J.D. Vance’s Best Friend, the Canadian Politician, Has No Comment
J.D. Vance’s best friend has no comment.
In truth, J.D. Vance’s best friend really doesn’t want anyone to know he’s J.D. Vance’s best friend — not now that he’s running for Canadian Parliament in an industrial city on the shores of Lake Ontario. For three consecutive days in late April, I arrive at J.D. Vance’s best friend’s campaign headquarters, on Division Street in the hardscrabble Ontario village of Bowmanville, and I’m told that J.D. Vance’s best friend is most definitely aware of my two prior visits. From behind a locked door, a polite older volunteer informs me that if J.D. Vance’s best friend has any comments to offer he will be sure to contact me.
Such is the plight of a Canadian politician named Jamil Jivani. A Yale law classmate of Vance and his wife, Usha; the son of a Kenyan father and white Canadian mother; and the product of underprivileged circumstances, Jivani had been parachuted into the safe district east of Toronto in good measure because of his connections to the vice president. Like Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Jivani has written a memoir of childhood hardship, one filled with uncheckable tales of youthful illiteracy and near brushes with violence, only his book purporting to portray young male rage disappeared without a trace; both tales read like special-need pleas for preferential treatment from an Ivy League school.
A few months before my arrival, Jivani’s Canada First, MAGA-adjacent Conservative party had been heading for a landslide victory, offering tax cuts and anti-woke policies, along with juvenile name-calling. But then Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada and derisively referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “governor,” offending the entire nation. In short order, Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian automobiles and steel and aluminum, in blatant breach of the treaty Trump himself had negotiated in his first term. Casting wolfish eyes on Canada as America’s “51st state,” Trump became the most despised figure in the country — along with his bearded sidekick, Vice President J.D. Vance. Editor’s picks
For reasons that seem to careen from grandiose designs on being a Mount Rushmore-worthy historical figure to schoolyard bullying, Trump thus transformed Canadian politics — and society. Trump’s degrading and ridiculous attacks instantly incited a 25-point swing to the center-left Liberal party, obliterating the huge polling advantage of a Conservative leader with an uncanny resemblance to a young Richard Nixon — the slicked-back hair, sly smile, bottomless grievance. By contrast, the new Liberal leader, Mark Carney, was a former head of the Banks of Canada and England, an economist with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and a history of dealing with the catastrophe of Brexit. His quiet demeanor and no-bullshit approach seemed to match the rising sense of outrage and defiance in Canada — or at least that is what the polls show.
Incredibly, no major American political figure came to the defense of Canada, to the dismay of my homeland, nor did business or union leaders, as American institutions cowered and curled into submission. For decades Canada has been America’s closest ally and friend, but in a matter of days the country embarked on a new and astounding anti-American trajectory, one that is likely have global implications, as the image of Trump and the United States morph into a singular authoritarian, untrustworthy, impulsive, belligerent, and uniquely unappealing brand.
THE STRETCH OF EXURBIA east of Toronto that Jivani is running to represent is much like Springfield, USA, the anywhere fictional city from The Simpsons, not the unfortunate real Springfield in Ohio that Vance falsely claimed was populated by pet-eating migrants — a transparently racist statement that Vance’s best friend overlooked, despite his mixed-race heritage.
The smokestack from a nuclear reactor looms over the landscape of this section of Lake Ontario, and the strip malls and row after row of new tract housing could be the outskirts of many American cities — but with an epic and telling difference. In Canada, diversity isn’t a dirty word or dog-whistle slogan, at least not for the vast majority, no matter how controversial the terms DEI and “woke” might be. The population in the city of Oshawa and nearby Bowmanville is as diverse as can be imagined, the old-school Ontario red-brick farmhouses flanked by Syrian Christian basilicas and Muslim Welfare Centers and mega-churches. Millions of immigrants have arrived in Canada in the past decade, causing an acute affordable housing shortage, but the closest a political party comes to race signaling is the unctuous Conservative leader’s constant references to the “rampant crime wave” that supposedly envelopes Canadians — fear that I failed to detect once in my fellow Canadians.
With J.D. Vance acting as Trump’s attack dog, conjuring the world’s lone super power as somehow a victim of scheming countries like Canada, Jivani obviously needed to downplay his close association with his best buddy. Normally an eager cultural warrior on social media, Jivani ducked the press to avoid questions about Vance, although for years the connection had been his sole claim to fame.
Along the new four-lane highways lacing the countryside, with countless plots pegged for imminent development, there are Asian supermarkets and fast-food joints and young immigrant families strolling in the new tract housing — some wearing turbans, some burqas, some Canadian flag T-shirts saying “Elbows Up.” In Dam Foods, a Jamaican store selling goat meat and oxtail around the corner from Jivani’s headquarters, the workers haven’t heard of the candidate, nor has he visited the store, at least to their knowledge — but the shop is a visible minority presence in a down-on-its-luck community in the midst of a cultural transformation.
Closer to the city of Toronto, the iconic General Motors facility has been reduced to a single operating plant, a few thousand employees turning out 600 pickups every day, but Trump’s tariffs threaten to destroy what remains of the Canadian automobile industry — and thereby decimate the city of Oshawa. Once, union autoworkers on both sides of the border shared a brotherhood, fighting for better conditions with a common cause, but Trump has managed to turn working-class brother against brother — while billionaires receive tax cuts.
In Oshawa, the leader of the local outpost of the United Auto Workers laments the “absolutely bizarre” tariffs imposed on the industry and notes Jivani’s connection to Vance. But what most distresses the autoworkers is the sense of helplessness. They have no way to catch the ear of the American government, to plead their case: Canadian autoworkers are highly paid, with excellent benefits, not the low-wage workers that the car companies have migrated to as they abandoned the Rust Belt on both sides of the border; Canadian workers are not destroying American auto jobs, as Trump continually asserts, but part of a highly functional, integrated system — like the two nations. If only the union in Oshawa had a way of getting word of their plight to the powers that be in Washington, I’m told.
But there is someone who could make that call — their local Conservative candidate Jamil Jivani could easily pick up the telephone and call his best friend, the vice president, on their behalf, if he wanted to. But he hasn’t, it would seem. Perhaps Jivani asking Vance to intervene would be pointless; perhaps he’s afraid of riling up his best friend; perhaps advocating for the autoworkers in Oshawa doesn’t serve his personal political ambition; perhaps Oshawa is just a stepping stone for a politician with his eyes on bigger prizes as a Christian nationalist; perhaps the good people of Oshawa are on their own. Vance may well consider himself above the concerns of a few sad-sack Canadians.
The only thing that can be said with certainty is this: J.D. Vance’s best friend has no comment.
“I hear he’s a slippery bastard,” one worker emerging from the afternoon shift at the General Motors plant tells me when I ask what he knows about Jamil Jivani.
FRIENDSHIPS AND FAMILIES by the millions crisscross the border, Canadian and American relationships built up over centuries of coexistence and co-prosperity and adversity. For most every American I know, Trump’s incessant attacks on Canada are a kind of joke — he can’t be serious, of course, they say: No one actually thinks that the United States should annex Canada. Except Trump, as the friendless president repeats over and over again. But the funny thing about dismissing a serious threat is that when no one else is laughing, it slowly becomes clear that the joke isn’t really funny. It follows that laughing at your own jokes, over time, turns you into the joke.
The friendship between Jivani and Vance appears to be sincere, as does the Canadian’s connection with Usha Vance, as Jivani offered a Bible reading at their wedding. When Jivani fell ill with cancer, he went to live with the Vances in Ohio, and when he was well enough to work again, his pal J.D. hired him to run his failed nonprofit that was supposed to save Appalachia. Vance also introduced Jivani to his book agent, securing a deal for his acolyte’s truly unreadable and unread memoir.
When Jivani was nominated to run for Parliament, the Conservative party appeared giddy at the prospect of having a member so closely connected with an American power player. But all that was long before Trump declared unilateral economic war on Canada — precisely the kind of unprovoked unilateral conflict he’d promised to avoid during the campaign, this one straining the credulity of even the most maniacal MAGA zealot.
Like J.D. and Usha Vance, Jivani is the product of a small law school circle revolving around Yale law professor Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother — a book that advocates authoritarian parenting in pursuit of ruthless ambition. Yale’s charmed trio from the benighted class of 2013 — all ravenously hungry for power, no matter what prior beliefs they might have held, like their supremely arrogant classmate Vivek Ramaswamy — appear unburdened by personal connections or loyalty to anything other than their own aspirations. Friendship with their transgender Yale law classmate Sofia Nelson, for example, was abandoned as inconvenient by Vance.
In this way, Jivani’s silence about his best friend makes sense. But now that friendship is reaching the true pressure point — for Jivani and for Vance, as it is for Canada and America. History is littered with former friendships undone by the lust for power — most particularly in Europe during the gangster 1930s, as preposterous as the analogy might sound — and so it might be for Jivani as he is forced to confront the reality that his best friend has sworn fealty to a president bent on the destruction of Canada.
FOR EXPAT DUAL NATIONALS like me, one of millions of Canadians living mostly invisibly in the United States, Trump’s assault on Canada has presented a new and unwanted set of dilemmas. If America’s policy is to actively harm my homeland, then what does that say about American society? There are many personal analogies for the U.S.-Canada relationship — a marriage, a friendship, differently sized siblings — but geography is destiny, and there is no way to reconfigure that reality. If America First means America Only, then how is it possible to ignore the assault on my history and beliefs and basic sense of decency? Unless it is all Trump’s passing fancy, as so many Americans seem to believe, like a narrative in a professional wrestling fantasy — in which case, who are the fools?
For many Canadians, Trump’s mystifying admiration for Vladimir Putin takes on sinister dimensions when it is applied to Canada, as Canadian politicians confront the implications of the president’s ongoing and seemingly very serious assault on the existence of the nation’s sovereignty. The questions multiply: How to strike a deal with a man who breaks his word so easily? How much damage can be done in four years? What are Canadians to make of the appalling lack of allies advocating for Canada inside the American political system? Horror stories of a newly politicized border run rife in Canada, with rumors of the perils of crossing into the United States as tourists raising an unthinkable question: What if America is becoming a permanent menace?
Or, as we say in Canada, in reply to the admonition to not take Trump literally: seriously?
THE TERM OF ART in economics is this: Beggar thy neighbor. It is used to describe a predatory approach to global trade: Impoverish your neighbor, the theory goes, and thus enrich yourself. The strategy was all the rage during the trade wars of the Great Depression, so that provides a sense of how it has worked historically — including the world war that followed. A variation of the zero-sum game usually ascribed to Trump, the difference is that beggaring thy neighbor requires an active and malicious campaign to harm your otherwise potentially cooperative next-door neighbor — risking the chance of retaliation, but also hazarding lasting disgust and estrangement.
For Trump, the amorality of this kind of ruthlessness is second nature. Beggaring thy neighbor is standard operating procedure in New York City real estate, with landlords getting rid of rent-control tenants or rival developers by way of relentless wars of attrition: Make your neighbor’s life impossible. Don’t collect the garbage. Create street noise, hire corrupt lawyers to send harassing letters, make the expense and stress seem not worth the fight — and so force surrender.
If this deliberately obnoxious thinking is applied geopolitically, Trump’s belligerence adds up — and that is precisely what Liberal leader Carney describes as Trump’s long-term aim with Canada, a fact that seems to be entirely ignored in the American press, even as it unfolds on a daily basis only a few miles to the north. Attacking Canada’s car industry, deriding its high-quality lumber, and devaluing the entire idea of the country as a pointless charade has the cumulative effect of demeaning a nation and a society — supposedly leading to weakness and the fantasy of capitulation.
But in Canada, a nation is at stake, not a prized lot on Fifth Avenue or a casino in Atlantic City. In the last days of April, after a few weeks of blessed silence from Trump — with the Conservative party trying desperately to change the subject to a program of change — the president again casually taunted Canada only days before the vote. Once again, Trump spoke about the country becoming the 51st state — like an old Mob boss shrugging and explaining the logic of extortion — assuring Time magazine that he isn’t trolling Canada, a fact that Americans seem to find impossible to acknowledge, despite the obvious truth in front of their faces
The new increasingly contemptible threats issued by Trump are still covered in the press in Canada, now with more of a sense of exhaustion and resignation than fear, but underneath the eye rolls there is the unmistakable sinew of defiance. The shock is gone, replaced by disbelief that a president, now openly described in the Canadian media as a madman, would try to impose his will, despite the obvious lack of any democratic interest in Canada in being annexed. Then there is the inescapable lesson of history, one that apparently will have to be learned again, the hard way: Beggaring thy neighbor, only beggars thyself.
THE SIGNS OF economic vulnerability are evident in the older, mainly white sections of Oshawa and Bowmanville: the boarded-up storefronts, the mostly idle car plants, the political arguments of pale-faced talking heads on TV about the coming recession. But so are the signs of real vitality, in the acres of new townhouses, rising from apple orchards where I worked as a teenager, populated by people from the world over, the bored young Indian and Filipino kids, trailing behind their parents in the ethnic grocery stores, forming their own memories inside the new reality that is emerging in Canada. For those kids, the reactionary politics and the fears of the disappearing generations behind Trump’s America are background noise, like the piped-in Bhangra Muzak.
“You can feel the transition everywhere,” a kid in Bowmanville’s Jamaican Dam Foods store tells me, with evident relief.
As America retreats into the past — the 1950s, the 1890s, the age of the Founding Fathers, take your pick — what is emerging in Canada has the unmistakable look of the future: Demography will inevitably bring the multifaceted world to North America, like it or not, and the new nation that is emerging north of the border is developing the understanding and tolerance and appreciation of complexity that will be a foundation of the 21st century.
This week, two of America’s closest allies are holding national elections centered largely on Trump’s version of aggressive nationalist populism, with both Canada and Australia swinging wildly against far-right reactionaries after experiencing a few months of the president’s dystopian chaos. Now, amazingly, decent, tolerant, unassuming but unafraid and unbending Canada — the friend the world never knew it had — stands on the frontline of a threat that confronts humankind. Globalism has become a pejorative term for many in America and around the world, a synonym for godless mind control or the specter of global governance or the horror of being overrun by of hordes of migrants, but in the exurbs east of Toronto, it is emerging in a society quietly but persistently redefining what it means to be a nation — a new identity that transcends nationality.
After Canada’s election on Monday, J.D. Vance’s best friend will almost certainly once again have no comment about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s vision for the future — which might explain why Jivani’s chances of victory have decreased rapidly. But Canada will. No matter who wins the election, the vote will have consequences that echo for generations to come. For Canada, there is no turning back. In Canada, Trump’s America has never looked so small and sad — a truth that America’s best friend sees with clear eyes.