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We all know what compassion means. But like most things that we believe we know, it’s worth going back to think it over again. To continually remind ourselves that compassion is not pity. It’s not just empathy. It contains empathy. It is not, certainly not, just sympathy. It’s far away from sympathy because it includes action. It requires action. To put this in the simplest possible way, compassion is action in order to make things better. It’s the very hard work of identifying with the other, identifying with the needs of others, identifying with the needs of our society, and being conscious of our need to become involved in working on all of that.

The Foundations of Canadian Compassion

I write these lines on the 11th of March, looking back 178 years to the birth of our Canadian democracy. It was on the 11th of March, 1848, that Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine was called by the Governor General, Lord Elgin, to form the government. His number two was Robert Baldwin. A Montrealer and a Torontonian. The two leading citizens of their cities. Great reformists in pursuit of justice had won a majority a few months before, and with their leaders making up the cabinet, this administration would soon be known as The Great Ministry.

Over the next three years, they worked day and night, through riots, tensions, and even the burning down of parliament buildings, to lay the foundations of what are still the humanist foundations of modern Canada—which, at its best, has compassion at its core. Today, there are economics and political science departments—even history departments—across this country which will describe its coming into being without including any of that. As per their account, Canada was built in a colonial context by rival factions, which they often see as little more than interest groups. The country is nothing more than a series of economic and political trade-offs. They don’t go back to look at the extent to which leaders like LaFontaine and Baldwin were driven by compassion and ethics.

Photo_ Frank Michel_ CC BY 2.0

But in fact, since 1848, almost two centuries ago, Canadian citizens have been working to make this country function at its best. True, most of the time it doesn’t function at that level, and granted, some of the time it functions at its worst. We all know when that happens, because those dark stains on our society are there forever. I chose that word carefully. These are not lessons. They are stains. The principal outcome of our long, continuous democratic history is that people who try to act consciously in this country know what to avoid. They can feel what they need to avoid.

I chose that word, continuous, carefully as well. So not only are we the world’s oldest continuous democratic federation, but we are also one of the oldest continuous democracies overall. Of the many established ones out there, many broke up and came back together. A continuous democracy is quite a different matter. True, we have done a lot of terrible and stupid things. But we never went that extra step to start massively killing each other or successfully overthrowing governments.

The Sources of American Violence

With 1.5 million casualties, soldiers, civilians and wounded included, the appalling breakup of our neighbour’s democracy comes to mind. The US Civil War saw 3.2 million citizens fight each other in astonishing violence. Certainly a failure of civilisation. And yet, despite the contrasts between the Northeast and the Southeast, we can pinpoint the origin of this fundamental violence to the very foundation of the country and its economic system: an unbroken line of slavery of over 400 years, from the early 1600s to the end of segregation, of which, as economic studies prove, even the non-slave areas benefited. It’s not until the early 1960s that the first real laws—enforceable ones—take shape. And even that was difficult.

Simply put, as terrible as the US Civil War was and despite many relevant social movements driven by compassion, an unbroken line of profound violence, based on mass industrialised slavery and segregation, negates the idea of continuous democracy completely. Something as deep as that never goes away. Just as the great mistakes made in Canada or any other country never go away. And they reappear regularly. One can argue—and this may be an understatement—that Mr Trump’s regime is but a reappearance of that same line of fundamental violence, as well as a rejection of the idea of the citizen and citizens’ rights.

When the president of the United States, with no reason or excuse, starts denigrating and threatening its neighbour—claiming Canada shouldn’t really exist, and implying that it could be made not to—it becomes clear not just that the lineage of violence is resurfacing, but also that this time, at least in part, it has set its eyes on us.

Even that is hardly new. The U.S. is a remarkable country, largely built by bullying its neighbours, invading and raking their territory. In 1847-48, it violently seized half of Mexico, invading it again twice in 1914 in order to force a change in government. The long settler’s march across the continent was enthusiastically seen as a conquest of the West, subduing Indigenous civilisations by force, and a now global US film industry was built in good part on the celebration of this violence. As for the broader hemisphere, in the 20th century alone, there were between 40 and 50 U.S. military interventions in Latin America to force government changes, on top of innumerable indirect interventions backing murderous regimes and coups d’état. Chile is one of the most famous examples.

So when the United States president threatens Canada, never mind the particular antics of the man at the reins, one just can’t imagine this is incidental and let it pass. Britain and France used this very method to build their reach in the 19th Century. When Empires want to do something unacceptable, they begin by invoking it. Just words muttered periodically, in press conferences, interviews, or while casually getting on or off airplanes. Threats are repeated one at a time, casually, as if it’s nothing at all, normalising over time concepts like justifiable coups, invasions, or forced changes of government.

In this case, you normalise the idea that Canada shouldn’t exist and that it’s okay to destroy it, because, underlying that ever-present dismissal, there’s a hope you’ll end up getting the riches.

And why shouldn’t they have the riches? You recently heard that argument from the U.S. president—“Canada has never done anything.” Per that narrative, we’re totally dependent on them, we’ve taken advantage of them, we’ve existed thanks to them. Therefore, our riches are their payoff. Which is to say, they get to destroy Canada. This is real. I am not paranoid. And neither are you. I want you to remember that Mr Trump, and in particular Mr Vance, who may well become president, are surrounded by a cabal of ultra-rich, ultra-influential individuals who, like Peter Thiel, openly declare not to believe in democracy. A deep state vehemently opposed to the notion that society can be ruled by compassion and not self-interest.

How Empires Function

Let us not forget that strange little incident over Greenland. I’m sure you remember it. The vice president’s wife. Then the vice president. Suddenly, they were there, for no other reason than a classic, brazen, yet half-baked attempt at imperial takeover. Why classic? It’s a matter of the actions and the language: broad strategic reasons, the good of civilisation, protecting us all from a barbarian invasion. In reality, they were after the mineral wealth—a crummy little play for economic riches.

They didn’t succeed because democracy’s greatest weapon against authoritarianism is ridicule. In Greenland, a small population made the world’s second most powerful man look like an idiot. He was forced to withdraw from a stunt that he and his boss thought was going to be easy. So no dog-sledging race photo-opps, and cultural, “soft-power” diplomacy. Unexpectedly—in their view of the world—a small population of weaponless natives stood up to them. It was then that the EU spoke up, and eventually Canada did as well.

Then came Iran, whose ruling regime is, let me say, all but a pretty one. Its long story of state violence and repression against those who speak up is horrifying. The thing is, there are a lot of ugly dictatorships in the world. And each has an internal logic—a history of its own.

The definition of imperialism is that one country believes it has the right to shape the destiny of other peoples. Mr Trump thought that about Iran, as he did about Greenland. Two very different places and situations to which he applied the same logic. Should he get his way, the outcome in the former will be just as disastrous as it could have been in the latter.

To put it simply, the sustained bombing of Iran has reinforced the regime and undermined the country’s democratic forces. Bombing has never won a war or overthrown regimes. Bombing infuriated the British in WWII and strengthened their will to fight on. The subsequent flattening of German cities by Allied bombers had the same effect and is generally thought to have prolonged the war. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia—a human disaster as much as a strategic failure. The most probable outcome of the air attacks on Iran will be to cement hatred in that country for the US and perhaps the West as a whole.

That single phrase—“We are going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong”—puts the United States on the side of barbarism. These words carry broad implications for disorder in the area, for the further isolation of Islamic countries, for the creation of generations of angry youth, and for the probable rise of a new wave of terror as the simplest response to an attack in which there are no soldiers to fight. This U.S. “initiative” will undoubtedly have a negative impact on all Western countries, including Canada.

Wondering only what it will look like is asking the wrong question. Once you open wide the Pandora’s box of violence, you lose control over the forces you have unleashed.

Just think about that phrase—“…back to the Stone Age, where they belong”—those words were addressed to one of the world’s oldest civilisations. 1800 years ago, Cyrus the Great ruled from India to Eastern Europe. Successive Persian empires followed, and major contributions were made to medicine, literature, philosophy, and engineering. We are talking about a civilisation older than anything in the West. Mr Trump’s dismissive words were uttered with ignorance, and they will hang there in the uncontrollable global memory, unexcusable, used as the justification for the years of violence and death to come.

Prime Ministers’ Toughest Job

Going back to the narrower issue between Canada and the US, what I have described so far will help you to understand why the principal foreign policy job of all Canadian prime ministers has been to keep us out of that sort of mess. And we do that by distracting Washington as much as possible. By being nice or appearing nice. By smiling a lot. By doing whatever we can to stop them from focusing on us or getting an excuse to actually do to us some of what they’ve done to our neighbours. Of course, sell every single piece of bubblegum, every computer and whatever else you can to the United States. It’s a gigantic market. And be very nice in a way that will help to keep the markets open. Smile, be friendly. But don’t hug. Keep your distance. This has been understood throughout Canada’s full history.

And then came 1958, the justifiable destruction of the Liberal Party and the arrival of Lester Pearson, along with a guy called Walter Gordon, a businessman who had a strong sense of compassion. He rebuilt the Liberal Party after the ’58 meltdown. He structured and organised Lester Pearson’s victories in the early ’60s. True, they never got a majority, but they did win power. He put in place much of the Pearson-era legislation, reflecting a clear platform of compassion built on a strong nation-state. And in 1963, in one of the most disastrous days in modern Canadian history, came the Gordon Budget. One that was almost identical to what Mark Carney is doing today, designed to make Canada function as an independent country, disengaged from core US economic interests.

The Bay Street bankers and corporate managers went bonkers. A massive panic campaign led by the business community insisted that our economy would collapse and that we’d become a third-world country. And Pearson, who was a good Prime Minister but didn’t know anything about economics, caved. Thus was Walter Gordon, one of the greatest political figures of post-WWII Canada, destroyed. I only got to know this great man in his old age. Even then, you could sense his enormous courage and—central to that—that he didn’t care what people said. He was willing to go out there and take it.

From that point on, the steam was knocked out of our foreign policy. We had lost confidence in Canada’s ability to pursue an independent economic policy. One of the leading forces in WWII was somehow reduced to a passive international status.

The Economic Assimilation of Canada

Partly as a result of our failure to become a more hard-hitting, economically independent power, we began to look increasingly inwards. From Universal Healthcare to the abolition of Capital Punishment, we started to focus more and more on compassion, putting in place the national and provincial policies that would make Canada a very different place from its neighbour.

In 1973, after some years at the helm, Pierre Trudeau tried to do something akin to what Walter Gordon had tried to. His so-called “The Third Option” attempted to diversify our trade as a way to diversify our international political relationships. He got no mainstream business support and little from economists in general. A policy can’t go far if nobody is willing to pick it up and run with it. And so we get to 1988’s “free trade election” that didn’t live up to its name. That election was about everything else that the deal it ran on implied, which was basically broad economic integration into the US economy. Meaning for Canada to have less and less control over everything else, less and less ability to pursue a foreign policy and less freedom to expand our interesting concept of a non-monolithic country. You could say that it was the attempt to get us to a point of no return.

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, I must say, had a number of good qualities. He, for one, led the international fight against apartheid in South Africa. But he betrayed the country over that 1988 deal with the United States, taking us down a road of much more than broad economic integration. I use this word carefully, too, for it has kept its meaning and has not lost an ounce of force through overuse. The result of this betrayal was thrilling for Big Business and borderless commerce, but we slipped down 40 years of being a subsidiary for US companies and markets, more and more focused on mass-production as opposed to high-level innovation. For all these world-class universities, one has to wonder why so many of our graduates leave for the US. At risk of generalising, there are simply few sophisticated jobs for them in Canada.

As additional collateral, a small group of people made a great deal of money, and the country’s rich-poor divide widened. Culture and volunteerism, however, increasingly became the counterweight to this broad economic submission. Canadians were still saying, out loud, we were going to do something different. With them, once again, I would say, compassion turned out to be central to the ways of our people.

Time for Existential Questions

And then, a new reality struck. About twelve months ago. Washington—the Roman Empire of our day, sitting on our doorstep—changed its mind. Empires do that. They have their own timetable.

Of course, we do have some influence: on bits and pieces of markets, on some people we do business with, and on our personal US friends. But all of that adds up to little. And nothing at all when it comes to broad US policy. That’s why our best option is to sell what we can, buy what we need, keep our distance and smile a lot. Nobody had any control over Rome, 18th-century Paris or 19th-century London.

Canadians tend to say that the change we are facing today is due to Trump. That is a comforting explanation, suggesting our problems are short-term. I don’t think that is the case. Suddenly, the US has lost interest in its standard economic control over its appendages from Central and South America to Canada. As often happens with empires, they just lose interest, providing their appendages don’t cause trouble.

So now is the time to ask ourselves real questions. For example, there is the upcoming trade negotiation aimed at renewing CUSMA, our three-way trade agreement. Why do we need this deal? Can we organise ourselves differently? Perhaps we will be able to pull off a new deal with the unstable and intellectually challenged US government, but can you imagine what they’ll ask for when we sit down to negotiate? Mr Trump has been preparing that ground for months, endlessly repeating that they were robbed last time around.

Photo_ Chris Connelly_ CC BY 2.0

I believe we should accept that we won’t have a deal, and that a door opens up for us to do what we should have done back in ‘88. We can sell as much as we want there and elsewhere and we’re certainly not going to give them the extra power over us that they’ll be demanding this time.

If we want to survive as a nation, we have to ask ourselves a question that’s nothing short of existential: What’s happened?

Trump and Vance have simply returned to the old U.S. tradition of being an inward-looking country. Keep in mind that there is nothing inherently wrong with that. They did so back in the 18th Century to get away from England, to be independent of international forces. That more or less worked until Japan attacked them in 1942, forcing them into WWII against their will. They went on to do a fine job during the war and, in many ways, almost automatically became the leaders of the Western democracies. But it was tiring. Ultimately, it wasn’t really what they wanted to be. It’s not in their tradition. And so after many decades, they’re done.

Of course, they don’t want to lose control. They don’t want to give up their markets. But it’s expensive, consuming, and even boring to lead the “free world.” It’s time-consuming. Is it not? As a result, all those Canadians, many of them business leaders and economists, who took us down that road of integration, have been picked up by the scruff of their necks and thrown on the floor, having failed miserably, having put us in an almost impossible position. So, again, what happened? Everybody is saying Carney is doing a great job trying to change Canada’s direction, but nobody is going back to examine how we got into this mess.

There is no harm, but justice, in identifying those who are to blame, the people who thought we could exist as a happy wagging tail. The thing is, if you don’t know how you got into a mess, you will hardly succeed in getting out of it. It was not even 12 months ago that business leaders lobbied for greater integration in the US economy, and now, in shock, they call for economic diversification. They want Europe. They want South Asia. They want East Asia. They are trying to invent a whole new way of life for which they are not trained or prepared in any way, shape, or form.

Imagining a Gigantic Pivot

We require not just a leap, but a gigantic pivot.

That’s why the prime minister is on a plane the whole time. Thank God he’s willing to do it. And that he’s young and strong enough, and that his wife is supporting him through this, while he takes up the weight of our nation’s future in flying around the world to convince everyone we are serious. This is an enormous challenge because there is no reason anyone should believe us.

Our good character and reputation may precede us, but many things in Canada need to change to demonstrate our commitment. We will need to move away from the low-level mass-market strategies we were obliged to adopt for US integration. Suddenly, we have to look at the much higher levels of complexity of, for example, the European market and face our own contradictions, such as how a highly educated yet mass-production-focused society makes no sense.

Many countries out there still want us for our mass-produced agriculture, our mining and our lumber. No one can deny the importance of those sectors, let alone today, but we simply can’t afford to go back to focusing on just that—back to 1910, the exact place where the US leadership and business would like us. We need to double down on our structural sophistication, nationally and internationally, stopping the brain drain, keeping our young and formed to thrive at home, building on what we already have, on the potential of our cultural diversity and our multilingual strengths, on the referential cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, or Calgary.

And mind that I am not invoking cheap nationalism or suggesting we close the borders. Quite the contrary. We need to open the borders in dozens and dozens of new ways, rather than being lazily reliant on one market, close by and unilingual in English. Granted, this whole internationalism is much more complicated, but let me argue, it’s much more interesting, much more fun. We, and our companies, should be promoting, in that sense, that our elites and future leaders look beyond Harvard and into the promise of a university education in India, China, Malaysia, Germany or Russia.

As soon as negotiations with the US begin, I can almost guarantee you that the US-integrated Canadian elites will swerve, calling for us to cave on a whole series of fronts, demanding we abandon smaller, successful sectors they don’t care about. It’ll be ‘88 all over again, only even more hysterical, and they will try to make it sound sophisticated. And it is in the advent of this new attempt at mass-producing panic that you, citizens, really need to step up. This is when you, Canadians everywhere, will have to go the extra mile to make yourselves heard and seen, from the streets to your representatives’ offices. We have to be, you have to be, ready to be firm in public. Firm with the people you might elect. Firm with your ideas. Calm, yet determined. We simply won’t be able to build a solid independence based on the old model. But if we are clear that we’re willing to do the work required for international diversity, then we are sure to survive.

The Opposite of Boring

It’s no secret why the prime minister is being welcomed in such interesting ways as he travels endlessly around the world, seeking new markets and new friends. His initiatives, his standing up to Trump, and especially his recent speech in Davos have made many realise that there is a chance for another model here, slowly coming to shape. But if we are going to succeed out there, internationally, in a new Canadian independence, we have to be willing to take this on. That direction will rely on us, on you, on citizen intervention, on you being heard, maybe even on you being as annoying as possible in a creative way.

Let me carefully choose my words once again, when I say all of this can and should be exciting. Risk is exciting. Change is exciting. Diversification is exciting. Multiplicity is exciting.

Why should we then be boring? After all, on those foundations of compassion, we have managed to build a naturally exciting country, our Canada. From our multilingual wealth to our thriving, sophisticated cities, and the growing social and cultural diversity we’re rightly so proud of. We should learn to harness this very comfort with diversity at the international level, economically and politically, using our own prowess at building bridges to further enrich our nation as much as to contribute to the prosperity of others.

If we manage to do that, Canada is certain to be a key player on the world stage. We will not just survive, but thrive together. We have all the tools we need to change. Compassion, after all, is action in order to make things better.

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