James Stranko: Dear Canada, Americans still love you but please stop insulting us

Toronto FC fans recently booed the American national anthem, the same way Canadians across the country have done countless times over the past 18 months. We get it, you’re mad.

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But consider this week, when the Barenaked Ladies will perform “O Canada” at the Buffalo Bills home opener. In contrast, I can confidently predict that the crowd will sing along and erupt in cheers. Unlike Canadians, Americans don’t currently boo Canada’s national anthem or angle a political dig into a conversation about the weather. Many Canadians do this, and for the ones who do, it’s sort of all they do these days.

As an American who is a frequent visitor (I estimate about 40 trips to seven provinces) and longtime observer of Canada-U.S. relations, I am deeply concerned about the long-term social effects of the current skirmish between our two countries. What might surprise you is that I’m much more concerned for you than I am for us.

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Most Americans have historically spent little time thinking about Canada and, when they do, it’s usually warm and fuzzy feelings. That’s why I’m worried that the feel-good elbowing up that’s coming from Canada is beginning to sour the tremendous amount of goodwill Canadians receive in America, further aggravating a bad situation for Canada.

When I recently shared some of these feelings in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, I unsurprisingly unchained torrents of finger-wagging from Canadians. The calumny followed a few predictable lines of argument. The first, and my least favourite, was, “Foreigners, and particularly Americans, don’t have a right to have critical views of Canada.”

The second, “This man is an example of how bad the American education system is,” was irrelevant to the argument and an unnecessarily ad hominem. And then there was my personal favourite: “These criticisms are trite,” which I take as a compliment because it means they’re still true.

Strangely enough, despite the torrent of negativity from Canadians commenting on the article, I received a larger amount of positive messages from Canadians sent to me through private channels. That leads me to believe that many Canadians are being forced into self-censorship and public-facing groupthink on the topic, which, like we’ve seen in many U.S. culture war debates, is immensely corrosive to the body politic and civil discourse.

The most insightful comment came from my mother, the Pittsburgh bellwether voter of pollsters’ and political consultants’ dreams. She’s a woman who succeeded through a high school education and hard work, and votes in every single election.

Despite the fact that she doesn’t consume political media, she has made some of the most intelligent statements on politics I’ve ever heard in my life. In 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s surprise first election, she presciently proclaimed, “Great, now every jagoff who catcalled me on the job and passed me up for promotions will feel like he can say whatever he wants.”

Visiting her for her birthday last week (sorry, mom, I know you stopped celebrating at 39), she congratulated me on the piece but said she had mixed feelings about the whole situation.

Her reason: She was talking to her cousin in Florida who checked in on her neighbours from Ontario after they didn’t show up all summer. The Ontarians told our cousin they wouldn’t be coming because their prime minister said they shouldn’t visit the U.S. while this is going on. My cousin told them they were missed and asked if there was anything she could do to help care for their property.

My mother, who still waxes poetic about dinner at Gibbys in Montreal in the 1970s, quipped, “I could never imagine president you-know-who telling Americans not to go to Niagara Falls or to Quebec City; it just seems like Canadians are taking it out on the wrong people.”

Most Americans sympathize with Canadian reactions to the bluster coming out of the White House. I can’t imagine you could fill a Canadian regional jet with the people who are calling Lake Ontario “Lake America.” But what Americans won’t sympathize with is hostility from private citizens.

While Americans will go out of their way to make sure Canadians feel welcome here in a time of turmoil, they will also remember when “The Star-Spangled Banner” gets booed, or their friends get snippy for no reason, and will start to change their blithely positive opinions of Canadians into more nuanced and negative ones. Nobody wins in this situation, especially Canadians.

Economist Kenneth Rogoff recently compared the U.S.-Canada tensions to a “bar fight,” and it’s easy to see the metaphor. But in a bar fight, you don’t just start punching everyone, you go after the instigator, while bystanders generally take sides depending on who is more popular or more sympathetic.

In this bar fight, Canadians still have most Americans on their side against the obvious aggressor. But the more Canadians reveal their contempt for ordinary Americans, the fewer people they’ll have on their side when the next fight begins.

National Post

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