Canada’s New Nationalism
On January 7, Donald Trump said publicly for the first time that he wanted to force Canada to become the 51st state. The president-elect had spent two months waiting to be inaugurated. He seemed to be yearning for action, to be on TV, to signal how he would lead. So he invited journalists to a gilded room in his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, stood behind a podium and spoke in a way that no American president had spoken in living memory. “You get rid of the artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security,” he said. “Don’t forget: we basically protect Canada.” Trump was talking like American leaders in the 19th century, bewhiskered men who used spittoons, men who believed their republic had a mandate from God to conquer and improve territories governed by lesser peoples.
It was hard then to know how seriously to take him, so I called a former senior American official to ask what to make of it. He was rattled. “I actually think he wants the territory,” he said. His fear was contagious. An icy jolt went down my spine as he sketched out the scenario. Trump could escalate tariffs until the Canadian economy was in ruins, then make overtures to Alberta—a take-it-or-leave-it offer to tear it out of Canada.
“Why don’t you become a state?” he imagined Trump saying. “You don’t have to send billions of dollars to Ottawa anymore. Your tax rates will be lower. A dollar will be a dollar. You won’t have to ask for permission to approve any pipeline, because you’ll be within the United States.” Could Trump play the nasty kind of game that Putin has played on the margins of the Russian Federation—stir up trouble and then send in the troops to restore calm?
The conversation terrified me. I started to wonder if Trump really thought he could get away with absorbing Canada. That week, I ran into a former Canadian special forces operator and asked him if Canada could stop an American invasion. He laughed and told me it would be over before it began. The Pentagon could remotely shut down our communications, fire a few missiles and it would be done. A lot of Canadians were asking themselves the same questions, as Trump insulted, belittled and threatened the country, calling the prime minister “governor,” promising we’d be better off as the 51st state. Eventually, even his press secretary smirked and joked about it.
It took time for Canadians to feel that jolt, but when they did, there was a national gut check. In the media, in the academy, in the halls of power, on shop floors, in pubs and at kitchen tables. Did we want to become Americans? The answer became clear soon enough, in the biggest wave of Canadian nationalism in living memory.
Absolutely not.
Never.
Two days after Trump’s press conference, Justin Trudeau flew to Washington to attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Trudeau had been recently forced to announce his resignation. Everyone was tired of him. Trump snubbed him at the funeral.
But somebody had to tell the Americans that Canada was not interested in becoming the 51st state.“That’s not going to happen,” Trudeau told Jake Tapper on CNN. “Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian. One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”
That answer struck Tapper as odd. A month later, when he had Mark Carney on the show, he played him the Trudeau clip. “Kind of a curious answer,” Tapper said. Carney, then a candidate for Liberal leader, laughed nervously. He was too diplomatic to tell Tapper the truth. Canadians define themselves in opposition to the United States because the country was founded by people who rejected the bloody American Revolution. We’ve kept rejecting it for almost three centuries.
The United States is an unpredictable and increasingly dysfunctional empire, an extended experiment in pushing everything to the extreme. Canadians, on the other hand, have a long but imperfect history of muddling along peaceably. We are not bound together by some intrinsic identity—by language, race, religion or a shared and glorious history of revolution or conquest. We become nationalistic only when it is necessary to protect ourselves against the aggression of the United States.
That negative, defensive definition has always been enough. It is kind of the point of Canada.
The story begins in 1763, after what Americans call the French and Indian War, English Canada calls the Seven Years’ War and Quebecers call la guerre de la Conquête. It was a colonial border war between the French and British, fought with muskets and cannons, with troops in canoes and on long marches through the woods. Much of the real fighting was done by Indigenous people on both sides. The conflict ended with the conquest of New France, the expulsion of the Acadians and the British victorious but exhausted and broke.
King George III wanted to reduce his defence budget, so he issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized the land title of unconquered Indigenous nations—still part of the Canadian constitutional order. That measure, which was both humane and practical, was unpopular in the British colonies on the coast from Georgia to Massachusetts because it meant they could not expand westward, over the Appalachian Mountains, into Indigenous territory.
Important American leaders, including George Washington, owned land on the other side of the mountains and would not accept the “artificial line.” Their anger and lust for land helped provoke the American Revolution. The revolution’s losers, the Loyalists, were driven into what is now Canada, where they settled down to build new lives as refugees, free from the mob violence they’d escaped.
French Canadians wanted no part of the American adventure and its militant Protestantism. They rejected the entreaties of Benjamin Franklin, who came to Montreal to seduce them. They preferred the guarantees of religious and linguistic protection the British had offered. When Benedict Arnold and a revolutionary army invaded, the Quebecers joined with the redcoats to stop them. Decades later, in the War of 1812, French Canadians again took up arms alongside their British and Indigenous allies to repel the American invasion. It was an alliance of peoples who did not want to be conquered.
Canada’s three founding peoples—Indigenous nations, French Canadians and the British Loyalists—were all losers, forced to focus on survival rather than conquest or glory. The story of Canada is the story of their ad hoc co-operation, stuck between an expansionist, dangerous empire and a vast wilderness. To survive in that marginal space, to build a political system that could withstand the pull of American gravity and the push of American aggression, they forged a new, common identity.
And yet it has always had a tentative quality, because so many Canadians have other, stronger identities. There are so many grievances, so much mutual suspicion and rancour on the northern side of the border that the common national identity only becomes dominant when the Americans turn their covetous eyes toward the “artificial line” that separates them from the northland.
Five Canadian elections have turned on Canada-U.S. relations. The first was in 1891, when Conservative prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, then 76, faced Liberal Wilfrid Laurier, then 49. Macdonald had united the Maritimes with Ontario and Quebec, created Manitoba, built a railway to British Columbia and imposed tariffs to help develop industry in Eastern Canada. The Prairies filled with settlers, but it was a challenge to compete with the behemoth to the south. Then as now, productivity was lower than in the United States, and Canadians were migrating with their feet.
The whole project was in trouble, and things got worse when Ohio congressman William McKinley championed tariffs of up to 50 per cent, much like Trump is doing now. Laurier proposed reciprocity—free trade—with the United States. Canadians looked ready to dump John A. in the hopes that the Liberals could make a deal.
But the Americans didn’t want a deal. They wanted to take Canada. U.S. secretary of state James Blaine wrote in a private letter that the United States intended to deny Canada free trade so that “she will find that she has a hard row to hoe and will ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.” A self-promoting Canadian businessman named Erastus Wiman—the Kevin O’Leary of his day—proposed “commercial union,” as O’Leary is now proposing “economic union,” the first step to erasing the border.
Macdonald managed to get his hands on a pamphlet in which a prominent Liberal journalist advised American allies on how to force Canada into submission. When he revealed it during a wild rally in Toronto, shocked Canadians rallied to support “the Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader,” as the Tory campaign posters put it. It was a resounding, election-winning wave of nationalism, confirming that Canadians were prepared to choose hardship and independence over annexation.
Sir John A. died later that year, and Laurier eventually became prime minister. He governed until 1911, when he campaigned on a trade deal that would have finally reduced the tariffs. The Conservatives were then the party of Canadian nationalism, and the Liberals were more open to modernizing influence from south of the border. But when an American congressman gave a speech saying he hoped to “see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot” of Canada, Conservatives rallied to beat the Liberals.
In the decades after, following two calamitous world wars, Americans came to think of Canada as an ally, not a potential possession, but the relationship still had its challenges. In the election of 1963, incumbent Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker campaigned on Canadian nationalism after clashing with John F. Kennedy over nuclear missiles. But JFK and Liberal leader Lester B. Pearson were both popular, and the Democrats were not menacing the Canadian economy. Diefenbaker lost.
Philosopher George Grant saw that election as the end of the country. In Lament for a Nation, the most important book on Canadian nationalism, he blamed the Liberals for making Canada “a branch-plant society.”
“Canada has ceased to be a nation, but its formal political existence will not end quickly,” he wrote. “Our social and economic blending into the empire will continue apace, but political union will probably be delayed.”
The obituary was premature. Instead, Pearson and his successor, Pierre Trudeau, created a new flag and a new identity based on bilingualism and multiculturalism. That new Liberal internationalism irritated the Americans. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson was so angered by a speech Pearson gave opposing the Vietnam War that he lifted him by the shirt collar and swore: “You pissed on my rug.” Nixon privately called Trudeau an “asshole,” to which Trudeau responded that he had been called worse things by better people.
By the 1980s, it was the Conservatives who were more open to greater alliance with the Americans. In 1988, Brian Mulroney campaigned on a free-trade deal he had reached with Ronald Reagan, against the opposition of Liberal John Turner and New Democrat Ed Broadbent, who warned it would lead to a loss of political sovereignty. A million more Canadians voted against the deal than for it, but vote splitting carried the day for Mulroney, who won a majority.
From then until just a few months ago, Canadian nationalism receded. Mulroney’s trade deal produced greater prosperity, and the two societies seemed to be going in roughly the same direction as trade steadily increased. Both countries were changing to allow greater personal freedoms and racial and gender equality. Americans no longer daydreamed about extending their frontiers northward.
Then Trump was elected for a second time.
As Canada settled deeper into the winter of 2025, and Trump kept boorishly insisting that Canadians would be happier in his clutches, we got mad.
Canadians yanked U.S. liquor from store shelves, cancelled trips and hoisted flags, even in downtown Montreal. Pallets of U.S. produce spoiled in the supermarket aisles. Normally bustling American border towns that depended on shopping day trips were suddenly silent. The U.S. departure lounges at Pearson and Trudeau were empty.
Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston removed interprovincial trade barriers for any province that would reciprocate and, post-election, Mark Carney went a step further and pledged to dismantle all interprovincial trade barriers by Canada Day. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announced he was planning to let some electricity contracts with the States lapse and use much of that excess power to boost his own province’s energy economy. Quebec Premier François Legault said Quebecers would consider east-west oil pipelines they had previously opposed.
People were soon speculating about a guerrilla war of resistance. The Americans might be able to take Canada, but could they hold it? How could they justify the casualties they would take? At the end of January, one of the most capable men I know texted me, out of the blue, that he had told his wife, the mother of his infant child, that he’d be “willing to die on the end of a rifle to make sure” the Americans could not take Canada.
It became clear how deep the feeling ran on February 1 at Ottawa’s Canadian Tire Centre, where the Senators played the Minnesota Wild. Because Ottawa is a government town, and there are often as many Leafs or Habs fans in attendance as Sens supporters, it can be a dull place to watch a game. But there was nothing sedate about the booing as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. Fans booed it heartily from start to finish, drowning out the unfortunate singer.
For pollster Michael Adams, president of the Environics Institute market research firm, who has been studying the Canada-U.S. relationship for decades, it was a seminal moment. “Oh, my God, it’s not just the elites, who’ve always been suspicious of the United States,” he said. “Ordinary Canadians are feeling it in their gut too. That doesn’t mean they’re going to grab their muskets and shoot Americans coming across the Niagara River. I don’t think it’s going to come to that. But they know this is wrong, and it’s making them think about what they cherish and want to defend about Canada.”
On Saturday Night Live, Mike Myers mouthed the phrase “elbows up,” and the movement got its slogan. It found a champion in Mark Carney, who won a landslide victory in the not-very-competitive Liberal leadership race by promising Canadians would never knuckle under to Uncle Sam. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who was initially reluctant to turn his guns from the Liberals to the Americans, read his falling poll numbers and started saying he, too, would stand up to Trump.
Carney campaigned as Captain Canada. And while Poilievre’s Conservative support stayed strong, NDP and Bloc Québécois voters shifted Liberal en masse, setting aside their partisan inclinations to embrace the leader they thought could best protect Canada. Lifelong New Democrats put Liberal signs on their lawns without a second thought. Everyone was suddenly reminded of the reason for the centuries-old alliance between French and English Canadians. And in the election that followed, as in the election of 1891, the will of the voters was clear. Canadians would take short-term pain to maintain their sovereignty.
On the surface, Canadians and Americans seem similar, but deeper down, the societies are diverging. Michael Adams of Environics noticed a growing shift in values over the years, which he explained in his bestselling 2003 book, Fire and Ice. Americans had become more patriarchal over time as Canadians became less so. Canada is a more urban country, more multicultural and less religious. It remained steadily socially progressive while the United States got more divided. Christian nationalism, political polarization and sharp inequality are all higher in the U.S. Canadians live longer, are healthier, shoot each other less often, hate each other less, are more open to immigration. Fewer Canadians die deaths of despair.
What has happened is not that we have become more Canadian, but that Americans have become more American: more aggressive, violent and individualistic. In their recent book The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett argue that the United States is going through a period of intense polarization and inequality—just like the Gilded Age, when the Americans tried to annex Canada and Sir John A. rallied us against it. “Between the mid-1960s and today—by scores of hard measures along multiple dimensions—we have been experiencing declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric and a descent into cultural narcissism,” they write. That cultural narcissism is the kind of thing that leads to casual annexation threats, to the assumption that Canadians might want to give up their country for another, to the anger when they refuse.
In every U.S. presidential election since 1992, polls show that Canadians have overwhelmingly favoured the Democratic candidate. Sixty-four per cent of Canadians would have voted for Kamala Harris, and only 21 per cent for Trump. Our national will to resist American gravity, to assert our independence, waxes and wanes depending on what is happening south of the border. What is happening now—the division of their society into mutually hostile camps, the militant expansionism, the breakdown of the rule of law—all of these things have happened before and, when they have, Canadians have hardened ourselves for hardship.
Canadians observed each other doing so and have taken pride in it. Eighty-five per cent are proud of their country now, up five points from a year ago. Adams, who has been studying the dynamic for decades, is not surprised. “We have the Trump bump. We’re probably back where we were 10 years ago, at very high levels of national pride,” says Adams. “It’s a sense that we ought to pull together, and that we damn well don’t want to become American.”
It is not an inspiring national cri de coeur, but for centuries, it has been enough.
