U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra speaks at a party marking 250 years of U.S. independence, in Ottawa on July 4.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
After a relationship sours, it can be comforting to remember the good times. It is tempting, if the other person makes the right noises, to wonder if it is possible to turn back the clock. To forget the bad and try again.
Some Canadians might feel that same yearning when U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra speaks today at the 9/11 commemoration in Gander. He will presumably strike a diplomatic tone. He may speak of the historic alliance between neighbours. Or American gratitude at the generosity of Canadians who took in thousands of stranded air travellers.
Such words will speak to the best of what was once a tight bond between Canada and the U.S. But they will not point to a possible rapprochement. That relationship is now in the history books, part of a bygone era.
Because no matter what Mr. Hoekstra says in Gander, no Canadian should forget the administration he represents. No Canadian should overlook that only four days ago his boss posted again an image of the entire continent – with Iceland thrown in for good measure – covered with an American flag. No Canadian should forget that President Donald Trump has said openly he would use economic force to compel Canada to join his country.
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Canadians and Americans remain tightly linked. They are geographic neighbours with entwined economies and long-standing military ties. But that doesn’t translate into confidence in U.S. reliability. The long Canadian assumption that the United States would act in good faith is over. Canadians can never again have confidence their neighbour will not descend into a thuggish form of diplomacy.
This is why the bond being celebrated today in Gander no longer exists.
Plenty of Canadians wish that the old relationship could somehow resume. This is seen when people call on Canada to swallow the insults to its sovereignty and return to the negotiating table. To find some sort of deal. Any deal. But blind hope is not a strategy.
There is a tragedy in this breakdown. For decades there was a fraternal bond between the countries that ran deep. Before 9/11 the border was both legal reality and largely invisible. Residents of the two countries did not even need a passport to cross. Tens of thousands of people changed countries for work, includes dozens of Canadians killed in the World Trade Center attacks.
When then-president George W. Bush invoked NATO’s mutual defence pact – Article 5 specifies that an attack on one treaty member be treated as an attack on all – Canada did not hesitate to step up. More than 40,000 Canadian military personnel served in Afghanistan. One hundred and fifty-eight of them died there, along with seven civilians.
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Would the United States honour that same commitment if Canada were to be attacked? Mr. Trump has been equivocal about Article 5 and says countries that underspend on military spending can’t count on support. “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want,” he said in 2024, while running for office.
Canada is now planning to invest more in its military than any time since the Cold War. And that’s good in its own right. An independent nation needs to be credibly able to defend itself. But this spending should not be done in an attempt to curry favour with Mr. Trump.
The last 20 months have showed Canadians that there is no act big enough to satisfy Mr. Trump. There is no policy reversal dramatic enough or offered bone tasty enough that he will not merely devour it and demand more.
Because Mr. Trump does not want to strike a deal with Canada. He wants to dominate Canada. And that is why Prime Minister Mark Carney is right to speak of a rupture, a split between what was then and what is now. While it is pragmatic, in the short term, to look for ways to blunt the worst of U.S. action, in the long term Canada must look elsewhere. We must find countries that seek true alliances, not junior partners to kick around.
In his video address to Canadians earlier this week, Mr. Carney ruled out “denial – waiting to go back to some good old days – and continued dependence.”
That’s the right approach. Those days are gone. And to the extent that they allowed Canada to sleepwalk into a dangerous dependency, they are not even the good times they may have seemed at the time. Nothing Mr. Hoekstra could say today in Gander will change that.