We Can Do Better Than a Downgraded Dependency

We’re going to feel the pain of decoupling from the US anyway - why not make it worth it by taking the opportunity to rebuild in a way that will never leave us so vulnerable again?

I have seen Canada’s relationship with the US recently described as akin to an unreliable boyfriend or a bad situationship. But that framing puts too much focus on the man in the story, and not enough on why we seem so convinced we need one to take care of us.

It’s the opposite of surprising that the current American administration would act like manosphere weirdos who want a whole roster of trad wives without providing any of the support or comfort any actual trad wife would expect.

It’s also not surprising that Canadians in particular - as a people long accustomed to being kept, albeit more trophy wife than trad, glorious and free to fuss over our little causes and how we looked to the world - might take a little while to adjust to our new, less comfortable reality.

What may be surprising, or at least what does not seem to have occurred to many of us, is whether, if we have to do all this work anyway to adjust to that reality, we ever want to need our old sugar daddy again. Or in fact, any daddy at all.

Now that we know from experience how easily someone we trust too much can so callously take it all away, why not try to make sure he, or anyone else, can never do that again?

The lack of true ambition to be great in our own right is a rare shared belief across both sides of our political divide. To me, both have visions of the future that are too stuck in the past to truly meet the moment we are actually in.

To understand the vision of Canada’s future that came to define Mark Carney’s rise, the obvious place to start is his much-parsed Davos speech. One of the more interesting things about it wasn’t what he said. It was how differently people seemed to hear it.

Many heard a kind of moral triumph. Canada would stand up to bullies, win the respect of the world, and everything would somehow work out because we were the grown-ups in the room.

Many critics, in turn, mocked those people, but to my mind heard something almost as limited. The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must, and Canada’s only option is to navigate its place within that reality.

I understand the darker interpretation, and probably agree with it in some ways more than the more starry-eyed one. But I also find the self-styled realists more irritating than the optimists, because they’re far less useful than they seem to think they are.

Yes, the world is changing whether we like it or not. The question isn’t whether we’d prefer that it didn’t. The question is what we’re going to build in response.

There’s an important difference between facing reality and surrendering to it.

Too often, we seem to confuse the two, as though anyone talking about where we should go must be naive about where we are. But acknowledging the world as it is isn’t the end of the conversation. It’s where the conversation starts.

I think my issue with the Carney side of our divide is that the conversation over there is quite limited by the fact that the people driving it are already established, and don’t really want change. Their vision, in the face of all this, is to preserve as much of what we have as possible. They seem reluctant to use this moment to imagine anything better.

That’s understandable, to a point. That side of our politics is largely made up of the established and, even more so, the elderly. At that stage of life, stability naturally becomes more valuable than reinvention. Practically speaking, many need to be taken care of. I think Carney resonated because, in this metaphor at least, he became their new daddy.

They heard someone who would stand up to change itself. In their minds, he was telling them everything could still be all right. He may change how we fund our lifestyle, but the work is still mainly to keep things as they are as much as possible.

I think that’s why we remain so blocked from even imagining changes that could actually make life better. Remote work, for example, would be too disruptive to too many assets the already established have invested in. It might make life better for a lot of people, but it would also make their old world investments a little less lucrative.

Similarly, we fret about a housing crisis and affordability, yet somehow many can’t imagine that affordability might involve prices going down. Our leaders will unashamedly speak about limiting losses for developers much more readily than they would ever admit that lower prices are the point. Because condos are not some separate little market. They are the first rung on the same overpriced ladder. If that rung gives way, it changes what people can justify paying for everything above it.

Everyone else is expected to accept a downgraded quality of life before existing asset owners are expected to accept a dollar less. Even though they’d still live in the same comfortable home and still have a nice life, somehow that would not be enough.

That’s also why the elder caste rages if you so much as suggest that older couples near the top of the household income distribution perhaps should not receive nearly $20,000 a year in OAS simply because they have come to expect it.

It’s probably even part of why we still haven’t achieved genuine internal free trade, despite promising it by last Canada Day and still not managing it by this Canada Day. It may even be part of why CUSMA now finds itself at risk. We simply don’t seem willing to change how we do things if it means asking the already established to give up even a little comfort.

That’s why I struggle when people say Carney gets it. I think he genuinely sees that the world order is changing. I just don’t think he sees what following that observation to its logical conclusion actually requires. He somehow seems to believe we can simply change who funds the way we do things without that fundamentally changing the way we order ourselves.

Essentially, as this constituency’s new daddy, he seems more interested in finding it a new co-parent than in helping us all become more self-reliant. If the US can’t be relied upon anymore, perhaps China can. Perhaps Europe can. Perhaps anyone willing to help us preserve the old model a little longer.

But I don’t want a better daddy. I want Canada to grow up.

I do like some of what Mark Carney thinks on a macro scale. I think the Davos speech did matter. It’s nice to be noticed. Social capital matters too. But we can’t just have that. I fear that too much foreign investment, at the expense of building more of our own capacity and strengthening internal trade, still relies too heavily on social capital over genuine purchase.

The other side, unfortunately, strikes me as more teenage than adult.

I find myself in the odd position of not really liking Pierre Poilievre, while also broadly agreeing with many of the ideas that seem to drive him. More importantly, I believe he actually means them. I don’t think he’s pretending to care about affordability, housing, or self-reliance because polling told him to. I think he genuinely does.

Ironically, it was an article that I think was meant to convince me he’d be a problem that instead convinced my little hippy heart that he really, really doesn’t like corporate lobbyists. That, and his reclaimed wood video, genuinely spoke to the circa-2000s buy-local true believer in me. So does hearing him say things like local tomatoes shouldn’t be less accessible than ones we truck in. I remember when that was the progressive position.

But, maybe because of my circa-2000s design background, I also can’t help seeing him as a packaging problem.

And I don’t mean the superficial makeover stuff. Though, to be fair, looking a little less like “Bitcoin Milhouse” was probably a good call. I mean his whole communications strategy. He spends too much time talking to people who already agree with him, and not nearly enough time persuading people like me, who don’t entirely, but could in many ways.

I don’t actually need him to become softer. In fact, I sometimes think the tone police are quick to dismiss anyone with complaints as Maple MAGA because it’s easier than asking why those frustrations are growing in the first place. The elderly toddlers still want daddy to keep the house quiet, and don’t want the teenager disrupting it, even if some of that rebellion is exactly what growing up requires. I need him to become more persuasive. Less aggrieved, more ambitious. Less focused on who’s to blame, and more focused on what we’re actually going to build together.

Because I don’t actually think he’s wrong about many of the underlying problems. There is a lot that’s broken in Canada for anyone who isn’t already established. We do need to build more, and we do need to become less dependent on countries that can weaponize that dependence against us.

I also reject the idea that admitting any of this somehow feeds Trump. If anything, refusing to fix what’s broken feeds Trump. Leaving people feeling ignored, dismissed, and steadily worse off is exactly how populism grows.

And to be clear, while it should probably not be surprising that conservatives remain conservative in at least some ways, their vision of the future is still too much a reaction to what went wrong recently. If they really want the more self-reliant Canada they talk about, they’ll probably have to let some of that older world go too.

The Carney side wants to preserve our lifestyle. The Poilievre side, in many ways, wants to restore an older way of life. I don’t want to simply preserve or restore. I want us to build something better.

That includes finally accepting that becoming less dependent on countries that can weaponize that dependence has to include the US, permanently. I think many conservatives understand the principle, but still instinctively treat the US as the exception. I don’t think there can be an exception anymore.

Yes, one way or another, Donald Trump will be gone soon enough. Even if he tried another January 6, he’s also an old man. But the electorate that chose him twice isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the younger politicians learning from him. Hoping America eventually becomes the America we remember is no more of a strategy than hoping China eventually becomes Denmark.

We should never have been this dependent on anyone in the first place, and we certainly shouldn’t choose to become that dependent again.

As another former US president we once thought represented peak American embarrassment once put it, “Fool me once...”

This, I think, is where both sides of our divide have something valuable to offer. I wish we could merge their best instincts.

I don’t actually think it’s delusional that Canada could become the next global daddy. Historically, a trajectory from the UK to the US to, perhaps one day, Canada doesn’t strike me as especially absurd.

Or maybe that’s still thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe the real way you become a leader in a more multipolar world isn’t by replacing the old hegemon at all, but by not really needing any of them.

Maybe it’s the quarter-Ukrainian in me, but after watching so many people talk about Ukraine as though it was a burden to be managed rather than a country to be believed in, I’ve found it deeply satisfying to watch it become a world leader in drone warfare and military innovation, and increasingly bring the war back to Russia itself in ways many people once seemed unable to imagine.

It can really work to our advantage that Canada is full of people from tougher places like this. People who came here because they wanted better. But we have to give them something to believe in bigger than simply getting by, or getting better only for themselves.

I am not, myself, trophy wife trite. I know this won’t be quick or easy. I know we may have to make compromises to get by before we can take a running start. But I want a clear direction of travel, not just a meandering line of evading disaster. I want the rough road we will have to travel anyway to be worth the journey.

We may have to give up some trinkets. OAS for wealthy seniors. Provincial protectionism. A few comfortable assumptions about what we’re owed simply because we’ve become accustomed to receiving it.

But we can still have nice things. They’ll just have to be earned a little more than we got used to.

Our prosperity, our resilience, and even our goodness will be more authentic, and more lasting, if they are things we built ourselves.