Canadians have a complex relationship with the United States. On the one hand, Canadians share the world’s longest undefended border with the U.S., voraciously consume their pop culture, and speak with (almost) the same accent. But in spite of living right on top of the most powerful economic, military, and cultural force in the world, Americans and Canadians are growing further apart, not closer. How has a country of 35 million resisted being culturally, economically, and politically subsumed by a nation with 10 times the population and infinitely greater cultural output? And what happens when that powerful neighbor elects a leader who disregards the norms and values of the liberal world order?

That’s what Michael Adams seeks to answer in his new book, Could It Happen Here: Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit. Adams has been monitoring Canadian political, economic, and social attitudes since the 1990s, back when NAFTA was newly in force and Canadians feared that their country would become indistinguishable from its southern neighbor. At the time, it seemed inevitable. In 2002, a poll of Canadians found that 58 percent of respondents said that they were becoming more like Americans. But when Adams asked the same question in the spring of 2017, only 27 percent of Canadians felt that way.

COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?: CANADA IN THE AGE OF TRUMP AND BREXIT By Michael Adams Simon & Schuster, 192 pp., $24

Much of what he sees taking place between Canada and the U.S. occurs in the context of history: Where Americans are now, Canadians have been before. Canada has already experienced a decade of media bashing, reactionary policy, attacks on science, and self-serving obfuscation by government officials. Because prior to the handsome, selfie-taking Justin Trudeau, Canadians had the Conservative Party and the aggressive Prime Minister Stephen Harper running the country from 2006 to 2015.

Elected by a mix of centrist voters upset with Liberal Party scandals and disenchanted, conservative-leaning suburbanites, Harper was a radical change for Canadians, and as his tenure dragged on, they didn’t like what they saw. What had once been a comparatively staid parliamentary process became an ideological battlefield driven by cultural resentments. In justifying new tough-on-crime legislation, justice minister Rob Nicholson said the government’s policies were instead going to be decided not by the best available data, but by “common sense,” and a rejection of the “educated urban elites who had the ear of government for decades.” One can almost hear the muffled screams from behind the mask of politeness that Canadians always wear.

This anti-elite, anti-information statement set the tone. The conservatives went on to eliminate the long-form census, a data collection tool that was essential to administering Canada’s historically large and interventionist government. The head of Statistics Canada, the government agency that oversees the census, resigned in protest. The census was the bedrock of evidence-based decision making in the country, helping inform policies like where to set electoral boundaries, devote healthcare funding, and countless other areas of governance. Later, the conservatives pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol. The idea was to force the Canadian government to rapidly shrink.