Canada's front-row seat for the American disaster

As many commentators have opined, Canadians should not become smug because Canada has fared relatively well in the Great Recession since 2008. Canada has been as fortunate as it has been wise, above all in having the United States, rather than more historically aggressive countries, as a neighbour; in having the British as the originating force for Canadian institutions and laws; and in being a treasure house of natural resources. It might even, someday, be seen as an advantage to have a viable French contingent of the population. It would require a preternaturally inept people to misplay this geopolitical hand.

It is notorious that most Canadians are to some degree anti-American, though most are also appreciators of America, and this makes the present election in the United States, unfathomably banal though the campaign has been so far, a matter of legitimate comfort to most Canadians. Canada has been to some degree the beneficiary of the self-imposed decline of America these past 15 years. It is a continuing struggle to persuade Canadians that they may safely liberate themselves from the impulse not to aspire to anything more ambitious in the world than to tug at the trouser-leg of the Americans. Canada entrusted its national security entirely to the United States in the 1930s, and through the end of the Cold War, and pulled its weight sometimes, and sometimes not. And the extent of its independence was mainly posturing through the United Nations in the role of peacekeeper.

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© 2024 Conrad Black