Deeper integration or independence: Choosing a side

Posted on March 2, 2025 by bhaggart

Like a lot of (most?) Canadians, I’ve been heartened by the outpouring of Canadian patriotism in response to US President Donald Trump’s ongoing tariff threats. Nationalism can often lead to terrible things. But it this situation, it matters that it’s being deployed to stand up to tyranny. It’s a healthy reaction.

Yet I’ve also been perplexed by how the urgency reflected in Canadians’ almost-instinctive reaction to the US threat has not been matched by the federal government and our other elected leaders. While they’ve mostly mouthed the right words, their actions have not risen to the occasion.

I wasn’t sure if they understood the nature of the crisis: a needless provincial election, a leadership race. No unity cabinet or any other extraordinary measure that would signal to the rest of us that yes, this is an emergency. And certainly, neither Justin Trudeau nor any other member of his cabinet have thought it useful to actually tell Canadians what the plan is, beyond, “We’ll tariff you if you tariff us.” Which, great, but that’s not a long-term strategy.

That said, we all have eyes. We can read the news. And what I’ve seen to date is not at all comforting. Quite the opposite.

At the same time that Trudeau says that Canada as a 51st state is a “non-starter,” that newly re-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford is sporting ball caps reading “Canada is not for sale,” at the same time that there is an emerging consensus that Canada needs to reinforce our domestic economy, strengthen our military and diversify our trade, Canadian governments are taking steps that will accomplish the exact opposite, that will lead directly to the vassalization of the country.

 The strategy: Keep Trump happy, minimal diversification

I have no special inside sources. But from where I sit, it sure seems that since November, Canada has undertaken a consistent strategy to deal with Donald Trump: Do whatever it takes to keep him happy and the border open. This has resulted in a $1.5 billion border package to deal with a (non-existent) illegal cross-border fentanyl trade. This was so clearly a move made simply to appease Trump that it’s been painful to watch his government try to justify it as a sound policy response to an actual problem. (As an aside: this is not just a harmless giveaway. It reinvigourates the failed war on drugs. It conflates criminal activity with terrorism, something that was at one point at least incredibly controversial. And its Joint Strike Force idea will almost certainly expose Canadian personnel to the commission of human rights abuses by lawless US officials.)

Most recently, the Globe and Mail reports that:

Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said Friday Ottawa is willing to discuss a new request from Washington that Canada match any U.S. tariffs imposed on China to create what U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is calling “fortress North America.”

For the kids reading this, the Fortress North America idea (which echoes Doug Ford’s Fortress Am-Cam) dates to the post-9/11 period (here’s something I wrote on it in 2001 when I was an economist with the Library of Parliament). The idea, then as now, is that in order to safeguard our economy, we have to give the US whatever it wants. Then, security; now, whatever idea wanders through Trump’s degenerate mind. What Joly’s talking about with respect to China is what’s called in the trade a common external tariff (CET). It’s a deeper form of economic integration beyond free trade: countries bind themselves not only to rules amongst themselves, but agree to treat other countries in the same way.

Most importantly for our purposes, both the border-security deal and a CET are forms of deeper integration with the United States. And while it was perhaps possible in 2001 to imagine that Canada would be treated as a junior partner in any friendly agreement, but still a partner, only the most delusional person could still think such a relationship is still possible after watching Trump berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy like an ungrateful vassal in the Oval Office, on top of literally every single thing Trump has done since assuming office.

This seems to be the strategy: try to figure out what Trump wants, give it to him, and pray he doesn’t hurt us. I might not like it, and it won’t work, but them’s the facts as I see them.

Sleepwalking into annexation

I’ve also been struck by the lack of serious attention to strengthening the domestic economy. The only ideas that have gained any traction are internal free trade and building a new east-west pipeline, both of which have been under discussion forever. One could put this down to a lack of imagination, but slow-rolling any meaningful change allows Ottawa to avoid the biggest problem.

The uncomfortable reality is that Canadian diversification away from the United States is not in the US interest. As the US declines in global power, Canada will become increasingly important to its economic and physical security. Taking steps to diversify substantively away from the US will make Trump angry. The United States will take steps to stop it.

This isn’t speculation; it’s US policy. Article 32.10 of the USMCA effectively gives the United States a veto over Canada negotiating a trade agreement with “non-market” countries; i.e., China. It serves the same purpose as the proposed common external tariff: to prevent Canada from diversifying our economy and to tie is ever-more tightly to the United States.

And I guarantee you that the United States will take steps to thwart any substantive action that Canada takes to bolster its domestic economy. Preferential government procurement contracts for Canadian businesses (an absolute necessity)? Moves to reinforce public broadcasting or to encourage a domestic cultural sector? That’s already under fire in their attacks on Bill C-11. You name it: if it has a chance of succeeding in building up Canada’s economy, they will try to smash it.

Any substantive move we make, in other words, will risk Washington’s wrath. That’s always been the case, in a sense. What matters is how our leaders – how Canada – reacts.

My biggest concern regarding Canada’s approach to the United States is that I don’t know where our red line is. At what point do we say, No farther?

Right now, the federal government’s policy of wrath-avoiding – let’s call it what it is: appeasement – is short-sighted and against Canadian interests. If Trudeau really believes in diversifying and strengthening the Canadian economy, it’s also incoherent. It’s a policy of deeper integration, not diversification. It’s a policy that will end with the de facto annexation of Canada.

To repeat: The reality is, if Canada does anything significant to strengthen our own market, or diversify in ways the US doesn’t like, they will (again) threaten our market access. Or worse.

Instead of acknowledging this reality, the Liberal party under Trudeau is trying to have it both ways: to stand up for Canada while giving Trump what he wants. In doing so, they’re sleepwalking Canada into vassal state status.

This strategy assumes that we can buy peace in our time. We can’t. Not with the US as it is, and as it’s likely to be in the foreseeable. Appeasement will only invite more extortion attempts.

Time to choose

The problem with the Fortress North America and subsequent proposals wasn’t really that Canada couldn’t satisfy the United States, on security or whatever. As I noted in this missive back in 2011 (as I said, I’ve been at this a while), it’s that we’re different countries, with different values and interests. There is a border between us. The United States will always look out for itself first. So long as Canada remains independent, this is not a problem that can be solved, only managed. No agreement can buy certainty, and certainly no agreement with an authoritarian/fascist regime.

Canada’s current policy of appeasement and minimal effort at strengthening our economy is bound to fail to protect our independence. If we’re serious about remaining an independent country, we need a long-term strategy that reflects the reality that, at some point, Canada will have to do things that Trump won’t like. There will always be something for the US to complain about. At some point, if we dare speak up for ourselves, they’ll treat us like they treat Zelenskyy.

To be blunt, you can’t can’t both wrap yourself in the flag and simultaneously say you’re thinking about letting an authoritarian government tell us who we can and can’t trade with. It’s either Canada or the US. Time for the government, for our leaders, to choose their side.

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Playing like it’s 1936

Posted on February 19, 2025 by bhaggart
Centre ice faceoff, Ottawa Senators vs Buffalo Sabres, Nov. 5, 2024.
How I spent election night: Ottawa Senators vs Buffalo Sabres, Nov. 5, 2024.

Like many other Canadians, I watched last Saturday’s Canada-US 4 Nations game and was looking forward to tomorrow’s rematch. (FWIW, I think the outcome will probably come down to Hellebuyck.)

And then former Edmonton Oiler and US general manager Bill Guerin started talking. From the Toronto Star:

After Fox’s Bill Hemmer suggested that Trump should attend the game in Boston, Minnesota Wild GM Bill Guerin agreed, saying that the team would “love it if President Trump was in attendance.”  

“We got a room full of proud American players and coaches and staff, and we’re just trying to represent our country in the best way that we can,” Guerin said.  

Fans in Montreal loudly booed the American national anthem prior to Saturday’s game, which drew the ire of American players and fans alike. Guerin called the booing “inspiration” for his team, who ended up edging out the Canadians in a skillful — and fight-laden — contest. 

“If you let it get the better of you, then you’re in trouble, but I really do think the players used it as inspiration,” he said.

Matthew Tkachuk, who anchors the American attack alongside his younger brother, Brady, visited the White House as a member of the Florida Panthers earlier this month, which he called “an incredible day.”

“Canada-U.S. is a huge rivalry in hockey,” Guerin said. “You know, I think there was a little bit of a political flare to it, it’s just the time that we’re in.”

After Guerin’s comments, I’ve lost all interest in watching Thursday’s game. And I want to explain why, not least to myself. Because there’s a lot to unpack in Guerin’s comments that go far beyond the usual international sports rivalries.

Corporate nationalism

I’ve been a hockey fan for decades. I’ve seen games in Mexico City, in Berlin, in Buffalo. I braved last Sunday’s snowstorm to take in some juniour hockey. I’ve designed and taught a course on politics and sports. So I’m not naïve as to the role nationalism, plays in hockey. Or fighting, for that matter.

Professional sports leagues in North America have encouraged this conflation of their business and nationalism for decades. It’s a mutually beneficial bargain for the state and for professional leagues, most of the time. Nationalism sells, and countries are always looking for ways to reinforce their citizens’ sense of attachment to the nation-state.

Equating hockey, in this case, with nationalism makes hockey something that people identify with. It becomes part of who they are. In Canada, thanks to a laissez faire attitude toward culture, hockey is pretty much the only vehicle regular Canadians have to express overt feelings of a shared identity. Which makes it the only tool in the tool box to deploy when that identity is perceived to come under attack.

Across the border, Americans have never been shy about expressing their nationalist pride. They call their national baseball championship the World Series, as if the United States is the entirety of the world. And in a sense, to many Americans, it is. The idea of American exceptionalism is mother’s milk. The shining city upon the hill. The belief that, given the choice, everyone would choose to be an American. The idea that they are a chosen nation, with a Manifest Destiny to rule the continent, if not the world.

Until very recently – let’s say November 5? – these US nationalist feelings were, if not completely harmless, mostly harmless, at least within the contours of professional hockey. We cheer for our country’s team, they cheer for theirs, one wins, the other says next time, and we all go for beers and talk about next Saturday’s Rangers-Sabres game.

We might even boo the other team’s national anthem, in the same way we’d boo a hometown hero who’d left for greener pastures.

There might even be fights (heaven forefend!) during the game, as one team seeks an edge, or wants to settle a score.

What all of these things have in common is that they take place within the context of the game itself. Nationalism here is little more than a pro sports team identity.

The real thing can burn you

But of course, nationalism is more than that. Nationalism is the single most potent force in politics and society. In the past two centuries, it has sparked more wars and led to more death than religions. Class identity – the obsession of Marxists – pales in strength compared to nationalism. If given a choice between fighting for their material class interests and their nation, nation wins every time.

To play with nationalism is to play with fire. It can warm, but it can also leave you with third-degree burns.

As we’re seeing right now in the 4 Nations Face Off.

I don’t have to explain this to Canadians, but for any Americans reading this, it is impossible to overstate how offensive and threatening US President Donald Trump’s threats are to Canadians. Completely unprovoked and justified by false (fentanyl and illegal immigration) and ever-shifting (trade imbalances) reasons, they are being interpreted – correctly, I’d argue – as a direct assault on Canada’s sovereignty. Constant talk of annexation, Canada as a 51st state, and using coercive economic power make this threat appear very real to Canadians, even as it’s dismissed or treated lightly by far too many US academics and pundits.

Canadians see how Trump and Musk are systematically dismantling the US government itself, facing little opposition. The lesson here is that what seems impossible today – the complete collapse of US democracy – could happen tomorrow – the subjugation of a truculent northern neighbour who won’t play ball on resources, or platform governance, or whatever. And in the midst of this we see supposedly serious news outlets analyzing the effect the annexation of Canada would have on the balance of power in Congress.

It’s delusional, both a coping mechanism that allows Americans to avoid acknowledging that they may already have lost their own democracy while also indulging in age-old American exceptionalism, that of course everyone would just love to join their country, if only they could be so lucky.

All this to say, pretty much nobody in Canada sees any of this as a game. Almost to a person – from the First Nations in Canada to Québécois nationalists – everyone sees this moment as an existential crisis, and the United States as the threat to Canada’s continued existence. That is, to Canadian nationalism.

Thanks to decades of nurturing by the NHL, media outlets and the Canadian government, hockey is currently the most powerful, perhaps the only, way ordinary Canadians have of expressing both their national pride and their absolute fury at the US government and those who are enabling its anti-democratic, anti-Canada policies.

Are Canadians going to boo the US national anthem at hockey games? You’re goddamn right we are.

US exceptionalism and fascism rear their ugly heads

On the US side, meanwhile, overt nationalism and American exceptionalism are the order of the day. Of every day. And they combine two things that, as I said, are usually merely annoying to non-Americans but when chained to an authoritarian government like the one that’s currently in place in the US can lead to some very, world-historically ugly, places.

It might be helpful to contrast our current ugly moment with happier times. Remember South Park’s (Oscar-nominated) Blame Canada song?

I will speak for all Canadians when I say that we loved every single glorious second of this song, from its utter ridiculousness to someone finally having the guts to take Anne Murray down a notch. (I kid. Anne Murray is a national treasure.)

One of the reasons we loved it is because it combined the absurd – what American would be stupid enough to think that Canada posed a threat in any way to the US? – with what every Canadian knows every American, in their red, white and blue hearts believes: “They’re not even a real country anyway.”

It’s a line that has the thrill of breaking a taboo, of joking-not-joking.

It scanned as a joke because Americans knew that Canada did not pose a threat to them in any way, shape or form. And Canadians knew that Americans may not really consider other countries to be as real as theirs, but it’s not like they’d actually act on it. And certainly not toward their northern, white neighbour.

All this made Blame Canada a sharp satire of US nationalism. But right now, when Trump seems intent using Blame Canada as a policy guide, it reads differently.

Which brings us to the past week.

Again, in normal times, Guerin’s non-Trump comments could be seen in the context of a that good-for-marketing, self-contained corporate nationalism. But the reality is that Canadians’ booing was very, overtly and explicitly political. It was aimed at the United States as a political entity and Donald Trump in particular, not the players. It had nothing to do with hockey.

To paraphrase Arrested Development, Canadians don’t hate Americans; we kind of like them. (If you want to extend the analogy further, Lucille is Trump, trying to turn Canadians and Americans against each other.) Every single US player plays on some Canadian’s favourite team.

Guerin, as well as Brady and Matthew Tkachuk, are grown-ass men and should be treated as such. The fact that they’re hockey players does not give them a pass for anything they say. It matters that Brady Tkachuk both shook hands with Trump and praised him effusively. He didn’t have to do that. Neither he, nor his brother, nor Guerin can claim not to know what Trump is doing to their country, and how he is threatening Canada. Explicitly linking Trump to Team USA’s strategy and performance – using the Trump-motivated booing as inspiration for his team to play a stupid game – is the act of someone who is mixing politics and sports.

Like it’s 1936

Guerin leaned into US nationalism and US exceptionalism in their response to Canadians booing the US national anthem. US exceptionalism in that they probably don’t see what the big deal is about the 51st state talk: who wouldn’t want to be an American?

As for the nationalism, the motivational speech practically writes itself:

They’re booing your song, your country! Are you going to stand for that? We’re the greatest country in the world! The president – your president – is in the crowd tonight! We’re going to teach the Canadians a lesson!

And in normal times, when the other side’s fans were booing you just because you’re the other team, that would be the end of it. Every good story needs a bad guy.

But sometimes, like now, the boos mean more. Sometimes politics matters.

Imagine the same speech coming from the head coach of the German national ice hockey team in the 1936 Olympics, playing against France:

They’re booing your song, your country! Are you going to stand for that? The Führer – your Führer – is in the crowd tonight! We’re the greatest country in the world! We’re going to teach the French a lesson!

Context matters.

Some might say (and some have said) that Guerin is an idiot, that most hockey players don’t have two brain cells to rub together, and that we certainly shouldn’t look to pro athletes for political or moral guidance. All of which may be true.

But idiots are fascism’s foot soldiers. Unthinking patriotism, mostly benign or even beneficial in normal times, can easily be weaponized when the object of that patriotism is unworthy or malign. Patriotic support for an authoritarian leader is support for an authoritarian. Nationalistic support for a Nazi regime is support for a Nazi regime.

The US players, and even Guerin, may not fully understand what they are attacking when they drop their gloves against their opponents. These grown-ass men might not even fully understand the implications of directly linking Trump to all of this.

It doesn’t matter. For whatever reason, the US hockey team’s nationalism, in treating politics as a game, as just another thing to get the team going, in tacitly endorsing Trump’s eradicationist view of Canada, sends a message to Canadians: they don’t really care what happens to our country, or by extension anyone in it. That they haven’t thought deeply about any of this doesn’t really matter. If your country is authoritarian, then standing up for your country means standing up for authoritarianism.

On one level, of course, this is still just a hockey game. But symbols matter, and hockey players aren’t the only ones who embrace an unreflexive nationalism or sense of US exceptionalism. (Nor are Canadians when it comes to nationalism, but that’s an issue for another day.)

They’re Americans, and they’re going to stand up for the flag and their president, no matter who he is or what he’s doing, to Canada or even to their own country. They’re going to skate out there and play, for the flag, and for the Führer. And that’s something that I don’t care to watch.

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Time to ditch the USMCA

Posted on February 19, 2025 by bhaggart

I have a new oped out in the Globe and Mail, on why Canada should not renegotiate our trade agreement with the United States and Mexico, the United States Canada Mexico Agreement (USMCA in the US, CUSMA in Canada, T-MEC in Mexico). The US itself has been pushing for a quicker renegotiation, while some pundits and premiers, such as Québec Premier François Legault, have been calling for renegotiation in order to end the current uncertainty in the relationship.

Their arguments are, to be blunt, nonsense.

The problem in the North American economic relationship isn’t with the USMCA, however it’s named. The problem is that the United States is not honouring the current agreement. To imagine that Trump’s and Musk’s United States would honour a new agreement when they don’t stand by their existing ones is pure magical thinking.

Legault and other renegotiation supporters are practicing cargo-cult policymaking. They want to continue doing the thing they did in the past without understanding why the thing they’re doing (negotiating agreements) delivered prosperity.

Trade agreements aren’t some magical economic-growth device that anyone can use at any time. They only work under specific circumstances. When you try to use them inappropriately, they can lead to disastrous outcomes.

The circumstances that allowed trade agreements to do their thing — a global respect for sovereignty and the rule of law — no longer hold.

It only makes sense to negotiate trade agreements when all parties can be trusted to abide by its terms, more or less. There is no global police to enforce international law, so you have to trust your partners. The United States has made it very clear that it does not feel bound by any of its agreements. That’s kind of what it means to dismantle the liberal international order.

Under these conditions, any agreement Canada and Mexico signed with the United States would serve to bind the smaller countries while leaving the US free to do what it wants, when it wants. It would not be an agreement between sovereign equals, but between master and servants.

If we renegotiate, I guarantee you there will be even more onerous terms that have nothing to do with North American trade and everything to do with cementing US dominance over our economies and our future. Already, the USMCA includes clauses limiting countries’ ability to set independent monetary policy, and that effectively give the United States a veto over any future Canadian and Mexican trade agreements with China.

What does any of that have to do with North American trade, you ask? Absolutely nothing. But it shows how the US uses the carrot and stick of access to its market force concessions on countries.

Trade agreements are supposed to protect the policy autonomy of the smaller party. The USMCA’s renegotiation clause is already being used to attack Canadian tax and cultural policies. If we renegotiate, expect more of that in pretty much every area of our economy.

This time around, I would bet any amount of money that Musk’s US government will go hard after anything that restricts his companies’ interests: bans on any online harms regulations or restrictions on self-driving cars or AI safety regulations. Policies in Canada’s interest that have nothing to do with trade.

Remember all of Trump’s talk about economic coercion? This is exactly what he has in mind. And there’s a process in place to deliver it: the USMCA renegotiations.

Negotiating, or renegotiating a trade agreement with an expansionist, authoritarian country like the US makes absolutely no sense. It would only serve to tie our hands at the very moment we need to reorient the Canadian economy. The whole point of the USMCA, from the US perspective, is to prevent this much-needed reorientation from happening at all. They want to tie us to the US mast.

To be clear, not having a trade agreement is not the same as not having any trade. Agreement or no, trade will continue among the three countries because each has and can do things that the others want or need. The only difference is that trade would take place without the false sense of security provided by a dead-letter agreement.

Any new or renegotiated trade agreement wouldn’t deliver the mutually shared benefits that people tend to associate with free trade agreements, because the world in which that was possible no longer exists. Instead, the new USMCA would bind only the weaker parties: Canada and Mexico. It wouldn’t be formal annexation, but it is, for the US, the next best thing.

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Rising to the occasion

Posted on February 7, 2025 by bhaggart

(Reworked version of another Bluesky thread. Note to self: This is not an efficient way to write.)

So the federal government is convening a industry-labour summit today to figure out, per the Globe and Mail, “how Canada can attract more investment, dismantle internal trade barriers and find new international customers as the threat of U.S. protectionism looms.”

Talking is good and planning is better, but I have to say that I don’t have high expectations for this summit to produce a workable blueprint capable of addressing the Trump threat. In particular, I’m worried that the federal government and the business sector continue to underestimate the enormity of what’s happened.

For example, while Canadian Chamber of Commerce president’s “all hands on deck” language sounds impressive, her calls for lower taxes as a response to Trump’s aggression suggest a business-as-usual mindset.

Calls for lower taxes is business boilerplate, trotted out whenever there’s a perceived threat to Canadian competitiveness. It’s in the business playbook. But it makes no sense in the face of a threat that will almost certainly require a massive expansion in government capacity, not least to help businesses diversify their markets.

Public policy experts, and here I’m drawing on John Kingdon’s foundational work on how policies get adopted, have long recognized that actors use crises to advocate for their pre-existing policy preferences. Rather than working from the problem to find a solution, more often than not policy entrepreneurs use the emergence of problems to promote the preferred solutions they already have in their back pocket.

That’s why I’m not holding out much hope for today’s summit. It takes time to come up with bold new plans, especially if you’re a business or organization that has operated under the same rules for three-plus decades. With the exception of Jim Balsillie, most business and labour leaders were not advocating for the complete reorientation of Canada’s economy away from an overdependence on the United States five months, or even five weeks, ago. Which means that they likely haven’t done the work needed to come up with what a month ago would still have been seen as radical proposals.

From this perspective, calling for tax cuts is as expected as they will be ineffectual.

There are a couple of exceptions where we can expect movement, precisely because of the presence of a pre-existing constituency. Economists and many policymakers have been calling for internal free trade for decades now, which means they could probably move fast (or start to move fast), should the political will be there (this, BTW, is textbook Kingdon).

An east-west energy corridor, maybe, for similar reasons, though that would be one for the history books: “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” anyone? It would be one of the greatest ironies in Canadian history if Justin Trudeau, hated in Alberta, were to deliver the west-east energy corridor that his father couldn’t, and which kinda poisoned Alberta against the federal Liberals for generations.

The problem is that there is so much more that would need doing to actually reorient the Canadian economy. Such as: massive CBC funding. Serious rebuilding of physical infrastructure. Reinvestment in education and training. Investment in government planning capacity, not consultants. Actually diversifying trade, not just signing trade agreements. These things cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. Which means higher taxes.

Then there are the things that nobody is talking about yet but that are equally, if not more, important. The United States is dismantling its regulatory state and sabotaging its statistical databases. Our two governments are interdependent. We need to stress test and reinforce Canada’s and the provinces/territories’ regulatory and statistical capacity. Otherwise US chaos will become ours.

Also underdiscussed: the vulnerability of our electronic infrastructure. US tech has bent the knee to Trump. They control the “cloud,” the servers on which a lot of Canadian businesses and organizations store their data. Elon Musk has penetrated the US Treasury Department and now has access to untold data on Americans, US businesses and, almost certainly, business that operate in the US. If I were at this summit, I’d raise the spectre of widespread corporate espionage. And if I were a university or researcher working on economic, socially or politically sensitive issues, I’d begin assessing my vulnerability yesterday.

I wrote the Third Option piece in part because I recognized that people were calling for it in all but name, but without appreciating the history, including why it has proved unworkable in the past.

To be clear, I believe that Third Option-style policies are absolutely essential, but it will take effort to go down that path. I also wanted to highlight that what’s needed involves a massive transformation of Canadian society, one we haven’t seriously considered in decades. In other words, this isn’t something we can tax cut our way out of. Calls for tax cuts have me concerned that Canada’s business leaders haven’t fully grasped how all-encompassing a switch from free trade to economic nationalism needs to be to work.

My grading rubric

Here’s how I’ll be scoring today’s meeting. Internal trade barriers are the bare minimum and not enough for a pass. Calls for reduced taxes and merely trying to make Canada a more competitive investment environment through deregulation won’t cut it, for reasons mentioned above. I will know that they’re serious if they commit (or call for) real money to things like infrastructure, transportation (including high-speed rail), green technology (to reduce energy dependence), and education (including to poach US-based researchers being driven out of the country).

I will also be looking to see if they call for government to establish a Royal Commission on the future of the Canadian economy. A business- or university- or think-tank-led study won’t be enough. What we need is a whole-of-government, whole-of-society analysis of the threats and our options. Anything less risks partiality and incompleteness, and will lack the legitimacy needed to undertake huge structural change. And though the clock is ticking, sadly this is not something that we can bash out over a weekend.

I’ll also be looking to see if they commit to enforcing Canadian media ownership rules and regulating US-based social media.

Also important: I would like to hear an explanation of how they intend to deal with Trump’s ongoing threat, including an explanation of what they want to accomplish, and what they want Canada to look like in five-to-ten years. Canada has already made a mistake in paying a $1.5 billion policy bribe to keep Trump from imposing his illegal tariffs. What was that supposed to accomplish? How do we avoid being extorted the next time? And the next time?

And if they highlight the threat posed by US attacks on statistics and regulation, I’ll know that they truly understand what’s going on.

Here’s hoping they rise to meet the occasion.

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Everything about One Thing

Posted on February 6, 2025 by bhaggart

(Warning: Self-indulgent post ahead.)

You all know the old joke about experts, which very much includes academics: We know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing. There’s definitely some truth to it: As a very smart economist colleague once remarked, just because you understand economics doesn’t mean you’ll be good at investing.

But it’s not quite accurate to say that academics know everything about nothing. Rather, all academics know everything about one thing. That one thing being their dissertation subject, the thing they had to write and be examined on to be awarded their doctorate, their PhD.

That’s not to say we’re completely ignorant about everything else. In the social sciences at least, you learn how to critically evaluate and assess information and arguments. That’s much more difficult than you’d think. We’re trained to tackle problems systematically, to go through an argument, to poke holes in it, to recognize its weaknesses but also its strengths.

And in the Canadian system at least, Political Science PhDs students have to pass comprehensive exams in two subfields, in my case Comparative Politics and International Relations. This involves intense study of key texts, in the case of my program (Carleton University, represent!) over the course of an entire year, to such a degree that you end up internalizing the discipline’s ways of thinking, key concepts and issues.

Did I mention that it’s intense? It’s intense: My partner will tell you she lost count of the times I wandered into the living room, blurted out something arcane about Marx before heading back to my desk for another eight hours of study. Imagine living with someone who does that for 12 full months. Over that year I listened to so many 10 pm-1 am Vancouver Canucks radio broadcasts. And I’m not even a Canucks fan.

(Though this study routine did allow me the pleasure of once hearing the Canucks’ broadcast crew descend into what can only be described as giggles when they realized they’d won that night’s 50/50 draw.)

This training not only serves as the foundation for the research we undertake after we’ve completed the PhD. It also gives us the general expertise (which is still pretty specific) needed to teach courses in these fields, though of course you have to keep up with developments in the field. As one of my PhD advisors told me when I’d successfully completed my comprehensive exams, “Congratulations! You will never be this well-versed in your field again!”

The One Thing

A doctoral program teaches how to think in a particular way, in specific areas. But it’s the dissertation that makes you a Doctor of Philosophy. That’s because, done right, it involves intense study, not just of one issue area, but one issue, One Thing. By the end of it, because it has to be original research that nobody has done before, you will understand this one thing better than pretty much anyone else on the planet. Chosen correctly, your dissertation committee will be experts in parts of your topic — in my case, each of my committee had individual expertise in Mexican politics (and also Canadian policymaking), US politics and copyright law. But in the room, when I was defending my dissertation, I was the only one who could bring it all together. That’s not bragging or a slight on my fantastic committee: it’s by design. That’s how a PhD works.

To outsiders, your One Thing can seem esoteric and pedantic, even silly. This is the root of the slight “everything about nothing.” And it’s true that most of the time, most dissertation topics are probably not directly relevant to people’s everyday lives.

Until they are.

Because social science research (most of the time) is based in the real world, there’s always a chance that today’s intellectual backwater will become tomorrow’s object of intense interest. I first discovered that in 2005 when I began my dissertation. I thought that copyright policy would be a relatively staid field, stable enough to let me trace processes of North American governance. Within three months, copyright had been politicized, including via the first successful political use of Facebook to affect government policy.

Whoops.

I now find myself in a similar position. Because my One Thing — the thing I was using copyright to examine — happens to be: the conditions under which Canada and Mexico can exercise meaningful autonomy (i.e., sovereignty) in the shadow of the world’s most powerful country.

Thanks to the United States’ foolish and immoral re-election of Donald Trump, this is now the most important question facing both countries.

This is the Catch-22 of a political science doctorate. You always want your research to be relevant, but if people come calling to talk about it, it usually means that something’s gone horribly wrong.

I’m telling you all this to explain (as much to myself as to anyone else) why I’ve been so direct in my writing about what I think Trump’s re-election means for Canadian independence, and why I’ve been writing so many opeds. My research in recent years has taken me away from North American regionalism and toward digital regulation (which just also happens to have become super-relevant, since Elon Musk is now apparently the co-president of the United States. I sure know how to pick the quiet topics). In a sense, this focus on Canada-US relations is a bit of a throwback for me.

Alarmist overreaction? Or expert understanding?

When you spend years studying a topic as intensely as you tend to do when completing a doctorate, you come to know it intimately. You develop a level of understanding about it that’s unmatched by all but a handful of people, in the country, in the world. Again, this is not bragging. This is what all doctorates involve.

This intense focus, I’ve found, can lead you down some interesting paths. Intimate understanding often involves recognizing that the conventional wisdom on a topic is flawed, or more usually not quite right. Because you’ve spent so much time with your topic, you end up developing your own conclusions about it, based on your own research.

For me, this has never been more true than now. Everything I know about my One Thing tells me that the North American relationship has been shattered utterly and completely, and that Canadian independence was in extreme danger. I recognized this immediately after Trump’s re-election, not because I’m super-bright and intuitive, but because this happens to be the exact thing I spent six years studying, and thinking about for years previously.

The downside of getting so deep into a subject is that it’s easy to forget that not everybody will have the same understanding of your topic as you do. This can cause problems in getting your message across, because often your expert understanding, gained from deep study, will run counter to the conventional wisdom. A conventional wisdom that is often shaped by self-interested actors who are perhaps not really interested in the truth. This happens all the time in copyright discussions.

Think about how many times you’ve heard an expert talk and thought that they sounded kinda nuts. These experts are often imparting their own deep knowledge about their One Thing. The irony is that it’s the expert is often the one who’s actually in touch with reality, but the non-expert doesn’t realize it.

This dynamic can create pressure on academics not to go against the conventional wisdom, to pull our punches. Nobody wants to come across as a loon, or be thought of as overreacting when things don’t go as bad as we thought they might. That’s another pressure: predictions run the chance of being wrong, and nobody wants to look wrong, or foolish. Or sometimes it might take decades for a prediction to be borne out. Only now, decades later, are free-trade critics’ warnings about free trade’s potential to hinder Canadian sovereignty coming true.

This has definitely been an issue when talking about Trump. I’ve certainly felt this tension between the One Thing that you know and the desire not to sound unduly alarmist or lose credibility. I’m certain that back in November, highlighting the US authoritarian turn and arguing (as I did, along with several of my colleagues) that Canada was in danger of losing its sovereignty to an authoritarian United States sounded a bit, well, overly alarmist.

I will say that I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they thought I might’ve been overreacting to this or that, but that they changed their minds once they saw Trump in action.

That’s the challenge inherent in speaking based on your understanding of an issue, in advance of a crisis. Warn people about an incipient problem and you risk losing credibility, not just if you’re wrong, but if you’re seen as hysterical. But if you wait for the crisis to happen, it’ll be too late.

The obligation to write, the obligation to serve

The other thing about knowing your One Thing is that, often, you’re one of only a very few people who have a deep expertise in that issue. To be clear, “a very few” can range from one person to several thousand. The point is, on any specific topic, the pool of people with deep expertise is limited. And within that pool, there’s a good chance that even fewer people share your exact same skillset and expertise (in my case as it relates to our current crisis, my One Thing, a background in political science, economics (trade), professionally working in Parliament, and an appreciation of the policy process).

Consequently, if you, the expert, don’t weigh in on something, via a journal article, a conference presentation, a government report, an oped, a media interview or whatever, there’s a non-zero chance that the thing that needs saying won’t be said, or the thing that needs doing won’t get done. It’s a pressure I’ve felt in particular when it comes to Canadian digital policy. There are many experts out there, but I also bring a particular viewpoint to the conversation. Again, this is not bragging; it’s the same for pretty much every expert in pretty much every field. Very few of us are interchangeable.

So it is with the One Thing I know. I write not just because I love writing: There are other writing projects I’m neglecting because of all this. I’m spending so much time on this because I feel an obligation, both as an Ontario university professor and as a Canadian citizen, to share what I’ve learned with my community in Niagara, in Ontario and in Canada.

As for my insistent assertions about the nature of this crisis, and the hard choices ahead, which might at times come across as an overreaction: They come not from any political ideology, or anti-Americanism, or love of controversy. Rather, they are based in my research and my training.

That doesn’t make my assertions infallible. I could be wrong! My assumptions could be flawed, my assessment incomplete or inaccurate. I would so love to be wrong about how dire the threat is, about the quality of Canada’s response to date, about all of it.

It would be much easier, and less stressful to be honest, if I could claim to see an easy way out of this. But that’s not what my training tells me. And that’s all I have to draw upon.

If you made it this far, congratulations! Enjoy this delightful song about academic romance from Camera Obscura.

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