We are nationalists, not in the sense that we want to keep Canada forever out of all future mergers of nations, but in the sense that we want to keep Canada out of the United States in the foreseeable future. We are nationalists because we believe that something new can be created here, and that something new might be a social democracy.

The alternative to Canadian nationalism is not a far-seeing policy of rational welfare on an international basis, but instead a gradual slide into satellite status, which will make it more and more difficult to solve even our problems of economic development with the full measure of freedom we require. The alternative is a policy of paralytic continentalism.

Like the National Housing Strategy and our shoddy attempts at Housing First, zoning reform is another good idea borrowed from social democracies and shoehorned into the neoliberal framework. The result is just one more technocratic non-solution designed to funnel money to the finance, insurance, and real estate sector while pushing Canadians further into precarity and homelessness.

US President-elect Donald Trump recently referred to Canada as the “51st State” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as its “governor.” While on one level, such ridiculous statements are part and parcel of Trump’s political persona, they reveal something deeper about the role that Canada occupies in the American economy and political imagination.

Economists like to fashion themselves as the “adults in the room.” However, their notion that incomes are determined by productivity is naïve. It ignores the role of power in the determination of distribution. The guise of objectivity that economists give to distribution diverts us from the difficult adult conversation that we must have: who should get what and why?

There is no way for the moderate, left-of-centre approach to work within the larger neoliberal world economy. Unless the latter is subverted, or challenged with a new political project, the kinds of alternatives proposed in Andrew Jackson and Scott Sinclair’s article (including an expanded social safety net and caring sector) cannot come to be.

It has been almost 40 years since there was major debate in Canada about our relations with the United States. While the FTA was implemented after the 1988 election, a majority of voters supported a more active role by governments in shaping economic development. Today we are confronted with the very serious probability that the free trade era has come to an end.

History is teaching us that a return to liberal democratic normality marinated in neoliberalism has passed its best-before date. To honour the sacrifices of the World War II generation, and the innocent victims of war, including the mothers of the Atacama, we need to educate ourselves about fascism—what it is, and how to defeat it.

The pandemic taught us the risk of relying on global supply chains. They are fragile and can be upset by political upheavals. Trump’s election upsets the apple cart. It’s time to recalibrate Canada’s place in the world. If we’ve lost one reliable friend, can we gain others? Will we take charge of our own economy so we can maintain democracy here?

Many vital left-wing books about global oil politics have been published over the last decade: Mazen Labban’s Space, Oil and Capital, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, and Simon Pirani’s Burning Up. Perhaps none have provided quite as sweeping and synthetic of an analysis as Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market.