It’s been a long time since the United States was at war with Canada.
And to be honest, despite the earnest efforts of a few jingoists relishing the current bilateral trade dispute, it still isn’t at war.
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, however, is another story for his own domestic political reasons. “You’re at war when you get attacked,” he said last month. “We got attacked.”
Currently, Canada and the U.S. are bobbing through yet another economic tempest cycle involving angry charges and reciprocal retaliatory tariffs that will hurt select sectors and some feelings for a time.
Trade is more important to Canada, which lacks the immense domestic market of the U.S. After Mexico, Canada is the States’ second-largest trading partner. Its select tariffs especially affect proximate border areas, including some crucial voting swing states, not by accident, I suspect.
This isn’t surprising given the political needs of Canada’s Carney, who must establish a strong public personality domestically after succeeding a political nebbish like liberal Justin Trudeau.
And it’s not surprising given the penchant of a president named Donald Trump, who feels compelled to punch anyone back, even if they’re way below his weight class.
That response serves Carney’s domestic purpose as it elevates him to a major stand-up player at home. It’s all part of the ongoing evolution of a maturing relationship between two geographically-adjacent offspring of a once global British Empire.
Each country took radically different paths to independence. The U.S. fought eight years to get it; Canada had it delivered as an unsolicited gift because London feared losing the place to an expansionist Washington in the mid-1800s.
None of this current squabble is unprecedented. Both countries have endured numerous local storms in the past. No doubt more loom in the future.
As someone who’s been involved with both countries my entire life through deep family and long professional ties, these regular disputes seem more like a household with two teenage boys. They share parents, values, intimate memories, and dinner tables, but end up some evenings slamming bedroom doors at each other over perceived slights.
One of the boys is older, bigger, stronger, and knows it. The other is maturing, is beginning to resent his junior status, and is challenging more. Which the older brother pretends not to notice because he likes things the familiar way they have been.
Canada is the world’s second-largest country, some four-million square miles that’s 10 percent larger than the U.S. with one-tenth the population. More than three-quarters of those people live within 150 miles of the U.S., which in most ways looms far larger in their lives than the other way around.
Canada is the harsher half of North America, which helps explain its historically much greater reliance on governments for most everything. While Abraham Lincoln’s administration relied on economic incentives, mainly free land, to encourage private companies to build transcontinental railroads to expand and unify the developing nation, Canada had no such enterprises to begin with.
When I flew across the U.S. one July Fourth evening, I watched local fireworks displays erupt silently far below, one after the other, for virtually the entire flight.
If you take an airplane north from Montreal, you will see lights below for maybe 15 minutes. And then, you will see absolutely zero lights below – nothing for six long hours.
Much of that space beneath is frozen most of the time, harboring bountiful natural resources. Then, when you land in Yellowknife, the largest northern city, you're still 1,600 miles from the top of the country.
It is populated in spots by a few thousand natives huddled in minute communities scattered across the frozen tundra where nothing grows taller than moss.
There, school teachers are recruited from southern Canada. One day in a classroom, I watched the teacher pass around tree leaves from her parents' Ontario yard. The youngsters oohed and aahed as they touched and smelled the exotic green things none of them would ever have to rake.
The two cousin countries share a 5,524.5-mile frontier, the world’s longest undefended border, which in some places cuts through living rooms and across airport runways.
Millions of European immigrants flocked to the U.S. promised land of freedom for decades, often fleeing hardship, war, or like the Mayflower Pilgrims, religious persecution.
Then they worked their way across the country generation by generation. For many years, my grandfather served as Canada’s immigrant recruiter in Scotland.
Every month, Ottawa sent him a requisition to find, say, one electrician and two carpenters with families for free passage to populate designated communities, often in the Canadian prairies.
When the American frontier was largely claimed by 1890, Alberta’s government advertised that Western province as “The Last Best West.” Farm land there for five years and it became yours, free.
Those experiences have shaped their national and provincial personalities. And played no small part in Alberta’s current drive for independence.
Over lunch one day, the renowned Canadian historian J.M.S. Careless told me:
"Americans cannot conceive of losing unless there’s a conspiracy somewhere. Canadians, constrained by climate, distance, and history, see no reason to expect victory."
Northrup Frye of the University of Toronto had a slightly different take:
"American students are conditioned from infancy to think of themselves as citizens of one of the world’s great powers. Canadians are conditioned from infancy to think of themselves as citizens of a country of uncertain identity, a confusing past, and a hazardous future."
This often leads to differing priorities and interests between a global superpower and a neighbor (or neighbour) of lesser strength. One day in Ottawa, the minister of external affairs told me, “The most serious dispute we have with any country is with the U.S. over fish.”
Then I took a brisk walk to the U.S. Embassy where a senior official told me dismissively, “The most serious issue between Canada and us is fish.” And he said the last word as if he smelled it.
The U.S. has actually invaded Canada twice, both when it was British-controlled. During the Revolutionary War, a general and future traitor named Benedict Arnold led an armed force that captured Montreal.
During James Madison’s presidency, the British Navy took to commandeering U.S. ships and crews for its own use. There was a major naval battle on Lake Erie during the War of 1812 that produced the epic quote by Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry: "We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
Madison also sent troops to invade Ontario from Buffalo. A Canadian milkmaid named Laura Secord sweet-talked her way through advancing American formations to become Canada’s Paul Revere by alerting the city that would become Toronto, “The Yankees are coming!” U.S. forces occupied York for two weeks and burned the place down.
In retaliation, the British forces burned Washington and the White House. But Dolley Madison saved George Washington’s portrait that still hangs there.
Word traveled slowly back then. A month after the War ended, Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British invasion of New Orleans, gaining the renown that helped him win the presidency 14 years later.
I’ve written here before about the clever 1867 U.S. purchase of Alaska for a bargain price from a cash-strapped Russian czar, a real estate deal that was much mocked at the time. It gave the U.S. one of the world's largest oil reserves, among other things. The shocking maneuver, part of the Manifest Destiny vision of Secy. of State William Seward, sandwiched Canada between two U.S. territories.
That spooked London into hastily turning its last North American colony into a country to avoid a feared U.S. takeover, despite the lack of Canadian desire for independence.
In modern times, most recently the Reagan years, the bilateral neighborhood disputes have revolved around tariffs and protectionist policies as both countries work on — or fail to work on — an updated relationship to recognize modern changes.
That would be like those two brothers upstairs, the older one recognizing the growth and maturity of his “little brother.” And the younger one no longer expecting kid-glove treatment.
But geographic, cultural, strategic, and economic realities have made both lands kin. NHL teams and the Buffalo Bills, for instance, play both anthems.
Sometimes there are policy spats, but there's also a shared prosperity and mutual security. The strategic reality for both is that Russia, the world's largest country, is Canada’s other next-door neighbor to the north. In Ukraine and Georgia, the world has seen how Russia treats neighbors.
On 9/11, when all North American air traffic was grounded, Canadians in Newfoundland and elsewhere housed and fed more than 7,000 stranded Americans for several days, no questions asked. Hockey rinks were turned into refrigerated food warehouses.
In gratitude, U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra personally went to the island province the other day and said: “During a very dark time, the people of Newfoundland showed us what true community really means.”
In the ensuing Afghan war, more than 2,100 Canadians were killed or wounded fighting alongside Americans. When Iran took 66 U.S. hostages during the 1979 revolution, it was Canada’s ambassador Ken Taylor who hid six Americans in his home and, months later, smuggled them to freedom.
Another Canadian diplomat, Gerard Pelletier, has stated the reality simply:
"We can’t move Canada out of North America, and the Americans cannot move us out either. So, we have to agree to live here together."
Looking at what has happened on the U.S. border with Mexico in recent years and what Russia is doing to Ukraine, another next-door neighbor, the sometimes bumpy, oftentimes amicable U.S.-Canadian relationship doesn’t really seem all that bad, eh?
