Commentary: Canada said no to America. It will reverberate far beyond its borders

While the prime minister’s approach is certainly new, it emerges from deep reservoirs of the Canadian spirit. For nearly a decade, I was a columnist at Esquire magazine. During that time, one of the greatest discrepancies I noticed between Canadians and Americans – and Canadian and American men in particular – was in their basic idea of what earned respect. 

For Americans, the capacity to project power, the ability to make things happen, to win, are the primary virtues. In Canada, the defining virtue is toughness, the capacity to endure.

The difference is subtle but profound. Margaret Atwood’s work of literary criticism that defined 1970s Canadian nationalism is entitled “Survival”. The coureurs des bois, the great New French traders who went into the impossible North on canoes looking for pelts, measured themselves by their ability to survive on the bare minimum in the midst of a vast indifferent wilderness.

These deep-running values, rarely openly expressed, are the undercurrent of Canada’s rejection of America last week. 

The offered deal, or at least the details that have emerged, veered significantly from purely economic matters. 

Apparently, one of the final sticking points was an American demand that Quebec undo its French language laws and French language cultural protections. French, in Canada, is not a business matter. Its place in our nation transcends absolutely any market-based consideration. It is not something that gets “put on the table”.