal cri du coeur anything beyond an eloquent dig at his misrule.
But from the American standpoint, if Carney’s vision catches on in this country or, indeed, everywhere, despite the certainty of temporary decline in economic fortunes, courtesy of an imperious power losing its grip and geopolitical standing, the Carney Doctrine poses an insidious and enduring ideological threat.
For many overgrown tweenagers, the prospect of losing a life of economic ease and security overcomes the endemic desire to spread their wings and take responsibility. And already, among the business and conservative crowd, they grumble that they want to go back to Egypt.
Hence, in the absence of any viable, let alone cogent, alternative vision, this moment becomes a test of manly maturity so to speak. As for me and my household, being a vision not very different from my own, this seems preferable, even if perilous, then continuing to be hitched to the geopolitical Titanic.