You may remember your liberal friends threatening to move to Canada after George W. Bush was re-elected. But something surprising has happened in the last few years: Conservatives have fallen in love with Canada. The conservative journalist John Fund wrote in National Review this month that Canada is becoming “more American than America.” That’s the same John Fund who wrote a 1995 Wall Street Journal staff editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the third world.” A lot can change in two decades.

In August, when Burger King announced its intention to acquire the Canadian coffee-and-doughnuts chain Tim Hortons and reincorporate up north, The Journal editorialized that the United States should focus on copying Canada’s attractive corporate tax policies, not on holding American companies captive. “Canada has become a far more business-friendly tax jurisdiction than the U.S.,” America’s leading conservative editorial page wrote. “The Burger King deal also signals the continuing success of Canada’s historic move toward open markets and economic growth.”

The libertarians Chris Edwards and Amity Shlaes (and Mr. Fund) have urged the United States to copy Canada’s tax-free savings accounts, which are substantially more flexible than I.R.A.s. Wonky conservative skeptics of comprehensive immigration reform, such as David Frum and Reihan Salam, like to point to Canada’s “points system,” which favors high-skilled immigrants and discourages family-based chain migration, as a model to imitate. All sorts of Republican politicians talk about Canada as a reliable partner for fossil-fuel-based energy, eager to extract oil from its tar sands and ship it to us through the Keystone pipeline if only we would let them.

But perhaps most of all, conservatives like Canada as an example of “expansionary austerity,” a country that grew its economy while slashing public spending and debt. Squeezed by high interest rates, a left-of-center government instituted big spending cuts in the 1990s; as a result, Canada’s level of public expenditure as a share of its economy has fallen to match America’s. Fred Barnes, the executive editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote several thousand words of praise for Canada’s fiscal restraint in 2011, under the headline “Lessons From Canada.”