In recent weeks, Canada has been in the news — the U.S. news, the world news — for several reasons. It was a good time to talk to David Frum, as it always is, on a host of subjects. He is my guest on Q&A, here. David has authored many books, and he has written countless articles. I first knew him in the mid-1990s. I would throw topics at him the way cocktail-lounge patrons throw requests at the pianist: “Play ‘Moon River.’” “David, tell me what I should know about Medicare Part B.”

He was born and raised in Canada. His father, Murray, was a prominent businessman and philanthropist, and his mother, Barbara, was one of the leading journalists and broadcasters in the country. David went to Yale and Harvard. He became a U.S. citizen in the 2000s. But he has a foot in Canada, or several toes.

At the beginning of our Q&A, I ask him about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has announced his resignation. I will paraphrase what David says (though closely):

The Justin Trudeau government, which started with such bright hopes, has collapsed into unpopularity. Trudeau’s party, the Liberal Party, which has been the dominant party in Canada for most of the past 100 years, is on the verge of a historic wipeout.

In the past 20 years, we have had two major economic catastrophes: the 2007–08 financial crisis and the pandemic. Canada came out of the first crisis very well, and the second crisis very badly. Canadians may not know exactly why Justin Trudeau is to blame, but they strongly sense that he is to blame, and now he’s about to be punished.

Housing prices are soaring out of reach in the parts of Canada where the jobs are. Crime is up, and crime has never been a Canadian problem. The immigration system, which was once a model to the world, is off the rails. And, of course, there is now the threat of a trade war with the United States.

Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, was prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1984 (with a brief period in opposition). What are the essential differences between father and son? Again, I paraphrase Mr. Frum:

The elder Trudeau was a ferocious man, an intense man, personally courageous. He was not always popular. He had strong views, but those views did not add up to a tidy ideological package, of the kind we would recognize today. And his views were always backed by the steely personality, and a strong sense of Canada’s place in the world.

Justin Trudeau is the opposite. Probably the thing he’ll be most remembered for is the statement that Canada could be the “first post-national state.” He had no sense of Canada as a country worth defending. 

And his persona is the opposite of steely. He’s like one of those fluffy kittens you see in toilet-paper ads. He’s very good-looking, very amenable. He can be very appealing. But to encounter him must be like encountering a giant fluffy Cottonelle ball, with nothing on the inside except vanity.

Another thing:

Justin Trudeau was very ideological. That’s a very unusual thing in Canadian politics. And he adopted the whole progressive package on everything from white guilt to massive intervention in the economy to “Our friends are bad, our enemies are good.” Canadians grew more and more weary of that package.

In our Q&A, Mr. Frum and I talk a lot about Canada and the United States, and Canadian pride, and affronts to that pride by us Americans. David gives assorted history lessons — for instance:

One of the things that Americans forget is the extent to which the American Revolution was a civil war within the British North American colonies. If you were living in 1775, the idea that there would be a United States was not at all clear. There was a string of colonies starting in Barbados and going up to Halifax (bypassing Florida, which was Spanish). The idea that there would be two or more countries was far from obvious.

David and his wife, Danielle, have a home in Ontario. It is in an area settled by refugees from the American Revolution. They were New Yorkers. The revolution came, and they stayed loyal to the crown. They thought they were patriots too. They were faithful to their notion of what it meant to be a British North American. They fought and lost.

The Frums live on a road called “Loyalist Parkway.” The Canadian equivalent of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) is the UEL: “United Empire Loyalists.”

Yesterday, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs — Republican-led, of course — put out a tweet. One of those chest-thumping statements, supporting Donald Trump’s imperial ambitions: Canada should be the 51st state, etc. The Republicans said, “We tamed the West, won two World Wars,” and so on. (They have since deleted their tweet.)

David Frum says,

Everyone in Canada knows that Canada was in those two wars a lot earlier than the United States. The U.S. enters the First World War in April of 1917; they don’t enter the second until December ’41. Canada was in both from the beginning. In Canada, there is a national pride that goes with close, cordial relationships with the United States but that does not like to be insulted. It’s never leadership to insult people.

I remember something that Bill Buckley said in the debate over the Panama Canal treaties: You have to bear in mind that people in other countries have patriotism, too. We Americans aren’t the only ones with national pride. Every people has some desire for dignity.

Think what the Ukrainians are doing to save their country, their independence, their right to exist.

Further in our podcast, Frum and I talk about international trade: NAFTA and the rest. Republicans once took great pride in North American trade, and trade in general. They knew it was good for America and everyone else. But the GOP has undergone a stark transformation.

Up in Canada, they have a Conservative leader named “Pierre Poilievre,” who, despite that name, is from the West: Calgary, Alberta. He is set to be the next prime minister. A great influence on him was Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom. That is good news for Canada (from where I stand).

Says David Frum,

He is the best debater in the House of Commons. He’s a career politician. He started as an intern, became a parliamentary aide, ran for Parliament. He has been nothing but a politician, and he is a very effective one. He’s a person of libertarian sensibilities, but he also has some of the modern populism. He has been a very effective organizer.

I think he will find it very difficult to deal with the Trump challenge, because there are factions of his party that are Trump-sympathetic, even as the electorate in general is Trump-unsympathetic.

Things could be exciting, up north.

In our Q&A, we talk about other issues — the loaded concept of “settler colonialism,” for example, and the jarring accusation of “genocide” — but I have typed long enough. Readers should hear David Frum for themselves: again, here. At the end of our conversation, I ask David for some books — some good books about Canada: historically, politically, and spiritually, if you will.

He starts with a book that is not about Canada at all: The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, by Geoffrey Blainey. You can learn about Canada from this book as well, says David — though Canada has experienced a “tyranny of nearness.”

Sir John A. Macdonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885, by Patrice Dutil. The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited, by Peter Brimelow. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, by Margaret Atwood. And after we were off the air, David mentioned two books about Canada in the world wars: Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War, by Shane B. Schreiber, and Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day, by Marc Milner.

A lot of people don’t think of Canada as fascinating, or even interesting. But . . . Regardless, I think of something that Charles Krauthammer told me, about Canada (where he was raised): “one of the freest, most liberal, most humane countries in the history of the world.” Amen.