Since taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly mused about making Canada its “cherished” 51st state, claiming Canada was not economically or militarily viable without the U.S. On February 1, he slapped punitive tariffs on the Canadian economy. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau — to whom Trump repeatedly referred as a “governor” — retaliated. The economics underlying the president’s argument were fabricated and fantastical, but this was the world’s most powerful country, helmed by an unpredictable and appetitive man, threatening Canadian sovereignty.

Trump’s annexationist rhetoric initially stupefied Canadians but from February 2025 onward, a wave of nationalist fervor washed over the country. National flags adorned the streets, even in Montreal where the fleur-de-lys of Quebec is far more common than Canada’s maple leaf. The American national anthem was met with thunderous boos at Montreal’s Bell Centre during a heated Canada-U.S. hockey game. Bourbon and California wines were pulled from the shelves of liquor stores, and consumers were implored to “buy Canadian instead.” Stories of Canadians trying to sell their vacation properties in Florida abounded. Cross-border travel fell off a cliff.

For the first century of its existence, Canada defined itself in opposition to the U.S. — a necessary unifying narrative for a country so vast and diverse. But it abandoned that narrative in 1988 when the country voted in an election widely understood as a referendum on a sweeping free-trade agreement with the U.S.

But all this sudden patriotism couldn’t obscure the fact that Canadians had been caught flatfooted. Over nearly 40 years of ever deepening economic, security and military cooperation with the United States, Canada had abandoned what was once its axiomatic principle: its separateness from the U.S.

For the first century of its existence, Canada defined itself in opposition to the U.S. — a necessary unifying narrative for a country so vast and diverse. But it abandoned that narrative in 1988 when the country voted in an election widely understood as a referendum on a sweeping free-trade agreement with the U.S. The economy of Canada changed dramatically as companies reoriented to serve the massive market to their south, now largely free from protectionist barriers to trade. So many of Canada’s defining economic, cultural and political attributes had been deliberately framed as distinct from the institutions of the U.S. But as one writer put it, in 1988 the promise of American-style prosperity came to supersede concerns for preserving a distinctly Canadian model of social democracy.

This was a mistake. Canada’s national purpose is rooted in what some have called the “heroic delusion” that underpinned modern Canadian nationalism: that it can be insulated politically from the influence of the superpower next door. Maintaining that collective suspension of disbelief is necessary to making the imagined community of Canada cohere: Canada was founded in deliberate defiance of the Manifest Destiny of the U.S. to control the entirety of the North American continent; losing sight of that north star opens Canada up to dissolving into a mess of its own contradictions.

Canadians may have responded to the threat of tariffs and annexation in 2025 with the muscle memory of nationalist pride, but Trump’s bluster has laid bare an unavoidable truth: Canada’s 40-year-ago embrace of free trade with the U.S. has come back to haunt it.

Trump, after all, is not all bluster: On October 24, the U.S. president unilaterally ended trade negotiations with Canada — and increased tariffs by 10 percent — after taking offense to a TV ad taken out by the Ontario regional government that included footage of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan saying trade barriers “hurt every American.” The Canadian government responded by saying it stood ready to “continue to build on the progress we had been making.”

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If I can claim any special insight into Canadian identity, it has been acquired through a familiar route. I immigrated from Ireland in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2010 and through a mix of accident and good fortune ended up teaching Canadian politics in Montreal. In my classes, I focus on Canada’s origins and its political culture. Nationalism, I should say, comes easily to me. I was educated, in Irish, by stiff-spined cultural nationalists who espoused highly selective but enthralling tales of the Irish people’s fight for self-determination over the centuries. Now, pulling at the nationalist threads of Canada’s history, I’m especially captivated by its founders’ desire to craft a bulwark against American expansionism.

Even today, university-age students carry with them a certain concern for excessive American influence over Canada, despite living their whole lives in the era of continental economic integration.

Lamentably, the students I meet are often better acquainted with the 50 states of the U.S. than Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories. International students are close to entirely ignorant of Canadian history and politics. Local students tend to know about the province’s nationalistic perspective, due to their high school curriculum, but this deliberately (and understandably) obfuscates the larger Canadian picture to try to foster a firmer attachment to Quebec’s language and culture.** **Almost all instinctively approach the question of Canadian political culture by setting up a dichotomy with the U.S., but quickly pull back from that framing, feeling as though it is insufficient — maybe even pathetic — to define oneself in relation to a neighbor. Something compels them to suggest that there must be more to Canada than not being the U.S.

I make it a vital part of my classes to disabuse students of this notion. Canadian identity, I tell them, is fundamentally rooted in its opposition to the political project of the U.S. This usually immediately grips their attention. Even today, university-age students carry with them a certain concern for excessive American influence over Canada, despite living their whole lives in the era of continental economic integration. A nightmarish cartoon of the excesses of Bible Belt America — God, guns, Confederate LARPers — is pregnant in their imagination. The 49th parallel is the barrier that keeps all that at bay. They know, somehow, not to take Canada for granted.

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Canada has always been a fragile political construction. When Canada was founded, on July 1, 1867, it was not a nation in the traditional sense, but rather a diverse population of Anglophones and Francophones, Catholics and Protestants, beset by stark regional differences in economy and culture. Both formal and informal institutions, like our party system and practices of federalism, took shape around this reality. Most of the territory felt a strong desire to maintain close connection to the monarchy and British Empire, but otherwise the colonies of British North America were far apart from one another geographically and psychologically. The country’s first prime minister, the hard-drinking political pragmatist Sir John A. Macdonald, was all too aware of the fragilities this entailed, stating in 1872 that Confederation (the name given to Canada’s founding) “is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone.”

The stakes were clear: It was “the state or the United States.” These fears were not unfounded, as there was no shortage of annexationist promises and schemes from U.S. politicians toward Canada in the 19th century.

One of Macdonald’s key partners in drumming up support for a legislative union, the Catholic Irish émigré Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was among those who most starkly framed the project of Canada as definitionally in opposition to the U.S. Unsurprisingly given my own background, I lean heavily in lectures on the words of this fiery Irishman in articulating Canada’s founding premise. “When the three cries among our next neighbours are money, taxation, blood,” McGee insisted, “it is time for us to provide for our own security” or risk making easy pickings for the 1 million troops of the Union army. McGee unified communities across the country through shared hostility to the “universal democracy doctrine” of the U.S.; they uncharitably understood the U.S. political project as intractably mob-like and sectarian, atomistic and materialistic; a country of witch-hunters and lynch mobs. There could be no Canada without this concerted and consistent rejection — sometimes principled; sometimes opportunistic and cynical — of what the U.S. came to represent in abstract terms.

Macdonald knew that Canada was still a “mere geographic expression,” rather than a fully realized nation-state. His government undertook massive nation-building projects like the continental railway and slapped high protective tariffs against the U.S to force economic integration among the still-disparate Canadian territories and keep Uncle Sam at bay. The alternative was either to compromise economic sovereignty by allowing U.S. capital to slosh all over the fledgling nation, or else to cede the West to American settlers and forego the dream of Canada as a coast-to-coast political project**. **The stakes were clear: It was “the state or the United States.” These fears were not unfounded, as there was no shortage of annexationist promises and schemes from U.S. politicians toward Canada in the 19th century.

But the lure of American markets remained. The Liberal Party in the early 1900s wanted to move past protectionism and toward the prosperity of continental trade. After all, the reciprocity treaty between the nations — in place from 1854 to 1865 — had produced an economic boom. The American journalist Samuel Moffett’s The Americanization of Canada (1907) ominously concluded that although “English-speaking Canadians protest that they will never become Americans — they already are Americans without knowing it.” The unavoidable flows of commerce, capital and communication, per Moffett, were already creating a single North American culture by sheer force of geography. Food, natural resources, jobs, ideas, and people all traversed a border that was barely monitored for large stretches. Moffett noted a “spirit of nationality” among Canadians to resist this gravitational pull but doubted it would be strong enough. Protectionism assumed a metaphysical significance for Canadians concerned about losing their identity and autonomy.

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In the decades that followed, despite flirtations with allowing more trade with the U.S., Canadian politics kept its nationalistic bent. The Liberal Party went on to abandon its advocacy for free trade and ascended to electoral dominance in part by vowing to keep Canada’s unique bicultural identity safe from erosion by U.S. influence.

A caricature of the U.S. as authoritarian, jingoistic, racist, and retrograde — especially in contrast to a tolerant and orderly Canada — had already been forming throughout the 1960s. The Vietnam War and brutal racism of the final days of the Jim Crow South drew Canadians to sharpen their perception of the differences between the two countries.

Still, maintaining constructive relations with U.S. administrations was imperative. After all, the two countries share the world’s largest undefended border; U.S. State Department officials often took Canadian resistance to economic integration as petty and pyrrhic. Canadian governments negotiated an agreement on defense cooperation in 1940 and an auto industry pact in 1965. The defense agreement permanently tethered the foreign policies of the two countries together, decisively shifting Canada away from its long incorporation in the British Empire. Canadians could now piggyback on the military might of Washington for national defense and the U.S. took up strategically valuable positioning in the Arctic. The Auto Pact of 1965, for its part, generated an integrated cross-border supply chain for car manufacturing, a significant degree of economic integration that highlighted how easy and lucrative it could be to erase the border between the nations in the name of trade.

The late 20th-century was perhaps the most decisive in carving out Canada’s modern identity. In the 1960s, Canadians hungered for public intellectuals pontificating on the distinctiveness of their identity. Among a flurry of nationalistic musings was an obscure academic named George Grant who scored a surprise bestseller in 1965’s Lament for a Nation. Like McGee a century earlier, Grant saw the U.S. as a warehouse of dangerous amoral ideas that threatened Canada’s communitarian underpinning.

A caricature of the U.S. as authoritarian, jingoistic, racist, and retrograde — especially in contrast to a tolerant and orderly Canada — had already been forming throughout the 1960s. The Vietnam War and brutal racism of the final days of the Jim Crow South drew Canadians to sharpen their perception of the differences between the two countries. Many left-leaning Americans agreed, endorsing this new sense of Canada as a more enlightened safe haven. An estimated 40,000 draft dodgers crossed the border between 1964 and 1975 to avoid military service in Vietnam. Progressives threatening to move to Canada after the elections of Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump became a familiar (and often cringeworthy) trope. Canadians, for their part, deeply enjoy occupying this role in the collective continental imagination, and precious few liberal Americans follow through on their talk.

A soft left-leaning cultural nationalism became etched into Canada’s self-conception. It won Trudeau no admirers in Washington: Nixon thought Trudeau was a self-satisfied and smug intellectual; to Reagan he was a woolly-headed peacenik.

Grant had pessimistically concluded in 1965 that the buccaneer capitalism and technocracy of the U.S. had already penetrated the True North beyond repair. Canadians were less sure. The ascension of Liberal Pierre Elliott Trudeau to prime minister in 1968 cemented an optimism that Canada’s distinctiveness could be saved. The charismatic Trudeau staked his legacy on creating a national narrative that was self-consciously progressive and pluralistic. (His son Justin would go onto be prime minister in his own right from 2015 to 2025.) Trudeau père achieved a legislative commitment to bilingualism, the constitutional entrenchment of multiculturalism, and the defeat of the first referendum on Quebec separation.

While the U.S. repressed the culture and language of French-speaking Cajuns in Louisiana**,** Canada’s francophone populations, especially in Quebec, fared much better due to legal protections and conspicuous inclusion in the national founding myths. The Canadian cultural mosaic, in which distinct identities exist parallel to an over-arching nationalism, further offered an alternative to the melting pot model found south of the border. The Liberal government alongside the socialist New Democratic Party had also overseen the creation of the country’s national socialized medical system; these measures all became crucial points of contrast with the U.S. A soft left-leaning cultural nationalism became etched into Canada’s self-conception. It won Trudeau no admirers in Washington: Nixon thought Trudeau was a self-satisfied and smug intellectual; to Reagan he was a woolly-headed peacenik.

Although Trudeau’s overall impact on the country’s identity was enormous, the economy suffered under him, with the stagflation of the 1970s and a horrific recession in the early 1980s. Voters punished Trudeau’s party in the polls, and the new prime minister, Progressive Conservative (PC) leader Brian Mulroney won the largest governing majority in Canadian history in 1984.

Mulroney, who grew up in a small Quebec town, had an ideological affinity with the emerging trends of privatization and deregulation in 1980s Anglo-American conservatism. In 1986, his government opened free trade talks with the Reagan administration, forcing a national conversation that would put the cornerstones of Canadian political identity to the test. It became the defining issue of the subsequent 1988 election — an election presented by both the pro- and anti-free trade sides of the debate as a critical juncture in the nation’s destiny. There would be no turning back.

The “end of History” for Canada, then, was not the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, nor the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the election of 1988: a messy national conversation about how much economic, political, and cultural exposure to the U.S. Canada can and should pursue.

Mulroney ingeniously framed the free-trade agreement as a modern nation-building project. The infamous American political consultant Arthur Finkelstein was drafted in to help, determining that the task at hand was “to convince Canadians to drink pig piss.” Mulroney’s team was intensely aware of the electoral risks associated with free trade. His rhetoric rose to the challenge. Promising to “instill in Canadians a new sense of national purpose,” the prime minister expressed his faith in Canadians’ ability to maintain their identity and “prosper under greater competition.” “Be bold, be daring,” he urged during the campaign, essentially flipping the script on Canada’s traditional ambivalence toward its relationship with the U.S.

Canada’s perennial concern for political independence rests on the retention of as much economic sovereignty as possible in a world where self-sufficiency is impossible.

John Turner’s Liberal Party became the primary agent of the anti-free trade side in the election. Its election platform declared, “The Mulroney trade agreement sells out Canada’s sovereign control over its own economic, social, cultural, and regional policies. It turns Canada into a colony of the United States.” One memorable Liberal television advertisement from the campaign made this sentiment manifest by depicting shady backroom trade negotiators erasing the Canada-U.S. border as the “one line” in the agreement that needed to be changed. The Pro-Canada Network (PCN), an umbrella organization made up of feminist, labor, cultural, and environmental activists, argued that Canada’s soul was on the line. Free trade was but a trojan horse for the undermining of Canadian sovereignty; the imposition of U.S.-style economic and cultural norms — resulting in lower pay, more working hours, for example — would change Canadian society in a way this otherwise diverse set of interest groups all viewed as existential.

In an election debate face-off with Mulroney, Turner, not an especially dynamic political performer, stunned viewers by forcefully accusing the prime minister of selling Canada out and unleashing one of the great speeches in Canadian political history:

“We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us ... to a colony of the United States, because when the economic levers go, political independence is sure to follow.”

Turner spoke with an arresting conviction, locating Canada’s fate in geography, history, and its defining quest to defy manifest destiny and political gravity. Canada’s perennial concern for political independence rests on the retention of as much economic sovereignty as possible in a world where self-sufficiency is impossible.

In his response, Mulroney tried to deflect by saying that the free-trade agreement was nothing more than a commercial document and cancelable, at that, with six months’ notice. “Commercial document?!” Turner incredulously fired back. “That document relates to every facet of our life!”

Turner was right but the Liberals lost the election. Pro-free trade business groups spent millions to flood the zone with advertising in the weeks following Turner’s debate night heroics. Voters delivered victory for Mulroney, whose party won 43 percent of the vote — enough to secure a parliamentary majority in Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

As such, free trade had won the day and was duly put into effect in early 1989. Canada chose the gravitational pull it once resisted. The long-established national narrative began to muddy.** **

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The free-trade agreement did not immediately turn Canada into a vassal state or colony of the U.S. in a literal sense. But Canada was now tethered closer than ever to its neighbor and would be signed up wholesale to the economic orthodoxies of the coming neoliberal age. The Canadian economy was transformed, and the promised economic prosperity duly arrived. Between 1988 and 2004, American goods increased by more than 40 percent to make up a much larger slice of Canada’s domestic market. “It had taken Canada 125 years to generate a GDP of $850 billion,” Mulroney said in an interview in 2024. “And under free trade and NAFTA, in the next 25 years, it totaled $2.6 trillion.” He remained proud to his final days of the free-trade deal he helped strike, calling it “the most astonishing thing that’s ever happened in the economic history of Canada.”

In popular memory, the anti-free traders came to be seen as akin to the machine-breaking luddites of the industrial revolution. Their vision of Canadian sovereignty, linked to the preservation of social democracy and protected from American influence, was simply no longer relevant. Old shibboleths about fears of cultural absorption and political disintegration at the hands of the U.S. were discarded as relics of a soon-to-be bygone era.

Perhaps Turner’s last stand in the 1988 election debate can be read as the final moral rejection of what became the unstoppable juggernaut of globalization. Turner labored under that “heroic delusion” that Canada could be fully sovereign from the U.S., sustained by the civic virtues of federalism, bilingualism and multiculturalism. Like all national narratives, at its best this is little more than a persuasive fiction. Yet giving up on it creates a chasm that is not easily filled, even by growing trade with the world’s most powerful economy.

By the time Turner’s successor as Liberal leader, Jean Chrétien, became prime minister in 1993, his party’s once firm opposition to free trade had little practical purchase on the world stage. Canada’s economic house was put in order via austerity in the mid-90s. In line with the now hegemonic global free-trade orthodoxy, the markets demanded the balance sheet be attended to, with a chainsaw if necessary.

It is true that a certain kind of facile feeling of Canadian superiority toward the U.S remains. We look on agog at the uniquely American prevalence of mass shootings and the influence wielded by arch-conservative legal and religious groups in public life.

A new dawn had indeed broken, just as both sides in the 1988 campaign had argued that it would. This is what Canada had signed up for, and it was much bigger than that initial trade deal. Government bureaucrats had warned that bilateral trade talks between the U.S. and Mexico could result in Canadian businesses losing their preferential access to American markets. Canada found itself a seat at the negotiating table and NAFTA went into effect in 1994.

Canada’s first Walmart stores opened that same year. Deindustrialization affected parts of Canada, with 334,000 manufacturing jobs lost between 1988 and 1994. Net employment increased on paper, but full-time unionized positions declined. The free-trade agenda sought to deregulate the labor market and prioritize market efficiency, strengthening the hands of employers and severely weakening union and social movements, as anti-free traders had predicted. In February 2005, the workers of a Walmart in Jonquière, Quebec voted to unionize. The store was shut down immediately. The same fate befell Quebec Amazon employees who unionized in 2024.

Trudeau-style left-leaning Canadian cultural nationalism had gone out of style. In its place emerged a shallow commercialized patriotism of multinational corporations dolloping maple leaves on their logos. In my classroom, students often struggle to explain what makes up Canadian identity, beyond hockey, the widespread coffee franchise Tim Horton’s, and an idealized view of Canada’s socialized medical system.

It is true that a certain kind of facile feeling of Canadian superiority toward the U.S remains. We look on agog at the uniquely American prevalence of mass shootings and the influence wielded by arch-conservative legal and religious groups in public life. It is an incredibly low bar, but we remain proud that Canadian children are not subjected to active shooter drills in school and that our political system is not drowning in a tsunami of dark money. But it can be hard now for Canadians to put flesh on these bones and form a coherent narrative of what truly differentiates us from our neighbors.

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Canada’s alliance with a relatively benign Washington always entailed some risk. Being tied to the mast of a regime defined by cruelty and graft is a problem of another magnitude entirely.

Among the predictions of what a second Trump presidency would look like, few, if any, had imagined calls for the annexation of Canada. Trump demanded a renegotiation of NAFTA during his first term, but ultimately the Canadian negotiators were able to deal with the indiscipline and tumult of the chaotic administration. Despite Trump’s clear disdain for then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canadian businesses sighed with relief that free trade persisted largely unchanged in the new NAFTA, now called USMCA.

The crushing reality was that the country had minimal leverage in a serious trade war with the U.S. (Per the Canadian government, US$2.5 billion in goods and services cross the border every day, adding up to nearly US$1 trillion annually.)

Canada’s April 2025 election would hinge on the question of who was perceived as best placed to defend Canada from the second Trump administration, an altogether different beast. The prevailing mood was one of righteous patriotic indignation, expressed in the form of slogans like “Elbows Up” and “Canada is Not for Sale.” The Liberals, led by former central banker Mark Carney, and the Conservative Party of Canada, led by the populist Pierre Poilievre, offered essentially identical platforms for how to deal with the economic protectionism and annexation threats emanating from Washington: Trump’s tariffs are unjustified, Canada will never be the 51st state, now let’s put this all behind us and swiftly return to the status quo ante bellum.

The crushing reality was that the country had minimal leverage in a serious trade war with the U.S. (Per the Canadian government, US$2.5 billion in goods and services cross the border every day, adding up to nearly US$1 trillion annually.) The strongest weapon in Canada’s arsenal to fight back in a trade war with the U.S. would be to withhold the roughly $163 billion in annual oil and gas exports. That is largely off the table, though, because it would risk an internal national unity crisis — real and imagined limitations on exportation and production capacity are a major source of resource-rich Western Canada’s grievance against the federal government in Ottawa. It might also prompt the U.S. to shut down the line 5 pipeline that takes Western Canadian oil and natural gas across Wisconsin and Michigan to refineries in Sarnia, Ontario, which would essentially deprive Canada of access to its own resources.

Close to four decades of integration has chipped away at Canada’s political options. When the economic levers go, political independence isn’t too far behind, after all. And so, despite some emotionally satiating patriotic rhetoric on the campaign trail, Carney was deferential and complimentary to Trump on his courtly visit to the Oval Office shortly after winning the election. Trump was similarly gladhanded by Carney when he set foot on Canadian soil for a G7 meeting in June 2025, never mind that tariffs were still in place, and Trump’s full-frontal assault on U.S. liberal democratic norms continued apace.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. The United Kingdom and the European Union came to trade agreements with the Trump administration later that summer, locking in baseline tariffs. Both jurisdictions pursued trade peace as quickly as they could, fearing economic ruin and political calamity. The indignity of Trump’s threats of annexation has given Canadians a higher appetite for pain, at least in the short term. Polling showed that 69 percent of Canadians agreed with “refusing difficult concessions even if it means a worsening of trade relations with the U.S.”

Without a doubt, Canada has no choice but to trade with the U.S. and the actions of the Carney government reflect the reality of the post-1988 world. The supposed rationale behind Trump’s tariffs on Canda has shifted endlessly, but what is overwhelmingly clear is that the president is basking in the power the gargantuan U.S. economy holds over Canada and other erstwhile trade partners. In assessing the U.S.-EU trade deal struck in July 2025, one Irish trade analyst summed it up well: “The price of dependency is having to swallow pride.”

PHOTO: Canadian and American flags near the Peace Park Pavilion, 2023 (by GlacierNPS via Wikimedia)