Beyond the tantrum: Canadian self-determination demands more than anti-Americanism

P.M. Szpunar writes, “A serious country would want better. It would want less theatre and more capability. Less resentment and more achievement.”

(AI Generated)

Author: P.M. Szpunar

P.M. Szpunar writes personal reflections on totalitarianism and political culture through the lens of opera and the operatic canon. Her work can be found at www.peaisgreen.com

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Grocery shopping on a beautiful Friday night, I couldn’t find celery, but that wasn’t the only thing missing; the produce section’s shelves were largely empty. Asking an employee, I learned that at least 30 percent of the store’s walk-in clientele was pressuring the grocer to boycott American produce. Here I was, a Canadian, on a limited budget, and fellow Canadians had made it impossible to purchase fresh food that’s affordable.

Food shortages and zooming prices are more than an inconvenience – they’re a warning sign. Not because you can’t find pecorino cheese for Jamie Oliver’s Summertime Tagliarini. But because scarcity has a way of turning consumers into zealots. The moral panic accompanying this year’s “buy Canadian” wave strikes me as not unlike the toilet paper obsession during the “great toilet paper scare of 2020”.

As emotionally satisfying as such gestures might be, self-righteous grocery patrols cannot sanitize Canada from the brash, blunt and “anti-Canadian” personality of the American President. The conceit is absurd not only because it restricts supply and reduces competition – raising prices for Canadians who already can barely afford to eat. But because it suggests the president of the world’s biggest economy can be wished away with the swap of a sticker. Nevertheless, our Laurentian Elites have doubled down, deeming the Americans unworthy of negotiation, at one point declaring the entire relationship over.

Canadian anti-Americanism is not simply disagreement with U.S. policy. Mature disagreement could be useful – it might ask how Canada could become richer, stronger, more productive, better defended, less dependent and more capable. Instead, the lazy version is an alibi veiled in a cultural sneer, allowing Canada to avoid responsibility for its own stagnation and creeping decline. It lets Canada blame Trump, Republicans, American capitalism, American arrogance, American exceptionalism and American vulgarity. By implication, Canadians are the opposite: polite, refined, wise, moderate, enlightened and morally evolved.

The narrative is flattering – and anaesthetizing. It allows a fraying country to milk the emotional pleasure of superiority without the burden of achievement. Washington is ever the villain while Canada is spared the painful question: why are we so dependent on a country we so enjoy resenting? Meanwhile, the harder domestic problems remain: weak productivity, low business investment, regulatory sludge, strangled markets, botched procurement, unaffordable housing and a culture that rewards woke “virtue” over merit.

Meanwhile, the Mark Carney and Doug “Rabid Dog” Ford governments have proved unpredictable even in their anti-Americanism. We’ve changed course too many times to fathom. Even summarizing it is bewildering: “Elbows Up” became permission for lazy anti-Americanism, metamorphizing into the self-servingly edited Ronald Reagan anti-tariff TV ad, to the Gordie Howe bridge dispute, then pleas for the Americans to “support our neighbours” as Canadian wildfire smoke crossed the border – after Ottawa eliminated nearly half the relevant emergency operations positions.

As if that weren’t enough, as Trump threatened still more tariffs, a crazed single-day rhetorical swing included “dismantle the U.S.” and “intensifying trade”. Whatever one thinks of Trump, Canada’s antics are not sophisticated diplomacy, let alone serious negotiations with our most important trading partner; nor are they indicative of serious political will. They’re a temper tantrum played out at the expense of terrified Canadians.

A mature Canadian patriotism would manage to restrain itself while looking hard at its own systems, institutions, resources and finances – and fix them. It would make Canada so productive, so innovative, so free and so well-governed that it could handle whatever the U.S. could throw at it.

Alas, the country’s decline proceeds apace. While some Canadians keep busy policing grapefruit labels for political impurity, many of the country’s most talented and ambitious head south. According to a 2024 paper by Leader’s Study, a shocking 48 percent of new businesses founded by Canadians were launched in the U.S.

Canada can posture against the United States culturally, but its most ambitious builders routinely look south for capital, scale, compensation, and company formation. Canada’s problem is not that it still likes America too much. It is that it resents American power and success while exporting the people most capable of building Canadian power and delivering Canadian success. Canadians watch ambition migrate elsewhere and then congratulate themselves for not being American. It is self-sabotage.

Yes, I know: America is chaotic, aggressive, unequal, loud and exasperating. But it is also dynamic. It rewards ambition. It generates prosperity. Canada, by contrast, specializes in over-governing its over-regulated markets, making ambition so reviled that hating Elon Musk is its latest virtue.

Resurrecting Canadian self-determination would mean building its productivity pipelines, procurement systems, talent pathways and innovation infrastructure so that staying in Canada became the obvious choice. It would focus on fully exploiting its most competitive assets for revenue-generation: oil, natural gas, mines and critical minerals.

A serious country would want better. It would want less theatre and more capability. Less resentment and more achievement. Less maple-leaf moralism in the grocery aisle, and more of the hard, unglamorous work required to make Canada strong, respected, resilient, free and wealthy.

Because behind the curtain, a Canadian founder will quietly board a flight to San Francisco because they dared to dream, knowing that even if they fail, they will learn more than they ever would from dutiful compliance. Elsewhere, a Canadian consumer will stare at a pitiful bundle of celery and wonder how a country so abundantly rich became small enough to mistake sourcing a different stalk for national strategy.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.