A closer read of the NY Mag article
I finally read all of Simon van Zuylen-Wood's feature article in New York about his extended stay in Canada. It's good! I learned a lot! There is a long sidebar about historical incursions and designs on Canada by the US that is very illuminating. His description of Charles's visit to Canada was also useful because I ignored it completely at the time. I liked the extended quote from Charlie Angus – a perfect encapsulation of the elbows-up spirit – and I liked the reference to peace, order and good government being enshrined in the Constitution (it's known as 'the POGG power' in Con Law).
There are just two points I would push back on. The first is the implication that Trump's cheesy efforts to humiliate Trudeau put an already-unpopular Trudeau's resignation over the edge. I would argue it was just the opposite: that if anything could have led to Trudeau somehow holding on beyond the decade he'd already been in power, with all the drama and difficulty and rake-steps he accumulated along the way, it was Trump calling him a governor over and over. That kind of "He's a cringey guy with a history of doing brown face and failure to deliver on core democratic promises but he's our..." defensiveness was part of what propelled Carney to victory. Just my take.
The other thing I disagree with is the assertion, held out in the article as universally acknowledged, that Canadians lack a core identity. I mentioned this in my last post. Maybe this is a semantic point because they mean core identity in the sense of one single (ethnic, historical) identity in contrast to identifying as a mosaic of cultures and stories. But in my limited experience, Canada, like any other place, is a vast collection of all these things and also totally its own thing. I don't think this dust-up has given Canadians a sense of national identity so much as it has provoked the sort of fuck-off patriotic-to-nationalistic response that, honestly, any number of countries may have to neocolonial aggression. We are not lacking for contemporary examples!
One more thing that caught my eye was this quote from Mr. "I never wrote a picture in my life" himself:
