NEW BOOK ALERT: An Excerpt From My Essay In 'Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience And Resistance'

Are you wondering how we're processing a changing relationship with the US? There's a book for that.

An edited volume of essays by prominent Canadians, and me, is fresh off the press. Edited by Elamin Abdelmahmoud, the book features over two-dozen pieces in which authors work through the past, present, and future of Canada-US relations. You can get a copy of Elbows Up! through Penguin Random House or wherever books are sold, including e-book and audiobook formats.

What follows beneath the cover image is an excerpt from my essay “The Work of Many Years” in which I offer an overview of the emotions many of us are feeling right now and tell the story of my late father. He was an American who was taken across the border from New York state to Ontario by his father — without his mother’s permission — in the 1960s. He never saw his mother again. I often wonder how he’d feel about this moment, and I wish I could ask him. I can’t. But I can wonder and I can offer my own thoughts, some of which you can read below.

Excerpt from ‘The Work of Many Years’

I’m writing the first words of this chapter in the shadow of Canada’s Parliament. Not literally. But close. The buildings are just up the street from where I sit in a coffee shop called Little Victories. The name of the shop seems appropriate. Maybe symbolic. I think most of us would take a little victory right now, the ambiguity of the modifier notwithstanding. A few hundred metres from here, you can see Parliament’s famous Centre Block, including the House of Commons, Senate, and Peace Tower. The Centre Block is undergoing major renovations, the work of many years. Much of the area is now a big hole in the ground. I’m trying not to think of that as symbolic, too.

Who knows where Canada’s relationship with the United States will be by the time that hole is filled in and the structure is fully renovated. Still fractured, is my guess. It’s a pity. Building a relationship between the two countries has also been the work of many years, of many decades, while knocking it down didn’t take much time at all. A lot of us feel snakebitten.

I’ve visited the U.S. more times than I can remember. Today, I refuse to go back. I’m a little surprised at my own refusal. It seems a bit precious. But it’s what I think is right. I’m torn, though. If I’d have known this conflict was coming, I’d have driven the California coast one more time or made an extended stop at a New Hampshire Liquor & Wine Outlet. The work of building a relationship between Canada and the U.S. culminated in a trade agreement worth $1 trillion a year, for better or worse. Getting there was rough. If Elbows Up! had been published in the 1980s, at the height of the free trade debate, you’d have a different sort of book. It’s ironic, or maybe just twisted, that so much of the 1980s was spent wringing our hands over the threat free trade posed to Canada’s culture, identity, economy, and sovereignty. Today, we wring our hands because we might lose free trade. We got used to having it around, branch-plant economy and all.

Along with a lot of trade, we share the world’s longest undefended border with the U.S. At least for now. We also share military integration and alliance. We hold deep cultural and personal connections. In many ways, these connections have erased the border in a manner residents of both countries have come to appreciate, a manner that stands in contrast to the literal erasure of the border and the annexation of Canada, the “cherished 51st state,” suggested by U.S. president Donald Trump.

It took decades to build the U.S.–Canada relationship, and just months to critically undermine it. The national feeling at this moment is discomfort and distrust, a sideways glance. We’d cross to the other side of the road if we could. Nobody make any sudden moves. Keep your hand on your wallet. Remember how to form a fist, thumb on the outside. I wish I could go back in time to the War of 1812 and tell the British forces (not Canadian) who burned down the White House, and people living in British North America, where things ended up. I think they’d get a kick out of it. Some might take up the torches again. They’d also probably say “We told you so.”

Canadians no longer trust the United States, global hegemon and erstwhile ally. We’re looking inward, relaxing rules for domestic trade. Until now, we were quite reliably informed that changing those rules was impossible, as likely as cracking cold fusion. Now, it’s easy-peasy. Done by Canada Day. We’re also looking outward, toward new or bolstered trade and defence relationships with foreign states that aren’t the U.S. That’s what discomfort and distrust gets you. But there’s more to it, still.

I think if you ask Canadians to use a half-dozen words to describe how they feel about our relationship with the U.S. right now, one of the first few they’d use would be betrayal. I think that’s the right word. I feel that way. Stabbed in the back, not quite out of nowhere, but the scale of the double-cross is immense.

I feel frustrated, too. And I bet I’m not alone. We can’t entirely decouple from America, which is frustrating. We may not want to, which is also frustrating. The U.S. is too big, too close, too convenient, too similar to us for the purposes of facilitating the exchange of goods and services. It’s hard to ship things across the ocean to England. It’s easier to drive them across a bridge to Michigan. National pride is a powerful force. The path of least resistance is a strong force, too, even after it leads you backwards into a stiletto.

Even with a knife in our backs, we need to keep company with Uncle Sam. Same as it ever was. In the 1968 book The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., which inspired this volume, editor Al Purdy argued that the very need for a collection of Canuck hot takes—my term, not his—on the U.S. was because “the most powerful nation on earth is everyone’s business, for what happens in the U.S. affects every Canadian.” That’s more true fifty-seven years later than it was when Purdy clicked and clacked those words on his typewriter. Accepting this means accepting that the relationship between the U.S. and Canada will be fractured, but not ground into dust. At least not any time soon. We’ll sit here, frustrated and betrayed, uncomfortable and suspicious, and try to sort it out, personally and collectively, economically and emotionally. But by god we’ll try to sort it out.

For me, the U.S.–Canada relationship has an added dimension of some complexity. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for using this space for some therapy. I can imagine this book as a lot of things, one of which is therapeutic. For the retail price, it’s a bargain.

My father was born in Newfane, New York, in 1962. Newfane is a small town on the south shore of Lake Ontario, just forty-five minutes from Niagara Falls. When he was about two years old or so, my dad was taken from that town and brought across the U.S.–Canada border by his father, without his mother’s permission. He was deposited with an aunt from his father’s side and her husband. They raised him as their own.

He didn’t know until years later that his mother and father weren’t his biological parents. He wasn’t formally adopted until his late teen years. He never got Canadian citizenship. He never held a passport. Today, we would say he was kidnapped. Perhaps some said as much then, but that didn’t change the fact he was taken as a young child from the U.S., from his home, never to see his mother again. He rarely set foot in the country of his birth after that, and never again in his hometown.

To read more, pick up your copy of Elbows Up! today.