Anthems For The Booing

On Anthem Discourse And Deeper Problems

I don’t much care about whether the American anthem gets booed at the Four Nations. It’s a fun news story, where sportswriters get to talk politics without being yelled at to “stick to sports” and you get the incoherent nonsense quotes from hockey players who have suffered more brain damage by the age of 16 than most should ever suffer in a lifetime. It’s a perfect news story, because it’s also fundamentally irrelevant to the actual story at hand, the rise of American insanity and the politics of Donald Trump.

I wouldn’t say I’m pro-booing, much more anti-anti-booing, though it was hilarious seeing Matthew Tkachuk squirm on Thursday after the game. Tkachuk is a decent proxy for why this is all just so absurd - he’s Canadian on his mother’s side, he played for a Canadian team, his brother is the Senators captain, and he seemed pretty fucking cozy with Trump when the Panthers went to the White House recently. He also pretty forcefully stood up for gay fans and gay players when there was the outbreak of Pride-related opt outs two years ago, which means he has a baseline understanding of things beyond getting a puck into a net. Oh, and the entirety of Edmonton wants to punch him in the face, which helps animate all of this.

It’s the ideal story if your purpose is to make this about a lot of things that it’s actually not about. This is not about hockey or anthems or even America and Canada. This isn’t about the Trudeau Liberals or Pierre Poilievre, as much as some want to make it about. This isn’t about any of that. This is about the last form of Canadian exceptionalism dying in front of us - this weird idea that we were the red line America would never cross. They might abandon their own people, Western Europe, the Asian Pacific, and their own democracy, but we had convinced ourselves that we mattered enough to them that we were safe. It’s an exceptionalism that permeates both left and right, both in the shock of Liberals that Trump would actually do this and from the right that there’s something the Liberals could have done to stop this or to limit the damage. This isn’t about us. We’re fundamentally irrelevant players to this narrative, because we’re passengers. Any country with our geography and our population will always be so.

We tell ourselves stories, stories designed to make us ignore the very basic truth that we live as we do at the pleasure of the US. We took a series of decisions to maintain some semblance of a moral foreign policy, and therefore came to increasingly rely on the only developed democratic economic power that was reliably growing. We made a series of choices, going back to the Auto Pacts of the 60s, to focus growth efforts south and not east - to move away from Europe and towards America. As China has risen, every government from Chretien onwards has faced the same dilemma - you need economic growth, you want moral foreign policies, but China has hundreds of millions of people leaving poverty. It’s why there’s always fits and starts with further integration in China - everybody loves the economic benefits of selling to them but nobody likes thinking about the fact that this column is likely being read on a device manufactured by people working for 10 cents a day. If it’s a Conservative government looking for more integration with China the left paints them as uncaring assholes only concerned with the bottom dollar. When it’s a Liberal one heading over there it’s proof the Liberals are too weak to stand up to communists and those who oppose religious liberty. And yet, every so often we whinge about our reliance on the Americans.

India’s the other way you’d juice economic growth, but we’ve been trying to get a proper FTA there for 15 years now and it’s not exceedingly clear it’ll ever happen. There’s also the not-inconsiderable issue of history there, as Canada has taken in considerable amounts of Sikhs that are not particularly fond of India in general and Modi in specific, which has had considerable consequences. That said, it comes back to the same thing - there is a theoretical price to reduce American economic power over us, but that price comes at an expense we aren’t prepared to pay (in this case, selling out our Sikh Canadian brothers and sisters).

So we’ve made our bed, a precarious and slightly insane bed we’ve made but we’ve made it. We don’t want to think about the consequences of that decision, because it means understanding that we are dependent on the goodwill of a super power to sustain our standard of living. We could stop that anytime, but we won’t, because then we’d have to acknowledge that we don’t have the moral high ground anymore if we chase the almighty dollar at all costs. And Canadians quite like the moral high ground, especially when it comes to the dirty Americans.

In specific, the 51st State stuff is new, and it’s hard to say anybody should have expected it, but in general the shock that Donald Trump considers us an enemy and a moocher off the US isn’t new. Anybody with a brain could have told you Trump was the bad answer for Canada, and that loyal Canadians should have rooted for Kamala Harris as a matter of pure self interest. The threats are more explicit, but Trump was never going to be good for Canada.

Whether anybody is willing to say it explicitly before the next election or not, the overwhelming policy question of the next 10 years is going to be whether or not it is worth selling out our principles to suck up to China and India to deleverage us from the Americans or not. We either need the Americans or we need a place to pivot to that’s actually growing, and the Europeans are in terminal decline so it’s the Global East or America. We won’t talk about it in those terms - we’ll talk about investment diversity and exploring untapped markets and all the other nonsense buzzwords. There’s a reason we talk about pipelines to tidewater and increasing exports without mentioning who we’re looking to export to. It’s all a facade, bht the choice is clear. Bending enough of the knee to Trump and the Americans or bending more of the knee to China and India. There’s no other option.

What does any of this have to do with the anthem? Nothing. Boo the anthem, don’t, boo the Tkachuks, don’t, I don’t care. It’s a sideshow. Anthem discourse is a fun distraction to the fundamental problem that Canada over decades has chosen the easy path of American economic integration over making hard conversations and harder choices.