There's a bit of Trump populism in us, too

The Trudeau government was quick to close the book on the Trump presidency and congratulate Joe Biden on his election. Other major American trading partners, notably Mexico and China, weren't so quick off the mark, perhaps fearing Donald Trump's wrath if he succeeds in overturning the results or launches another bid for the presidency in 2024. More importantly, Canada's haste to move on from Trump denies what should be our advantage in explaining to the world the rise and apparently enduring popularity of Trumpism.

Commentators and pollsters underestimated the depth of Trump's support in the electorate in both 2016 and 2020. They discounted 2016 as a protest vote against a corrupt establishment, but the 71 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 clearly knew what they were voting for.

Trump's continuing popularity is not difficult to understand. The U.S. has been traumatized by years of abysmally poor decisions by its ruling political class: an unnecessary, bloody, and expensive war in Iraq; foreclosure on 10 million homes when the housing bubble burst in 2007; and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, which left 19 of the 20 largest U.S. financial institutions on the brink of collapse — just to name three. Saving these institutions cost hundreds of billions of dollars just as 8.5 million Americans were losing their jobs. With tens of millions more seeing their home equity shrivel, resentment spread that deadbeat homeowners who recklessly spent money they never intended to repay and irresponsible lenders who facilitated such scams were being bailed out by taxpayers. The result was the Tea Party movement, which derailed much of Barack Obama's legislative agenda.

These repeated, massive failures of governance prepared the ground for the rise of Donald Trump. After Trump won in 2016, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan ruefully acknowledged that Trump had “heard a voice out in this country that no one else heard. He connected in ways with people that no one else did.” The disillusion, despair and exclusion felt by working-class whites was vividly reflected in their falling life expectancy.

For the past four years, Canadians have congratulated ourselves on resisting the siren call of populism sweeping the U.S. We should not be so smug. In the early 1990s, there was widespread, highly vocal dissatisfaction with a prolonged recession, soaring government deficits, and the constitutional impasse over the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. The federal government even commissioned a report on the malaise. Keith Spicer concluded there was “a fury in the land” — mostly directed at then-prime minister Brian Mulroney. The same kind of fury propelled Trump to the White House. Canadians' anger with political elites produced regional populist movements in the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois, which continue to roil not far below the surface of

Canadian politics.

A New York Times' correspondent observed years ago that “No other country puts such a high premium on its own virtue as does Canada.” Worse, much of our presumed virtue is hypocritical. We rail about Trump's protectionism, while maintaining barriers to trade both with the U.S. and internally that are even higher. We sneer at the resources the U.S. devotes to its military and healthcare systems, while relying on them to police the world for us and produce vaccines to stem the pandemic. We deride the low level of public debate in the U.S. even as political correctness leads us to waste time on phoney issues like the mythical 2020 “She-cession” while avoiding problems the U.S. at least acknowledges need addressing. As former Liberal foreign policy adviser Jocelyn Coulon concluded in his recent book, Canada Is Not Back, “Canada would make an original contribution to building a new world order by acknowledging the deep-seated causes of the crisis challenging the world instead of clinging to the old order.” Far from being trailblazers of a new liberal order, we are reactionaries defending institutions that seem increasingly anachronistic, from the UN to the CBC to medicare.

If Canadians had experienced the same traumas Americans had — costly wars, millions of foreclosures, a devastating financial cross — I suspect we would have reacted with the same anger and frustration. Until the U.S. governing class demonstrates it has learned from its mistakes and addresses the open wounds in its body politic, Trumpism will remain a force.

Instead of gleefully joining the global chorus of liberals rejoicing that “The King is dead!” Canada should be explaining to the rest of the world why Trump won in 2016 and was almost re-elected in 2020. We are supposed to know our American neighbours better than anyone, while our own experience with populism in the 1990s should have given us insight into it. Instead, we have wasted our own experience and proximity to the U.S. because we were too busy flaunting our often-hypocritical liberal virtues.

WE ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW OUR AMERICAN NEIGHBOURS BETTER THAN ANYONE.