“Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston Saul
As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto.
Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche, Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course.
Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn.
Is Trump an aberration? Not according to Saul who offers Grover Cleveland as the 19th century DJT. Like Stephen Marche, Saul thinks there will be a civil war in the United States within twenty-five years. But he doubts it will be a repeat of the 19th century Civil War of Shermanesque armies against armies. More likely a continuing breakdown of the legal system, and of the willingness of individuals, states and the federal government to obey the law. More like the chaos of Caligula than Caesar vs Pompey.
On the tariffs Saul is cheerful. Canada sent half its goods south before the 1988 free trade deal and three quarters after it, he reminds us. So Trump’s tariffs have frightened the Canadian provinces into dismantling the trade barriers they kept against each other. Duh.
“We thank him for his stupidity,” Saul says of Grover Trump.
John Ralston Saul once wrote a book about Canada entitled A Fair Country. So I suggest a book about America should be called An Unfair Country. He laughs. He’d call it The Great Drama. With perhaps the subtitle: Not As Big As Canada.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. He is sitting where Lester Pearson’s bed used to be — Pearson rented the floor of the house Saul now works in. Both he and Carney arrived with international standing already earned. Pearson also brought in Medicare, which Saul makes concrete: a bone marrow transplant, five weeks in a private room, zero dollars and zero forms.
2. Canada never had its civil war, and his explanation is calculation rather than virtue: Canadians understood that if they indulged in that kind of violence, the only beneficiary would be the country across the border. Survival produced restraint.
3. A generation of Canadian executives were trained as branch managers. For 150 years Canada worked at counterbalance — it was a serious player in Asia in the 1920s and 30s — and abandoned the habit after 1988. The prime minister has opened the doors; Saul is blunt that the wrong people have to walk through them.
4. America is poor in water and short of what an empire needs; Canada has the wood, the mines, the oil and gas, three coastlines and the Northwest Passage. Trump says Canada has nothing America needs. Saul calls that the exact inversion of the fact, and reads Greenland as the logic exposed.
5. His prescription is narrow and specific: a Supreme Court that functions as a court rather than a political party, and a reversal of the election-funding decisions. He will believe America is saving itself when the money comes out of elections.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:58 — Your map is wrong — Canada is the bigger country
05:53 — Is Trump an aberration? Grover Cleveland
08:45 — A civil war within twenty-five years
11:40 — Canada has everything the United States needs
12:03 — Greenland, and the next island over
16:45 — If you live next to Rome
19:00 — “We thank him for his stupidity”
25:00 — It was an attempted coup d’état
25:59 — The Lester Pearson comparison
28:45 — Medicare, and a transplant that cost nothing
31:00 — Macron’s hug in the courtyard
33:13 — Could Canada join the EU?
40:04 — If he wrote a book about America: The Great Drama
43:57 — Take the money out of elections
44:25 — Closing