In his 2006 book Differences that Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada, the Canadian sociologist Dan Zuberi examines the experiences of low-wage hotel workers in Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia. His conclusion, unsurprising but powerfully documented, is that the policies and institutions on the Canadian side of the border — comparatively robust public goods and services, national health insurance, higher union density — yield dramatic differences in economic security and mobility for workers.

The COVID-19 crisis has thrown those differences into sharp relief. The point is not that Canada is a beacon of social democracy (it’s not). It is that the United States, with its for-profit health care system, fragmented and miserly welfare state, and inept political class, was so uniquely and manifestly ill-equipped to tackle the crisis that it is now commonly described as a failed state.

The recent experience of Iowa and a similar “heartland” setting north of the border — the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan (what I’ll call MASK) — dramatize these stark differences.