Being out of the country this Canada Day is probably a good thing as I am not feeling overly patriotic, a dulling of an already dulled sense of national pride.
Frankly, I’m unsure why anyone of us living in our various self-declared free and democratic states should be brashly beating their jingoistic drum at the moment. What is it that we have to be particularly proud of? Quiet and equivocating in the face of an ongoing genocide playing out in real time. Bowing and scraping at the foot of a renegade superpower, one time voice of the free world*, now gone rogue and sliding heavily into authoritarian mode. Arming ourselves to the teeth because we’ve stood handmaidens to a world, burning from our over-consumption, made more dangerous and precarious. Finding comfort in the enduring lullaby, Well, At Least We’re Not As Bad As Them.
And Canada may well be one of the worst offenders.
Back in late April, just short of a majority of us voted with the conviction that we were dodging a bullet, electing what we believed, hoped, crossed our fingers, a federal government and new Prime Minister that would exhibit a toughness and resoluteness to stand up for, in the vaguest of terms, the country’s best interests. A government that would dig in its heels to stop a further right-wing drift. Maybe with his international experience, as a central banker during previous times of crisis, 2008, Brexit 2016, Covid, our rookie PM might even exhibit a voice of reason and stability on the world stage.
But Prime Minister Carney has been or done none of those things.
Instead, he’s gone out of his way to placate the implacable, whimsical, unhinged and compulsive demands and delusions of a corrupted and morally bankrupt president and country. Beefing up the border against problems that exist only as tactical phantoms. More resources for northern defense. Nodding amiably in consideration of signing on to a ridiculously implausible weapons system. 
All for what?
More demands, even more intrusive into our sovereignty, more because more will never be enough.
“A major part of his ‘managing Trump’,” Doug Saunders wrote of Carney a week ago in Internationale Politik Quarterly article, Canada’s Delicate Balancing Act, “was always going to involve making whatever sacrifices were necessary in order to maintain the free trade relationship with the United States.” So perhaps our expectations in April were too high. Misguided and delusional. The Mark Carney who declared that ‘The old relationship with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations, is over’ was nothing more than a campaign mirage. “Because Canada’s core national interests are so tightly enmeshed with the United States,” Saunders writes, “there were calls for the Liberal prime minister to forge a strictly realist foreign policy.”
We’ve strapped ourselves on too closely to America to be able to do anything other than maybe, hopefully, moderate their Dear Leader’s claims and demands, going as far as to ditch legislative policy at the stroke of midnight in response to the most recent presidential impulse. “But then his strategy,” Saunders says of our prime minister, “may only need to last until Trump’s control of all branches of US government has a chance of ending in the mid-term elections of 2026…”
And what then? Having groveled and degraded ourselves awaiting the arrival of different U.S. leadership with a different policy towards us 18 months from now, in this post-Trumpian dream scenario, what incoming administration, having watched Canada cave early and often, won’t also want to play hardball? Internationally, who would want to partner up with such a feckless country as Canada is proving to be, treating Europe and Asia as absolute Plan Bs?
It ain’t very aspirational on this, our national birthday. And it’s not exactly what many Canadians voted for in April. Some sort of dignified acquiescence. Even those of us who didn’t cast our ballots for the Mark Carney’s Liberals, I think, wanted to believe him when he told us the old relationship with the United States was over, even if we weren’t sure what he planned to replace it with. As of today, July 1st, it appears to be nothing more than waiting it out and hoping to return to that old, comfortable relationship, our beloved status quo.
(*some conditions apply)