Americans tire of the idea that a more enlightened people live to their immediate north. The English, I can report, know the feeling. A sort of moral premium appears to be the due of smaller countries abutting larger ones.

Facts are facts, though, and the recent re-election of Justin Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister reminds us of several. At around 20 per cent, Canada has a bigger foreign-born population share than the US. It manages to square this with universal healthcare and an income distribution that is — to go by the Gini coefficient — about as equal as Germany’s. Most votes in the election went to redistributionist parties and even the Conservative candidate hedged his qualms about immigration.

Canada is something that is increasingly said to be impossible in real time and space. It is a cosmopolitan social democracy. A conflict between immigration and welfare is the given reason for the ordeal of the western left in recent years. The less that citizens have in common — goes this logic — the less willing they are to underwrite each other’s livelihoods. It is a theory worth taking seriously but it has calcified into something like fact, even as the evidence remains uneven.