Canadian Morality Is Downstream of American Power
Canada's self-image as the kinder, gentler alternative to America rests on a fact it prefers not to examine: the kindness is subsidized.
This argument isn’t original to me — largely coming from Jonathan Bi, drawing on Rousseau.
Global order doesn't sustain itself. The trade routes, the financial architecture, the security umbrella that makes peaceful, prosperous life possible for Western nations, these exist because one country has spent decades willing to be hardened enough to maintain them. That means projecting military force. Running an economy calibrated for dominance rather than comfort, where capital concentrates, competition is merciless, and the distance between winner and loser is deliberately wide. You don't build and hold the top of the international system by being gentle. You build it by being effective, which often looks, from the outside, like aggression. Canada watches from inside the perimeter and calls the aggression a character flaw, and from that protected position, climbs the moral high horse.
American militarism, inequality, and ruthlessness are treated, in Canadian public life, as symptoms of a society that hasn't yet figured out what Canada has. But they're not symptoms. They're load-bearing. Remove them and the structure Canada lives in crumbles. Canada has spent decades underfunding its military and redirecting that money into the social programs it calls its “identity”…a trade that only works for as long as America is willing to foot the bill, and it no longer is.
Rousseau put it coldly: slaves love their chains. Not because they're stupid, but because the chains are comfortable, and comfort is a powerful argument. When nothing existential is at stake, moral reasoning becomes a leisure activity. You can afford to prefer equality over excellence and far-out ideals over practical trade-offs, because those trade-offs are being made elsewhere, by someone else, at considerable cost.
What sharpens this from observation into problem is how the country’s governing class has oriented itself toward Europe, it’s systems, ideals. Which perhaps could be justified if Canada was in Europe, except that Canada is not in Europe. It is physically, economically, and militarily bound to the United States. The values being performed and the reality being lived are in different worlds.
Canada has mistaken a long run of safety for evidence of its own soundness. The kindness is real. The values are sincerely held. But they were formed under conditions that may not hold, sustained by a relationship that is being renegotiated, inside a world that is getting less forgiving. History doesn't care how reasonable your principles were. It cares whether you understood the situation you were actually in.
J