The Limits of Canadian Post-Nationalism

A Country Cannot Run on Maple Syrup Alone

Pre–post-nationalist Canada goes to war. Source: Canadian War Museum

Will the future look more like post-national Canada or nationalist Russia? So

Eugene Earnshaw

asks in his response to my We Were Never Post-National essay. He hopes that the answer is Canada: “A liberal democracy that binds the state together with shared values and history, through national heroes and a few cultural touchstones such as hockey and maple syrup and land acknowledgements.” But there are at least two implicit claims in the very framing of his question. One is that Vladimir Putin’s revanchism is the most salient example of nationalism. The other is that Canada is truly a post-national state. As a fellow Canadian (now living in the US) myself, I politely reject both assumptions.

The Nations of “Post-National” Canada

Canada was built on the concept of two founding peoples: the British and the French. (I say “British,” not “English,” to acknowledge the outsized role of the Scots.) In 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau officially adopted a policy of multiculturalism, which would seem to auger Canada’s transition from a bi-national to a post-national state. According to the multiculturalist model, Canada is a “cultural mosaic” (in contrast to America’s “melting pot”) with no dominant culture(s). But government fiat, even if accompanied by robust immigration, cannot easily supplant a country’s prior history and identity. Moreover, Trudeau also established Canada’s official bilingualism, which confirmed the primacy of English and French. Both languages correspond to the cultural reality that Canada was founded by distinct English- and French-speaking peoples. Canada remains a successful country because immigrants have traditionally joined those founding peoples; not because they’ve displaced them.

Most obviously, the Québécois, one of Canada’s two founding peoples, have never relinquished their self-conception as a nation. As French speakers, they’re a minority within largely Anglophone Canada and an even smaller minority within North America as a whole. Had they abandoned their national self-conception, they would have disappeared when they were first conquered by the British in the 18th century. Thus Québécois nationalism, like that of many smaller peoples, is oriented toward cultural preservation (la survivance). A near-successful independence movement attests to its vitality. So do provincial laws that assert the primacy of French language and culture. For the Québécois (and, indeed, for many others), “post-nationalism” is a euphemism for the dissolution of their identity within an English-speaking monoculture. In 2006, Canada’s parliament approved a motion recognizing “that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” Thus ostensibly post-nationalist Canada contains at least one official nation.

In fact, it contains many, as Canada formally recognizes over 50 indigenous First Nations. Technically speaking, “nations” might be an overstatement, as the largest tribe (the Cree) maxes out at around 220,000 members. Nevertheless, the term First Nations accurately conveys how indigenous Canadians see themselves and are seen by the government in turn: as members of autonomous peoples with inherent communal rights. Like the Québécois, only more so given their reduced numbers, the First Nations are a minority for whom a fully realized “post-nationalism” would mean an end to their collective identity. Indigenous peoples (also including the Inuit and Métis) are around 5% of the total Canadian population. French Canadians (including Francophones outside of Quebec) are 22%. Thus more than a quarter of “post-national” Canada’s population—by Canada’s own definition—belong to nations.

But what about the other three quarters? Is Canada a predominantly post-national state with carveouts for established minorities? That’s the position of the country’s Laurentian elite, as reflected in the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called Canada “the first post-national state.” But Canadians as a whole, like their internal nations, are a minority in the greater context of North America. Though larger in land mass, Canada has about one-ninth of the population of the United States. Its survival as an independent country—despite sharing a language and, in many respects, common culture with its southern neighbor—attests to a national identity. Against the pull of north-south continentalism, Canada has forged a subtle but real east-west unity. After all, hockey and maple syrup are not enough to prevent Canada’s Maritime provinces from joining the same political union as territorially adjacent, culturally contiguous New England (where hockey and maple syrup are also popular).¹

A more substantial marker of Canadian identity is the phrase “Peace, order, and good government,” which appeared in the British North America Act that established the Dominion of Canada in 1867.² In contrast to the equivalent United States slogan, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Canada’s founding principles express a more communitarian, gradualist (one might even call it counterrevolutionary) ethos. That ethos is rooted in British politics and law, as Canada peacefully achieved national independence, maintains a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, and still pledges fealty to its mother country’s monarchy.³ Canada is attractive to immigrants because it’s a successful country (“the peaceable kingdom”), and that success is rooted in a particular, indeed national, tradition; though one largely shared with the broader Anglosphere. Insofar as immigrants, like my own non–Anglo-Saxon grandparents, adopt that tradition (or the Quebecois equivalent) as their own, Canada’s success will continue. However, the danger of post-nationalism is that it corrodes the shared identity that makes diversity tenable.

The Luxury of Post-Nationalism

In Canada’s case, post-nationalism goes hand in hand with settler-colonial theory, which portrays all non-indigenous Canadians as “settlers” and Canada itself as a fundamentally racist, imperialist, and thus illegitimate project. Since most of Canadian history is tied up with the British Empire, or simply with Western civilization more broadly, that history becomes a source of shame, not pride. Even Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald—a 19th-century man with unsurprisingly 19th-century views—has been subject to cancellation. Taken to a post-national extreme, what’s left of Canadian identity becomes the anti-identity of multiculturalism: a blank slate thinly overlaid with anodyne folk signifiers (hockey and maple syrup) plus ritualistic expressions of shame (land acknowledgments).⁴ Canadians are known for saying sorry; settler-colonial theory reduces Canada to one big national apology. No wonder 25% of the population say they’re attached to Canada “only as long as it provides a good standard of living,” with another 6% not feeling any attachment at all.

Thus a substantial minority of Canadians are effectively post-national. At best, they may view Canada as, in novelist Yann Mattel’s words, “the greatest hotel on earth.” But a hotel accommodates guests; guests don’t accommodate hotels. Hotels certainly don’t impose values or command loyalty; especially not hotels built on stolen land by founders they disavow. Undoubtedly, the British Columbia–based Sikh separatists who blew up an Air India plane saw Canada as a hotel. So did the Afghan migrants who murdered their female family members in the name of “honor.” And so do the perpetrators of Canada’s current wave of antisemitic and pro-Hamas violence, which includes arson attacks on synagogues and shootings at Jewish schools. On the anniversary of October 7, anti-Israel protesters burned a Canadian flag and chanted “Death to Canada.” Accordingly, a majority of Canadians say newcomers should embrace the country’s values and discard incompatible beliefs. A majority also say non-citizens who express support for terrorist groups or hatred toward minorities should be deported. These are the nationalists who see Canada as more than just a hotel.

Canada’s much-ballyhooed diversity is not a source of unique identity. Having lived in both countries, I can attest to the presence of Indian restaurants, Chinatowns, and Caribbean festivals in the United States as well. What is unique to Canada is the tendency to virtue-signal the self-hollowing of its own national core. But this Canadian exceptionalism is made possible by the good fortune of history and geography. Canada’s only neighbor is the United States, which hasn’t been a threat since the War of 1812.⁵ Canada is a member of NATO, fought in both world wars, and has contributed troops to smaller conflicts like those in Korea and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Canada has benefited from being wrapped in an American-made security blanket. It’s been able to posture as post-national because there’s no serious challenge to Canadian sovereignty—largely thanks to the defense of a shared continent by nationalist Americans. For countries that border expansionist powers like Russia, China, and Iran, post-nationalism would simply be a welcome mat for dominance by stronger nations. (As it stands, China, among other countries, interfered in Canada’s last two federal elections by exploiting diaspora populations.)

Unlike the United States and Europe, Canada also lacks proximity to poorer or war-torn countries. It hasn’t had to cope with migrant caravans or boatfuls of asylum seekers overwhelming border authorities.⁶ Instead, Canada has largely selected legal immigrants on the basis of job skills, education, financial security, and language proficiency. As Michael Cuenco notes, this policy has preempted “backlashes by ensuring the quantity of immigration can be adjusted to economic conditions, while the quality is such that new arrivals reinforce the stabilising egalitarian character of society.” But Trudeau has threatened Canada’s pro-immigrant consensus by dramatically increasing the number of newcomers, including foreign students and temporary workers who bypass the country’s unabashedly Canada-first, points-based system. A record 6.8% of Canada’s population now consists of temporary residents, while two-thirds of Canadians say there are too many immigrants coming in. Trudeau’s predicted electoral landslide loss reveals that even welcoming Canadians can only tolerate so much post-nationalism. Were Canada in a less fortuitous geopolitical space, the backlash would have come sooner.

True National Love

A counterargument is that what I’ve described as Canadian nationalism is really patriotism, which is compatible with post-nationalism. In this view, “good” love of country, like support for its culture, is patriotic, whereas “bad” love of country, like opposition to open borders, is nationalistic. But both sentiments are connected. For example, Quebec, which controls its own immigration policy and seeks to preserve a Francophone identity, accepts proportionally fewer newcomers (who, in turn, must speak or learn French) than the rest of Canada. Earnshaw suggests that “patriotism, the love and enthusiastic support of one’s state, by no means requires nationalism to function.” But the state, which collects taxes and enforces laws for the sake of the collective good, is not lovable on its own. It only achieves legitimacy insofar as it represents the embodiment of that collective good: the nation. Post-nationalism, the denial of a shared nationality, thus threatens the very basis of statehood.

A dichotomy between nationalism as “aggressive” and patriotism as “defensive” is equally arbitrary. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is no more nationalistic than the Ukrainians’ defense of it. The Ukrainians are not “patriots” simply because their cause is just. Nor did their war effort suddenly turn nationalistic when they invaded Russian soil. It has always been nationalism, not post-nationalism, loyalty to homeland, not simply to universal values, that motivates their fight against foreign aggression. Were Canada to ever face an existential threat, it would need to rely on those same sentiments. Fortunately, despite elite rhetoric, there is still a critical mass of unapologetic (or, being Canadian, somewhat apologetic), flannel-clad Canucks who view their country in national terms. I don’t know if the future will look more like nationalist Ukraine, aspiring to liberal democracy, or nationalist Russia, sliding deeper into autocracy. But I’ll bet it won’t resemble post-national Canada, which is a beneficiary of uniquely North American circumstances and—contra Trudeau—was never all that post-national to begin with.

1. In a blow to Canadian distinctiveness, Vermont is known for its maple syrup, New Hampshire for its moose, and Boston for its hockey (and cold winters).

2. “Canada Day” was officially called Dominion Day until 1982, though the name change never went into effect in my household.

3. George Grant writes in Lament for a Nation (1965), p. 70: “That we never broke with Great Britain is often said to prove that we are not a nation but a colony. But the great politicians who believed in this connection . . . did not see it this way, but rather as a relation to the font of constitutional government in the British Crown. Many Canadians saw it as a means of preserving at every level of our life—religious, educational, political, social—certain forms of existence that distinguish us from the United States.”

4. As

Joseph Heath

points out, there’s an inherent contradiction between the settler-colonial conception of Canada and multiculturalist support for mass immigration. If non-indigenous Canadians are “settlers,” and to be a “settler” is immoral, then Canada should not be importing more of them.

5. Though the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of militant Irish-Americans, raided Canada (seen as a surrogate of Great Britain, which then ruled Ireland) as late as 1871.

6. However, recent illegal border crossings by asylum seekers from the US to Canada have stirred predictable discontent.