Canada Can No Longer Pretend To Be Better Than US At Anything

In a healthy nation, Canada’s loss to the United States in the 2026 Olympic gold medal game would be only a disappointment. In Canada today, it feels like a verdict.

When a people that has systematically emptied politics, culture, and education of any serious aspiration to excellence discovers that even its last unquestioned superiority, hockey, no longer belongs to it, the sting is not merely athletic; it is spiritual. The game revealed what we have been at pains to avoid: Reality has returned, and it has no patience for our stubborn ideology.

For decades, Canadian nobility and self-respect have been constructed in large part against the United States. We consoled ourselves that we were more decent, more humane, more peaceful, and more equal. All this while quietly dependent on American power, American military protection, American capital, and American innovation. Our anti-Americanism became a kind of ersatz patriotism: a cheap, risk-free moral superiority available to everyone. But such a posture only works as long as there remains at least one area in which we can plausibly claim to be best. That was hockey.

This is why President Donald Trump’s much-derided warning cut so close to the bone. He said that if Canada allowed itself to fall into China’s orbit, the communist regime would “terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.” The statement was ridiculed in the Canadian press as vulgar, hyperbolic, and “so American.” Yet Trump grasped a truth our own ruling class cannot utter: that for Canada, hockey is not a game but the last living symbol of national excellence.

And now, even here, reality has intervened. We lost to the United States on the largest stage and in the one domain in which our superiority felt metaphysically guaranteed. The anti-American myth met the American scoreboard, and the myth lost. 

This defeat is not an isolated humiliation. It caps a few weeks in which we learned that Canada has become “poorer than Alabama,” that our celebrated Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) regime helped murder an otherwise largely healthy 26-year-old with Type I diabetes and depression, that we suffered one of the worst mass shootings in our history, and that our prime minister prefers posturing against our freedom-loving friends while sliding toward communist despotism.

These are not scattered misfortunes. They are the symptoms of a single disease: a nation that has chosen flattering opinions over hard truths for so long that it no longer recognizes the difference.

We believed we could construct a politics of boundless compassion without the discipline of production and responsibility. We are now shocked to discover we are poorer than a state at which we were trained to sneer. We believed we could absolutize individual “choice” without any philosophy of the soul, and we are astonished that this leads to the bureaucratic facilitation of suicide for the young and despairing. We believed we could abandon the language and ideas of character, vice, and virtue for that of “trauma” and “systemic” explanations, and we feign surprise when violence erupts that our therapeutic categories can neither contain nor explain. We believed we could condemn America and court China while never confronting the simple question of which regime is more friendly to human freedom.

In each case, ideology promised to protect us from the rude judgmental reality our ancestors took for granted. In every case, reality has come back, unsoftened and unimpressed.

Hockey now joins this list. On the ice, you cannot hide behind intentions, commissions, or moral preening. You either score or you do not. You condition your body and your will, or you lose to someone who did. The rink is one of the last places where equality of outcome is openly rejected and excellence still honored. That is why this loss hurts. It touches the last place where we allowed ourselves to believe in striving, merit, and unapologetic victory.

This should be taken as a final warning. Our anti-Americanism has become a narcotic that dulls the pain of our own decline. It allows us to dismiss every uncomfortable comparison with a smug sneer about guns, Trump, or greed, while ignoring the true scoreboard on wealth, seriousness, and the courage to name and distinguish friends and enemies.

Reality does not care about our national mythology. It does not care that we feel virtuous. Reality comes and hits you in the face whether you like it or not. It just did: on the balance sheet, in the hospital room, at the crime scene, in foreign capitals, and finally, on the ice.

It is time to wake up. To go on as before by soothing ourselves with anti-American platitudes — worshipping compassion without courage, rights without duties, and choice without truth — is to accept slow national suicide under the cover of moral satisfaction. 

Our persistent anti-Americanism has been nourished, in part, by the belief that whatever else may be said, we were superior on the ice. To lose, at this moment and to that rival, is therefore to be confronted with undeniable judgment. Ideology has its limits, and reality is one of them. 

Dimpee Brar is the current Director of Engagement for Allies for a Strong Canada. Her co-author and brother, Takdeer Brar, is a consultant with Earnscliffe Strategies. He has served on numerous election campaigns in both Canada and the United States. Most recently, he served as the GOTV Chair for MP Jamil Jivani’s election campaigns. Their work can be found in the Toronto Sun.