Matt Gurney: Harper has the right vision for Canada. But we worry about the same thing

Pivoting from the United States and seeking new alliances will require pain and sacrifice ... and it’s not clear Canadians are willing to stick with it.

Definitely not the White House.

By: Matt Gurney

There was a lot of interesting news to come out of the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto this week. In due time, I imagine you will read about quite a few of those developments here. But as I watched the coverage and viewed the remote broadcasts of the speeches from the event in my own hometown, I was surprised to find myself most fascinated by what former prime minister Stephen Harper had to say. He dropped two genuinely noteworthy gems. And one of them is something that all Canadians need to be thinking about going forward.

Let’s get the purely political one out of the way first. The former prime minister has substantively endorsed the version of events the current prime minister has offered to explain why Canada is in a trade war with the United States. In agreeing that Mark Carney was right to walk away from the negotiations because the U.S. was demanding sacrifices that would have reduced our sovereignty, Harper has declared himself in agreement with the majority of Canadians who have supported the prime minister’s decision, and in doing so, has also put himself offside with a significant fraction of conservative voters.

I’m offering this comment neutrally, without trying to analyze what it means or moralize it, but I think it’s safe to say that there is a significant fraction of the conservative voting base in this country that is either inherently sympathetic to the position of the United States in this moment of tension, or is at least so inherently skeptical of Carney, or perhaps simply the Liberal party, that they cannot accept that the current unfortunate situation might actually be America’s fault and that Carney behaved responsibly and in the national interest. Conservative MP Jamil Jivani has thus far seemed to be the leading voice for those conservatives. If Jivani can be said to lead the skeptical faction of the conservative movement, it’s now possible to suggest that Harper speaks for the faction that agrees with and supports Carney, at least on this file.

What that is going to mean for the conservative movement in this country is going to be fascinating. It will be interesting to see how many true-blue conservatives are willing to criticize or publicly disagree with the most successful conservative Canadian politician in generations. I suspect the number will not actually be that small. But it will be something to watch.

But the most interesting part of the former prime minister’s address was speaking to something more fundamental. I’m going to quote that part of the speech at length, relying on the transcript of his remarks, published by the National Post. Here is some of what the former prime minister had to say:

… it is clear that the current U.S. administration views our level of economic integration as incompatible with our separate sovereignty. Thus, to maintain that sovereignty, we must pursue diminished reliance upon the United States. There will be significant costs to this effort, but those are costs that I hope and believe Canadians are able and prepared to accept.

I find this all, I do find this all very sad, just as equally necessary. And I believe that, in this necessity, our country will also discover, and is discovering, opportunity…. It is an opportunity for Canada to rediscover a long-term agenda for economic prosperity, an opportunity to realize our true potential as a country, which I believe, to be frank, we have come nowhere close to achieving.

We in this room all know very well that this is a competitive world, fraught with shifting politics, fragile supply chains, and other transactional pressures, now more so than recent decades. In the face of such change, Canada cannot simply blame external factors or make other excuses to explain away the difficulties that we face. Leadership is defined by taking accountability for what you can control.

And today, more than ever, Canada must become more internally competitive, more externally connected, and more truly sovereign than it has been. That is the opportunity.

I found those comments by Harper to be striking. Because in the midst of a speech that was resolutely pro-Canada, and also overtly in line with the government’s own position on these issues — that’s why they invited him to give the closing address! — the former prime minister of Canada took a moment to pause and note that what we are discussing here is going to require sacrifice. Specifically, a painful kind of sacrifice. We’re going to have to grow up, stop relying on others and stand on our own. And that is never fun.

On the one hand, you would think that would be a simple statement of the obvious. Of course doing big things requires sacrifice. But what kind of sacrifice? What are the things that Canada will now have to do that it wasn’t doing before? What are the costs of doing those things?

Harper’s comments struck me as interesting because, even though he didn’t go into detail, he was hinting at the sort of things this will require. In effect, we’re going to have to act like a grown-up country. We’re going to have to spend the money and the political capital to build out the infrastructure required to grow our economy on our own. We’re going to have to accept the financial costs of doing these things, but also the political costs of doing these things. And though the former prime minister made no explicit comment about defence or security, I choose, perhaps overly optimistically, to read some of that into his comment about Canada becoming “truly sovereign.”

It’s fascinating to note that none of what Harper is suggesting there, or even maybe simply alluding to, ought to be controversial. Canada is not being asked to make unusual sacrifices, unheard of in the annals of history. We’re being asked to function pretty much like a normal country and do normal-country things. Normal countries develop their own economies. Normal countries get the regulatory systems that oversee economic development and growth right. Normal countries either build the infrastructure necessary to create prosperity, or at least create a regulatory and permitting environment that allows the private sector to do that. Normal countries largely take care of their own security.

Canada hasn’t been doing those things, not for a long time, because we haven’t been a normal country. Or perhaps it’s better to say we were a country that evolved in an abnormal environment, and pleasantly so — our next-door neighbour was, for a very long time, rich, powerful, reliable and friendly, and we optimized ourselves accordingly.

That was fantastic! I got to grow up in part of that period, and highly enjoyed it. But that came with costs for Canada and Canadians, in the forms of capability gaps in our own domains.

And we aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed. Harper’s comments brought to mind some of the hostile rhetoric we’ve been hearing from the United States. Senior U.S. figures, including the president, have huffed and puffed that Canada couldn’t survive without America, and wants the benefits of being a state without actually being one.

We don’t need to take these statements entirely at face value. Clearly, this is designed to be hostile and performative rhetoric that plays to the MAGA crowd in the United States. But there are slivers of uncomfortable truth in some of those comments — only slivers, but still. There are elements of state capacity that are typically held to be the responsibility of sovereign governments that Canada has, for generations, largely outsourced to the United States.

We have police forces and military forces and economic infrastructure, such as electricity transmission lines and pipelines and ports and railways. But we have scaled these things on the assumption that we could rely on a friendly and benign United States to pick up a lot of our slack, and in recent generations, we’ve allowed the scale of the slack to grow.

I don’t want to get into the debate today over whether or not this was naive or logical in the circumstances. Personally, I think it was both, depending on when the question is being asked. But the important thing for our purposes is not to apportion blame so much as to acknowledge reality. One does not need to accept Donald Trump or J.D. Vance or any of them as good-faith analysts of Canadian politics to acknowledge the reality that Canada felt comfortable under-investing in core competencies because we had faith that the United States would backstop many gaps in Canadian capability. Not out of charity, necessarily, because America benefitted mightily, too, but all the same, we counted on them and didn’t invest in ourselves. And we continued to do this even in the face of growing warnings that the United States was becoming less and less interested in that arrangement.

Okay! So that era is over, for now. Canadians seem to support Carney and his government’s efforts to make Canada less dependent on the United States. The long-term goal seems to be a stronger, richer, more powerful Canada that truly can stand more on its own. And in the meantime, Canada will seek new deals and alliances with the rest of the world to help smooth our transition away from the United States. Hello, Europe!

The public seems generally supportive of this. But what about when it hurts? What about when it costs us something? What about when the bills come due? Bills we got away with not paying for generations?

Are we actually prepared, as a country, to pay higher taxes to support a much larger military? Are we prepared to put much more money, and oversight, into our domestic security agencies to offset intelligence that the CIA or FBI once might have freely shared, but which now may come with strings attached or not come at all? Has our political culture matured enough that we can truly expect to see politically controversial proposals for huge infrastructure projects not getting derailed by local NIMBYism? (The recent case study of the Toronto Island airport expansion was not encouraging!) Will entrenched Canadian bureaucratic norms really yield to the pressure from Carney and others to trim environmental assessments and Indigenous consultations down to something efficient enough not to scare away would-be investors?

I hope so. Because I’ve always been bullish on Canada to at least this extent: we ought to be no less competent than any other nation, and our actual advantages in terms of our natural resources and other economic assets are real and massive. There really isn’t any particular reason Canada should not be one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. We have so much going for us. And most of what we have working against us are things we’ve done to ourselves.

We can undo them, but there will be costs for that. Much like Stephen Harper, I believe this country has never hit its full potential, and I even believe and hope, like him, that we might be willing to do the things we need to do to change that. But for right now, it is just that: a belief and a hope. We haven’t proved that we can yet. I hope that we will. But I confess I worry about that sometimes.

A lot of bills we should have been paying for generations are about to start coming due. Some of these bills are going to be a lot bigger than I think many of us have realized. I hope that, as a country, we are prepared to have the serious discussions about why these bills must be paid and how we will responsibly grow our economy so that we can efficiently settle the tab.

But we’ll see. We had a good run under a very benign hegemon for many generations. We were spoiled. I hope not to the point where doing better has become impossible. But only time will tell.

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