i don't want to support a canadian government if it just wants to be all about free markets. if carney and ford and smith want to work a room by pushing market theory and competition, they may find a muted response. those are american ideas. one of the basic differences between canada and the united states has been that canada is a more socialist country, more willing to use government to solve problems, and less interested in market economies. if you ask a canadian on the street to come up with a reason they don't want to be americans, besides a beer commercial, the first and last thing a lot of us will say is we don't want to lose our healthcare.
there's an opportunity to enforce this, but the governments we've elected recently aren't aligned with historical canadian values. it was nice to hear chretien talk on sunday, as he might have been the last truly canadian prime minister and, at 91, he might represent the end of a culture and be the last of his people, so to say. yoda, indeed. justin trudeau, mark carney, chrystia freeland, michael ignatieff, stephen harper, doug ford, danielle smith, etc have their differences, but they all share the characteristic that they are culturally american and have spent their entire political careers wanting canada to be america lite, either as some kind of california north or as some kind of more enlightened texas. that's not going to work with a lot of people, who are going to wonder what the point is.
if we remember that being canadian means using government, and use it to retreat from the reliance on market-based solutions we've seen dominate politics since the turn of the century, we might find more people want to remain canadian. if we keep copying america, we might find people think there's less purpose to it, and they may start to look at the positives of the alternative.