A prophet from our past predicted Canada’s present. Will we listen to his rallying cry for our future?

David Moscrop is a politics writer, author, and editor at McClelland & Stewart, which is reissuing an abridged edition of Mel Hurtig’s The Vanishing Country.

Canada is deep into a trade war with the United States. Our economic well-being is on the line, and so is our sovereignty. But at the heart of the conflict is a contradiction. We seek to manage threats from our neighbour, worried that it is not only unreliable, but dangerous – and yet the Canadian government still wants a permanent free-trade arrangement and a tariff-free relationship with the Yankees. Terrible food, and such small portions.

Our dirty national secret, which few dare mention, is that in all probability, if the U.S. were to drop tariffs tomorrow, so would we; if they were to offer terms for a renewed USMCA, we’d likely take it. In the last quarter of 2024, around 76 per cent of our exports went stateside in a trade relationship worth roughly a trillion dollars a year. We can’t afford to deal with the U.S., but we can’t afford not to. Since the cost of not dealing with them is exponentially higher than the cost of dealing with them, we deal with them. We’ve hitched our wagon, placed our bet, and piled all our eggs into the American basket.

So we’ve fallen into a trap. But this is a problem that was diagnosed long ago by, among others, an author and bookseller.

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For decades, the late activist Mel Hurtig warned that Canadians were selling our sovereignty to the Americans with trade deals, cultural integration, and national defence association. He published The Vanishing Country: Is It Too Late to Save Canada? in which he argued that we had foolishly gone all-in with the Yankees and were paying the price with poor growth, diminished sovereignty, and a loss of national identity. That was in 2002.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Mr. Hurtig’s warning reads as prescient, timely and more urgent than ever. A new, abridged edition of The Vanishing Country now bears the subtitle “The Sellout of Canada,” reflecting the book’s comprehensive history of how Canada set itself up to be at the mercy of President Donald Trump and his increasingly erratic and ignorant whims. The book’s critical assessment of our trade and policy failures stands, and stands the test of time, as does Mr. Hurtig’s blow-by-blow history of the decades that led to the challenges we’re facing today. Reading it is like watching a horror movie you’ve now seen all the way through, knowing where the monster hides, how it stalks and maims and kills its prey. You want to scream at the protagonist – us – stop! Don’t! You fools, can’t you see what you’re doing!?

But Mr. Hurtig was an optimist. He also argued that despite decades of national capture by the Americans at the behest of political and business elites, we could still save our country – and our sovereignty – and preserve ourselves as a distinct polity with control over trade, defence, social policy, cultural expression, industrial strategy, and more. The Vanishing Country is not a book about hopelessness or foregone conclusions; it wasn’t in 2002, and it’s not in 2026. And so the reissue of the book is on shelves in the spirit of informing and inspiring this generation to take on a new but familiar fight.

Then, as now, Mr. Hurtig offers Canadians a way out of a predictable mess, of what he calls a “Dependency, Vulnerability, and Mythology” surrounding the Canada-U.S. trade and cultural relationship. As he argues: “Trade is good. Exports are important. But neither is supposed to be the raison d’être of our existence as a nation.” He cautions readers not to overestimate or exaggerate exports, as important as they are, and sell out the country in their name. We didn’t listen. Today, we might.

When The Vanishing Country was published, more than 80 per cent of Canada’s economic output and consumption was domestic, our own. That meant about a fifth of our economy by gross domestic product was export-based. By 2025, that number was about 30 per cent. Exports are more important now than they were in 2002 – and certainly more important than in 1988 or 1994 – but that shouldn’t distract us from the fact that domestic trade and industrial capacity is essential, the beating heart of the nation.

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It’s a mistake to think the economic nationalists of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and beyond were opposed to trade. They weren’t. They were opposed to unfettered free trade that sold Canadian sovereignty and manufacturing down the river, and they were opposed to relying too much on the Yankees, and on their terms. Today, the Carney ministry has found itself needing to boost domestic production and exchange, and diversify trade. On the former, results are modest so far, but on the latter goal, we’re seeing some movement. In 2025, total exports to the U.S. were down 3.7 per cent while exports to the European Union were up 16.4 per cent, 50 per cent to Britain, and 11.8 per cent to China, among other growing export markets such as Australia, Singapore and Indonesia.

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Those numbers demonstrate a promising trend, but the lesson from The Vanishing Country is that Canada shouldn’t make the same mistake it did in the 1980s and 1990s by developing an overreliance on any single trading partner or jumping into comprehensive trade deals that erode domestic capacities and place unreasonable limits on sovereignty. That way lies madness – and vulnerability. While there are important areas of co-operation that exist among countries, such as minimal taxation agreements or climate action, full-on integration across borders ought to be a non-starter.

Writing in the final chapter of the book, “Let’s Take Back Our Country,” Mr. Hurtig asks what Canada’s “big advantage” is when facing a domineering America. “It’s the fact that there are many, many millions more proud Canadians who love their country than there are Americanizers who couldn’t care less if Canada survives,” he concludes. His claim is truer today than it was back then.

That’s encouraging news, and we ought to build on it. At the end of The Vanishing Country, Mr. Hurtig challenged us to “never, never give in to those who are selling out Canada,” and warned while we might fail in a struggle to assert our sovereignty and rebuild our country, it would be a greater failure to not take up the fight. Today, that fight is more important than ever, and the stakes are accordingly high, as are the risks. But so too is the energy, purpose, and passion of those who see better days ahead for this country. And the good news is, we have a timeless guide at the ready.