“Canada” vs. “America:” A Struggle for Liberal Democracy

5. 5. 2025

Portrétna fotografia Ivana Kalmara — Ivan Kalmar

On April 28 in Canada’s federal election, the Liberal Party was reelected, with Prime Minister Mark Carney at its helm. The main opposition Conservatives lost. The social democratic New Democrats got back into Parliament but lost the financing reserved for larger parties. The New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh lost his own “riding” (electoral district) and resigned as party leader.

The Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, lost his riding also, but did not resign. Election night was a bitter but not surprising disappointment for him. The Liberal Prime Minister was, until November, 2024, the unpopular Justin Trudeau. All the polls saw Poilievre as the incoming Prime Minister after ten years of Liberal rule. Nor could Mark Carney, who replaced Trudeau in a desperate attempt to save the Liberals, have much hope of prevailing. But then the thing happened that changed everything: the second coming in the United States of Donald Trump.

Why does he hates us so?

In 1846, Britain and the US “made a deal,” to use a favorite Trumpian expression, and divided the territory of indigenous North Americans between themselves, largely along the 49^th parallel. The British part became Canada. Trump has called this border an “artificially drawn line from many years ago.”¹ His associate, Elon Musk, said that Canada was “not a real country.”² Like so many people outside of Canada, Trump and Musk think of Canadians as basically Americans.

Canadians could not disagree more. When, before his reelection, Trump suggested that Canada should become “the 51^st state,” most people thought he was joking. But on February 1, Trump hit Canada and Mexico with a tariff of 25% on most of their exports to the US.³ He gave two reasons. First, he claimed that both countries had a large trade surplus with his country, and that this meant that the US was subsidizing Canada to the tune of $200 billion per year. Second, he suggested that Canada, like Mexico, was the source of the fentanyl scourge that had killed thousands of Americans, and of large numbers of illegal immigrants.

Both of these assertions are false.

The TD bank, a leading financial institution in Canada, explains, using American Census Bureau figures, that the actual trade deficit is only $45 billion in Canada’s favor. And, as any economist knows, negative trade balances are not necessarily “unfair” and they are not a subsidy by the importer of the exporter. All of Canada’s trade surplus is caused by the fact that Canada fuels the US economy with its exports of natural resources like oil and water and the potash needed used by American farmers for fertilizer.⁴ The US needs these imports.

The fentanyl accusation is simply a lie. Recently only 0.2% of fentanyl seizures by the US authorities have taken place at the Canadian border.⁵ Nor is there any evidence of a very large number of “illegal aliens” entering the United States from Canada.⁶

So if neither trade nor drugs, nor migrants, justify Trump’s tariffs, then what is the reason for them? In the words of Prime Minister Carney, “ America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. (…) President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.”⁷

Bullying, greed, and the desire to shock in order to stay in the news are a standard for Trump. But I would suggest that there is more to his hostility against Canada. While Trump insists that Canada would be a “cherished” 51^st state, he has only disdain and distaste for the real Canada, an independent country of people who do not want to be American. Why does he hates us so?

To understand the answer, we need to pay attention to what “Canada” and “America” mean, not objectively as countries, but as concepts, notions of the imagination.

American peasants, polite Canadians

When I, a teenager recently „escaped” from communist Czechoslovakia, was preparing to move with my parents to the United States, my aunt from Montreal met us in our temporary abode in Italy. She described the difference between Canadians and Americans, as she saw it. Canadians, she said, are polite and Americans are “peasants.” After I moved to Canada from the US (once again a refugee, this time avoiding the war in Vietnam), I realized that my aunt was using a well-worn Canadian cliché. The idea about Canadian politeness is matched in Canada’s self-image only by Canadian multiculturalism. Canada, Canadians will routinely say, is multicultural, while the United States is “a melting pot,” expecting people of all races, colors, and creeds to give up their heritage in order to become American.

Here are some other Canadian values as described by the Prime Minister as he celebrated his election victory: seeing “kindness as a virtue,” “cultural institutions such as the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation),” and “universal public health care.” This last is emblematic. To this day, though pressures on the system are mounting, Canadians receive medical services from a checkup to an MRI to chemotherapy without having to pay a penny.

Going by such Canadian rhetoric, you’d be excused to think that we believe Americans lack the values we celebrate. They are impolite, ethnocentric, and don’t care for the poor and weak. But this, of course, would be crass prejudice. Americans may be less reserved but value politeness as well. Many parts of the US have become just as multiracial and multicultural as Canada, while some rural areas in Canada remain mostly White and Anglo.

It is true, though, that our public broadcasting, education and health systems have their faults, they are far more concerned with universal access and are conceived of as a right, not a privilege. But many progressive and liberal Americans strive to have the same kind of public services that most Canadians are proud of. The charismatic American Senator, Bernie Sanders, for example, has long argued for a health-care system modeled on Canada.⁸ The real difference between Canada and the United States is not a matter of national character. It is a matter of politics.

In both countries, “Canada” stands for a liberal democracy that is inclusive of people of all races, ethnicities, languages, genders, and sexual orientations – things that became standard, at least in aspiration, in the post-World-War II West. And in both countries, “America” under Trump stands for exclusivist, anti-migrant nationalism and a return to patriarchal gender relations. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, whose authoritarian rule has been publicly acknowledged by Trump and his entourage as a model, calls this an “illiberal democracy.” Illiberal movements bear strong resemblances to prewar fascism. They rightly point to the many failures of the liberal democratic West. They reject the neoliberal policies of worldwide deregulation, of trade but also of worker protections, leading to unheard of inequality and a wide-spread sense of insecurity. As an economic solution, they advocate for economic nationalism. In America this means hoping falsely to restore economic security by restricting foreign competition through tariffs. It also means keeping out migrants, believing that this will bring investments and jobs back to the country and make it “great again.”

In short, “Canada” as an idea stands today for liberal democracy, and “America” for illiberalism.

Canada first

In the real America, there are millions of people for whom liberal democracy remains a cherished ideal. In the real Canada, the Liberals themselves have moved to adopt some illiberal ideas, becoming softer on environmental protection and much stricter on immigration. Among the Conservatives, illiberal ideals are more explicit than that. Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader has advocated, Trump style, for lower taxes, fewer public investments, restrictive immigration policies, tough policing, and defunding public broadcasting. His style, too, was stridently hostile to the other side, very much in Trump’s mode. Even after Trump succeeded in deeply antagonizing Canadians and Poilievre rushed to distance himself from him, he did not manage to come up with anything better than the slogan, “Canada first” – a pitiful transposition of Trump’s egotistical nationalism, with “Canada” simply substituted for “America.”

Within both countries, demographic divisions correlate with this political contrast, misrepresented by the catchwords, “Canada” and “America.” Urban liberals are partly responsible for the illiberal reaction in the countryside, including by farmers. When my Montreal aunt lumped “Americans” with “peasants,” she was unconsciously expressing the same disdain for rural America that is also common among many city-dwellers in America. In Canada itself, the demeaning stereotype of Texan cowboy country is matched by that of the province of Alberta. The “white man without a college education” is not only disproportionately represented among Trump’s supporters, but also among Poilievre’s. And in both countries, many groups of people of color, once firmly liberal, have been moving into the conservative camp.

The contest between America and Canada is not only between two countries, but also between two ideas, within each country. This struggle is the North American arena of the global conflict today, between liberal democracy and illiberalism.

How did Canada come to be the bane of the reactionary illiberal Right?

Anti-Canadian propaganda

There was a time when, across the world, “Canada” stood for a country without problems, a vast idyllic space characterized by beautiful landscapes, prosperous and welcoming, though perhaps a little too cold. My first awareness of a change happened during my research on illiberalism in Poland during the so-called “European migration crisis,” five or six years ago. A parish priest who was the spiritual advisor of a Catholic nationalist youth association was interviewed by one of my research assistants, who had himself been a member. Justifying sentiments against Muslim migration to Poland, the clergyman exclaimed, “we are not in Canada,” using the country as a metaphor for multiculturalism.

Since then, I have noted a rise of negative portrayals of Canada on the internet. Several people have posted videos on YouTube discouraging others from moving to Canada due to cultural differences, high prices (true), or intolerable crime (false).⁹ I have even seen videos about Canada’s terrible economy and the disadvantages of moving there, in Spanish.¹⁰ I am currently engaged in a research project investigating the possibility that these are part of a concerted anti-Canadian propaganda, spread from the United States or, perhaps, like many illiberal ideas, even from Russia. Regardless of its origins, the idea of Canada being, in Pierre Poilievre’s words, “broken,” owes much to home-grown, Canadian illiberal opinion makers.¹¹ After Trump’s assaults on Canada, Liberals were able to seize on this kind of Conservative criticism as unjustified and unpatriotic.

I am aware of the argument that mainstream liberals are adopting illiberal notions in order to diffuse opposition to them from the right flank of the electorate. In Canada, this has meant that the Liberals softened their commitment to environmental protection, reversed their openness to immigration, and doubled down on crime. For this reason,the New Democrats campaigned on the need to preserve progressive policies by asking us to vote for them rather than the Liberals. In spite of widespread personal approval of the New Democrat leader, Jagmeet Singh, however, Canadians rejected his appeal. They understood, correctly, that the main challenge now is to preserve not only the country, Canada, but also the idea of “Canada,” which in spite of everything remains radically opposed to that of Trump’s “America.” Mark Carney, a respected former head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, seemed the one best qualified to do the job.

For now, Canadian pride in the face of the bully in the White House has ensured that, unlike in the US and other countries, the illiberal trend did not prevail here. That is one thing for which Canadians can thank Trump.

The author is a professor of anthropology and the author of the book White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Illiberal Revolt.