For most of our lives, being Canadian has been remarkably inexpensive.
We have lived beside the richest and most powerful country in the world, enjoyed privileged access to its enormous market, and still been able to construct a society distinctly our own.
We may now be discovering that this arrangement came with an expiry date.
The collapse of Canada-U.S. trade negotiations presents us with a question much larger than tariffs.
What is it worth to remain Canadian? There is no point pretending economic disruption would be painless. Americans are richer than Canadians on average. American productivity is higher. If GDP per capita were the only scoreboard that mattered, Canada would be losing.
But there are other scoreboards.
A Canadian born today can expect to live about three years longer than an American. Preventable mortality is dramatically lower here. The American homicide rate is about three times ours.
These aren’t sentimental measures of national identity. They are outcomes.
Living longer is an outcome. Being less likely to be murdered is an outcome. Receiving medical treatment without first proving you can afford it is an outcome.
Our health-care system is unquestionably struggling. But walk into a Canadian emergency department and notice something. The country is sitting there beside you.
Rich and poor. New Canadians and families who have been here for generations. People who arrived in expensive cars and people who came by the bus. There isn’t a rich people’s emergency room down the hall from which poor people are excluded.
We decided that illness should not normally require a financial means test before treatment.
That is a Canadian choice. So are public education, pensions, unemployment insurance, disability supports, bilingualism and the many imperfect institutions through which we have decided that some things should be shared rather than purchased entirely according to individual means.
None of this makes us better people than Americans. The point is simpler: we are not the same country.
And now we may have to decide whether the difference is worth anything.
Suppose the price of the present disruption ultimately amounted to a five-per-cent reduction in the standard of living we otherwise would have enjoyed. That would hurt. Businesses would suffer. Jobs could disappear.
But in economies where real living standards normally rise over time, a five-per-cent setback amounts roughly to surrendering several years of progress. Painful, certainly. National ruin, no.
There is, however, an enormous qualification. Five per cent means almost nothing to some people and everything to others.
For an affluent Canadian it might mean keeping the car another year or taking a less expensive holiday. For somebody already choosing between groceries and rent, five per cent can mean hunger.
So, if there is a price for Canadianness, we must be very careful about who receives the bill.
It would be a grotesque irony if Canada defended its distinctive social model internationally by abandoning it domestically. Low- and modest-income Canadians must be protected from the worst consequences of whatever economic disruption follows.
That isn’t separate from what we are defending. Canada should become more productive, diversify its trade, eliminate ridiculous internal trade barriers, build infrastructure and become less vulnerable to the decisions of any single foreign government.
But we should not confuse becoming more competitive with becoming less Canadian.
Instead, we may finally have to recognize something previous generations rarely had to say aloud.
There is a value to being Canadian. It is found partly in additional years of life, safer communities, public schools and hospitals, and institutions built around the proposition that human worth cannot be completely described by purchasing power.
For generations we received many of those benefits without paying much of a geopolitical premium for them.
Now someone may be presenting us with a bill.
Let’s pay it. Let’s fight like hell to make the bill smaller. Let’s build a stronger economy so we can afford it. And let’s make sure those with the broadest shoulders carry more of it than Canadians who are already struggling.
But don’t sell the house because somebody increased the mortgage payment.
The real question isn’t whether being Canadian costs something. It is whether, when finally asked to put a price on our country, we remember its value.
