Where ICE is refreshing, not arresting

The impact on the US is just beginning to show

The Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts attract hordes of visitors during the summer and autumn. The season seemed to get off to a slow start and I wondered if we’d see a big decline because Europeans and Canadians are choosing to go to other, more hospitable countries. I have an apartment I rent out through Airbnb, and that’s also a measure.

So far, the Airbnb bookings have been good, and Great Barrington seems busy. But the effects of the tariff threats and immigration service directives is affecting long-established operations. For the first time in my memory, Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, sent out ticket discount email in June.

This morning I received an email from a lovely camping ground on Cape Cod that was even more startling, because getting space there seemed to be a challenge. (I’ve only been there once, but I do recommend it: an easy walk to the beach and a friendly, well-run operation.)

We invite you to return to Cape Cod and camp with us again this summer at
North of Highland Camping Area. Scenic Head of the Meadow Beach is only a short walk away. You can stroll along miles of pristine shoreline beaches, soak up the sun, play in the waves, and at the end of the day still get a restful night’s sleep, looking up at the magnificent array of stars overhead. . . . This summer, many of our good friends from Canada are not travelling to the U.S.. We will certainly miss them, but the silver lining is that we have more great campsites available for you to enjoy. . . . New bookings can now reserve a camping stay this season for as little as THREE NIGHTS throughout the entire month of July.

If I hadn’t already made plans, I’d be booking a spot today. Easy biking, and there are pleasant bathrooms and hot showers!

What does the world think about America?

When I asked that question of our international network of academic authors back in 2005, as we began work on Global Perspectives on the United States, I received 300 responses within 24 hours. That was a time when people were upset about the invasion of Iraq, but in comparison to 2025 those seem halcyon days.

I wonder if the vitriol of people like Vice President JD Vance toward other countries is the result of an all-too-American need for adulation? Frances Trollope, the immensely successful 19th-century British author, wrote in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), that

One of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans . . . [is] their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them . . . Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation.

So how about Canada? Do we need their adulation, and acquiescence, too? In fact, Canadians have not been overly admiring or particularly acquiescent. I pulled up the article on Canada-US relations and thought you might enjoy this background reading before the next round between Mark Carney and Donald Trump. I’ll put my bet on Carney, and the Canadians.

Canada-US Relations

By John von Heyking in Global Perspectives on the United States

From even before its founding in 1867, Canada has understood itself as living in the shadow of the United States. As the country with the largest trading relationship with the United States (Canadian imports represent the largest percentage of total imports for the United States (17 percent for 2003), and U.S. imports constitute the largest percentage of Canada’s total imports (61 percent fro 2003)), and sharing with it the world’s largest undefended border, Canada has consistently defined its existence in terms of its relationship with its southern neighbor, which has produced an ambivalent attitude toward the United States. On the one hand, the Peace Arch at the border on the West Coast has two inscriptions, “Children of a Common Mother” and “May These Gates Never Be Closed,” which reflect the common cultural and political background of the two countries as well as their continuing trading relationship. On the other, the political, cultural, and economic dominance of the United States produces anxieties among Canadians, who fear such dominance threatens the integrity of their country. Thus, the socialist historian Frank Underhill (1889–1971) wrote that the Canadian is “the first anti-American, the model anti-American, the ideal anti-American as he exists in the mind of God” (Granastein 1996, 8). This double-sided view permeates Canadian history, politics, society, culture, and economics, as well as the academy and the media.

Early History

Canada and the United States were born in the tumultuous era of British seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imperialism. The 1774 Quebec Act was one of the “intolerable acts” that gave rise to the American Revolution of 1776. That act permitted French-Canadians to practice Roman Catholicism and to live under French civil law, and it gave Quebec power over much of present-day Quebec, Ontario, and the U.S. Midwest, which included Indian lands coveted by the Americans. The Americans saw the Act as a threat to their interests, which contributed to the revolution two years later. Canadian views of the United States date back at least to the American Revolution, when colonists loyal to Great Britain moved to what was then called British North America in Ontario and the Maritimes. The Loyalist loss of property contributed to a tradition of viewing the U.S. political system as lawless and disrespectful of rights In the 1860s, when the Dominion of Canada was established, Canadians looked toward British parliamentary institutions instead of to U.S. institutions, which were under duress because of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s (served 1861–1865) suspensions of civil liberties. Canadians viewed Lincoln’s acts as the dictatorial dimension of the U.S. political experiment. The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset has described how the two nations were separated by the outcome of the American Revolution: “One [nation], the country of the Revolution, elaborated on the populist and meritocratic themes subsumed in stating the objectives of the good society as ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The founding fathers of the counterrevolutionary nation defined their rationale as ‘peace, order, and good government’ when they put together the new Dominion of Canada in 1867” (Lipset 1990, xiii).

The next historical phase occurred in the free-trade elections of 1891 and 1911. Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier (1841–1919) of Canada and President William Taft (served 1909–1913)) of the United States had signed a Reciprocity Agreement in early 1911 that removed tariffs on agricultural products but protected Canadian manufacturers. However, businessmen in Ontario opposed the agreement; they argued that it would divert trade away from Great Britain and, voicing a fear consistently heard throughout Canadian history, that it would lead to the assimilation of Canada into the United States.

The World Wars and the Postwar Era

The period of the two world wars, 1914–1945, saw a major reorientation of Canada away from Great Britain as the power of the latter waned and the United States rose to preeminence. Canada entered both wars earlier than the United States and contributed more human and material resources per capita, in an effort that at least English-speaking Canada viewed as a duty to protect the British empire, which also meant to protect freedom and justice. Ironically, though, Canada’s war effort forced it to depend on the United States for economic, financial, and even military assistance. For example, Great Britain in 1917 owed the United States $3 billion, and it looked to Canada to offset some of its debts. However, Canadian manufacturing at the time was small, and depended heavily on U.S. imports of materials. Canada became more dependent on the United States as it tried to help Great Britain.

The postwar period witnessed Canadian industrialization and massive political and social changes as well. The Cold War anti-Communist “Red scare” in the United States made Canadians question the value of liberty there and led some to judge it as despotic as the Soviet Union. The 1957 suicide of Egerton Norman, Canadian ambassador to Egypt, because of allegations of Communist sympathies by the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Internal Security, highlighted these tensions for Canadians. However, the Cold War also saw increased military integration of the two countries in the form of the 1958 establishment of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which integrated the defense command structures of the two countries and placed Canada under the shield of U.S. nuclear missile systems.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War brought up to 125,000 U.S. draft dodgers, whom historian Jack Granastein calls “anti-American Americans,” to Canada, and manyenrolled into Canadian graduate and journalism schools and eventually took leadership positions in Canadian universities and the media, helping to turn Canadian opinion against the United States.The war produced one of the notorious low points in Canadian-U.S. relations. In April 1965, Prime Minister Lester Pearson (1897–1972) delivered a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia in which he suggested the United States pause bombing North Vietnam to provide Hanoi flexibility in their negotiations with the North. At the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David the next day, President Lyndon Johnson (served 1963–1969) undiplomatically grabbed Pearson by the lapels and told him that he did not like it when Canadians came into his country and “pissed on [his] rug” (quoted in Granastein 1996, 176). The government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) would later pass a parliamentary resolution condemning U.S. hostilities in Vietnam that President Richard Nixon (served 1969–1974) saw as a betrayal.

The philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965) was the most influential and sophisticated statement on relations between the two countries; it argued that the Vietnam War had revealed the “Moloch face” of American imperialism, and that, by embracing liberalism and capitalism, Canada had lost its identity and its independence from the United States.

The Issue of Free Trade

The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (the predecessor to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which also includes Mexico) was the central issue of Canada’s 1988 election, which again highlighted the conflict between economic interests and anxieties about Canadian independence. The Liberal Party, which had traditionally favored free trade, opposed the agreement and ran memorable commercials showing the border between the two countries being erased as a result of free trade. The Conservative Party, which had traditionally opposed free trade, supported the agreement. When the Conservatives won the election, they saw their victory as a referendum vote for free trade. The Liberals split the anti-free-trade vote with the social democratic New Democratic Party; together, the number of votes cast opposing free trade was actually larger than the number of votes cast for the Conservatives. Even so, polls taken since 1988 have consistently shown support among Canadians for free trade, and no political party promises to revoke it in its entirety.

While Canadians accept close economic relations with the United States as being in Canada’s interests, worries over independence continue to get expressed on other fronts, including culture, various sectors of the economy, and in terms of security.

September 11

The terrorist attacks of September 11 have simultaneously tightened and strained Canadian-U.S. relations. Immediately following the attacks, the benefits of integrated air space were evident, especially when Canadian airports were able to land a number of U.S.-bound flights later in the day. Canadians took in stranded passengers, and Canadian cities sent police and fire personnel to assist with the cleanup in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Both countries have subsequently made efforts to integrate security for the continent, especially for air and seaports, as they strive to ensure security for their bilateral trade. Canada and the United States have also cooperated to tighten border security, especially after an Algerian who planned to blow up Los Angeles International Airport was arrested by U.S. border guards when attempting to enter the United States from British Columbia. Conversely, controversial statements by members of the Canadian government the decision of Prime Minister Jean Chretien (b. 1934), not to support the invasion of Iraq, and his cool personal relationship with President George W. Bush (served 2001–present), are evidence of the tensions in the two countries’ relationship. In February 2006 Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party began his term as Prime Minister and political commentators anticipate improved relations with the U.S.

The Canadian government tries to sustain close relations with the United States, which it feels is in Canada’s best interests, while trying to placate a vocal anti-American constituency. An interesting example of a contradictory policy is the decision to put the navy warship HMCS Toronto under U.S. command in the USS George Washington aircraft carrier group in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea in 2004. While part of a carrier group that supports coalition troops in Iraq, the HMCS Toronto was under Canadian orders not to participate in actions involving Iraq. The inclusion of the Canadian warship in the U.S. carrier group in a war that Canada does not support produced charges of hypocrisy among opposition groups and the media.

Perspectives on the United States

During the early part of Canadian history, Canadians regarded the principles of the American Revolution as too radical; in the past thirty years or so, a large segment of the population has come to regard those same principles as too conservative and surpassed by the principles of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The United States as Too Radical

Canada’s founders generally admired the intricate system of checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution, and viewed it, like Canada’s own, as a descendent of the British constitutional tradition. However, the U.S. Civil War demonstrated its weaknesses, and Canadian statesmen, including Prime Minister John A. MacDonald (1815–1891) and his Quebecois colleague, Georges Etienne Cartier (1814–1873), who were in the midst of crafting their own constitution, concluded that the U.S. one was too populist and too decentralized. Contrary to most thinking today, the Canadian founders regarded popular sovereignty as a threat to individual liberties and looked to the British Crown as a better guarantor of those liberties. MacDonald contrasted the “constitutional liberty” of Great Britain with the “unbridled democracy” of the United States (Ajzenstat et al. 1999, 206). He thought the U.S. Constitution’s provision that all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government should reside with the states made the central government too weak to defend the nation. U.S. President Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties and the secessionist ambitions of the southern states confirmed that view. In Cartier’s words, “The distinction therefore between ourselves and our neighbors was just this: in our federation the monarchical principle would form the leading feature, while on the other side of the lines, judging by the past history and present condition of the country, the ruling power was the will of the mob, the rule of the populace. Every person who had conversed with the most intelligent American statesmen and writers must have learned that they all admitted that the governmental powers had become too extended, owing to the introduction of universal suffrage, and mob rule had consequently supplanted legitimate authority” (quoted in Ajzenstat et al. 1999, 185). In other words, Canada’s founders preferred the monarchy because they felt that it better preserved individual liberties.

Along with the picture of the United States as unbridled democracy went the popular view that it was a breeding ground of licentious and reckless behavior. This view reflected that fact that Canada’s culture was generally more conservative than the United States’ until about the 1950s. A famous metaphor within the Canadian narrative was that while wild cowboys populated the American West, the Canadian frontier was won by the Northwest Mounted Police (later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), who secured the region against U.S. whiskey traders and established law and order before peaceful farmers and ranchers settled there.

The United States as Reactionary

After the Russian Revolution (1917), the Canadian view that the American Revolution was too radical slowly began to be replaced by the view that it had been insufficiently radical. It was common until that time to regard the U.S. Constitution as leading to socialism. Even today, the notion that liberal democracy is a stepping stone to socialism characterizes much of Canadian discourse about itself. In the period between the Russian Revolution and the end of World War II, with the increased prominence of the United States in international affairs, its confrontation with Communism, and its greater (compared with Canada) adherence to laissez-faire capitalism, many Canadians began to view the United States as reactionary, while (so it seemed) the rest of the world was moving toward socialism.

The perspective of the United States as a liberal democracy resisting the tides of history conflicted with the end-of-history or end-of-ideology perspective that gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. The end-of-history thesis was that history is moving toward a universal homogeneous state characterized by consumerism, mass marketing, and cultural degradation caused by capitalism. This theory wedded socialist views of capitalist economics with earlier conservative criticisms of liberal democratic politics and culture to argue that the mass society brought about by liberal democracy and capitalism would destroy culture and moral life. Unlike socialism, though, the end-of-history theory saw history ending in the United States, which had perfected the creation of the universal but vulgar culture. So argued George Grant in Lament for a Nation. Grant believed that the election of Lester Pearson, a Liberal, as prime minister would lead Canada inevitably to become the fifty-first U.S. state. This view continues to find expression in the twenty-first century in concerns about globalization, free trade, and U.S. power.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), which was meant as a nation-building document, was modeled in part on the U. S. Bill of Rights, but it contains several features, including provisions for affirmative action, multiculturalism, and funding for denominational schools, that are not found in the U. S. Bill of Rights. These features, along with the predominant view in the legal community that judges should interpret the Charter in a purposive and progressive manner, lead many Canadians, especially those on the left, to regard themselves as progressive and Americans as reactionary.

Distinguishing Canadians and Americans

Since the inception of the Charter in 1982, Canadians have debated how—and even if—they differ from Americans. Some Canadians believe that they are more socially conscious, as evidenced in the resources they spend on health care, the welfare state, multicultural programs, and the environment, while Americans, in these Canadians’ view, are more devoted to free enterprise, consumerism, and the military. Some Canadians also regard themselves as morally autonomous but see Americans as more obedient to traditional forms of authority, including patriarchy and religion. Others argue that such beliefs obscure the reality of converging values, and that, in many respects, Americans are more multicultural and socially conscious, as evidenced by the larger numbers of non-Anglo minorities in the United States, the larger proportion of gross domestic product spent on health care there, and by the fact that social democratic ideas, including the welfare state and feminism, came to Canada from the United States. Still others regard the debate over converging values as a construct of central Canadian intellectual and media elites, whose view of the United States as a threat to Canadian identity is not shared by those in other regions of Canada, particularly the western provinces.

Writing in the 1850s, the political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that democracies tend to eliminate differences among people, which leads them to establish artificial classifications and differences, “with the aid of which each seeks to set himself apart, out of fear of being carried away into the crowd despite himself” (Tocqueville 2000, 578). From the founding of Canada, Canadians have attempted to distinguish themselves from the United States while adopting U.S. political, economic, social, and cultural ideas and practices. The paradox of this conflicted attitude was best summarized by Frank Underhill in the 1960s: “If we are eventually to satisfy ourselves that we have at last achieved a Canadian identity, it will be only when we are satisfied that we have arrived at a better American way of life than the Americans have.”

It looks like that time has come.

Who is Karen Christensen? Find out here. What is The Way We Live Now trying to accomplish? Read about it here.

Canada in the background in happier times, en route to a sports conference.