Canada should not be held up as a post-Brexit dream despite its Prime Minister looking like a ski instructor

Brussels has already precluded divvying up the Single Market unless the UK signs up to other stuff: the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, EU labour regulation and freedom of movement. It would mean taking up the Switzerland option, which May has firmly rejected.

But if Canada is the only option, what is it like being Canada? Surely, it is thriving in its frosty northern world hugging the US border.

The border with America is what its prosperity is all about, accounting for three quarters of Canada’s foreign trade. Sitting cheek-by-jowel to Canada is the world’s most coveted marketplace and Canadians, until recently, have not bothered to consider selling much to anyone else. America sucks in its natural resources, timber, minerals, commodity materials, electric power and manufactured goods but it is far from an easy relationship.

A nation of 35 million doesn’t dictate terms of trade to a nation of 325 million, no matter how close the kinship. On a good day, Washington views its northern neighbour with amused condescension, country cousins, but this can quickly turn to suspicion or anger.

Donald Trump is threatening to repudiate Nafta, the 1994 agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico that created the world’s largest zone for free trade in goods and labour. The president hates America’s $15 billion (£11 billion) trade deficit with Canada, complains that Nafta gives too much away and he would replace the independent panels created to adjudicate Nafta disputes with US courts.

But President Trump’s America First agenda is nothing new. For generations, Canadians have lived with the grumpy but hungry bear next door. Since the 1980s, Canada has been locked in a recurring cycle of disputes over its exports of lumber into the US. America accuses Canada of subsidising timber sold from government land while American forests are privately owned.

Canada protects its dairy and poultry industry from American competition with quotas, fixed prices and tariffs and now Trump is championing the cause of US steelmakers, threatening big tariffs unless Canada agrees to renegotiate the Nafta treaty; Canada is America’s biggest foreign steel supplier.

Canadians have to roll with the punches. They remember the unfortunate Lester Pearson, the Canadian premier who, following a critical speech on the Vietnam War, found himself grabbed by the collar and lifted off the floor by a furious President Lyndon Johnson. “You pissed on my rug,” said the president.

Fortunately, for the UK, meetings in Brussels post-Brexit are unlikely to get physical but the same truths must apply. There is a dominant partner in any deal with a trading superpower and that partner sets the terms.

For Canadians, Brexit is a puzzle. It would be as if each Canadian province had votes in the US Congress and then gave them away on a whim; not something any sensible Canadian would do.