The Colonialist Impulse
Canada's Americanized elites look silly
Pivot? Pivot Pivot?
Just as American culture has within it what Selig Adler described as an isolationist impulse, so Canadian culture contains within it a belief that Canada must be subservient and subordinate to the Anglo Great Power of the moment.
This is our Colonialist Impulse.
We see this most plainly in the American talking point about Canadian foreign policy in the Trump era picked up readily by MAGA North and other fellow travelers in the warning against substituting China for the United States as Canada’s dominant foreign policy partner.
“We need to be very wary about pivoting to China at the expense of the U.S” former Chief of the Defence Staff Wayne Eyre told CTV last week. General Eyre might have a point were Canada to pivot like Ross, Rachel, and Chandler moving a sofa up winding stares or even have the intention of pivoting to China to become an ally of the Chinese against the Americans.
But Canada does not have the intention and is not making any such pivot. There is no statement or action that Eyre or anyone else can point to that makes this Canadian foreign policy. None. There is no scheme to turn Canada from the increasingly untied states to China as Canada’s preferred hegemon. Eyre speaks of an entirely imaginary pivot yet despite the facts and the widely reported evidence that his comment had no foundation, Eyre had no problem parroting an American, anti-Canadian talking point.
Old habits die hard. Wayne clearly missed the announcement that Canada was going to put some daylight between it and the United States, given the American’s aggressive and adversarial behaviour toward Canada and its NATO allies. Open some daylight but nothing more. The Davos speech made international headlines. Odd Wayne.
He didn’t actually, even if unintentionally. Wayne embodied one part of the speech when Prime Minister Mark Carney described the attitude some will take in a more dangerous world. There “is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.”
To Eyre is human. But Wayne errs in his beliefs about where Canada is going. Again, he need only have paid attention to the Davos speech: “So, we’re engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”
We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.
And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.
We are building that strength at home.
We need to build strength at home.
So we are.
Canada will buy a new airborne warning and control aircraft, the first time in Canadian history. The chosen aircraft marries a capable Swedish radar and electronics package with a Canadian fuselage meeting the military need and the economic need to expand Canada’s domestic military industry. That is Canada’s strategic plan, in a single airframe. we are not alone. Other NATO partners are buying the same system.
Not surprisingly, there are voices against this deal, all American or carrying water for them since the alternative is the E-7 Wedgetail based on the Boeing 737 airframe. Those same voices also criticise the decision not yet made but widely expected to purchase Swedish fighters either instead of a full order of American F-35s or in some combination with the American fighter. There are no good arguments against this plan, which is to say there are no military ones that speak of actual defence capability. There are many good ones.
There are instead silly arguments against two aircraft. Silly like the one offered by David Perry, head of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, an old and formerly highly regarded centre for Canadian foreign policy advice. Perry thinks Canada cannot manage two different fighters at the same time. Cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. “The planes are completely different in terms of how they would work,” Perry told Canadian Press. “You wouldn’t have a situation where you could have a pilot hop into one cockpit one day and the other one the other day.” This is so absurd an idea that it makes Perry look like a fool.
If that were not a weak enough argument, Perry had another. According to CTV, he “accused the Carney government of reopening the procurement plan for political reasons, namely tensions with the United States. What Perry dismisses as “political rerasons” and therefore implicitly poutting partisan interest ahead of national interest. Perhaps David should stop looking in the mirror or using cheap MAGA North lines. Politics is why Canada has changed course. Foreign politics. American politics. The United States changes the political calculation for Canada, hence the shift in strategy.
Perry also placed great weight on the fact it “took years of consultations and studies to finalize an agreement with the U.S. and Lockheed Martin.” Absolutely trivial in light of the fundamental change in Canadian-American relations. Not surprisingly, in line with his American talking points, Perry said that if “the government really wants to increase the size of our overall fighter fleet, the smartest way to do that would simply be to add on to the order of F-35s, the more capable aircraft and the one that was competitively selected in a competition by a highly skeptical prime minister, Justin Trudeau.”
Note the word “smartest.” Perry doesn’t define it. What he proposes would be stupid. Not smart. After all, as capable as the F-35 is, the aircraft will remain under de facto American control for spares, upgrades, and even deployment. None of that fits with Canada’s foreign policy, that is, its global affairs policy, of opening some space between the Americans and Canada and of ending the days when 70% of Canadian defence purchases wren to American suppliers.
Bear in mind Perry made this comment for greater integration with the Americans not only after Davos made clear what Canadian policy is but also after the Americans postponed delivery to other countries indefinitely of weapons already paid for in some cases simply because American needs take priority. The United States Air Force cancelled the Wedgetail program as its chosen replacement for the E-3 Sentry. Now given losses in the Iran war it has restarted its interest in an aircraft until now only going to Britain, Turkey, South Korea, and Australia. This failure to deliver will only get worse as the Americans struggle to regain their stature badly damaged by a stupid war in the Middle East. The United States is retreating into Festung Amerika and withdrawing from NATO. That is not Canada’s policy and should not be. If Perry believes otherwise, he should say so openly.
Perry made much of the competition run by the Royal Canadian Air Force that selected the F-35 over the Swedish jet, as if the military and strategic circumstances had not changed radically since then. Again, this is an old argument for old bureaucratic reasons, like one about two different aircraft at the same time as if Canada and other countries had not done the same thing before for good reasons.
What was not outright silly in Perry’s comments were superficial. But what’s particularly striking is that a Canadian commentator took the American line against Canada, belittled the decision on fighters as being caused only by “political reasons, namely tensions with the United States.”
There is more to Eyre and Perry’s comments than Canadian bureaucratic inertia or even the cowardly go-along to get along notion the Prime Minister described. Eyre and Perry embody the Americanization of Canadian elites. We saw this with Canadian media who had no trouble carrying water for the White House in its ongoing war with Canada. Selected Canadian reporters met secretly with American officials about a memo from the Americans that criticised Canada. None reported it as an American perspective that may be at odds with reality, let alone a Canadian reality. They reported the American critism as valid, on the face of it, without question. None presented the Canadian perspective or even considered that they might be manipulated by the Americans, willingly or not, or the result of telling a biased story, as they did, would have on Canadians who look to them to be informed.
We see the same thing in the nonsense over Canada’s defence spending as a share of economic output. The idea is American in its roots and, as Iran has shown, is utterly meaningless as a way of measuring defence capability. It does however reflect the American interest in having NATO allies buy American military equipment. Spend more but buy ours, they say. This not working as they hoped. Note the recent panicked offer by Lockheed Martin to promise the French delivery of HIMARS artillery rockets early rather than have the French buy a European product. Other countries in greater need had already been told their HIMARS orders were on hold or delayed but there was this offer to France. This idea the whole thing is a Buy American scam also aligns with the American goals in CUSMA talks, which is to have Canada as a market for American products and a supplier of raw materials while shifting car manufacturing - among other things - to the Untied err United States.
Canadian elites repeat American lines as if they were real. We do not even need to remind everyone of the more and more aggressive attacks on the Carney government by the CPC under Pierre Poilievre, all of which support the American lines against Canada in both defence and trade talks. These are not accidental alignments at least as far as the CPC goes and for Canadian media, including the CBC, which already imagines it is American, the preference for the American and Americanized perspective is natural. Genetically coded.
“The ability to pick up a phone and have a sensitive conversation, even if political relations are up and down, I believe is in the national interest, and so investing in relationships over the long term is a good investment.”
That’s something else Wayne Eyre told CTV. Some might be surprised to know that it is very much current Canadian policy as it has been Canada’s approach since the invention of the telephone. Trump and Carney do talk and seem to get along. According to some sources, they talk regularly. Canadian and American relations have been through many bumps and rough patches before now. Things will likely be smoother again so Eyre’s advice is not really all that insightful but it implies that current Canadian policy is wrong because it is not in line with American demands.
What’s most interesting is the way Canadian elites - Eyre and Perry among them - mouth American lines easily. Keith Halliday, a former foreign service officer wrote last week about the American efforts - deliberate, government operations - to manipulate Canadian public opinion and the ease with which Canadians collaborate.
He describes the sorts of stories we’ve talked about here already. Then he explains why they are significant.
First, they often frame the issue from the D.C. perspective. Canada may be lagging Mexico in CUSMA talks, which undoubtedly frustrates the White House, but are we really “lagging” or just not surrendering as quickly as hoped?
Second, they often rely on Washington sources. A Canadian Press story on the recent U.S. pause on the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) tells us that Pentagon communications officials privately briefed journalists -- mostly Canadians -- to get their message on Canadian underperformance out there. The story referred to supposed Canadian unresponsiveness to a secret Pentagon wish list and delays buying more F-35 fighters.
Third, few of the stories put the specific disputes in the context of the broader US economic and diplomatic offensive against Canada.
Where Keith may see this as a new thing, the links you find scattered thorough this column go back to other observations made here about the Americanization of Canadians that comes from simply living next door to its voluminous cultural output. Canadians are already conditioned to respond to the stimulus. Newfoundlanders and Labradors are no different and indeed at the old Blogspot site you will find the roots of this entire thread on how people form opinions and how actors can manipulate those opinions. What’s happening in Canada is what happened and happens in Newfoundland and Labrador. It is also what happens in the United States.
We won’t go into the roots and causes, some of which are deliberate and some of which are merely the inadvertent result of people thinking a certain way and acting the same way. There is less manufacturing than the paranoids or Chomsky and Hermann suppose but the outcome is the same.
Well, almost the same. All thje same, as much as elites are compromised and Americanized, ordinary Canadians are still very angry at the American administration. They have not slacked in their spontaneous economic boycott of the Untied States, at least as far as booze and travel goes. The Americanized elites are different. That’s why we see the difference between the CPC and the federal Liberals, the latter being much more aligned with Canadian popular opinion. That opinion doesn’t see a pro-Canadian stance as being anti-American but by God and Donald Trump, MAGA, its agents like Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, and its Canadian fellow travelers certainly see even the smallest deviation in Canada from American demands as anti-American rebellion in its would-be colony. It is hard to think of Canada as a post-colonial state when so many of its elites are still colonised and colonialist.
