Canada’s relationship with the U.S. is in decline, and no one wants to talk about it

This past week, on the very same day Donald Trump was being placed under arrest in New York, many of the leading voices in the Canada-U.S. relationship were jammed into packed meeting rooms and corridors at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Toronto.

They were there to talk mainly about what’s going right between Canada and the United States, economically. They were not there to talk about what’s gone so wrong with Trump, or politics in general in the Trump era.

Yet whenever any speaker did broach the subject of Trump or, more broadly, the crumbling state of democracy in North America, a definite ripple went through the crowded ballroom.

“Back in 1989, when the (Berlin) Wall came down, the United States was the principal exporter of democracy worldwide — frequently unsuccessfully, frequently hypocritically,” said Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group, which along with BMO, hosted this inaugural Canada-U.S. summit in Toronto.

“In 2023, you can make the argument that the United States is increasingly the leading exporter of tools that damage and even destroy democracy, including in the United States, including in Canada.”

Chris Coons, who sits on the powerful U.S. Senate foreign relations committee and was one of the marquee speakers at the summit, handled the Trump situation this way: “I’ve been talking with colleagues of mine in the Senate, who were saying, ‘Why are you in Toronto when there’s so much excitement in New York today?’… I said this is the best possible day to be outside.”

That got big laughs from the crowd, as did an off-the-cuff remark from Kelly Craft, who Trump sent to Canada as his U.S. ambassador from 2017 to 2019.

“It’s amazing what a Twitter feed will do to an ambassador’s state of mind,” Craft said. “I’m just thankful that that gentleman did not discover TikTok while I was in Canada.”

Another former U.S. ambassador to Canada, Bruce Heyman, was one of the few speakers to publicly say on stage what many were buzzing about in the hallways of the Ritz: “What I worry about most for the Canada-U.S. relationship is what’s happening back at home,” Heyman said, “and today is a perfect example. It’s a huge mistake not to put that on the table.”

More than 50 years after Pierre Trudeau compared Canada-U.S. relations to “sleeping with an elephant,” it seems the beast is still lurking, but it’s now the elephant in the room — the force that is impossible to ignore but also to confront.

I sat down with Bremmer midway through the day’s proceedings and asked him how this conversation could be put on the table — not just at this summit, but in some ongoing way. How do Canada and the United States grapple with the reality he talked about in his opening remarks to the summit — the fact that politics has become a lot more toxic and polarizing, and that the United States is no longer the democratic beacon it once claimed to be, to Canada and the world?

First of all, Bremmer said, it requires candour.

“When I say that the Americans and Canadians need to be honest with each other, we need to also be honest about the things we’re a little embarrassed about, we’re a little ashamed about,” he said. “We need to be willing to say that.”

So, in that spirit, Bremner flatly declared that the U.S. political system no longer shines as an example, for Canada or the world.

“Let’s not just talk about my earlier statement about exporting (social media) tools that destroy democracy. In 1989, other countries looked at the United States as an aspirational model. You wanted your political system to be like the U.S., right? No one would say that today. You want to send your kids to American universities, you want to buy a piece of real estate in the U.S. and Canada. You’d like the reserve currency. But no one would say we want our political system to run like that.”

Of course Canadians and Americans should be talking about how the politics south of the border can spill over here. Again, no one mentioned it on stage, but in his interview with me, Bremmer cited last year’s convoy protests in Canada as evidence of the cross-border spillage.

“We saw that with the truckers, you know, the convoy …. That made real news in the United States, because of course, they were the same people that were talking to each other. There’s a lot of pollinization; there a lot of learning, a lot of campaigning and the rest. None of that is healthy.”

Coons was in the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, when the pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the building — an event, he told me in an interview, that he prefers not to recall that often.

“But I do focus on it pretty regularly,” he said. Polarization takes hold, Coons said, when “you stop negotiating, talking, listening, compromising. When you stop respecting each other, when you’re convinced that the other side doesn’t share your values, is only interested in running over you.”

The solution, the senator says, is to give citizens government that works for them, in a practical way. That’s why, he said, so many attendees at the summit were focused on matters of economic integration between Canada and the United States — because that’s where the solution lies to the political forces driving people apart.

“One of our challenges is to reengage in a way that rebuilds confidence no matter who the next prime minister or president is,” he said.

Coons says he believes democracy’s decline in the U.S. is linked to the breakdown of traditional media and fragmentation across the social-media universe — something Bremmer also sees as a big factor in what’s going so wrong, not just in the U.S. but globally.

I asked Bremmer about the power of advertising in the last century — how the ad industry itself helped create the American middle-class dream, also with spillover effects, especially in a Canada also awash in U.S. popular culture. Could advertising not be used to help put political culture back on track, too?

Bremmer said he’d like to believe that’s possible, but the ad world has also broken down — like the media, and culture itself, it no longer works in mass markets, but in micro-targeted market segments.

“We now know how advertising works, on a very micro level, and that has taken power away from people, and it has put it in the hands of those that can ‘productize’ people,” he said. “I believe that the advertising model, particularly for social media and related algorithms, is driving polarization.”

That might well be one of the topics confronted at the next Canada-U.S. summit. Bremmer says the sequel to this summit — and there will be one — will likely expand its agenda to tackle the complex ways in which Canada-U.S. relations are linked politically and culturally, too, not just economically.

The consensus from attendees was that the gathering was a major success, in terms of the discussion it generated and the blue-chip participants it attracted.

It could well be that it was also a success because it did not get sidetracked by the big Trump news south of the border last Tuesday. That is, after all, how Canada learned to manage the relationship while Trump was in power — not as the sleeping elephant, but as the elephant in the room.

Clarification — April 9, 2023: This story has been updated. BMO and the Eurasia Group hosted the inaugural Canada-U.S. summit. A previous version only mentioned the Eurasia Group.

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