Is the 49th Parallel Now an Ideological Iron Curtain?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

Nine months since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the animosity towards him by many, maybe most, Canadians, continues to grow. It turned around the fortunes of the three most prominent Canadian politicians: Justin Trudeau, the prime minister forced out by his own party; Pierre Poilivre, who had been considered a shoo-in to replace him prior to 2025; and Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal seen as Trudeau’s likely successor.

This earthquake has shaken Canadian-American relations to the core, even more so than during the Vietnam War, when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon viewed Canada as lacking in courage to defend the “free world” against “|Communism.”

The visceral hatred of Trump is more than just due to his ill-considered jibes about making Canada the fifty-first state, in effect ridiculing Canada as a weakling and freeloader, a country that was evading its share militarily and economically in relation to the United States. It’s more than about tariffs and the economy. And Americans, who typically pay little attention to their northern neighbour, know this. Major American newspapers have covered this story – for example, a very prominent article in the New York Times of Aug. 10, “ ‘Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada’s Answer to America’s Abandonment,” by Canadian Stephen Marche.

“In response to America’s threats,” he contends, “Canada is in the middle of the greatest explosion of nationalism in the country’s history, far more substantial than the nationalism of the 1960s. Then, Canadian identity emerged and proliferated through books and music and the national broadcaster, the CBC, as well as through official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism. The entire time, Canada was integrating economically and militarily with the United States.” Now Canadians are boycotting American goods and cancelling travel plans to the U.S., many going so far as to define the administration as fascist.

Canada is indeed, in Trump’s mind, a “DEI woke” country on steroids, its education systems captive to left ideologues, and more like the left of the Democratic Party than many American Democrats themselves. It upholds everything Trump is trying to disassemble at home.

Most “elbows up” Canadians who put Mark Carney into power after a campaign that was almost literally about nothing other than Trump, sensed this. “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” Carney declared after winning the federal election. But Canadians may not fully realize that this is a deeper and wider rift than one between Ottawa and Washington. It’s part of an ideological conflict within the western world about the very nature of governance and political legitimacy.

In fact, were Canadians more perspicacious, they would agree with what one British commentator has referred to as a new “Cold War,” but one not, as in the past, against Communist powers Russia and China, but between the U.S. and Europe. While the author, Philip Cunliffe, Professor of International Relations at University College London, in his Aug. 13 article “The New Cold War Will Divide the West, America is turning on Europe,” on the UnHerd website, never mentions Canada, this country is clearly on the side of Europe, and it explains why Carney has taken to calling Canada “European,” and in terms of foreign relations he is aligning with Britain, France, and Germany in their positions on the two major conflicts now raging, Gaza and Ukraine.

The clearest exponent of the MAGA Republican worldview is, as Cunliffe asserts, not President Trump, but Vice-President J.D. Vance, who “unleashed the opening volley in this ideological attack in his extraordinary speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he calmly and methodically took apart the dismal record of European states on individual liberty and democratic rights.”

Vance criticized European Union interference in the Romanian presidential elections of the previous year, and he also met with the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel -- “a figure of obloquy for the European liberal orthodoxy.” Vance called these attacks “tyranny in disguise.” He adopted the same tone that American leaders adopted when speaking about the squashing of popular opposition in the Communist Eastern bloc. He has also accused Europe of engaging in “civilizational suicide” through its unwillingness to halt mass migration.

Vance has not only criticized the British record on free speech, but in a recent visit there, he met with Robert Jenrick, the rival to the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. He also spoke to Nigel Farage, seen by mainstream British politicians as beyond the pale, but gaining so much support for his anti-immigrant Reform UK Party that he could conceivably become the next British Prime Minister. Though his party won just four seats in the 2024 election, it gained the third largest share of votes, mostly from dissatisfied Conservative voters.

As for the 2024 winner, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Labour Party’s leader wasn’t even on the agenda. In fact a damning new Human Rights Report from the U.S. State Department concurred with Vance. The new dossier on Britain’s civil liberties warns that the U.K. human rights situation has “worsened during the year,” amid “serious restrictions on freedom of expression.” (It also said they are under threat in Germany.) Would Vance say the same about Canada? I wouldn’t bet against it.