In his 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow (himself born in Quebec) describes what Augie sees to the north while riding a freight train back to Chicago:
…my eyes followed the spin of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor leaves, and a world of great size beyond, of fair clouds and then of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light.
This vision of Canada as a vast horizon of unexplored possibility beyond what is available in the United States can be easy to forget these days, when US president Donald Trump has been referring to our prime minister as “governor” and openly musing about erasing the border and annexing our country. In February, when Justin Trudeau (the Canadian prime minister at that time) was attending an AI summit in Paris, I heard a radio report in which, amid the hubbub, a reporter shouted a question at him: “Is Canada a viable country?”
Now, Trudeau was trying to avoid answering questions, and this one, shouted at him as he walked away, was clearly meant to goad him into a response, but it still spoke volumes about how much power the US president has to shift the frame of discourse around any subject. In December of 2024, no one would have dreamed of asking the prime minister whether Canada was a viable country; by February of 2025, two short months later, Canadian sovereignty had become, if not an open question, at least a matter for debate.
It’s hard to know what Trump’s overall policy ideas are, or even if he has any, but from the outside, it sometimes seems he wants to roll back the entire 20th century. With his fondness for tariffs and his musings about annexing sovereign countries and territories like Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, it looks like Trump could be taking the US back to an era of protectionist trade practices and expansionist, or even imperialist, foreign policy: basically, the United States of the 1890s. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advocating cod liver oil as a cure for measles, even American medical science is returning to the 19th century.
Whatever Trump’s precise intentions are, the plunge from the tremendous Canada of light to the fifty-first state has been dizzying, and it’s no surprise we Canadians are feeling a little bruised. But when Trump implies that Canada is really just an extension of the US, with nothing but an artificial line on a map dividing the two, he’s wrong. Since at least the mid-1800s, when Herman Melville mentioned “the timber man of Canada” in his novel Pierre, and Walt Whitman asked, “Is he Canadian?” in Leaves of Grass, American literature shows that our neighbors to the south have seen us as a separate, distinct nation. Canada’s identity as a separate country is an essential part of the American imagination and of American identity itself, providing American writers with a way to define what their own country is, and what it could and should be.
At its simplest level, Canada appears in American literature as a wilderness escape from a more urbanized United States. Bellow himself, in Augie March, has a rich American take “Canadian hunting trips,” and this ability to get away to the north is a marker of his wealth. Similar ideas are common among mid-century American writers: John Cheever, Frederick Exley, and James Salter all mention salmon fishing in Canada in their work.
The apotheosis of this view of Canada as a wilderness getaway might be Sylvia Plath’s poem “Two Campers in Cloud Country,” subtitled “Rock Lake, Canada” and written about a camping trip she and her husband Ted Hughes took through Canada and the northeastern US in 1959. Far from being a mere extension of the United States, in the poem Canada is radically different, “the last frontier of the big, brash spirit” where the sunset is “a huge splurge of vermilions.” Canada is so powerful it can erase the campers’ notions of civilization, leaving them to “wake blank-brained as water” and “wonder what plates and forks are for.”
Subsequently, this idea of Canada as an untamed wilderness modulated into the view of it as a country full of cottages. Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem “Pax Arcana” refers to her mother’s cottage “at the lake in Canada,” and in her short story “The Thing Around Your Neck,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie mentions a character with “a summer cottage in the Quebec countryside.” And in a related idea, in her novel torpor Chris Kraus describes “vacationing academics” in “the Eastern villages of Quebec.” All of these references conjure an idea of Canada as a pleasant, less urbanized place to get away from the rush of American life.
This points to a more significant role for Canada in the minds of American writers, as a place of political sanctuary from whatever is happening in the US.In torpor, though, Kraus also touches on a different idea of Canada when she describes a family who, in the 1800s, turned their “humble parsonage” in upstate New York into an “important station on the Underground Railroad that relayed fugitives… to freedom, into Canada.”
This points to a more significant role for Canada in the minds of American writers, as a place of political sanctuary from whatever is happening in the US. We hear a mild iteration of this every election cycle, when a few celebrities threaten to move to Canada if the Republican candidate wins. But much more potent versions of this idea run all through American literature, beginning with the so-called “slave narratives,” accounts of Black Americans who fled north to escape the horrors of slavery.
Henry Bibb, to pick just one example, describes Canada as “a land of liberty, somewhere in the North,” where he was “regarded as a man, and not as a thing.” This idea hasn’t gone away: Colson Whitehead echoes it in his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, when Royal tells Cora that “he favored Canada over the west” because “They know how to treat free negroes there.” And Canada played a similar role during the Vietnam War, when Americans fled here to escape the draft. In Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run The Frog Hospital, which takes place partly in the early 1970s, the young male characters make “semiannual treks across the border to Canada to avoid the draft,” and are often referred to as being “in Canada again” or “just back from Canada.”
Canada’s identity as a separate country is an essential part of the American imagination and of American identity itself, providing American writers with a way to define what their own country is, and what it could and should be.What these images of Canada have in common, of course, is that our country is seen as a better place; whether you were escaping slavery or dodging the draft, Canada offered freedom and safety from the worst aspects of American domestic and foreign policy. This idea is even more striking when it comes to the role Canada plays in American “alternate history” novels where the US has fallen into full-on fascism. In Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, the Axis powers have won World War II and the US is now divided into an eastern half, controlled by Nazi Germany, and a western half, controlled by Japan. One character remarks that comedians like Bob Hope “broadcast from Canada,” where they have escaped because “it’s a little freer up there.” With the US under an oppressive regime, Canada offers an escape where comedians still have the freedom to mock those in power.
And in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Canada plays a crucial role in offering sanctuary to Jewish Americans when the US, under President Charles Lindbergh, becomes an increasingly antisemitic fascist state. When it was published in 2004 the novel seemed to be a commentary on George W. Bush’s America, but it has gained new relevance in the Trump era. (That’s literature: “news that stays news,” as Ezra Pound said.)
References to Canada run all through the novel, where it provides “a potential haven from persecution” for American Jews. And when one family, the Tirschwells, decides to flee north, we are told that “the Canadians had also arranged a low-interest loan to pay for the Tirschwells’ move from America,” a vision not only of tolerance, but of a country actively aiding Americans in escaping the persecution being imposed on them by their own country and welcoming them to a new one.
A similar dynamic holds in science fiction. In Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient Parable of the Sower, set in 2025, the social order has collapsed and California has become a dystopian nightmare of raging fires and roving gangs. People are still moving north, though, trying to get to Canada because things are “easier up there.” Curiously, in Butler’s version of 2025 Canadian border security is much stricter, along the lines of what President Trump claims to want: “People get shot every day trying to sneak into Canada,” one character remarks. Be careful what you wish for, I guess? Shooting border crossers isn’t very polite, but it aligns with the vision of other American authors in suggesting that Canada has differences worth protecting.
The common thread running through all these portrayals of Canada is that it is the better angel of the American nature, a necessarily separate country that continues to preserve values of freedom and openness even when the US abandons them during one of its periodic paroxysms of isolationism and xenophobia.
But recently, under the second Trump administration, this idea of Canada as a sanctuary from the US has shifted from the fictional to the actual, from metaphor to literal truth. I have been interested in references to Canada in books by non-Canadians for years, and have spent some time tracking them, but it’s hard to describe the chilling feeling of watching this particular vision of Canada become a reality. It’s not just a few Hollywood celebrities half-joking about moving north.
In mid-March it was widely reported that Ranjani Srinivasan, a graduate student at Columbia on a student visa, had fled to Canada to avoid being arrested by ICE after her visa was abruptly revoked. And about ten days later there was another news story about Jason Stanley, a professor leaving Yale for the University of Toronto because he was afraid of incipient fascism in Trump’s America. Just academic liberal hysteria? Maybe—but Stanley is the author of the book How Fascism Works, so maybe his warnings shouldn’t be too quickly dismissed.
For now, the visions of America in novels like Roth’s and Butler’s remain fiction. But if you look at the beginning of Trump’s second term from the most pessimistic angle, with its attacks on free speech and academic research, and its deportations without due process, you can see alternate history becoming reality, a dystopia being created right before your eyes.
In this fraught climate, Canada could become in reality what it has often been portrayed as in American literature: an alternate history of the United States itself, a country that has remained true to Americans’ most cherished values, even—or especially—when they themselves have not.
