Juan F. Hernandez completed a PhD at UBC’s Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies in 2020 and is now a sessional lecturer at the University of the Fraser Valley, where he teaches inter-American relations.
The recent economic attacks deployed by the United States government against Canada in the form of the infamous tariffs are not entirely novel in the history of US-Canada relations. For those familiar with modern Canadian history, the Bomarc Missile Crisis serves as a reminder of the pattern of aggression from the American executive when Canadian policy has not aligned with their immediate interests.
During this crisis, Canada faced American pressure to deploy the nuclear-armed Bomarc missiles as part of the NORAD defence strategy in its territory. The Progressive Conservative government of John Diefenbaker hesitated — leading to tensions with the US. The Kennedy administration didn’t hide their discomfort with Diefenbaker and moved quickly to deploy a propaganda effort (more elegantly named a PR campaign) to delegitimize the prime minister and to groom another Member of Parliament who would dance to the American tune, Liberal Lester B. Pearson. In a publicity Blitzkrieg, Pearson was positioned as the rational choice and “Dief the Chief” painted as an incompetent leader.
So shocking was this episode to those paying attention that it inspired the famous essay “Lament for a Nation” by Canadian philosopher George Grant. The shock was not so much the change in government but the underlying principles that condition it and the political and moral implications of such intervention. Sovereignty violated; Americans appeased.
Some argued that that two leaders, Kennedy and Diefenbaker, didn’t really like each other, and that this personal antipathy was the cause of the misunderstandings and hiccups that led to the Missile Crisis. This is not fully convincing.
Others believe that regardless of how much (or how little) American presidents liked or disliked their Canadian counterparts, the American agenda would take precedence over personal affections. If a prime minister would not collaborate, perhaps the next one would.
Today, something similar happens in the face of the Trump tariffs. It’s not important whether Trump likes or dislikes Trudeau, or for that matter, Mark Carney. It is of little importance whether Trudeau stands up to Trump or cozies up to him by queuing up at the Mar-a-Lago main gate.
The Trump administration, like the Kennedy administration many decades before, is set on getting their way with Canada. Kennedy had the apocalyptic pressures and images of the Cold War on his side. Trump wants to bring apocalypses to others to save America.
My wager is that the Trump administration’s goal is to slowly take over our country and if not, at least to secure parts and sections of our sovereignty. His playbook (which not coincidentally borrows heavily from the Russians) includes deteriorating the standing of Canada’s international image, attempting to increase internal polarization in the country, slowing down the economy and then once he has reduced his opponent, only then, he would negotiate to end the “crisis” — of course a crisis of his own making for his own goals.
He would declare “victory” when better terms of trade (for the US) have been created via political manipulation and weakening of the Canadian purse and spirit. He doesn’t need to create a 51st state, but he would exert enough pressure to create the conditions under which American capital can access Canadian resources with little oversight and regulation and under the conditions most favourable to it. And this is what most commentators have failed to grasp.
The connection is becoming increasingly more clear: American capital plus Canadian resources equals American effort to undermine Canadian sovereignty in order to extract said resources under terms and conditions favourable to America.
Perhaps Grant’s “Lament for a Nation” is worth recalling and re-examining today. Grant was lamenting the end of a Canada he knew: a conservative, British-influenced polity with a distinct balanced culture (political and otherwise) between the British and the French heritage and mildly influenced by American economics and culture. His conservative reaction can be read as a farewell to a Canadian general culture that was on its way of becoming one with the American; farewell to a Canadian politics and economics embarking in a slow but steady march towards what he termed a “homogenous state,” a state dominated by American technology (and its pervasive but invisible influence in the human mind), culturally liberal, creating a political subject indistinguishable from an American.
The Bomarc Missile Crisis revealed this in the context of the Cold War. The Trump tariffs just rudely reminded us in post-‘ideological’ and neoliberal times that the American empire lives inside the American republic and that the empire is propelled and fuelled by capitalism and its insatiable appetite for accumulation. Today more than ever our integration seems inevitable if the empire is given free rein at the American centres of power.
American capitalism through its different periods and levels of sophistication has achieved a previously unimaginable level of power and wealth, but also a devastating level of control of individuals and an apocalyptic desire to secure all resources — even those that lie in the most isolated places such as beneath the Arctic seabed, in the vast Canadian shield, in the most remote Canadian forests or in its monumental water reserves.
The Bomarc crisis was primarily a defence and military issue within the Cold War context. The Trump tariffs can be understood as the ramifications of empire operating inside the American republic. Both are manifest proof of American foreign policy betraying its most solemn rhetoric of human rights and the international rule of law. This only highlights the underlying vacuousness of such stated principles (i.e. human rights, sovereignty of nations, rule of law, sacredness of human life) and the historical contingency that underscores any hope for a foreign policy espousing any morality.
Episodes like these that question Canadian sovereignty should not make us indignant but remind us that America’s obsession with controlling its neighbours is nothing new. In view of the naked goals of this administration, Canada must understand that American foreign policy informed and propelled by its monumental finance capital is, and always will be, a threat to its sovereignty and its right to exist.
This is an opinion article. It reflects the contributor's views and does not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
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