The past two decades have seen an evolution in Canada’s most important relationship. The clichés about our neurotic obsession with America as the swaggering older sibling have receded amid Canada’s confidence about its place in a globalized world. And, as longtime Washington columnist Lisa Van Dusen writes, after the reality-show nightmare of his predecessor, Joe Biden has been a sanctuary of sanity.

Lisa Van Dusen 

When I first started covering Canada-US relations as a Parliamentary Press Gallery Reporter at 19, Canada’s bilateral relationship with the United States was most definitely still in the “sibling” stage. 

America was the geopolitical superpower, political major league and cultural behemoth we were either trying to emulate or provoke with negative attention-getting behaviour, like the 13-year-old kid brother of a star quarterback. We were younger and smaller, hypersensitive to every glance and mumble, and keeping a running inventory of all the things that made us different. Canadians were notoriously self-righteous about our social safety net, our free health care, our politeness and our notorious self-righteousness.

By the dawn of the millennium, I was working on an American news desk two blocks from the White House when the internet had begun to change everything, putting the world at our fingertips, instantly globalizing impacts with an immediacy that transformed the news cycle from an actual cycle of event/response/coverage inputs to a borderless, organic ecosystem; a feedback loop of interconnected, perpetually alchemizing actions and reactions. That change was nowhere more obvious than in the first viral, presidential impeachment scandal of the fourth industrial revolution, first broken online by the Drudge Report, then published in the Washington Post.

That process of globalizing information and knowledge, communication and culture, telescoped the evolution of the Canada-US relationship by making so many of its components suddenly borderless, shared and simultaneous. One generation after Mel Hurtig and the Council of Canadians railed against the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement—the Mother of NAFTA—as a threat to cultural sovereignty, Schitts Creek swept the Emmys, The Weeknd solo-headlined the Super Bowl halftime show and Margaret Atwood, who fought alongside Hurtig, is a global brand with a fan base that not only transcends borders but defies demographics. Brian Mulroney was right about Canada’s ability to compete.

Canadians no longer fret as much about cultural sovereignty because human beings everywhere no longer consume culture the way they used to. The elements of our culture that make Canada distinctive—Indigenous literature, art, music and dance; virtuoso Quebec filmmakers; the novels of Esi Edugyan, Éric Dupont and Souvankham Thammavongsa; the playlists of Coeur de Pirate, Drake, Justin Bieber, Jully Black and Joni Mitchell—are everywhere, for anyone to consume, anytime. 

That elusive Canadian identity that we’ve been at such pains to define—perhaps in the same way we don’t like to define comedy or love for fear of demystifying it—has not only done quite well as a virtual export in a globalized market, it has thrived. Within the sublime, staccato delinquency of Letterkenny and the small-town pluralism of Schitts Creek, there are 1,000 “That’s so Canadian” moments. In other words, we know it when we see it. 

Our politics—long a source of comparative pride for being less extreme and more manageable than the endless campaign mode and Babel of special interests next door—have been besieged by the same narrative warfare tactics, covert astroturfing and social media lunacy as everyone else’s. We may be smug about Canadian democracy because we simply cannot imagine anything else existing in its place. 

But our contiguous status and inseparable fate guarantee a vested interest in how America fares, especially in this moment of geopolitical challenge. After the reality-show nightmare of his predecessor, Joe Biden has been a sanctuary of sanity—friendly but not obnoxious, knowledgeable but not arrogant, patriotic and worldly. He’s the American neighbour you’ll have a sundowner with at your Siesta Key condo in February or your Ogunquit rental in August and never once argue about politics. 

After nearly a year that began with the incumbent’s mismanagement of a deadly pandemic acting as an existential threat against his own people and ended with his goon squad attacking the US Capitol, the new president next door is now leading the global recovery from COVID-19 and presiding over a normal, competent government. It was a testament to Canada’s political maturity that it emerged from the Trump presidency relatively unscathed. Now, whoever wins the September 20th election, it can continue implementing its own pandemic recovery, dealing with the systemic and security threat of China, defending democracy and preparing for a post-pandemic reality knowing that the president of the United States isn’t one more wicked problem on its plate. 

Biden won’t be calling us names on Twitter or playing the useful idiot while undermining the rules-based international order. His views on trade are more about economic recovery, American workers and domestic politics than about reflexive protectionism, and he won’t be announcing unprovoked retaliatory tariffs in emoji. Biden doesn’t see the world as a treasure map of un-consummated deals—Let’s blackmail Ukraine! Let’s sell out the two-state solution! Let’s buy Greenland! He has nearly five decades worth of institutional knowledge as to how things are supposed to work, so can tell when they’re not working and, more importantly, why. All excellent qualities in both a president and a neighbour.

The bilateral conflict over Iraq that defined the Canada-US relationship during those first post-internet, post-9/11 Bush years declared our post-adolescent independence. The swathe of Canadians who preferred Barack Obama to Stephen Harper created a bilateral bipolarity during the years that followed, and the previously unthinkable daily assault of the Trump presidency on the American public brought out a fine Canadian absence of Schadenfreude. The correction to our assumptions about America’s superiority made us less defensive about our own. It was like seeing the star quarterback stumble in the front door at 3 am, completely off his face. Not a time for gloating.

Two decades into this new century, it seems we’ve outgrown our sibling phase, and we can just be neighbours. As experts from the Greeks to the Gallagher brothers could tell you, “neighbours” can be a much healthier relationship status—less emotionally fraught, less competitive and more constructive; a navigation and negotiation of interests between keepers of adjacent properties.  

And, of course, friends.  

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.