During his 1969 visit to the United States, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau held a news conference at which he described his American hosts in a memorable analogy. “Living next to you”, he said, “is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt”.
The phrase “sleeping with an elephant” has come to define US-Canadian relations in the minds of many Canadians. But since President Trump launched his second term in the Oval Office, the elephant has been neither friendly nor even-tempered. In fact, its twitches and grunts have recently become more like angry kicks and menacing roars, especially with Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada.
Rather than meek acceptance, however, the response in Canada has been a surge of nationalist sentiment. Only, at the helm of this patriotic revival is a new prime minister, Mark Carney, for whom the substance of Canadian identity amounts to little more than . . . globalism, multiculturalism, and liberal proceduralism.
Trump has offered varied justifications for his punishing tariffs. He alleges an uncontrolled stream of illegal immigrants and fentanyl pouring across the border, notwithstanding the Canadian government’s serious efforts at interdicting such flows. He is on much firmer ground when he points to the trade imbalance between the two counties, with Canada running a significant trade surplus with the United States; about 20% of what Canada produces is consumed by Americans.
At a meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Justin Trudeau, the recently ousted prime minister, protested that such tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy”, eliciting from Trump a suggestion that Canada would be better off as the 51st state. This line was initially heard by most people as a jest, but Trump has become fixated on the idea. Remarks about the US-Canadian border as an “artificially drawn line” have fueled fears that his real endgame is annexation.