Canada and America were born in different ways. Even today, it shows

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Canada’s national holiday and America’s fall within a few days of each other, yet celebrate two very different things. Each celebrates their respective country’s birth, of course, but they define this in different ways.

The American commemorates a breach, an abrupt and indeed violent rupture with the imperial power; the Canadian, the date scheduled for its inception as a federal state by the Parliament of that same power.

There was no necessity for either of these choices. Instead of July 4, 1776, the date the Continental Congress adopted the final text of the Declaration of Independence (it had actually voted to declare independence two days earlier), the United States could have dated its birth from Sept. 3, 1783, the day Britain formally recognized American independence in the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.

Or it could have chosen March 1, 1781, the date the Articles of Confederation, the country’s first constitution, took effect. Or June 21, 1788, the date the current constitution was ratified. Or March 4, 1789, the date it went into effect – the counterpart of our July 1.

For our part, we didn’t have to choose that date as our birthday. We could have chosen March 29, 1867, the day the British North America Act passed into law. Or Dec. 11, 1931, the date we became a (mostly) sovereign state, under the Statute of Westminster.

Or even April 17, 1982, the day the Constitution Act, 1982 became law, at last granting us the formal power to amend our Constitution on our own, without having to ask Britain to do it for us.

That each chose the day it did tells us much about both countries. It may also help to explain why they find themselves in such different moods, on the 250th anniversary of the American founding and the 159th anniversary of the Canadian.

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The former is the more auspicious occasion, of course, the kind of round number that usually serves as the platform for a burst of national pride – not often in short supply in the United States. I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, and the year-long buzz of good feeling that accompanied it, even in a country reeling from inflation, Vietnam and Watergate.

Yet this year’s semi-quincentennial finds the United States in a much darker mood: sour, divided and doubting itself as it has on few occasions in its history. Objectively, the country is in remarkably good shape: Violent crime is down, the stock market is soaring, unemployment is scraping 4 per cent and average incomes, driven by the tech boom, are racing ahead of other democratic countries’.

Nevertheless, few Americans seem particularly enthused about the country’s prospects on this holiday, and fewer still seem inclined to celebrate the 250th. There’s no mystery why this is the case. Donald Trump is not only easily the worst president of all time, he is the worst it is possible to imagine, a leader whose instinct in every situation is to say and do, not only the wrong thing, but the worst possible thing.

If it were only the incompetence, or the corruption, or the baseless attacks on America’s allies and the truckling to its foes, or the disdain for civil liberties and disregard for the rule of law, or the assaults, literal and figurative, on women and minorities, or the fiscal profligacy or the economic illiteracy - if it were only all of these, it would still not match, in its depressive effect on Americans, his mounting attempt to destroy American democracy, the better to install himself as a kind of king, around whom all of the country is expected to revolve.

The anniversary is a case in point. In his cartoonish vanity, Mr. Trump has done everything he can to make the celebration of the country a celebration of himself, and thus to make it impossible for those disinclined to celebrate the latter to celebrate the former. In the most patriotic county on earth, he has succeeded in discrediting patriotism. He has polluted the Fourth of July.

Canada represents the opposite paradox. Objectively, we have a great deal to be gloomy about. We are beset by crises on every front. The economy has been sinking deeper and deeper into a growth trough for decades, and now struggles to keep pace with population growth.

Sorry, did I mention population growth? Lately it has been shrinking, for the first time in our history, after the government slammed the brakes on immigration, to make up for having lost control of it before. And not only shrinking, but aging, with an ever-growing share of the population living into old age, and with younger adults having an ever diminishing number of children.

Worse, the country we thought was our best friend, our largest trading partner and historic protector, has decided it no longer wants to be any of these things. Under Mr. Trump, indeed, it has become something of an adversary. Even as we are attempting to renegotiate, at Mr. Trump’s insistence, the terms of the free trade treaty between us, the President has several times declared his intention to annex us. After Greenland, no one thinks he’s joking.

So we are desperately trying to diversify our trade, the better to reduce our dependence on the United States, even as we are trying not to lose our access to the country that still accounts for nearly 70 per cent of our trade. We are spending enormous amounts building up our military, even as we find ourselves falling further and further into debt.

And, at the very moment we are most concerned to defend ourselves from attacks from without, we find ourselves facing not one but two attempts to divide the country from within, with a referendum in Alberta and an election in Quebec both slated for the fall.

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I could go on. We can’t get pipelines built. Or maybe, depending on your point of view, the problem is that we can. We have only begun to grapple with the legacy of decades of mistreatment of the country’s Indigenous population, with untold consequences for everything from resource development to local government to private property rights.

We have a health care system that costs us more than 12 per cent of GDP yet leaves millions without a primary-care doctor and imposes waits of more than six months, on average, to be treated by a specialist - with both costs and shortages likely to grow worse in future, as the economy slows and the population ages.

And Canadians’ response to all this? We’re more than bullish. We’re positively beaming. Forty-seven per cent of Canadians now say the country is on the right track, up from 26 per cent two years ago. Eighty-four per cent say they’re proud to be Canadian, including 82 per cent in Alberta and 81 per cent in Quebec.

Pride in Canadian institutions is similarly up across the board: Not just the flag or hockey, but polling by Research Co. finds pride in the Canadian Armed Forces at 74 per cent, up eight points in the past year; pride in our democracy at 62 per cent, up four; in multiculturalism at 65 per cent, Indigenous culture at 64 per cent, health care at 58 per cent; and Parliament at 53 per cent. Even the Canadian economy comes in at 46 per cent, up six points.

Why is America such a mess, psychologically, while Canada is almost irrationally upbeat? Mr. Trump has a lot to do with both, obviously. But he is as much a symptom of American malaise as its cause. Before asking what Mr. Trump has done to America, ask how Americans could have voted him into office, not once but twice - the second time after he had attempted a coup against the country’s democracy.

America has always been a country given to extremes: from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond. It is the flipside of its idealism, which is real – ask Americans what it means to be an American, and they will tell you it’s about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and America’s special mission to the world – and occasionally dangerous.

Add to that the social divisions in the country, divisions centred not just around race but around culture, geography and education: divisions that gave less-educated people licence to resent the better educated.

Add to that the series of traumas it has endured over the past 20-odd years, from Sept. 11 to the Iraq war to the financial crisis, events which helped to convince a great many Americans that nobody in charge knew anything, that the experts were all wrong, that everyone was lying to them.

Now add social media, with its levelling pretense that all anyone needs to understand anything is to “do their own research” – a few dives into Google, a couple of hours on your favourite social-media site, and you’re done. And then add Mr. Trump, who lies so often and so shamelessly that he negates the very authority of truth.

No wonder Americans are in such a state, lacking confidence, lacking solidarity, but most of all lacking trust: in each other, in the authorities, in the American project itself.

And Canada? Comparisons can be odious. Too many Canadians have invested far too heavily in the idea that the justification of our nationhood lies in our supposedly profound cultural differences with Americans, an argument that is not only sterile (as if differences were an end in themselves) and distracting (making preserving differentness the purpose of policy, and not, say, good policy), but also requires the erection of absurd national stereotypes in support of the thesis: stereotypes that are inevitably self-serving (somehow we always come out looking the better of the two) and just as inevitably reductionist, eliding as they do the very real differences that exist within each country.

Even so, there are differences between the two countries, differences rooted in our histories. It’s not trivial or accidental that the road we chose to independence was by evolution, rather than revolution; neither are the consequences of that choice for our sense of self. Likewise, there is a real, if not always honoured, tradition of compromise, of making allowance for different political and cultural communities.

That can be taken too far: Extremism in the defence of moderation is no virtue. If Americans can be too set in their beliefs, it sometimes seems like we do not believe in anything, as if the most sacred principles were just another bargaining chip. America was the country of slavery, but also the country that sent in the army to desegregate the South. I’m not sure that would happen in Canada.

But the point is we are still trying to get it right. Canada, it has been said, is the only country that pulls itself up by the roots from time to time to see if it is still growing. But that sort of self-examination is healthy. Who are we? We’re the people who are always asking “who are we?” And that’s okay. The point is not to answer the question but to ask it.

We have our own divisions, God knows, but nothing like as toxic or as entrenched as they have become in the United States. It is hard to escape the impression that, for many of Mr. Trump’s supporters, the primary if not only factor in their support is the anxiety he arouses in his, and their, opponents. They are prepared to bring the country down, if necessary, to “own the libs.”

It helps, in the end, to have a common enemy. Nothing has done greater service to Canadian pride and patriotism in recent times than the second coming of Mr. Trump, in all his malevolence. Whatever else we might disagree on, we can all agree we don’t want him. That we can still agree on that is a thing worth celebrating in itself.