Decoupling From America
Canada is fighting a sovereignty election. Next up: Everybody else.
“We're over the shock of the betrayal,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Sunday. “But we should not forget the lessons."
With that, Carney announced that he was calling a snap election for April 28. Enter the Chaos Campaign. It is an election, Carney continued, about nothing less than Canada’s sovereignty. And he needs a mandate, he said, to “fight the Americans.”
Just a few kilometres away, at his campaign kick-off, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre was speaking in similar terms. He’s running to unleash the Canadian economy “so that we can confront Donald Trump and the Americans with strength.”
New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh joined the chorus: “We will never be Trump’s 51st state. Not in name, not in values, and not on my watch.”
Most Canadians are taking Donald Trump’s threats, and the election itself, deadly seriously. Still, it is easy, even understandable, to roll your eyes at the rhetoric. To throw your hands in the air, to declare that everyone is being dramatic, to say this, too, shall pass.
It’s a pretty rational reaction. Since the end of the Cold War, Western civilization has been on a pretty consistent march upwards. Not the Dot Com bubble popping, nor the War on Terror, nor the Great Recession, nor Brexit, nor Donald Trump’s first term, nor the COVID-19 pandemic managed to wreck the foundations of our prosperous, friendly, stable, democratic world. Why would Trump’s encore be any different?
After averting total calamity again and again, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world is simply just. Or that some historical spirit is pushing at our backs. Or that things will just always work out for the best.
But that way of thinking is stupid. The Western world continues to be rich, free, and sovereign because we have institutions, civil society, diplomatic relations, and leaders who cooperate to keep us thus. It is no accident, but good planning.
There is now one leader who is dismantling those institutions with terrifying speed, smashing civil society with the full weight of the American state, and shredding those diplomatic relations with glee. With that system of liberal order broken, we can no longer be confident that things are going to work out alright. In fact, the balance of probabilities now suggests that things are about to get a whole lot worse.
How much worse? We should not limit our imagination.
On the flipside, we also shouldn’t limit our imagination as we come up with solutions to the crisis. Earlier this month, I sketched out some top-line ideas about how Canada can go about that.
So, in this dispatch, I want to take a look at some more tangible ideas on how Canada can insure its own future, how it can rewire itself to the rest of the liberal world, and how it can make itself prickly and armoured against a belligerent former ally. To do it, I’ve trawled the usual sources, the leaders, analysts, and columnists who have chewed over this idea in recent weeks; and plenty of other places, from our friends in Greenland to some historical antecedents.
Given the stakes of the campaign, we should all be firing up our idea generators and running them at capacity — and then pressing our local candidates for office about their own ideas, or lack thereof, of how to manage our current crisis.
It’s telling that three major elections of recent weeks — German, Greenland, Canada — all turned on how to decouple from an increasingly-dangerous America. I suspect the global elections in the coming weeks and months will be fought along much the same lines. Learning lessons, as Carney suggests, is a damn good idea.
So, no more table-setting. Let’s get to it.
From North-South to East-West
When British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, it had a big ask: An east-to-west railway, to be built “at the earliest possible date.”
The Canada Pacific Railway is central to Canada’s origin myth. But building the railway was not just a transportation project, it was an exercise in national security.
Canadians travelling from one coast to another basically had to transit through America. Mail sent from Victoria to Ottawa had to pass through the United States. At various times, America saw Indigenous peoples living north of their border as a threat which may warrant invasion or as “a trump card” to be used so that “every vestige of British power may be swept from the Western half of the continent,” as one newspaper editorial argued. (Canada would, of course, perpetrate its own genocide in constructing this railway.)1
The railway would be the mechanism through which Canada, for good and bad, would expand its empire and facilitate the movement of its own goods, people, and soldiers. It would be the spine of its defense against an expansionist America.
Ottawa was, perhaps, too paranoid back then. American invasion plans were half-baked or nonexistent, and its obsession with manifest destiny was waning by the close of the 19th century. But building the railway was, ultimately, the right thing to do.
A century of peace alleviated the need for such east-to-west infrastructure. Ottawa happily built roads, railways, shipping lanes, and energy infrastructure to run from its territory south into America. Even its ambitions across the Pacific and Atlantic ran through the United States. Albertan oil would be refined in American refineries, Quebec hydroelectricity would power streetlights in New York, and car parts made in Ontario would be slotted into vehicles in Detroit.
This was the right choice, but it always required logic and sanity to prevail on both sides. With a breakdown on one side, Canada has no choice but to rebuild those east-to-west linkages. And, where possible, build them east-west-north.
Mark Carney has already sketched out what this could look like, promising more rail connections, more LNG facilities, more military bases, and more ports. Pierre Poilievre has offered a more narrow vision for that idea, proposing a ton of new energy infrastructure to extract, move, refine, and sell oil and natural gas. There are other ambitious plans out there.
But these plans would be a failure if they existed only to move fossil fuels around. Canada needs more flights connecting its regions, and linking its cities to European capitals — including in Greenland. It needs more ships to ensure trade remains strong with Mexico. It needs better trade infrastructure, to bring goods from ports on the east coast to ports on the west.
This isn’t about one new rail line or a single pipeline. This requires a total strategic rethink about the direction in which our goods move.
If done right, this would not only allow Canada to diversify trade away from the United States whilst also making Canada a useful link in global supply chains and international trade. If America returns to its senses in four years: Great, things can move in four directions. If Washington’s protectionist mania continues, then Canada can continue cementing its east-west flow of goods.
Invest Now — But Smartly
If we’re lacking for inspiration on how to hit the ground running on our re-invention, we should cast our weary eyes to Berlin.
Buoyed by his big election win, but even before he’s formed government, CDU/CSU chair Friedrich Merz has helped pushed a massive constitutional reform package through Germany’s Parliament. The spending plans, totalling €1 trillion, blow through measures meant to constrain state spending. And, good.
Fiscal restraint and austerity are not ends onto themselves, they are tools meant to provide stability in good times and to allow for freedom of movement in bad times. These are bad times, and states need to move.
We’re about to watch Germany use that debt to not only recapitalize its military, but also to invest in more green energy and build out civilian infrastructure.
“We are getting our country back into shape,” reads a preliminary agreement between the first-place CSU/CDU and second-place third-place SPD, “through investments in roads, railways, education, digitalization, energy, and health.” This will include state investments in the “semiconductor, battery manufacturing, hydrogen, and pharmaceutical industries.” This will also include investments in social supports to prioritize “social cohesion.” And it will lead the government to “present a priority list of armaments to be procured quickly, which will quickly and efficiently increase our country's defence readiness.”2
There are lots of pitfalls for this plan. Western investment has become less-and-less efficient over the years — with governments marring their spending with their own red tape and complicated approvals, worsened by tight labour markets.
But Germany seems keen to make one big spending push now, coupled with sweeping reforms to maximize the impact of those Euros, so that it remains on steadier footing for the next decade.
Plans are better executed when they are comprehensive, detailed, and long-term. For years, Western states have been limping from one budget to the next, lavishing money in one direction and then another, hesitant to commit to anything. Those days need to be over. Canada, like other countries in the Eurozone and NATO, needs to put its cards on the table and unveil serious medium-term spending plans — both for national and international security, but also to keep working people from feeling the pain of global instability. Call it a Green New Deal, call it a neo-Marshall Plan, call it whatever you want: Now is the time for those investments.
Create an Arctic Pact
“Greenland,” Jens Frederik Nielsen likes to note, “is not for sale.”
Nielsen is likely to become the prime minister of Greenland, following a big win for the centrist pro-independence Democrats party earlier this month. He now has the tricky challenge of forming government, pushing back against America’s annexation talk, and planning for an independence referendum.
After that, another decision looms large over Greenland.
From the Democrats’ campaign platform:
We must find solutions that ensure that our country can emerge as a strong and independent nation, while preserving and strengthening the areas of cooperation that benefit us all. One of the options to be carefully examined is the construct of free association. […] We need to be open and realistic about our options. The US is the only realistic partner other than Denmark, which is why we need to engage in an honest and respectful dialog with them. A dialog that can lead to cooperation — and perhaps even negotiations — on how they can contribute to our journey towards independence. But again, it must be on our terms. Our country should not be reduced to a strategic pawn in a larger game.3
This is a striking situation which Nuuk finds itself in. The nation’s long path to independence has always turned on the idea that the island would need a partner in independence — and Washington always made sense. But now, with that dream of independence within reach, it is facing threats of annexation from that supposed friend.
This week, a delegation of Trump officials are heading to Greenland to visit a U.S. base — without an invitation. Their visit is prompting panic.
This is an intolerable diplomatic affront, one that Canadians are the best-positioned to appreciate.
While Canada should have no illusions about replacing America as some world superpower, Ottawa should have designs to become the world’s premiere Arctic power.
The international body meant to govern affairs in the high north, the Arctic Council, is essentially defunct. That’s probably for the best. There is no way to operate the Council without Russia, nor is there a world in which it could be effective with Russia. We ought to replace it with something better.
We need an association of like-minded Arctic powers which can patrol the thawing Arctic waters, manage mineral extraction, ensure the peaceful usage of the North, monitor the effects of climate change, and protect the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples who live there. America only cares about mineral rights, Russia wants to use the North for geopolitical ends, and China is looking to expand its neo-colonial ambitions in all directions — all three must be resisted. That falls to Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. So let’s get cracking.
Northerners have been having these conversations for years. Yukon Premier Ranj Pillai told me earlier this year that Yukoners have often felt like they’re “standing in a lonely place,” having these conversations only with other Northerners. That has changed in a big way in recent months. “Seeing Canada come to the table — with the support and the financial commitment — was important,” he told me.
“Leaders in the North and leaders in the South need to understand that the dialog — that the cultural, social, and political engagement — has to happen east-to-west,” Pillai says. That means better connecting Whitehorse to Yellowknife to Iqaluit to Nuuk to Reykjavík to Svalbard, and so on.
In figuring out how we like-minded nations can secure the North, we may be able to strike a better free association deal for Greenland than whatever predatory offer Donald Trump is sure to make.
No to New Nukes, Yes to the Nuclear Umbrella
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