Peaceful Wolverine Canada’s flag is younger than plenty of the houses in this city.
The maple leaf only went up in 1965; before that we flew a British ensign. “O Canada” wasn’t the official anthem until 1980. We didn’t fully own our own constitution until 1982 — before that, the final say on changing it sat in London, and when we finally brought it home, Quebec refused to sign. A country whose founding document was still legally British in living memory is not an ancient thing. It is a recent, negotiated, still-arguing thing. All countries are conceptual — they exist only as “mind-objects,” not as a physical monument you can find and touch — and “Canada” is a shaky one.
And it was assembled, not born. There was no revolution, no storming of anything. In 1867 four colonies — Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick — signed a deal, under the Crown, largely for practical reasons: Debt, railways, and a nervous eye on an America that had just finished a civil war with a very large army. The rest was added on afterward. The Prairies were bought from a fur-trading company. British Columbia was talked in with the promise of a railway, which then got built across the whole width of the country precisely to hold the parts together.
None of that was empty land. People had been here for thousands of years before any of it, but they didn’t have the numbers or technology to resist colonization. The country was extended over them by unhonoured treaty where it bothered and by force where it didn’t — Louis Riel and the Métis twice stood up for a nation of their own and were twice put down, the second time with a hanging. Then came the residential schools, a system built to take Indigenous children and make them something else, running from the 1880s until 1996. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it cultural genocide — not a footnote to the country, but part of how the country was made.
So this is what we’re actually talking about when we talk about Canada: a young, deliberate, unfinished arrangement, cobbled together out of two European empires and hundreds of nations that were already here, held together by a railway and a Crown, its flag and its anthem and its constitution all younger than plenty of people still living. It nearly came apart by a vote as recently as 1995, and it held by roughly a point.
I think the interesting questions aren’t about how great it is. They’re about what it even is, and what we’re doing when we choose to love it.
Because most of us do, in some fashion — and this past year more loudly than usual, with an obnoxious neighbour to the south musing about annexation and a lot of us clarifying very firmly that, well, hell no. We’re not that. But a feeling that shows up when someone insults you is worth examining before you trust it.
Do we even need a country — or do we just need to belong to something, and the country is one container for that among many, no more sacred than a hockey team or a church, a town or a gym, a profession or a trade?
Is being Canadian something you are or something you do — a skin you’re born in, or a coat you put on and could, in principle, take off? There are plenty of Canadians insisting they’d be better off as United Statesians right now. That rings bitter, shortsighted, divisive, and ignorant rather than defiant and tough.
Is there a real line between the good kind of national pride and the bad kind — or is that just the flattering story we tell, the one where my love of home is patriotism and yours is nationalism?
And underneath all of it: There’s no God signing off on any of this, no destiny, no blood in the soil that means anything, any more than the planet was fated for the dinosaurs or the sabre-toothed tigers or the groundhogs. So, should we believe in our countries at all? And if we should — believe in what, exactly?
Patriotism
Patriotism is love of the place you’re from and the way of life in it. Not the government or the constitution — the place. The land, the people, the habits, the particular way strangers here nod at you on an empty street. At its most basic it’s local: I like it here, these are my people, I’d defend this.
Orwell drew the line in Notes on Nationalism in 1945. Patriotism is defensive: It’s devotion to a particular place — and this is key — it has no wish to force that place on anyone else.
You can love Moose Jaw without compelling Regina to admit it’s second-best. The trouble starts when love turns competitive — when “I love mine” quietly becomes “and mine beats yours.”
Patriotism does real work. It is, quietly, one of the load-bearing concepts of a functioning country.
Consider what a country actually asks of you. It asks you to hand over a chunk of every paycheque so a hospital gets built in a town you will never visit, for a person you will never meet. It asks the losing half of an election — millions of people who think the winners are wrong and probably even dangerous — to shrug and hand over power peacefully and try again in four years. It asks a Prairie farmer to care, at least a little, whether a fishing town in Newfoundland washes into the sea. None of that is natural. None of it is in your narrow self-interest. It happens because enough people quietly feel that the fellow in Newfoundland is, in some hard-to-defend way, one of us.
We call that feeling patriotism. Take it away entirely and you don’t get a clean utopia of rational individuals. You get a place where nobody will fund anyone else’s hospital, and the losers of the election reach for something heavier than a ballot. The Canadian version of the bond is almost boring in its decency: Equalization payments, disaster relief that crosses the country, a stubborn assumption that we’re in this together even when we can’t stand each other. That is the pragmatic component, and it is not grandstanding. It’s the thing that lets millions of strangers behave, most days, like neighbours.
The same wiring that funds the hospital can be made to do terrible things, and it is depressingly easy to do. Because the feeling runs underneath thought — we are, let’s be honest, a tribal, superstitious, self-flattering species that prefers simple stories with a good guy and a bad guy — it can be steered. The demagogue’s move is old and it always runs the same way: Find a threat, or invent one, wrap yourself in the flag, and quietly redefine anyone who objects as a traitor. Once dissent is “un-Canadian,” you can get decent people to cheer things they would never accept if you described them plainly.
We have done exactly this, here, more than once. In the First World War we rounded up Ukrainian Canadians as “enemy aliens” and put them in camps. In the Second we took everything from Japanese Canadians — homes, boats, and businesses — and shipped whole families to the interior, and we did it under the flag, to applause. Samuel Johnson said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and he wasn’t sneering at love of country. He was warning that it’s the easiest thing in the world to hide behind. The man shouting loudest about his flag is very often the one with the most to cover.
The bonds are real and load-bearing. And precisely because they’re real, they’re worth hijacking, which is why the grandstanders reach for them. Patriotism isn’t the con. Patriotism is the thing the con exploits.
Which is the uncomfortable place this leaves us. If the same feeling builds the hospital and fills the internment camp, then “is patriotism good?” is the wrong question. How do you tell the good kind from the bad kind while it’s happening — when the flags are out, the mood is high, and it feels, in the moment, exactly the same?
Nationalism
Nationalism isn’t the opposite of patriotism. It’s the cousin — same blood, bigger appetite.
Patriotism, we said, loves a place and wants nothing of yours. Nationalism loves a nation, and needs it to matter more than yours — if their country wasn’t inherently superior in their minds, they would be confused about the point of a country at all.
The object quietly changes. Patriotism is attached to something you can point at: The land, the people, that strange-but-delicious food found nowhere else, local sports and holidays. Nationalism is attached to an abstraction — “the nation” — that has to win.
Nationalism is the part of you that needs the coasts to admit they aren’t as good as the interior, and vice versa. Orwell had the number of this exactly: It runs on power and prestige, and it lets a small person feel large by borrowing the size of the group. You didn’t do anything. You were born here. But now you’re great, and they’re not.
And it has a machine, always roughly the same parts. A threat, real or invented. A golden age we’ve supposedly fallen from. A pure “us” and a contaminating “them.” And a strongman promising to make it great again. Every ugly nationalism in history has been built from that same handful of pieces, because the pieces work: They flatter you for nothing, and they explain your troubles by pointing at someone else. That’s the version that fills the camps and cleanses the villages. That’s the one people mean when they say the word like a curse.
However…
Nationalism is also how the powerless became peoples. A colony saying “we are a nation and we will govern ourselves” is nationalism — and that sentence broke the British Empire, from India outward. It is the English word behind the engine of nearly every independence you’d call just. And you don’t have to leave this country to find it. The Métis under Riel were a nation insisting it had the right to exist. Quebec’s nationalism, the thing that nearly ended Canada by a point in 1995, is at bottom a people refusing to quietly dissolve into someone else’s country. That is not a demagogue’s con. That is a people reaching for the dignity of governing themselves. The same engine powers atrocities — they’re happening right now, actually. Different hands on it, pointed somewhere else entirely.
So nationalism does real work too — but different work than patriotism. Patriotism keeps the bond warm among people who already share a home. Nationalism draws the edge of the home in the first place, and, crucially, asserts it against everyone who’d deny it. That built half the countries on the map. Arguably it built this one.
The catch is built in, creating complexity where we prefer simplicity. To make an “us,” you have to make a “them.” Patriotism can love its home without an enemy at the gate. Nationalism, by its very structure, tends to need one — the border only means something against what’s on the other side of it — and to be fair, there usually is. Which is also why nationalism is the demagogue’s favourite instrument by a mile. Patriotism he has to corrupt into competition before it turns dangerous. Nationalism arrives pre-loaded — the threat and the enemy are already in the box. He doesn’t have to build the feeling. He just has to point it.
Which brings it home, I think. A once-friendly neighbour muses about making us the fifty-first state while loud-mouths say things like “We’re the strongest military ever, how come we’re not using it?” And suddenly a whole country is on its feet: We are not for sale, or conquest. Is that patriotism — defensive, love of home, wanting nobody’s country but our own? Or is it nationalism — us against them, the border thrown up like a wall, a little curl of superiority in it when the crowd boos the American anthem? Be honest: It’s both, and it flips depending on the hour and on who’s got the microphone. The same person can move from one to the other between two sentences and never feel the switch.
The only kind worth having
Good pride widens the us and can survive a hard question about itself. It can love the country and say, in the same breath, that the residential schools were a horror, both in intention and in execution, notwithstanding the better examples.
Bad pride narrows the us and cannot take the question at all — it hears “the schools were a horror” as an attack, an act of disloyalty, proof you were never really one of us. That’s the tell, and it’s the same tell in every language and every decade: The good kind can criticize the thing it loves; the bad kind forbids it. When dissent starts getting called betrayal, you already have your answer, whatever the flags are doing.
So. Should we believe in this country at all? Does it deserve defending, investing in, a plan to remain? And believe in what?
Not the way you’d believe a fact or a fate. There’s nothing making Canada true. It’s a made thing, an arrangement, a democracy of compromises, and you know what they say about compromises. But that’s not a reason to stop believing in it. It’s what makes it worthwhile for each of us. You don’t believe in a bloodline — you just have it, and you can’t argue with it. You commit to a project. And a project is a thing you build, which means a thing that isn’t finished, which means a thing you’re allowed to call broken. You’re allowed to be frustrated, to take a couple of steps back, maybe consult a friend, maybe even reluctantly undo a couple of unwise steps and take that fifth humiliating trip to the hardware store, even though it’s effortful.
That’s the whole difference. Belief in a destiny can’t be questioned. Belief in a project is nothing but questions. The good kind of national feeling is the second kind, by construction — and it means that loving this country and telling the truth about its worst days are not opposites. They’re the same act.
So — build together.
Building is forward-looking: You can’t build a golden age you’ve already lost, only a thing that isn’t done. Building is self-critical: You can only fix what you’ll admit is broken. And building is an open circle: Every sincere hand you can get, you take. That’s not flag-waving. It’s the exact opposite of the demagogue’s machine, part for part. And while you can’t be proud of something you inherited — only grateful — you can be proud of progress in a national project.
Authoritarian movements are rising across the democracies. The postwar order — the one Canada helped build — is fraying at the seams. If that rhymes with anything, it rhymes with the 1930s, and the thirties are not a decade to feel nostalgic about. They’re the decade the world ran this exact experiment and mostly failed it. The feral version of the feeling won across half of Europe — golden age, pure us, contaminating them, a strongman to restore it all — and it ended in death camps and a world war.
And we were not clean, we Canadians. We mistreated our own citizens based on their ethnicity. Asked how many Jewish refugees we’d let in from the fire, as post-war Europe continued to murder and expel them, one Canadian official’s answer was, notoriously, “none is too many.” The schools ran the whole time. That happened here, under this flag, in the decade some people want to remember as simpler.
As much as it feels good to claim it, we’ve never had a Golden Age. At least, not for everyone. Not yet.
But there have been other things, too. History we can celebrate. On these prairies, in the dust and the wheat-price collapse, with men riding the rails through this city looking for work that wasn’t there, people did not, on the whole, turn and blame the foreigner. They built. They built co-ops and credit unions and grain pools to survive together what none of them could survive alone. In Regina, in 1933, in the pit of the Depression, they wrote down a manifesto for a country that looked after its own. And this province — this one, Saskatchewan — went on to give the whole country medicare. That is the good kind of national feeling, caught in the act. Crisis came, and the answer was to widen the circle and build outward, not to close it and hunt for someone to blame.
That’s the choice, and it’s on the table again, this decade. When someone stands outside the fence and tells us what we are, the answer is not to boo louder — booing is just the small feeling borrowing the crowd’s size, and we’ve seen where that road goes. The answer is to turn back to the work: To keep building the thing, honestly, with its worst history admitted and its circle open, because it’s worth building — and because every alternative on offer is worse.
That’s the belief worth having. That Canada is a place worth having, and ours, and that working on it — together, with clear eyes — is the best thing we could do with the time. Especially now. Especially here.