The trend has expanded to Canadians refusing to buy American products or travel to the country.
“The Canadians, we’re all sticking together, it’s really cool,” one of my oldest family friends, who’s like a second mother to me and lives in Toronto, said over the phone the other day. “March break, you know they all take off for Florida?” She was referring to uni students who usually travel south to get away from the Canadian cold. “ZERO. They rebooked to Mexico.”
But, of course, my son doesn’t get it. How could he possibly, when it’s taken me until this moment to understand how umbilical my connection to Canada is?
I can’t remember either of my parents, both born and bred in Toronto, ever mentioning anything about being Canadian. My father revered Canadian soldiers specifically. He was an amateur historian who would drag us to armouries on family holidays, where he’d pore over various military records while my brother and I kicked the dirt next to a brass cannon on the lawn. (My need to hear about the battle of Ypres remained, stubbornly, non-existent.)
Canadians were low-rent and we knew it. We just needed to look to our southern neighbours for comparison.
Americans had The A-Team, starring Mr T. We had The Beachcombers, about a Canadian log salvager who battled another guy … who also wanted logs. They had Superman. We had Captain Canuck. We ate cream of wheat. A trip to Florida at age 13 left me gape-mouthed at one supermarket’s aisles – aisles! – of cereal boxes so colourful it looked like a rainbow had attacked a marshmallow factory.
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As for any feeling of national identity?
“Canada is the existence of not being,” Mike Myers, who grew up in Toronto, told Rolling Stone magazine in 1999. “Not English, not American. It is the mathematics of not being. Subtle flavour. We’re more like celery as a flavour.” And this is exactly how we felt growing up.
But now, 27 years after moving to Australia, I feel like punching a wall. Instead, I type out two words over WhatsApp to my oldest friend in Toronto: “Elbows up!!!!”
“WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F—???” she replies. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that the US would treat Canada as an enemy and threaten annexation or economic warfare. We’ve been the greatest allies for 200 years, with the longest undefended border in the world. It’s heartbreaking … But also, Trump can go f— himself a million different ways.”
We are in a collective state of emotional whiplash.
“Can the Canadian military defend itself against America’s?” I asked my husband in bed the other night, while flashing him a nervous look.
I knew, as soon as the words tumbled out of my mouth, the answer. (Obviously not.)
But, perhaps for the first time, I finally understand, and feel a sort of maternal affection for, a part of myself that I have sometimes wished I could kick to the kerb.
I always thought that my effusive friendliness – I give off a golden retriever vibe, so deeply daggy next to you bronzed surfers, coolly surveying a rip – was simply because I’m my mother’s child. My late mother and I had a fractious relationship. But she was the most vibrant person I knew; her eyes lit up if she saw you, or your dog, on the footpath. Her laughter had the energy of a balloon popping. And my side-eyed view of power and money as potentially dangerous unless guided by a desire to make life better for others? That just came from my late father, right? He had one true religion: everyone was equal and a person’s station in life had nothing to do with it. You treated people with respect, unless their behaviour gave you a reason not to.
I never thought these traits might be because they were, because I am, Canadian.
Mark Carney: “We didn’t ask for this fight. But Canadians are always ready when somebody else drops the gloves.”Credit: AP
But now I think they just might be. That I just took for granted the fact that the people who raised me happened to themselves have been raised in a left-leaning country that prioritises socialised healthcare, welcoming outsiders in need, and good governance over the pursuit of happiness and the “American dream” of making it rich. It was just the air that I breathed.
“The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, said on March 9. “Think about it, if they succeeded, they would destroy our way of life. We didn’t ask for this fight. But Canadians are always ready when somebody else drops the gloves.”
And this I now know, too.
Carney might have been helped by Trump to win the federal election, rumoured to take place on April 28. Until Trump’s taunts, Carney’s Liberal Party was disastrously behind in the polls. Now he’s neck-and-neck with his primary opponent, the Conservative Party’s leader Pierre Poilievre, who has been branded as Trump-friendly and given the moniker “Maple MAGA”.
No one likes a bully.
Elbows up.
Samantha Selinger-Morris is the host of The Morning Edition for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.