For a lot of Canadians, an exciting ice hockey sport turned out to be an exhilarating antidote to an unforgiving winter.
Greater than that – as a subdued Canadian coach Jon Cooper informed reporters after Canada’s greatest hockey gamers beat America’s greatest hockey gamers in extra time final week – the beleaguered nation “wanted a win”.
Cooper wasn’t requested nor did he elaborate on why Canada needed to prevail.
He didn’t need to.
The explanations have been plain to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who leapt, I reckon, with a mix of pleasure and reduction when the world’s most gifted hockey participant, Connor McDavid, potted the objective that despatched his group and a grateful nation into a contented frenzy.
For weeks, a blustering US President Donald Trump has taunted Canada and its prime minister. He has referred to a proud folks and land as America’s would-be 51st state and Justin Trudeau as its “governor”.
Trump’s antics and threats have triggered a surge of delight amongst often reserved Canadians about their beloved residence and fear for its unsure future.
And the trash-talking chief of Canada’s “dearest” and “closest” ally has confirmed that the majority politicians and corporate-hugging columnists have the foresight of Mr Magoo.
Just like the doddering, shortsighted, cartoon character, a number of free-trade-adoring politicos and polemicists refused to see or heed the warnings sounded within the twentieth century in regards to the existential dangers of tying Canada extra tightly into the dominant US financial system within the twenty first century.
It’s a outstanding sight to observe, hear, and skim Canada’s myopic “intelligentsia” drape themselves within the Maple Leaf whereas urging the nation to “purchase Canadian” and style different systemic and structural methods to attempt, belatedly, to curb its dependency on the US to stave off changing into – formally – America’s 51st state.
It’s a outstanding sight as a result of, because the early Nineteen Eighties, the reactionary elites have devoted – with out hesitation or remorse – their appreciable powers and affect to backing each calculated step in direction of Canada morphing, in impact, into America’s 51st state – economically, culturally, militarily, and diplomatically.
The beaming poster boy for this blatant hypocrisy is Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, who, by conviction and temperament, was all for Donald Trump earlier than he was in opposition to him.
In a uncommon second of sincerity, Ford – the faux “populist” anointed “Captain Canada” by a gullible and simply impressed institution press – admitted that he had wished the havoc-wreaking Trump to return to the White Home.
A crystal ball wasn’t essential to image that, given the best situations, a resource-hungry commander-in-chief with hegemonic aspirations would finally occupy the Oval Workplace and entice like-minded acolytes in Canada.
Within the early Nineteen Eighties, I used to be a lowly undergraduate political science pupil, finding out on the College of Toronto.
One in every of my professors was the late and famend Canadian political economist, Stephen Clarkson.
Professor Clarkson was an excellent trainer and thinker who thought and wrote rather a lot about Canada’s previous, current, and the turbulent waters the nation was heading into at that pivotal time.
I used to be among the many fortunate secure of Clarkson’s analysis assistants when he launched into writing a ebook in regards to the perils that the brewing prospects of a free commerce deal between Ottawa and Washington – championed by US President Ronald Reagan – posed to Canada’s sovereignty.
The ebook printed in 1982 and titled, Canada and the Reagan Problem, was, without delay, a sober rebuttal to the legion of giddy continentalists who have been satisfied that Canada ought to deepen its already inexorable hyperlinks to the US, in addition to a flare that raised the alarm in regards to the nation’s quick waning capacity to exert any tangible measure of independence at residence and overseas.
Whereas Clarkson was a nationalist, he was additionally a realist. He knew that, by advantage of geography and historical past, Canada and America have been sure to 1 one other.
Nonetheless, he understood the pressing crucial for Canada to look past the rapid horizon to broaden commerce in current and rising markets exterior the US as a way to diversify its export and import insurance policies and, consequently, cut back America’s gravitational pull.
Clarkson’s prescient cautions have been dismissed by a smug gallery of “free-trade” apostles because the anachronistic, anti-American “spleen bursts” of an academically educated ostrich against prosperity.
So, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney negotiated a complete free-trade take care of Reagan in 1988 – a lot of Parliament and the press trumpeted the settlement as a victory of commerce over foolish, outdated notions of Canadian autonomy.
The 1988 federal election was fought over the potential penalties for Canada of the Mulroney-Reagan pact.
In a televised debate, then Liberal chief, John Turner, famously challenged Mulroney – who claimed, absurdly, that the deal could possibly be “cancelled” at any time.
“With one signature of a pen,” Turner thundered, “you’ve … thrown us into the north-south affect of the US and can cut back us, I’m positive, to a colony of the US as a result of political independence is certain to observe.”
Turner’s chest-thumping efficiency was simply that – a efficiency. The Liberal Get together’s opposition to the Mulroney-brokered free-trade accord was a rhetorical pantomime.
Quickly sufficient, Liberal prime ministers have been singing their very own fulsome praises of the deal and alluring Mexico to hitch the continent-wide association consecrated by the smiling, hand-holding “Three Amigos”.
Quick ahead to February 2025 and Professor Clarkson’s admonitions and reservations from greater than 4 a long time in the past have come to fruition.
An emboldened US president seems intent on annexing Canada by financial coercion and, given the coverage of just about unfettered integration pursued by a succession of Liberal and Conservative governments – and endorsed by starry-eyed editorial writers – Trump has the levers and leverage to do it.
Immediately, Clarkson’s critics – inside and out of doors amnesiac newsrooms and capital cities – are dashing to undertake his “foolish, outdated” prescriptions to protect the nation’s phantom sovereignty and outdo each other as standing on guard for thee – Canada, that’s.
Their epiphanies are 40 years too late.
Canada has, by their deliberate design, lengthy been America’s keen, “open for enterprise” vassal.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
