The World Is Watching Canada

This week Canada’s Liberal Party pulled off an improbable, come-from-way-behind fourth-term win. There will be little time for the party or its leader, Prime Minister Mark Carney, to celebrate. Unlike a decade ago, when Justin Trudeau won in a landslide and told supporters after his big win, “Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways,” these days can hardly be described the same way.

Mr. Carney’s new term begins with a daunting to-do list. On the economic front, Canadians are expecting quick action to alleviate the cost of living crisis; polling data from the Angus Reid Institute, where I work, shows nine in 10 Canadians are concerned about the prospect of a recession within the next year. President Trump made Canada, along with Mexico, the first casualties in his global trade war, imposing crippling tariffs before pausing some, while continuously repeating his desire to annex Canada as America’s 51st state. Initially, Canadians thought Mr. Trump was just being Mr. Trump. But his consistency has left the nation feeling betrayed and anxious and angry.

Mr. Carney matched the voter energy in his victory speech on Monday night. He told Canadians that Mr. Trump was trying to break them “so America can own us” and reassured them it would “never, ever happen.”

Now the world is watching Canada like some global lab rat, to observe how it will react and respond to what our neighbor to the south throws next. Canada’s imperative today should be to reframe its place in the world beyond America.

Canadians like to see themselves as polite peacekeepers. But there is a worrying gap between how we view our influence globally versus how the rest of the world sees it. In a survey last year, just over half of Canadians said their country was viewed positively in world affairs. While not a direct comparison, by contrast, a global Fulbright Foundation survey conducted around the same time found that fewer than one-third of respondents said Canada used its influence around the world “mostly for good.”

In 2015, Mr. Trudeau campaigned to bring Canada back into the world after criticism that the country had lost its soft power. Two years later, Canadians increasingly backed finding new economic partners when Mr. Trump, in his first term, demanded a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that yielded the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which many argue disadvantaged Canada economically.

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