We all knew Donald Trump can win elections, we just didn’t know he’d be winning them outside the USA. Last Monday, Trump won the Canadian election for Mark Carney. There is no other way of interpreting the resurrection of the Liberal Party and the reincarnation of the uber-technocrat, Jesuit-educated Carney. In January, Carney was an out-of-work, itinerant central banker for hire, intellectually and temperamentally very much out of step in the new Maga world of ethno-nationalist populists. Today, he is the liberal world’s man of steel who will square up to Trump, the very man who enabled his election win.
Carney turned the Canadian election into a referendum on Trump. Canadians responded enthusiastically. Before Trump began dismissing Canada as an American state in waiting, the Liberal Party’s support plummeted to a low of 16 per cent. This week it won 43 per cent of the vote. Trump has managed to create something the world has never seen: virulent Canadian nationalism.
Ironically for a committed cosmopolitan - he got an Irish passport years ago but has recently relinquished his Irish and British citizenship - a walking, talking Davos-man, Carney wrapped himself in the Maple Leaf and rode the nationalist wave. Bigging up his ice hockey credentials – Canada’s real game – he deployed resolute rhetoric against the US to sell ordinary Canadians a firm but fair vision of themselves and their country. And they bought it.
Liberals all over the world are taking Carney’s victory as evidence that the juggernaut of ethno-nationalism can be beaten by facts, reason and an appeal to the better side of the electorate’s nature. Canadian nationalism is the acceptable face of nationalism in the liberal world because it is ... well, Canadian and decent. It presents itself as a middle-of-the-road, rule-of-law, Molson-lite nationalism. Defined not by what it is, but what it is against, this new Centrist Dad jingoism knows who the enemy is: Donald Trump.
Canadians have given liberals a new playbook. Stand up to Trump and your people stand behind you. All around the world, conservatives are realising that Trump and proximity to Trumpism is a massive liability. This fact alone changes the global background noise.
The new Canadian Confederation was proof that the antagonism between the 1 million Canadians of French origin and the two and a quarter million Canadians of British origin could dwindle as they found common ground
So it turns out those nice Canadians are harder than most imagined. But now that the campaign is over, how does Carney, a brilliant economic mind, negotiate from here? He must find a way to deal with America, not just because the US and Canada are neighbours, united by history and geography, but because they are, for all intents and purposes, two nations with one economy. Around 76 per cent of exports (representing around one-fifth of Canadian GDP) flow southward – making Canada particularly vulnerable to US tariff policies.
According to ScotiaBank, Canada imports roughly 34 per cent of its inputs (ie intermediate goods) from the US, and exports roughly 75 per cent of total goods it produces to the US. Energy is Canada’s single largest export to the US by value, with crude oil and natural gas making up roughly one-third of Canada’s total exports flowing south. Around one in six jobs in Canada are linked to exports, with some estimates suggesting incomes are 15 to 40 per cent higher thanks to freer trade.
Mark Carney needs a deal. The one thing in his favour is the growing realisation that, when faced with stern opposition, Trump always caves in. Carney just has to hang tight, fly the flag, follow the puck and wait for the phone call.
Whatever happens, it is clear that Carney’s ascension to power within the Liberal Party represents not merely a change in leadership but a recalibration of Canada‘s economic and political identity. That identity was officially created at midnight on July 1st, 1867, when church bells rang out from Nova Scotia to Ontario, signalling that nearly four million people would wake up as citizens of the new Dominion of Canada. The official population of 3.8 million was only 10 per cent of the bustling nation to the south.
At that stage, many Canadians doubted whether their garrison country would survive, wondering just how long Canada could remain without the Americans, driven by their “manifest destiny”, ruling the entire continent. After all, the Americans had just slaughtered each other in the civil war, so Canadians were under no illusions about what the recently victorious Union army could do if it turned around and switched its attentions from the warm south to the freezing north.
But the new Canadian Confederation was proof that the antagonism between the one million Canadians of French origin and the two and a quarter million Canadians of British origin could dwindle as they found common ground. The rest – the indigenous peoples, the original inhabitants – didn’t get a look in. The hope was that the differences, be they regional, racial or religious, could be gradually ameliorated by prosperity.
Can 'technocratic daddy' Mark Carney solve Canada's deep-rooted problems?
Apart from the linguistic and cultural clash between French and English speakers, the major fault line in the new Canadian Confederation was sectarian. In the first Canadian census, 8 per cent of the population were neither French nor British. Of this group, 200,000 were German and the census turned up only 125 Jews, 11 Hindus and three Chinese.
The Irish were the largest group with the “British” cohort, and we brought to Canada our sectarian “green and orange” hatred that would play out in regular riots from Montreal to Toronto and Halifax. Ulster Protestant emigrants joined forces with Scottish farmers to form an Orange phalanx against the surge of Irish Catholic migration from the 1830s onwards. Today there are more Orange Lodges in Canada than anywhere else in the world outside Northern Ireland. (In fact, I witnessed my first and last Orange 12th of July march in Toronto back in 1986!)
More than 600,000 Irish emigrants arrived in Canada in the 20-year period between 1830 and 1851, making the Irish the second-largest ethnic group after the Quebecois. We kept coming to the new Confederation and, by 1931, more than a quarter of all Canadians were Irish-Canadians, one third Catholic and two-thirds Protestant. Today, there is scarcely a family in Antrim that doesn’t have people in Canada, particularly Ontario.
Maybe a reason that I am interested in the country is that, but for last-minute cold feet, I would have been a French-speaking Canadian. In the late 1950s, my just-married parents got Canadian visas. My mother had secured a teaching job in Montreal, but a week before they were due to sail from Cobh they got the heebie-jeebies and stayed put. Between 1830 and 1970, 1.3 million Irish people moved to Canada. As a result, Irish-Canadians are about 14 per cent of the Canadian population today, Mark Carney included.
[ The Canadian election: Trump effect a major factorOpens in new window ]
Today’s Canada is no longer divided between French and English speakers. It is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Many Canadians, including lots of the 41 per cent who still voted Conservative last week, believe immigration must be reduced, citing runaway house prices as evidence that the country can’t cope. Similar arguments could be plausibly made here.
Canada is in essence two economies and cultures: the resource-based “cowboy” commodity economy in the culture of western Canada and the service, “social democrat” society of eastern Canada. Imagine a fusion of Texas and Belgium and you get the picture.
This is the country Mark Carney must unite. And nothing unites better than a common enemy. For Canadians, that man is Donald Trump, who this week proved he can win elections anywhere in the world.
