Saying goodbye to an old friend - the USA I once trusted to be a rival and still a buddy
All the King's horses and all the King's men won't be able to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Dear Readers: Since the beginning of 2025, The Rewrite’s weekly review of media has been alternating between Substack and The Hub, where we have also launched a well-received podcast. However, I haven’t been completely comfortable that I am treating subscribers fairly - the much loved paid ones in particular. So, I’m going to do my best to provide unique commentary different from The Rewrite’s core purpose on those alternating weeks. Essentially, I’m moving some of my freelance writing, much of which has been behind paywalls, from other platforms to here. Happy to accept any feedback. In the meantime, here’s something on how I’m feeling these days about America and my lost country.
I went to, and graduated from, an American high school.
Back then, there was a lot of political controversy in America’s world. I remember seeing the news tickers at the railway station that informed me of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
On the news, I watched as entire neighborhoods in Washington, Detroit and Los Angeles burned. Still within my high school years, American National Guardsmen shot and killed students at Kent State University. The Vietnam war was raging. Older brothers and acquaintances of my schoolmates were reported killed or wounded. My classmates pondered whether, at some point, they would have to decide to accept being conscripted or to flee to Canada and start a new life there. Almost weekly, there were huge anti-war protests somewhere. A popular habit among those in my generation, when travelling abroad, was to sew a Canadian flag patch on their backpacks, feeling it made them safer in an anti-American world.
Through it all, as an ex-pat, I followed my father’s directive to avoid involvement in other people’s politics. It’s a habit I maintained throughout my life unless other people’s politics got involved with me.
So it is with immense sadness that I have had to say goodbye to my lifelong relationship with the United States of America. Oh, for sure, I’ll do my best to maintain old friends south of the border and like a lot of Canadians have family members and many acquaintances with dual citizenship.
But insofar as the rest are concerned, it’s time for me to move on. Time is frequently on my mind, Portugal has caught my eye these days and I always thought Mexico had more soul in the tip of its little finger than most North America cities, for all their wealth, can muster. It’s over. And it’s not me, USA: it’s you. We’re just neighbours now.
Oh, Canada has a lot of faults. The imperial warrior nation of my father’s and grandfathers’ generations has long ago been replaced by one renowned for and oblivious to its status as a military freeloader. The prime minister Canadians have preferred for the past decade, Justin Trudeau, cared a lot more about scrubbing industrial proposals through a gender lens, denouncing his “genocidal” nation as institutionally racist, LGBTQ2etc rights and saving the world from climate change than he did about fiscal policy, economics and other fundamentals like security. He burned through an attorney general who refused to lie for him, two finance ministers frustrated that he wouldn’t rein in spending and our “Five Eyes” security allies don’t trust us.
He and his fellow Liberals, anxious to change the world, neglected the basics of government: the maintenance of sovereignty through a strong military, security of the borders, national unity, trade relationships and a stable, diversified economy. As a result, our productivity and GDP per capita levels have plummeted and our spirits have sagged. The current government has amassed more debt in nine years than did all its predecessors over 148 years that included two world wars.
My only defence on all of that; the only excuse I have to offer my children and grandchildren for the shambles of a broken country my generation is leaving them, is that I tried. I am truly sorry that I failed.
But for all its faults and lost ways, Canada is my country. It is my home and remains, in my mind, the True North, Strong and Free. I have travelled its length and breadth. I have fished under the Arctic’s Midnight Sun, drank Screech and Newfie beer made from iceberg melt, butchered the French language, been befriended by a man born in an igloo, climbed mountains, hiked badlands. sweat-lodged, smudged, feasted on Muskox, Caribou and Moose, nibbled on Narwhal, sampled seal, bannock, Saskatoon berries and dipped my toes in its oceans. I have loved Canada and it has loved me back. I still believe that it could be the shining example to the world I was raised - God Save the Queen - to believe it could be, but am quietly coming to terms with the fact I am too old now to ever see that day, should it come.
American President Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs on goods imported from Canada is the greatest external assault on my country in my lifetime. His arrogation of the authority to describe Canada - the second largest nation by land mass in the world - as a mere 51st state is deeply insulting and profoundly unsettling. The sole upside is that my country, much diminished by a decade of being run by the equivalent of a high school Glee Club, may rediscover its strength of purpose, pride and set about restoring its dignity.
If tariffs come into effect, Canadians - and not just a few - will begin to lose their jobs. At the very least, the ranks of the unemployed could grow by hundreds of thousands; although some estimates go as high as 2 million (Canada’s workforce in 2023 was 16.5 million).
Americans, too, would pay a price, probably most noticeably when they go to fill up their cars and trucks with gas. If Canadian counter measures, which still may be necessary, kick in, they, too, will suffer layoffs. Some will join the dots while others, still euphoric over Trump’s election, will just blame Canada. Most, probably, are oblivious. On the evening of Feb. 1, when Canadian cable news networks were offering wall to wall coverage of the Trump tariff declaration, CNN was showing a documentary.
Eventually, the formal relationship between Canada and the USA will stabilize. But the damage will have been done.
They don’t trust us and Canadians will never trust the United States of America the way we once did. And trust, when broken, is rarely reconstituted.
It is, indeed, a sad new world.
Check out TheHub.ca on Tuesday Feb. 11 as I look into some goings on at the Mother Corp, the revenge of the gate-keepers and more. Thursday, the Full Press podcast featuring yours truly, Tara Henley of Lean Out and Harrison Lowman of The Hub will examine the wobbly state of journalism. And, next week, look for more of the same back here on Substack.
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald and a former vice chair of the CRTC)
I won't blame the US for the shabby state Canada is in. When I did an MBA in the 80's Canada's crappy productivity was a major topic in the International Economics course. Nothing has changed. When I lived in Japan for most of the 90's, I came to realize the CBC's view of Canada was a fabrication. Too many of our governments hate our industries, too many of our industries are oligopolies, too many of our jobs are public sector, too many of commitments are ignored and too many of us are lost in the green fog. Had we behaved responsibly for the last 40 years, Trump's policies wouldn't matter nearly as much.
Poignant and moving, Peter.