Canada's post-nationalism is worth fighting for

Blame Canada. That appears to be the logic at work over at Postmedia, where its pundits have clearly picked their side in the battle between Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau. Whether it’s veteran columnist John Ivison and senior editor Terry Newman at the National Post or Don Braid and Rick Bell at the Calgary Herald, they’re united in their willingness to justify the incoming U.S. president’s bad joke about Canada becoming America’s 51st state. There’s no limit to what they’ll apparently excuse if it means getting another opportunity to dump on Justin Trudeau. 

To Newman, for example, this is all just a good laugh at the prime minister’s expense — one he apparently invited by refusing to roll over to Trump the last time he was president. For Braid, it’s yet another opportunity to whine about the Trudeau government’s refusal to enthusiastically cheerlead the oil and gas industry. Bell, meanwhile, writes about how Trudeau reminds him of a “97 pound weakling” from an ad featuring Charles Atlas back (way, way back) in the day. Bog-standard fare, in other words. 

Ivison’s column, on the other hand, is anything but. In it, he essentially suggests that the prime minister has given up on the idea of a coherent national identity — and Canada has in turn given up on itself. “Nations fade away when their sense of citizenship dies. If it turns out that Trump wants the country more than we do, we might as well give it to him.”

Well, then. 

Trudeau’s willingness to apologize for historical wrongs, empathize with those hurt by (and still hurting from) the legacy of Canada’s residential school system, and otherwise acknowledge Canada’s less-than-honourable moments has long rankled conservative politicians and pundits like Ivison. But it’s his articulation of Canada’s emerging post-national ethos — that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” — at the tail end of a long New York Times Magazine feature from 2015 that really sticks in their craw almost a decade later.

"What that sense of post-nationalism has done in reality is corrode the idea of citizenship that held Canada together,” Ivison writes, “with its sense of obligation, its willingness to sacrifice and its collective mission.” Now, I doubt most Canadians could tell you what post-nationalism means, much less why it might be diminishing their view of the country. But if they can, that’s probably the result of a long-running Conservative campaign to tell Canadians that their country is broken, one that’s reached new heights — or depths — under Pierre Poilievre’s leadership. 

We should also be mindful of the role the pandemic is playing here. We all got to see how provisional our commitment to things like sacrifice and shared mission were during the pandemic, and it became almost immediately obvious that it was the more conservative-leaning among us who were most actively and aggressively undermining those values in the name of their personal freedom. The pandemic and its aftermath also badly damaged our already weakened healthcare system and added more stress to already overheated housing markets across the country, both of which gave Poilievre more broken things to blame on Ottawa. 

It’s worth noting that Canada isn’t the only Western democracy where measurements of national pride have fallen in recent years. In the United States, for example, annual Gallup polling has it at the lowest level in decades, while in Australia the proportion of people who say they have a “great sense of belonging” is at its lowest level since 2007. It’s almost like the pandemic, along with the recent surge in populist politics, has shaken everyone’s faith in government institutions and their ability to protect and preserve people’s interests. 

It’s also worth pointing out that this supposed decline in national pride here in Canada is heavily concentrated in one part of the political spectrum. As the Canadian Press’s Nicole Thompson noted in June 2023, a Leger poll taken at the time showed 97 per cent of Liberals said they were very or somewhat proud to be Canadians, as did 87 per cent of NDP-leaning respondents. But among Conservative voters it dropped to 76 per cent, and expressions of national pride tumbled to just 45 per cent of PPC voters. 

Ivison suggests that what Canada really needs is a nation-builder along the lines of John Diefenbaker, who rejected the idea of so-called “hyphenated” Canadians. “We could do with more talk about One Canada,” Ivison says. But with our increasingly fragmented and fractured informational landscape, not to mention social media platforms that algorithmically reward conflict and division, said talk seems almost impossibly naive. There is no going back to the two-dimensional world of the 1950s, and we’d be fools to even try. 

Instead, we ought to lean into the advantages that Trudeau’s post-nationalist vision offers in a world of ever-expanding diversity. I’m not talking about Justin Trudeau here, by the way. Instead, as his father Pierre famously said, “a society which eulogizes the average citizen is one which breeds mediocrity. What the world should be seeking, and what in Canada we must continue to cherish, are not concepts of uniformity but human values: compassion, love, and understanding.”

He was right when he first said this in 1971. He’s even more right today. His son’s willingness to apply those values to Canada’s past can be discomfiting for some people. But our ability to incorporate diversity into our national image and make room for other people and cultures remains a strength, even if it’s been tested of late. There’s more risk in walking this path, and it invites interference from those who are most threatened by it. But in a world of irreversibly declining birth rates and aging populations, being able to integrate new ideas and people will be the coin of the realm for the rest of our foreseeable future. We’d do well to remember Pierre Trudeau’s words — and better appreciate his son’s attempts, however imperfect, to put them into practice.