David Tabachnick is a professor of political science at Nipissing University
Through the narrow and cloudy lens of Republican presidential politics, Canada may seem suddenly a foreign country. With the dollar plunging, legalization of marijuana a good bet, and a newly installed Liberal Prime Minister, U.S. conservatives may look across the border and see new threats to their agenda and values.
While the dollar has not yet reached peso territory and four U.S. states have already legalized weed, the real divergence between Canada and conservatives in the U.S. is Justin Trudeau's policy on refugees. Cowed by a nervous public and a GOP-controlled Congress, Barack Obama was only able to muster a pledge to resettle 10,000 Syrians fleeing from civil war compared to our PM's promise to open our country to 25,000, a number of whom have been arriving over the past week.
The U.S President's comparatively feeble proposal makes for an easy applause line on the Republican campaign trail. "I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration," Donald Trump asserted at a rally last month. "If I win, they're going back."
Beltway power brokers have only recently realized that Mr. Trump is no longer simply a punchline for comedians but a very real prospect for the White House. The Liberal government would be wise to pay attention. Tellingly, at another campaign event, Mr. Trump further linked the refugees to illegal Mexican immigrants, calling both groups a "Trojan horse" for terrorists. For Mr. Trump and his supporters, a proposed wall along the Mexican border goes part and parcel with his recent plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
While nowhere near approaching the jingoistic rhetoric infecting the GOP nomination process, Canada's refugee policy has not been immune to similar criticism. Following the Paris attacks, Mr. Trudeau admitted that growing questions about security demanded a new timeline for resettlement, vaguely justified as an attempt "to do the right thing the right way."
In other words, because there is just enough truth behind Mr. Trump's bombast, there may also be enough fuel to feed U.S. anxiety that its northern neighbour is becoming a safe haven for violent jihadists. To date, we've only had a momentary glimpse of this idea when the failed candidate Scott Walker attempted to outdo Mr. Trump by musing about building an even more massive border wall between the U.S. and Canada; a practical impossibility but completely in line with the deepest fears of Republican voters. Unfortunately, these fears could prompt a return to the dark period after 9/11: beginning with Clinton-era UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke calling Canada "a Club Med for terrorists" and followed by more than a decade of negotiations on how people and goods would travel safely across the border – something Canadian businesses can ill afford a repeat of.
Things could be even worse this time. Fifteen years of "the war on terrorism" has provoked a disturbing nativist turn in much of the U.S., where all foreigners are distrusted. Canada's reputation for tolerance and embrace of multiculturalism, backed by the same values that support the Liberal's refugee policy, may now seem both alien and frightening to many Americans.
In the same way Mexico has long suffered from American border anxiety, Canada may soon experience the same.