Elbows Up!, page 18
Canadians no longer trust the United States, global hegemon and erstwhile ally. We’re looking inward, relaxing rules for domestic trade. Until now, we were quite reliably informed that changing those rules was impossible, as likely as cracking cold fusion. Now, it’s easy-peasy. Done by Canada Day. We’re also looking outward, toward new or bolstered trade and defence relationships with foreign states that aren’t the U.S. That’s what discomfort and distrust gets you. But there’s more to it, still.
I think if you ask Canadians to use a half-dozen words to describe how they feel about our relationship with the U.S. right now, one of the first few they’d use would be betrayal. I think that’s the right word. I feel that way. Stabbed in the back, not quite out of nowhere, but the scale of the double-cross is immense.
I feel frustrated, too. And I bet I’m not alone. We can’t entirely decouple from America, which is frustrating. We may not want to, which is also frustrating. The U.S. is too big, too close, too convenient, too similar to us for the purposes of facilitating the exchange of goods and services. It’s hard to ship things across the ocean to England. It’s easier to drive them across a bridge to Michigan. National pride is a powerful force. The path of least resistance is a strong force, too, even after it leads you backwards into a stiletto.
Even with a knife in our backs, we need to keep company with Uncle Sam. Same as it ever was. In the 1968 book The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., which inspired this volume, editor Al Purdy argued that the very need for a collection of Canuck hot takes—my term, not his—on the U.S. was because “the most powerful nation on earth is everyone’s business, for what happens in the U.S. affects every Canadian.” That’s more true fifty-seven years later than it was when Purdy clicked and clacked those words on his typewriter. Accepting this means accepting that the relationship between the U.S. and Canada will be fractured, but not ground into dust. At least not any time soon. We’ll sit here, frustrated and betrayed, uncomfortable and suspicious, and try to sort it out, personally and collectively, economically and emotionally. But by god we’ll try to sort it out.
For me, the U.S.–Canada relationship has an added dimension of some complexity. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for using this space for some therapy. I can imagine this book as a lot of things, one of which is therapeutic. For the retail price, it’s a bargain.
My father was born in Newfane, New York, in 1962. Newfane is a small town on the south shore of Lake Ontario, just forty-five minutes from Niagara Falls. When he was about two years old or so, my dad was taken from that town and brought across the U.S.–Canada border by his father, without his mother’s permission. He was deposited with an aunt from his father’s side and her husband. They raised him as their own.
He didn’t know until years later that his mother and father weren’t his biological parents. He wasn’t formally adopted until his late teen years. He never got Canadian citizenship. He never held a passport. Today, we would say he was kidnapped. Perhaps some said as much then, but that didn’t change the fact he was taken as a young child from the U.S., from his home, never to see his mother again. He rarely set foot in the country of his birth after that, and never again in his hometown.
For years, my dad’s birth mother, Molly, would send him letters and cards for his birthday and at Christmas, a little cash tucked inside along with loving notes. These letters and cards were marked “Return to sender.” My dad wouldn’t see them. Later in life, as an adult, he learned of their existence. My mother got a hold of them. Molly had sent them to her before she died. She’d hoped my dad would read them, at last. He didn’t want to. He couldn’t. He was struggling with alcoholism and raising young kids while just a kid himself. He hadn’t gone to college or university. He lived in a city, Peterborough, that was heading for the sort of post-industrial decline Bruce Springsteen sang about in the 1980s. That was a decline shared by the rest of Canada and the United States, and one, as it happens, that precipitated Donald Trump, tariffs, our current battle, and this book.
My father’s struggle didn’t end well. He did later manage to go to college. He became a mechanic. He got sober for more than a decade. Then he relapsed. He drank himself to death in 2014 at the age of fifty-two. Just before he died, he read the letters from his mother. The work of many years.
I’ve told this story before in private. I’ve cobbled it together from the information that’s been passed along to me from my family. It feels like a story that one should at once never tell and yet must tell. I’m sharing it publicly now because the truth should be on the record. More germane to our purposes, I can’t think about the U.S. or explain my feelings about that country without thinking of that story and of my dad. It’s a blessing and a curse. I hope he wouldn’t mind me sharing all of this with the country at a time when we’re sorting out our complicated feelings about our neighbour and—I think I can still say—friend. Cultural and personal connections persist, despite the actions of those who’ve set in motion the desecration of the relationship.
To betrayal, distrust, and frustration, we can thus add the word complicated. From what I can tell, my dad continued to love the U.S. throughout his life, despite his own complicated relationship with the country. He must have watched Top Gun a hundred times. I remember seeing it with him at a drive-in. I remember how loud it was, like the jets were overhead. He assembled models of U.S. fighter jets and placed a miniature stealth bomber toy on the dashboard of his red Jetta. He still has that little stealth bomber; it’s with him in his burial niche. You don’t watch Top Gun that often or go to your eternal rest with a miniature American stealth bomber unless you hold on to at least a little fondness for the land of your birth.
For a while, years ago, I considered applying for U.S. citizenship. I didn’t research it too deeply. I wasn’t sure I was eligible, though I think I am. I have my father’s paperwork, vital documents, buried in a box of things I try not to look at too often. I knew that if I applied successfully, I would have to file taxes each year with the Internal Revenue Service. I wasn’t interested in that.
It’s possible there’s more to my dual-citizenship ambivalence. It’s possible part of me was motivated to keep away from U.S. citizenship lest I needed to, at some point in the future, go around explaining that I was a dual citizen, as some seem to do for reasons I don’t quite understand. It seems almost decadent. Two passports? In this economy? Moreover, I would have had to give up the smug moral superiority, the Canadian national pastime, of judging America and its people from on high. As a dual citizen, would I even be permitted to scoff at the comings and goings and happenings of those who live stateside, saying things like “I can’t believe they have…” I’d be part of them, wouldn’t I? Would I have to start apologizing for my president? Or saying, “He’s not my president.” Quelle horreur. Better to sit in judgment on Jupiter’s throne.
I also knew that, if I were to apply for U.S. citizenship, I’d have to confront my father’s past, and I wasn’t sure how that would go. Writing this chapter and researching Newfane for the first time in years, I recall a trip my dad took our family on to Niagara Falls—the Canadian side—when I was a kid. It occurs to me now, I’m embarrassed to say for the first time, that during the jaunt, he must have thought about his hometown, just over the border, less than an hour by car but decades away. It was a border he couldn’t cross, could never cross, whatever the paperwork requirements may have been.
I guess I’m confronting that history now, both privately and quite literally publicly. Writing this is heartbreaking, and I’m starting to regret my choice to do so in a busy coffee shop. If anybody asks, there’s something in my eye. Both eyes. Damn Yankees.
But now the decks are clear. You know where I’m coming from—the emotional cobwebs cleared. And you know that, for my part, my feelings about the U.S. are bound up with my father’s history. So I’m not a totally honest broker. But I’m aware of it at least, just as I’m aware of my fascination, admiration, revulsion, and hopes for the country Leonard Cohen called “the cradle of the best and of the worst.” That line comes from his song “Democracy,” and it continues “it’s here they got the range, and the machinery for change.”
Boy do they ever. For better and for worse. Having travelled throughout much of the northern U.S., having driven across it, having consumed its culture—food, television, film, music, books, video games, architecture—and having studied its history, foreign policy, and domestic politics, I can confirm Cohen was on to something. I can confirm that when Canada loses some or all of its relationship with that place, it’s no small loss. For all the trash we can talk about America’s past, present, and future (let’s be generous and assume it has one), it’s a country with its own gravitational pull.
When the Trump tariffs were announced, there was immediate talk of pulling American alcohol off the shelves in Ontario and elsewhere. I supported that move and still do. I also went to buy one last bottle of bourbon before switching to Canadian rye. I’m writing this chapter while wearing a hoodie from Powell’s Books, pride of Portland, Oregon. It’s the best goddamned place in the world. I could spend a year there. It’s the world’s largest independent bookshop. It’s the size of a city block, its four floors heaving full of new and used books—more than a million of them, in fact. It’s like the Library of Alexandria with tote bags.
Here is where I do a little American hagiography, perhaps out of a sense of journalistic fairness and balance, but really just because it’s the truth. For years, each American city I visited would become a favourite for its food or architecture or literature or history or whatever. Portland, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles. I remember driving through the Nebraska grasslands and thinking that land must have been blessed by the most benevolent god. For decades, American sports teams caught my attention. I was a Dallas Cowboys fan and a New York Yankees fan, and not just during the winning years. From grade school onward, I was a Red Wings fan, until just recently, when I gave up the red and white for the red, white, and blue of the Montreal Canadiens—an ironic, colourful twist.
Today, I won’t cheer for any American team. Call me petty. But I won’t. I don’t judge those who do—we all have our reasons for where we draw our lines—but the Trump regime and its enablers have pissed me off sufficiently that I just can’t. As I mentioned at the top, I also won’t visit any of those American cities I love, nor will I go find new ones to love, any time soon. It wouldn’t feel right. Besides, at the rate people are being detained at the border, or worse, I’m one Google search away from finding myself down a hole and without a phone call to my lawyer.
I’m still drawn to the U.S. despite myself. I’m not alone. But I worry the hegemon is in terminal decline. When Robert Prevost, Bob from Chicago, was elected pope and became Leo XIV, Bishop Robert Barron cited the late Cardinal George of Chicago, who said, “Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.” America’s democratic institutions are falling apart in real time. Maybe it’s no longer a democracy at all. The country is run by a lunatic, and it’s abandoning the deeply flawed, often violent, but nonetheless core role it played in the decades after the Second World War of cobbling together something of a world order.
What comes next? We don’t know. As rotten as much of the American-led domestic and world order has been, it’s hard to cheer for chaos, especially since it’s at best an even-money bet that something far worse emerges from a moribund America. It’s a bit like Canada’s complicated relationship with U.S. free trade: you may have hated to adopt it, you may have remained skeptical of it, but when it’s gone and you’re staring down at a crater in the ground, nobody is celebrating. You start to think it’s not the last of the craters to come.
The thing about countries, democracy, and relationships is that they tend to take a long time to build and a short time to tear down. Americans are betraying their own institutions, values, and ideals. It’s not the first time. American commitments to what former president Ronald Reagan called the shining city on a hill were always conditional, even hypocritical. The country was founded on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery. It fought a civil war over the latter, which stands to this day as the bloodiest conflict the country has ever engaged in—and it has never gone long without a conflict. Today, it declines into outright fascism, shredding its own Constitution in the process, a land of immigrants that now disappears immigrants.
As America declines, Canada is stuck working through the feelings that come with having to decide to what degree we wish to, or must, continue our relationship. Even now, our government is discussing joining Trump and company in a zany missile defence scheme, one made all the more uncomfortable by the fact that it might well be an extension of our existing relationship under norad, a reminder that we’re in continental defence together and, by the way, that those nasty missiles, should they one day arrive, will probably be shot down over the true north, strong and free.
Our feelings of betrayal, discomfort, and distrust won’t abate any time soon, but neither will a sense that, however much we may need or want to be bound to the U.S., we’re profiting from and enabling a country we know to be plumbing the depths of inhumane behaviour at home and abroad. Again, it’s not the first time. But we may nonetheless be pressed to answer some tough questions, like just how far we’ll go to preserve our own well-being while the world’s hegemon, our primary trade and defence partner, swirls around the drain of history and pulls others down with it. So, to the list of feelings, I add guilt.
That’s a lot of feelings. Big feelings. Coming to the end of this meandering chapter, I’m reminded that writing is thinking. And I think there’s one more feeling to add: grief. It’s sad to lose so much of a relationship of the sort Canada and the U.S. have had for so many years—not sure when, or if, you’ll fully reconcile, or even want to. I think we’re grieving that loss.
Still, the sun breaks through the loss. It’s a bright and warm spring day in Ottawa as I write the end to this chapter. Princess Margriet of the Netherlands was meant to be in town to open the Tulip Festival, in recognition of Canada’s role in freeing the Dutch from Nazi occupation during the Second World War, but she had to cancel for health reasons. The festival continues and the flowers still bloom. Ottawa is still Ottawa, and we are reliably told by our political leaders it will never be the capital of the 51st state, because Canada is not for sale. That’s good news. Most of us prefer not to be American. I think most of us prefer not to be at loggerheads with America, either. Nobody likes feeling distrustful, frustrated, guilty, or betrayed. Nobody likes to grieve.
We may work it all out in time, though. Each generation brings renewal, new approaches, new perspectives, often forgetting or overcoming the past so that they may have a richer future. The Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges knew how important forgetting was, how crucial it was to survival. He once said, “Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too.” Maybe we’ll forget all of this soon, and have our vengeance.
Thinking of that, I wonder what a Canadian looking back on this chapter six decades from now—roughly the same length of time from which I look back on The New Romans—will have to say about the U.S.–Canada relationship. I suspect, whatever else may be true of their moment, they’ll recognize as familiar the frustrations, anxieties, complexities, and hopes I’ve expressed here, as they undertake their own work of many years in building a Canada that must exist, for better or worse, alongside the United States. For them, I hope they can build a better, more enduring, more just relationship with the Yankees than we’ve managed.
For my country, I hope we can protect ourselves—our culture, our workers, our industries, our sovereignty—from American threats. I hope we can emerge from all of this stronger than when we entered it. My hopes are more modest for myself. I confess a selfish motive here, but I hope our relationship with the U.S. returns to something resembling normal so that I can go back south of the border without guilt or fear. I know where I’ll go first. I’ll go to Newfane, New York. I’ll finish a trip that started with my father in the 1960s, just around the time Al Purdy was setting out to find a handful of Canadians who could express how they felt about Canada’s relationship with the United States.
TOM POWER
And It’s Ours
I’ve been hosting Q on CBC Radio for about ten years now, and I’ve spent that time very lucky to have a job where I speak to Canadian musicians and artists, and musicians and artists from all over the world. But since the threats of annexation and the “51st state” rhetoric kicked up a few months ago, I’ll admit I’ve been thinking a little more deeply about our responsibility to share stories about Canadian music, about Canadian art, and tell the stories of Canadian artists. About the quiet resistance of making space for the profound art that lives right here. Reflecting on that made me reflect that I had to fall in love with the art we make here first.
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I was in Dublin. I was fifteen, so it must’ve been 2002. I had flown across the pond for a week of gigs (“gigs” makes it sound cool—it was more like community theatre performances) with a Newfoundland fiddle group called the Celtic Fiddlers. Before you get too impressed: I didn’t even play fiddle…I played bass. And also my mom was a chaperone on the trip. But that week I kept hearing Irish traditional music everywhere. Blasting from the fronts of shops, quietly bleeding out of the corners of pubs I wasn’t old enough to be in, peeking through the crackling speakers of the coach bus while I sat in the back and played Nintendo ds. I was curious about it, so I walked into a record store with the twenty euros I had borrowed from my mom and bought a cd by The Pogues called The Very Best Of…. I put it in my Discman, pulled on my headphones, and was transported. The music was messy, it was defiant; it had whistles, accordions, drums, and banjo. It sounded like it had been written by the smartest person you’d ever found yourself sitting next to at a pub while the bar staff called closing time, or at least what I imagined that was like because again I was fifteen—either way, I didn’t know folk music could sound like that. I was in.
