What Does The World Think About Canada?
We're at once the last great hope and the scene of a wreck. No wonder people can't look away.
In May, I spent just shy of three weeks on the road in Australia and New Zealand talking about political decision making, nationalism, Donald Trump, and Canada. I visited book festivals in Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland, speaking to shockingly large crowds who wanted to get a better sense of what’s happening right now and what might come next. I was happy to see so many keen faces staring up from the crowd, but I kept wondering why people weren’t outside.
In Sydney, at the Town Hall, somewhere in the range of 1200–1600 people (I’m bad at counting) showed up to attend a panel I was on discussing the changing world order. That talk included a lot of discussion of what comes next for Canada. In Auckland, a meet-the-Canadians panel drew a crowd of over 400, with 200 more turned away for lack of seating, though that showing was more that a little thanks to the tremendously talented fiction writers on stage. Nonetheless, people showed up on sunny afternoons, early mornings, and rainy evenings. It was encouraging, invigorating, and the slightest bit disconcerting.
That Canada was of interest to crowds in Australia and New Zealand may be less surprising than you might expect. In New Zealand, there’s a sense of gentle parallel, a feeling that they sit in relationship to Australia the way Canada does to the U.S., though the dynamics of that relationship don’t quite entail the precise degree of existential threat faced here.
Listening to audience questions and speaking with attendees after panels, people cited Prime Minister Mark Carney as an example of a leader standing up to Trump, offering a vision, a way forward in a world gone mad. Many pointed towards Carney’s Davos speech about middle powers and the changing global order as a point of interest, even pride. They thought of Canada as the anti-America, as a bastion of sanity, progressiveness, and hope. Carney cuts a dashing figure among those who view him as a stolid technocrat (complimentary) offering stability amidst growing chaos and, whatever else he might be, not Trump — and he seems to know what he’s doing.
