This election is about Donald Trump — and a lot more

In ways no one could have understood at the time, June 16, 2015, turned out to be a momentous day for Canada and Canadian politics, the reverberations of which are only being fully felt now, nearly a decade later.

In the moment, the day's most significant event might have seemed to be an announcement by the leader of the Liberal Party in downtown Ottawa. Still four months away from becoming prime minister, Justin Trudeau stood before television cameras at the Château Laurier and presented a plan for sweeping political reform, including a categorical commitment to change Canada's existing electoral system. 

If things had turned out differently that might have been the launching point for a historic shift in Canada's political system — perhaps toward proportional representation and the coalition governments that are common in Europe. 

In reality, the day's more seismic event occurred eight hours south of Parliament Hill, on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. 

After riding a golden escalator down to the lobby of the skyscraper he named after himself, a former reality TV star announced that he was running to be president of the United States. He said "drugs" and "rapists" were streaming across the American border with Mexico. He promised to build a wall. He said the United States was being "ripped off" by the rest of the world and that it didn't have "victories" anymore. He vowed to "make America great again."

In the years that followed, the United States had multiple opportunities to decisively reject Donald Trump. But last fall, they chose him — for a second time — to be their president. 

For Canada, the first four years of a Trump presidency were a time-consuming challenge. The scramble to maintain an open economic relationship with Canada's largest trading partner necessarily became the Trudeau government's top priority. But it was still possible then to believe those four years were a strange anomaly — that America would, after four years of Trump, snap back to normal.

Joe Biden's victory in 2020 seemed to confirm that. But the four years of Biden's presidency now seem like the last gasp of a world that no longer exists. And two months into the second four years of Trump, the threat to Canada now seems existential. The first time around, Trump talked about tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now, he threatens to erase the border — an "artificially drawn line," in his words — between our two countries.

"Trump is posing the gravest challenge our country has faced since the Second World War," Chrystia Freeland, the former foreign affairs minister who was at the centre of Canada's initial response to Trump, said at a Liberal leadership debate last month. 

At the same debate, Mark Carney said, "Canada faces one of the most serious crises in our history."

Skeptical observers might accuse these Liberals of wanting to capitalize on the threat. But it is hard to deny that a profound threat exists.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in February that "we can't rely on the Americans anymore." Of the current and coming conflict, former prime minister Stephen Harper wrote that "the preservation of Canada's existence must be our highest objective," something that wouldn't need to be said unless Canada's existence was not entirely assured.

Timothy Snyder, the American historian and author who has become a leading voice on the threats endangering American democracy, wrote recently that "Trump's rhetoric about Canada uncannily echoes that of Russian propagandists towards Ukraine."

Decades of Canadian economic and international policy have been — quite rationally — geared toward greater integration with and reliance upon the United States. As John F. Kennedy said in 1961, economics made us partners and necessity made us allies. But the United States is no longer a reliable ally or partner. And that casts into doubt not just continental relations and Canadian security, but the entire world order.