Paradox #1: Familiar Strangers

A persistent paradox with implications for mutual trust and cooperation

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker several years ago in which one diner says to another, “You seem so familiar, but I know we have never met. Are you perhaps Canadian?” This captures a persistent paradox in U.S.–Canada relations: Canadians seem familiar to Americans, yet Americans often know surprisingly little about them.

This dynamic is not unique to international relations. Walk a dog through your neighborhood and people you pass will recognize the dog before they remember you. Familiarity requires little effort; knowledge requires energy and priority. Americans function without knowing much about Canada, and often openly admit their benign ignorance. They assume that if they need to know more—about Canadian politics, markets, or security—they can readily consult a specialist. Yet Canada expertise in the United States remains a niche field. There are not nearly enough experts to meet the need, in my opinion, if not the market’s.

For Canadians, the luxury of benign ignorance does not exist. Traveling to the United States requires a passport, navigating a different currency, airport security rules, and—if ill fortune strikes—either the complexities of the U.S. health care system or the overlapping jurisdictions of federal, state, county, and municipal law enforcement. More significantly, the United States is Canada’s dominant export market; its companies are deeply embedded in U.S.-led supply chains. Canadian consumers are also immersed in U.S. entertainment, news, and sports—cultural familiarity that is imperfectly reciprocated. Few Americans could name as many Canadian musicians as Canadians can American ones.

This asymmetry gives Canadians a kind of cultural advantage. A skilled Canadian can “play American” well enough to put U.S. counterparts at ease. Differences are downplayed. Yet this very capacity reduces incentives for Americans to learn about Canada. If Canadians look and sound somewhat like Americans, why probe deeper?

However, this performance of similarity has limits. At first, Canadians’ politeness works to make Americans feel welcome, a courtesy extended to guests. When Americans are no longer viewed as guests but as “part of the family,” Canadian candor emerges—particularly about U.S. politics, social issues, or cultural behavior. When I surveyed U.S. foreign service officers who had recently completed postings to Canada, several described this shift from courtesy to critique as jarring. They wondered if earlier friendliness had been inauthentic, and a few parents reported their American children had been involved in schoolyard conflicts triggered by unexpectedly blunt criticism from Canadian peers.

Familiarity, once questioned, can feel like deception.

Linguists warn English speakers learning French about faux amis—words that look familiar but have different meanings. The French “actuellement” means “currently,” not “actually.” Canada has its own faux amis for Americans. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms resembles the U.S. Bill of Rights, but its approach to certain liberties differs. Firearms ownership, constitutionally protected in the United States, is not an enumerated right in Canada. The Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination has no full Canadian equivalent; an accused person in Canada may be compelled to testify even to their detriment.

These are not trivial variations. They reflect divergent constitutional histories and debates about liberty, authority, and the role of the state.

Sigmund Freud once referred to “the narcissism of small differences”—the tendency to imbue minor distinctions with outsized significance because they matter to identity. For Canadians, difference from Americans is a central component of nationhood. Many joke that the defining feature of Canadian identity is being “not American.” As a young American scholar, this negative definition annoyed me, provoking the reaction: “What’s wrong with being American?” With time, I came to see that asserting difference from a powerful neighbor is a rational exercise in self-definition.

Seymour Martin Lipset’s classic Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (1991) argued that our national mythologies shape enduring differences—from individualism versus collectivism to religion’s place in public life. When I first encountered Lipset’s work, some of the formulations (“America was born of revolution; Canada of evolution”) seemed glib. They now strike me as shorthand for deeper dynamics with policy implications.

Yet generalizations produce their own hazards. The United States and Canada are large, diverse, and regionally distinct. A Newfoundlander compared with a British Columbian reveals as much variation as an Alaskan compared with a Floridian. The Canadian most Americans “picture” is often an Ontarian—sometimes even a Toronto resident—reflecting the outsized influence of the Laurentian elite described by John Ibbotson and Darrell Bricker. One can find exceptions to any generalization, but national comparisons still resonate because they play a role in shaping group identity: to define “us,” one must also define “not us.”

Paradoxes are not problems to be solved; they are contradictions to be understood. The paradox of Canadians as familiar strangers challenges Americans precisely because it subverts expectations. Rationally, we know Canadians should differ—different history, institutions, policies. Emotionally, surprise at those differences can feel sheepish, even naïve.

This paradox has consequences for trust. Robert Putnam’s work on social capital formation emphasizes that trust enables cooperation. Canadian scholar Paul Pross’s concept of “policy communities” describes how people working in a shared endeavor—like the management of U.S.–Canada relations—develop their own norms, language, and expectations based on repeated interaction. The Canada–U.S. policy community has generally succeeded in overcoming the familiar-stranger paradox. One reason: Canadian personnel in foreign affairs and cross-border issues often remain in their roles for years, while U.S. officials rotate more frequently. Trust built on continuity is more stable than trust requiring continual reconstruction.

Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity argued that economic integration requires deep confidence between partners. Where trust is partial, regulation grows, slowing the movement of capital, goods, and people. In Europe, trust enabled integration up to a point. In North America, trust has been more uneven, particularly regarding Mexico’s political stability and economic institutions. Yet even between Canada and the United States, more similar to one another than to Mexico, there have been limits to mutual trust that can be traced to the paradox of being familiar and strangers at the same time.

Even between the United States and Canada, trust is vulnerable. Looking back, the era from the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement (1989) through early 2017 increasingly resembles a “golden age” of bilateral relations to me. During that period, the United States mostly adhered to rules it helped write rather than exploiting its economic heft to compel Canadian concessions. Since 2017, however, both the Trump and Biden administrations have used trade leverage more aggressively renegotiating NAFTA and employing US economic force in an industrial policy aimed at reshoring investment and innovation from Canada to the United States. These strategies may reflect domestic political imperatives, but they undermine trust nonetheless.

Trust, once impaired, is difficult to restore.

Understanding paradox can help. If Americans recognize that their assumptions of similarity are sometimes misplaced, they may feel less irritation when faced with difference. If Canadians recognize how their downplaying of difference shapes American perception, they may more clearly signal when conversation shifts from courtesy to candor. In short, acknowledging familiarity and difference together—rather than alternating between extremes—could strengthen bilateral expectations and credibility.

Rebuilding trust matters. North America’s global competitiveness depends in part on reestablishing confidence in cross-border economic relationships. Canada and the United States share the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, and each will benefit from cooperation on energy, defense, innovation, and supply chain resilience. Yet success in these endeavors will require a mutual willingness to invest in understanding one another’s politics, pressures, and priorities.

We remain familiar strangers. But understanding the paradox—and its role in shaping trust—can help us become more familiar and less estranged. In U.S.–Canada relations, that is not a small thing. It is the foundation on which prosperity and security must continue to rest.