Canada: More American than the United States?

I’ve always found something charming about Canada Day, the July 1 national celebration, landing just three days before America’s Independence Day.

The two holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the country’s 1867 confederation under British law, while July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution against the crown. Yet after centuries of peace, with the two countries now sharing the longest undefended border in the world, the timing normally feels less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint birthday party.

So leave it to Donald Trump to reintroduce tension to the holidays.

Last Friday, just as Canadians were getting ready for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that the United States is renewing hostilities in the briefly suspended trade war. “We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that “we will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

And then, in a Sunday interview on Fox News, he renewed the rhetoric that most infuriated Canadians: his claim that Canada should be annexed by the United States. “Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state. It really should,” he told anchor Maria Bartiromo. “Because Canada relies entirely on the United States. We don’t rely on Canada.”

In thinking through all of this, I’ve found one voice especially clarifying: the Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant.

In 1965, Grant published a short book — titled Lament for a Nation — arguing that Canada’s increasing integration with the United States was a kind of national suicide. This was, in part, a political matter: By hitching its economy and defense to those of a much larger neighbor, Canada effectively surrendered its ability to set its own political course.

But it was also a kind of spiritual death: By embracing free trade and open borders with the United States, Grant argued, Canada was selling its conservative soul to the American ethos of never-ending revolutionary progress. It was, in effect, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth.

Given the Trump threat, Grant’s argument feels more vital than it has in decades — prompting a round of intellectual reconsiderations. Recent pieces by Patrick Deneen, a leading American “postliberal,” and Michael Ignatieff, a leading Canadian liberal intellectual (and Grant’s nephew), have highlighted elements of the argument that feel especially relevant in the current moment.

Yet Lament for a Nation is also notable for what it failed to foresee. While Grant predicted America’s liberalism would swallow Canada, it is, in fact, the most philosophically illiberal administration in modern American history that threatens Canadian sovereignty.

And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied under the banner of Liberal Party Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who fully embraces Canada’s modern identity as the most tolerant and multicultural country on the planet.

Lament for a Nation takes, as its central event, the 1963 defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. His defeat, per Grant, was the moment that Canada’s fate was sealed.

Diefenbaker was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party (now more simply called the Conservative Party). Grant writes about him a bit the way that some on the intellectual right talk about Trump today: as an imperfect but basically necessary bulwark against the depredations of the liberal elite.

A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the traditional power elite in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. These elites, per Grant, believed that Canada benefited from increasing economic and military interconnections with the US, such as eliminating trade barriers and joint participation in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a different approach — one that valued Canadian self-determination over the material benefits of trade and security cooperation. On key issues, most notably the 1962–’63 debate over stationing American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Diefenbaker resisted the intellectual and political elite’s “continentalist” approach — instead raising concerns that too much integration with the United States would threaten Canadian nationhood.

It is this hesitancy, Grant argues, that brought the wrath of the elite class down on his head, ultimately leading to the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat in the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was no longer any barrier to a policy of economic and political integration with the United States.

“Lamenting for Canada is inevitably associated with the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His inability to govern is linked with the inability of this country to be sovereign,” Grant writes.

It’s easy to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. After all, Canada remains standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he just wrong that integration with the US meant national suicide?

But to take this line is to misunderstand Grant’s argument. His position was not that the integration with the United States would literally lead to Canadian annexation. Rather, it’s that Canada would lose the ability to chart its own course, surrendering its effective sovereignty and, more fundamentally, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from the United States.

The United States, per Grant, is the physical avatar of Enlightenment liberalism: a worldview that he described as celebrating the emancipation of the individual from whatever fetters society might put on them. The American ideology of capitalist freedom was a solvent dissolving local cultures and national borders, homogenizing everything into a single mass of modern technological sameness.

Canada, by contrast, took its core identity from British conservatism — a sense that politics is not about individual freedom but rather conserving and incrementally improving the traditions and cultural inheritance that define its essence and maintain its good functioning.

In Canada, Grant says, this conservatism was “a kind of suspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater sense of propriety than those in the United States.” Partnering with the French speakers in Quebec (Lament for a Nation made scant reference to indigenous Canadians), the new country was in opposition to the American vision of frenetic capitalist change.

Yet this conservative identity, Grant feared, was weakly rooted — and vulnerable to American imperial influence in the absence of a political class willing to wield nationalist policies in its defense. He narrated its ideological decline in three steps:

Diefenbaker was, per Grant, the last gasp of authentic Canadian conservative resistance to this process. His defeat marked the moment that Canada’s spiritual death at American hands became inevitable.

Today, Canada is facing a nakedly imperialist American president who is attempting to weaponize Canadian dependence on American markets into political submission. Grant, the liberal Ignatieff writes, was “the first to warn us that this was how continental integration would end.”

Yet the circumstances are very different from what Grant might have expected. While Grant warned that American ideology was seductive, that Canadians risked voluntarily submitting to a liberalism that would subtly alienate them from themselves, they are today facing a brash American illiberalism led by a right-wing populist most Canadians revile.

“Even in the fury of Lament for a Nation, America was seen as a benign hegemon — at least to us — who respected the fiction of our sovereignty. Today’s President disdains his allies and can’t stop telling Canada he wishes we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes.

For this reason, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives but by the Liberal Party.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals won Canada’s April election on the back of anti-Trump resistance. This was not only because Carney took vocally anti-Trump positions, but because his chief rival — Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — was a right-wing populist whose political style seemed far too close to Trump’s for Canadian comfort.

Carney won, in short, because Canadians saw conservatism as too American — and Carney’s liberalism a better representation of Canadianness in the current moment.

This irony owes itself, in part, to Canada’s national reinvention since Grant’s original publication. In the past several decades, Canada has engaged in a collective nation-building project to redefine its national identity around ideas of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been extraordinarily successful: Canada has a notably higher percentage of foreign-born residents than the United States, yet faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash.

Grant would surely see this as vindication of his thesis: Canada has abandoned its traditional identity in favor of a Canadian copy of America’s Ellis Island narrative. Yet what Grant didn’t foresee is that this kind of liberalism could form an effective resistance against Yankee imperialism.

Canadian nationalism today is not just about symbols, like the flag or the crown, but about a sense that Canadians do not want their politics to take on the bitter ugliness of Trumpified American politics. Their attraction to what Grant identified as too-American liberal ideals of freedom and progress forms a key part of the hard ideological core uniting Canadians against American pressure.

In this sense, and perhaps this sense only, Canadians have become more American than the Americans. This year, July Fourth may have come three days early.