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We have had our own experience in the past with nationalism, only it was left nationalism — foreign investment controls, cultural protectionism, anti-Americanism — and therefore orthodoxy. We have had likewise our own populism, only it was left populism — the NDP, basically — and therefore adorable.

We have also had our revolt of the pitchfork-bearing masses. It was called the Charlottetown referendum, a rejection of elite consensus to match anything in the U.S. or Europe. But that was nearly 25 years ago, and tempers have cooled a little. We had, likewise, our own great national beard-pull over free trade in the 1988 election; that, and the subsequent embrace of the agreement by the Liberals, rather settled the matter.

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But of course: we are what economists call a small open economy. A protectionist movement is easier to imagine in a gargantuan economy like the United States, where barely 10 per cent of GDP is traded. It’s more obviously suicidal where exports account for nearly a third, as here. At the same time, NAFTA does not touch upon our sovereignty to anything like the same degree as the European Union does member states.

Possibly if it did we would not be so sanguine, or so sanctimonious.

Which is true of a lot of things. If Canadians are in a less belligerent mood than our American and European cousins, it may be because we have not endured anything like the series of calamities they have. In contrast to the United States, median incomes in Canada have grown steadily for most of the past 20 years; inequality, whether measured from the top or the bottom, is nothing like as bad. Our housing market did not collapse, nor did our banking sector.