Poilievre had an easy time running against an unpopular incumbent he could use as a dart board for empty right-wing labels like “woke” or “authoritarian socialist.” But running against an out-of-control Trump administration that has its eyes on Canadian resources and the ideological sympathy of a large part of the national conservative movement? That has proven much harder for him.

Canada is no longer dealing with a globalizing neoliberalism that extracts surplus value from developing countries, the domestic working class, and racialized minorities. Instead, the American alt-right works with and through a different regime of accumulation that bears more affinities to mercantilism than the neoliberal order it is in the process of supplanting.

By raising tariffs unilaterally, Trump will grossly violate USMCA, the former NAFTA. It’s no use doing deals with Trump, that he will break. Instead, let’s dust ourselves off and make things by Canadians for Canadians. Canada was tossed out of similar arrangements before. We picked ourselves up, became more self-reliant and thrived. Can we do so again?

The unfolding climate catastrophe, growing inequality, the disintegration of the country’s social safety net, and the rise of profoundly reactionary yet increasingly viable political forces at home and abroad make it imperative for Canadian socialists to develop strategies to begin to substantively challenge Canadian elites at the national scale.

Following the Danish example and hoping that playing along will win us favours is unlikely to produce significant dividends. If Trump’s bluster and threats force Canadian leaders to realize this and to reconsider the nature of their relationship with our southern partner, in a perverse way he might even end up doing us some good.

Canadians today will continue to love Americans but recoil at the actions of the American government. Trump, on the other hand, sees an American greatness that should be exported and has thus stumbled into an historical fixation that has laid largely dormant since the Treaty of Ghent. But Canadians didn’t want to be Americans then, and we still don’t today.

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.

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following reports last month concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

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.