I’m putting America on a shelf, for now. I think it has reached a particular inflection point. Maybe America as we knew it is over. Maybe there’s still hope. I don’t know. But for the moment, I’m turning my attention to my second country, the one I now call home. Because I think we have seen enough to take some lessons northward and do a bit of self-reflection. If you’ll give me the grace of hearing me out, I have some recommendations.

1. Don’t get complacent. It would be easy and tempting to believe that what happened down there couldn’t possibly happen here. And while there are structural and cultural differences that may offer some protection, there are also a great number of similarities that could take Canada to a similar place. We can’t put our heads in the sand and simultaneously put ourselves on a pedestal. That’s a recipe for rupture.

2. Stop voting on vibes. Demand substance from politicians. Releasing a fully costed platform used to be a routine feature of Canadian elections. That’s apparently no longer the case. More and more frequently, parties slip out vague and sometimes mathematically impossible platforms, like an afterthought, just days before elections, leaving little room for dissection and discussion. So what are we voting for?

America played this game. Donald Trump’s greatest strength, in my opinion, is that he simply validated voters’ feelings of frustration, rather than providing much detail about what he would actually do in office. He traded on anger. And the rest of his party followed. He made general statements about his policy intentions, but was sparse on details. Even the recent tariff announcements were a mystery to everyone around him until right before the press conference.

This approach is frustrating and insulting. We should give ourselves more credit and demand detail so that we can make informed decisions at the ballot box.

3. Don’t ignore growing divides. In America, for decades, there has existed a huge divide between urban and rural areas. I see the same here in Canada. I’ve lived in both. The prospects of rural dwellers and even the worldview are worlds apart from those of urban folks. To a certain extent, that may always be the case. But we can’t ignore serious structural inequalities.

Having lived without healthcare in the US, I truly value Canada’s healthcare system. It must be guarded and maintained as the precious but dynamic thing it is, not neglected or treated as something static to be whittled away at. I could not get a family doctor in rural Ontario. The lack of access in rural areas is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. Rising housing costs that threaten the security of those in rural and urban areas cannot be downplayed.

In America, when we started seriously talking about very real inequalities with respect to race or sex, the people who also experience inequality due to geography and class felt ignored. And when Trump validated their anger, it didn’t matter much what else he said or stood for. They were hooked on the outrage. I’m still trying to figure it out–somehow we need to be able to talk about all of the forms of inequality, and it’s hard to make everyone feel heard in the same breath. But we certainly can’t pretend that some issues aren’t actually issues.

4. Guard truth with everything we have. The discussion of foreign influence in Canadian elections has become politicized. That needs to stop now. The way that foreign governments are interfering in Western elections isn’t about advancing one candidate over another. It’s about sewing discord and chaos. It’s not a political issue; it’s one of national security. Canadian parties need to work together to properly regulate the spread of disinformation on social media in particular, as well as the rise of faux media sources. 

Balancing free speech and the need to protect truth is a tricky act. But we can’t ignore that challenge just because it’s hard. Even having the conversation can itself be a protection, because it promotes critical thinking. We should be talking about the media. What does it mean to be public vs. corporately owned? What does real, investigative journalism look like vs. when an internet-savvy personality just compiles a collection of ideas into a theory? And how are we sharing all of this? The techno-oligarchy outed themselves when they sat on stage behind Trump at his inauguration. We cannot ignore this and must push back aggressively. 

5. Celebrate Canada but resist isolationism and nationalism. I hope that Canada, and the rest of the world, does not simply respond to America’s isolationism by itself become more isolationist. America will be a sinking ship, trying to suck everything else down with it. But when we remember that America’s strength was all about alliances and deepening its influence through the exercise of soft power, a lesson to take away is not how to be “number one,” but how to build a collective success through cooperation and shared purpose. A lot of analysis has talked recently about the end of the Pax Americana. But the Pax Americana wasn’t just about America. It was about everyone else involved, too. It might be more complicated, but I think the rest of the world can move on together, even without America, to preserve something of that order.

6. Don’t take fundamental aspects of functioning democracy, such as rule of law, for granted. The US is quickly seeing these pieces of its democracy eroded as Trump tests the limits of his authority. It is scary to see how much of these conventions rest on everyone’s respect for them, rather than any mechanisms of enforcement. But authoritarians seem to work from a pretty common playbook. We can learn the language of the politician who wants to remove the limits on his potential power, and see these as the threats to democracy that they are.

7. Embrace change. America loves its history, mythologizing and revering its origins to the point that America sees itself as a fixed ideal. America got stuck in this reverence instead of seeing potential in the future. Humanity faces an existential crisis with the environmental destruction we have wrought on our natural world. The current economic system has created this crisis, as well as an astronomical wealth gap that has made many people lose hope of improving their lives. Faced with these fears, many Americans wanted to fall back on the mythological past. While I generally abhor the self-helpy tendency to put a positive spin on everything, in this case, I think we have to regard our crisis as an opportunity to imagine a better future for everyone. America, Canada, any country–we must recognize our nations as dynamic, growing things. Every challenge is an opportunity to layer onto these ideals, or improve upon weaknesses, rather than a threat to that fixed ideal.

8. Continue the challenging and painful process of Reconciliation. After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission listed its calls to action, I felt excited and hopeful. It seemed to me like Canada’s discussion of its shameful colonial history was more advanced than in the US, despite having a similar legacy of genocide against indigenous people. 

But in recent years, those actions have stalled, or have even been branded as controversial. Similar to how America’s attempts to grapple with its legacy of slavery have come under fire, some Canadians are meeting the discomfort of reconciliation with defensiveness and resistance rather than humility and grace. 

As in America, Canada’s colonial history is a collective trauma, not just for the victims but also for the perpetrators. The ugliness in America that has found its expression in Trump is an outgrowth of its unreconciled history. Canada’s violent colonial history will remain as a rot within the heart and soul of this country if we do not adequately address it. 

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I do hope that enough of America’s democratic skeleton can remain to carry us beyond and build us back up from Trump’s destruction. I do hope. But while we remain firmly in the moment of the fall, I think the most hopeful thing we can do is try to avoid the same happening elsewhere, including Canada.

What do you think?