In the weeks leading up to his second inauguration as U.S. President, Donald Trump began talking about “annexing” several countries, including Panama, Greenland, and Canada. Mercifully, he would clarify in a January 7th press conference that while he would consider using military force against Greenland and Panama, he would rely only on “economic force” to take over Canada. The threat of American imperialism has been a constant in Canadian history, and cause for concern for Canadian philosophers.
Nations are moral communities that embody certain values and embed those values in their laws and institutions. In his landmark work, Lament for a Nation (1965), Canadian philosopher George Grant argued that one moral principle at the heart of the Canadian community was “order.” While the cornerstone principle of the United States is “liberty,” Canadians have from the outset endorsed a different conception of the good. Compare the slogan of the Declaration of Independence (1776), “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” to the aspirations of the British North America Act (1867): “peace, order, and good government.” The approaches the two nations took to their western frontiers also illustrate this contrast. While Canada dispatched the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to impose order on the wilderness, the American “wild west” became a byword for chaotic liberty.
The ethos that Grant had identified is related to what intellectual historian A.B. McKillop termed the “moral imperative” in Canadian philosophy. Nineteenth-century philosophers like John Watson, George John Blewett, and John Clark Murray, held that one’s identity and moral horizons are inextricably linked to their community. Reflecting on this tradition, Leslie Armour succinctly captured this perspective in The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (1984): “I would not know who I was if I were alone in the universe.” These early thinkers passed this communitarian ethos to their students, who went on to become civil servants, clergy, and teachers, and to embed those values in Canada’s government, churches, and the minds of their students. John Watson’s theology became the backbone of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant domination. The generation of policymakers and civil servants who built the modern Canadian state were reared on this communal conception of the good that called for the creation of an orderly, just society.
This finds expression in Canada’s laws and institutions. Take the Canada Health Act (1985) and its processor legislation, which defines Canada’s healthcare system. In principle, all Canadians have access to hospital and physician care without having to pay a cent upfront. Whatever its faults, a different ethos informs this policy than America’s chaotic landscape of private health insurance. When Donald Trump inanely declares that Canadians would have “much better” healthcare were Canada the 51st state, he overlooks the moral conviction underpinning Canada’s healthcare system.
Grant warned that the greatest threat to Canada, as a nation with its own moral destiny, was integration into the American empire. This fear of American imperialism is not new. In the 1860s, the Fathers of Confederation looked on as the American Civil War unfolded across the border and worried that upon settling their internal dispute, the Americans would turn their guns northward as they had five decades earlier in 1812. The divided colonies of British North America would not be able to protect themselves. One motivation for Confederation—the unification of these colonies into Canada—was mutual defence against American expansion. A hundred years later, during his 1969 visit to Richard Nixon’s White House, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau would quip that: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Fortunately, there was no subsequent invasion of Canada by the United States. Instead, for most of Canada’s history, the threats posed by the United States have been economic and cultural. The United States has the larger, dominant economy, and is one of the biggest, wealthiest players on the world stage. Recurrent concerns have been expressed about how the ownership of Canadian industry becomes concentrated in American hands, leaving Canadians with less control over their domestic economy. In the mid-twentieth century, Canadian governments tried to increase domestic ownership of Canadian industry and diversify Canada’s trade portfolio to decrease its dependency on the U.S. economy. However, this economic nationalism waned by the 1980s, suffering a blow during the debate over the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement which would later be replaced with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and its recent replacement, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
Of course, the United States is also a cultural powerhouse, exporting its books, TV shows, and films to the rest of the world. Canadian artists and cultural industries have struggled to compete with their American counterparts, relying on the state to help them reach a domestic audience. Part of this is simple economics of scale. It is cheaper to sell American media in Canada as a secondary market than it is to fund, develop, and sell Canadian content. In Quebec, this is mitigated somewhat by the language barrier. Francophone Quebecers read their own novels and watch their own films, because there is an appetite for French-language works that the United States is not supplying. The arts are the means by which a nation expresses itself, and insofar as Canadians have unique stories to tell about their values and experiences, U.S. cultural hegemony remains a challenge. This is why the “cultural industries,” such as publishing, music, and film were exempted from the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and its successor legislation—to safeguard Canada’s cultural sovereignty.
Why should anyone care about any of this? What would it matter if Canada is economically dominated by the United States? Why worry about whether Canadian novels are read or Canadian films watched when we have perfectly good American ones? If at the heart of the Canadian nation is a distinct conception of the good, realizing that good requires sovereignty. Sovereignty over the social and economic institutions necessary to realize that conception of the good, and sovereignty over the cultural institutions that give expression to the Canadian nation’s values and aspirations.
In any case, there is no legal mechanism for Canada to annex itself to the United States. As Charles Taylor once pointed out, the provinces would presumably have to separate and then annex themselves to the U.S. individually. The Clarity Act (2000) does have provisions for the secession of Canadian provinces. But what province would pursue this route with an eye toward joining the United States? The most prominent separatist movement in Canada is in Québec, where it is largely motivated by a desire to preserve the French language and Quebecois culture. Whatever you think of Québec separatism, its aims are better satisfied within a bilingual Canada than they would be in the United States. The assimilation of the French in Louisiana has long been a cautionary tale about what might have happened to Québec if absorbed into the anglophone culture of the United States.
Sometimes people say that the Prairie provinces—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta—might be interesting in seceding and joining the U.S. Yet, successful protest movements in western Canada have always been organized around the idea that “the West wants in” not “the West wants out.” Western separatist parties have failed to find a constituency in mainstream Canadian politics. If the western provinces feel ignored in the smaller pond of Canada, it is doubtful that they would feel noticed among fifty other states. Of course, the future is not written and this all could change, but it is hard to believe that any province could foment an upstart movement with the momentum to both leave Canada and join the United States.
The United States occupies a special place in Canadian philosophy. As Ian Angus explains, the metaphor of the border along the 49th parallel enables Canadians to bring to mind a conception of the United States which they use to critique Canadian society, and to imagine a different future for themselves. That is to say, to borrow Charles Taylor’s turn of phrase, the U.S. is one of Canada’s “significant others,” which Canada defines itself against. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
The post The 49th Parallel: Canadian Philosophy and American Imperialism first appeared on Blog of the APA.
Read the full article which is published on APA Online (external link)
