The Limits of True Patriot Love

On a recent spring night, Gustavo Gimeno, the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, strode onstage before a crowd gathered for an evening of Haydn, Mozart, and Mahler. The orchestra had performed Mahler’s Third last year, gloriously, and the room was ready for the Fourth. The maestro’s baton went up—and out came the opening strains of “O Canada.” The audience leapt to its feet in a rousing singalong, then erupted in hoots, cheers, thunderous applause. It was a big Canadian moment in a country that doesn’t indulge in many. My companion, a friend who has been in the country less than a year, asked if this was normal. “Absolutely not,” I whispered. But these are uncommon times. Against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s protean tariffs and fifty-first-state riffs, the country was bracing. The uncertainty unleashed by the Trump administration has seen markets plummet and recover by turns, and economists were warning of a global recession, which would likely hit Canada harder than the US. A Canadian published a harrowing account about being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE—after a routine border crossing. She was held for eleven days, kept in a cell where the lights were never turned off, and transferred from prison to prison. There have been reports of Canadian citizens born in Iran and Afghanistan being denied entry at the US border. The whole affair has awakened a dormant national pride in my compatriots. In the first phase, flag sales surged. The Sobeys near me began running ads over the PA for proudly Canadian Gay Lea butter and milk. “Canada Is Not for Sale” merchandise became such a hit it spawned counterfeit sellers and a cease-and-desist letter. In a flourish reminiscent of “freedom fries,” some coffee shops ditched the Americano for the “Canadiano.” When I told my mother about the anthem, she pumped her fist in the air. Phase two has been marked by a rollout of hyper-Canadian cultural product. A stage show next month, The Sound of Our Nation, will feature iconic pop numbers from the “Canadian Songbook” sung by musical-theatre actors. Mike Myers returns to Second City for a benefit performance this week. A new Molson ad celebrates national pride set to Rush’s “Closer to the Heart,” and at the just-unveiled Grizzly Bar in Toronto, the maple leaf is ubiquitous and Canadian Tire money accepted as currency. I’ll confess that my own response to this general reaction has been one of bewilderment. Like many people I know, I spend too much time reading about and being troubled by its latest horrors. I understand the impulse to draw together as a country; a depolarizing pull has been refreshing in an election year. My unease is with the shape and ubiquity of this unfamiliar new social force—elbows up, Canada!—and the speed with which American technicolour nationalism has produced a mirror image of sorts in this country. A “Dear Canada” video last month, in which Democratic senator Adam Schiff runs through highlights of our achievements—insulin, basketball, peanut butter—hints at the extent of the shift. Schiff’s message echoes an appeal to Americans created by a Toronto ad agency in October 2016, in which Canadians enumerated ways in which America was (already) great. This time, we’re the ones being talked down. It’s as though the red, white, and blue could only be matched with the red and white and maple leaf. We turned overnight into a nation of zealous Canadian patriots, even if we’re not a hundred percent certain what that means.

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Patriotism surges during times of war, and it is forged most enthusiastically in opposition to outside forces. I know its appeal intimately. Like most people of my generation growing up in India, I was raised with a Gandhian pride in a country that sprang from opposition to the British empire and the peaceful struggle that had won us independence and the world’s admiration. Ninety-six percent of Indians polled by the Pew Research Center in 2021 said they are very proud to be Indian. (Less encouragingly, 64 percent of the Hindu majority believe Hindu identity is very important to being “truly Indian.”) I lived in the US too, for five formative years, so I saw that version up close. It was not all bad. Brash American confidence could express itself in those times as optimism and warmth, and the country’s revolutionary past seemed to carry through in an interest in its own history—less so the shameful parts, though I did learn in school about Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears and, mostly via the Civil War, about slavery. Patriotism, per Orwell, is distinct from nationalism. It emerges from love for a place and a way of life that is defensive rather than aggressive: a benign impulse that aligns well with the Canadian ethos. Nationalism, on the other hand, Orwell wrote, “is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” The goal of nationalists is influence and prestige for the country but also for any other group to which they claim allegiance. Among the groups Orwell named: communists, political Catholics, Zionists, antisemites, and “the White Race.” (Some groups that drive the nationalist’s fervour, including that last one, don’t even exist as such, Orwell noted presciently; there is no agreed-upon definition for them.) It’s worth noting that Canadian flag waving, unlike its American counterpart, even pre-Trump, tends to signal pride without invoking might. There may be a note of smugness, which I noticed when I settled here, but we have neither the means nor desire to impose our will on the world. Still, as nationalism ascends in countries like America and India, Russia and Germany—it can lend a chauvinistic colour to displays of patriotism. Patriots invaded the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, intent on saving their nation from treasonous elites. Canadian patriots, during the pandemic, flew flags from car windows and slapped “Fuck Trudeau” stickers on bumpers. This populist-inflected patriotism captured an anger and a loyalty to a group that seemed a little more in line with nationalism. It was not a posture shared widely in this country. Then, this year, Canadians in large numbers adopted both the flags and the rage. The trade-war patriots are more like old-school patriots than that variety who assembled in convoys. The fans rallying behind a Canadian team, any team, winning the NHL playoffs (that’s 71 percent of us) or growing misty eyed at the “I am Canadian” ad remake released in March as “We are Canadian,” again featuring comedian Jeff Douglas, don’t want to tear down anything. They are expressing their loyalty to a country they know and love, and they are staking out its cultural borders. That country—the Canada of Joni Mitchell, of Tim Horton’s coffee, of Mr. Dressup and his puppets, of Howie Meeker, and the Tragically Hip, as spelled out by the viral Mark Carney / Mike Myers ad—is a benevolent vision inflected with deserved indignation. The Carney / Myers ad was amusing, as even my thirteen-year-old admitted, and he belongs to a demographic that is exacting when it comes to the cool–cringe continuum. Still, there’s something odd about this iteration of patriotism, with its vision of a strong, unified Canada wrapped in simple slogans. It’s good to be careful when you are staking out space that you don’t box yourself in. But Trump 2.0 has seemed to thrust us into a kind of broad, reflexively nostalgic nationalism. It’s striking how quickly the sheen of a post-national, multicultural Canada—“diversity is our strength”—faded, only to be replaced by Flag Day festivities in the republic of double doubles and Casey and Finnegan. I looked up Casey and Finnegan, along with one or two other details in the Carney / Myers ad. My knowledge of hockey players from the 1940s is not all it should be, and my childhood entertainment was not Mr. Dressup but a series on Indian farming and a weekly medley of Hindi film songs broadcast on Doordarshan, then India’s only TV network. My Canadian music, for that matter, is more about Spookey Ruben, R. Murray Schafer, and Patti Schmidt on the CBC’s Brave New Waves than anything by the Hip. It’s a big country. I’m not looking for better representation for my own aesthetic preferences—or any other part of my identity. What we need, I would suggest, isn’t a new version of the same play that looks more like a government pamphlet, with a representative from every racial group, colourful street foods and traditional garb, and a cameo from, say, the Weeknd. (Maybe the nostalgic iteration of Canadianness we’re getting is as authentic as any other that tries to speak for everyone.) It’s hard not to notice, though, that for a diverse country, Canada is weirdly adept at rallying behind the dominant message, whatever it may be. Diversity-is-us was the message for some time, and post–Truth and Reconciliation hearings, it was accompanied by a widespread reticence around national symbols. A sesquicentennial shame hung over our celebrations in 2017. Who wanted to fly the flag, with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls underway? If there was a way to commemorate a historic anniversary that also acknowledged terrible tragedies and failures, we didn’t find it. Canada’s largest city marked the occasion by floating an enormous yellow rubber duck into Lake Ontario. There was something disarming and, well, Canadian about this. Now 2025 has brought the swift resurrection of a version of Canada we’d dumped so readily—and the march in lockstep that unity can sometimes demand. It’s vital for Canadians to seek out new alliances and come together to solve the very real problems posed by the changing world order. But are sentimental hand-over-heart displays the path? Any patriotic turn in answer to a nationalist gambit is still playing the same game as Trump. Isn’t it possible to sidestep the patriot wars altogether and still draw nearer as Canadians? We could cheer our prime minster as he tells an insistent American suitor that Canada isn’t interested, while also remembering that his spots with Myers were political ads kicking off an election campaign. The red and white of the flag and the red and white of the so-termed natural governing party sometimes bleed into each other. Displays of solidarity are useful, as long as they eventually go beyond show. The truth is, for a good many Canadians, Trump’s threats and policies weren’t the first or worst existential challenge or threat to well-being. The country faces a housing crisis so extreme there have been requests for medical assistance in dying from people experiencing poverty or homelessness. Ontario, where the homelessness is the worst in the country, had more than 80,000 unhoused people last year. A startling number, nearly half, of Canadians without terminal illness who chose MAID cited “isolation or loneliness” as a source of their suffering—more so than uncontrolled pain or emotional distress. Thirty-five First Nation reserves haven’t had safe drinking water for more than a decade. The opioid crisis still rages, accounting for nearly 51,000 deaths since 2016, according to federal health data, and our experiment in legalizing cannabis, while lucrative for government and some industry players, has been flawed when it comes to public health objectives, a 2024 government review found. Canadians under twenty-five consume cannabis at some of the highest rates in the world, even as studies link chronic use to higher risks of mental health issues, especially given other risk factors. Some of our problems gained visibility thanks to an external lens. A review from British Medical Journal, produced with Canadian experts, presented a scathing appraisal of our handling of the pandemic: it found “an ill prepared country with outdated data systems, poor coordination and cohesion, and blindness about its citizens’ diverse needs.” We still wrestle with the after effects. The results of the latest World Happiness Report showed that Canada dropped thirteen spots in the ranking over a decade, from fifth place to eighteenth. Toronto is now the city with the worst traffic in North America and among the worst globally. One-third of skilled newcomers in an Ipsos / Canadian Institute of Citizenship survey said they are likely to leave the country within two years. A broad national discontent was forced into the open after the government stumbled on a possible cause for the housing shortage: a surprise population spike of 1.3 million in 2023, announced by Statistics Canada last March. The bump was mostly due to temporary residents. Media soon sounded the alarm about student-visa abuse; 50,000 international students were no-shows at their schools. The feds raced to reduce immigration targets and cap student visas. Some, but not all, of these problems became political fodder leading up to an election call. After the writ dropped, though, the country’s mood shifted. The less charged environment is nice, but beneath the pleasantness is enough reason for worry. Those lowered immigration targets, for instance, are expected to cost billions in revenues, according to an RBC report. Higher-education institutions are already hit by the loss of lucrative foreign students. York University has paused admissions to a fleet of degree programs, including environmental biology, global history and justice, Indigenous studies, gender and women’s studies. And there is the political impact. Robust, decades-long support for immigration has seen a dip, with a majority of Canadians now favouring lower target numbers—a reminder that the best outcomes for projects of inclusion rely on good policy and responsible execution. Every country has its challenges, and if we waited to solve all of ours before declaring a love of country, patriotism wouldn’t exist. This is a dismaying list of dysfunctions, though, and there has been little momentum or drive to correct things. Our national impulse to be agreeable sometimes manifests as complacency. We are quick to understand why things can’t be better. I’m sometimes guilty of this; when a friend expressed outrage in June 2020 at Ontario’s pandemic response, pointing to the disaster in long-term-care homes, I defaulted to glib comparisons to the US. I wasn’t alone. Canada’s own view of its pandemic response was generally quite positive—with exceptions. “Maclean’s rejects the argument, prevalent in this country, that good enough is good enough,” Alison Uncles, then editor-in-chief of Maclean’s (and my former colleague), wrote in a scorching 2021 editorial. “Hindsight is 20/20, the argument goes. . . . We’re middle of the pack. What’s to complain about? Pandemics are hard.” Education and public transit are hard too, and there have also been rationalizations of learning declines, and of transit woes. To challenge the status quo, particularly post-pandemic, was read as joining the ranks of those disenfranchised patriots. The past year brought the beginnings of a reckoning. In Canadian style, it took the form of a nationwide convulsion against the incumbent prime minister and party and toward the opposition (we do this from time to time, as Kim Campbell can attest). But even if solutions to housing costs and inflation, a struggling health care system, and high unemployment are not that simple, we had at least begun talking about the problems. This, too, was a big Canadian moment. Then the tariff crisis arrived, with attendant Canada bashing. Out came the flags. The Liberals benefited immediately in opinion polls and then electoral polls—suddenly Pierre Poilievre’s brash stylings and focus on Trudeau were outmoded. But patriotism is the perfect trump card (sorry) for all parties in an election year. Accountability is no longer the most pressing issue for our politicians. It’s standing up for Canada. And they already have our support. Because We. Are. Canadian. My in-laws were among the many who dusted off the maple leaf for Flag Day. They dressed in red and white and gathered with friends in their Eastern Ontario town. What had we done for Flag Day, they asked innocently. My husband got off the phone with them steaming—something I’ve never seen in many years of marriage. “I’ll put up my flag,” he told them, “when a couple who work hard can afford to buy a house and afford basic necessities and plan for their future.” I think there may be a generational divide on this question, as well as an economic one. In World Happiness Report rankings for the under-thirty group, Canada ranked far too low, at fifty-eight. A number of younger people I’ve spoken to are much more concerned about rising costs and housing than any insult to national ego—a trend supported by an Abacus poll last month, which found that handling Trump is the top election issue for boomers but not young voters. I found myself thinking about “Buy Canadian” campaigns as I walked through the desolate halls of the Bay’s flagship location one spring morning. A court had just granted the retailer permission to liquidate. It looked like a 700,000-square-foot boutique store, a few shoes and bags and jackets scattered about the shelves. I asked a sales associate if there was any HBC Stripes merchandise left. I had been looking at tea towels and cushions with those iconic stripes for years, but I’m not a big shopper and it was never a necessity. “You can look downstairs, but I think they’re all gone,” she replied. I felt a little guilty asking; she’d soon be out of a job, and I was scraping for souvenirs of Canada. Of course, the Bay barely qualifies as Canada; since 2008, it has been owned by NRDC Equity, which has an address in affluent Westchester County, New York. The iconic Roots, with its nostalgic cabin-chic aesthetic and beaver mascot, was sold in 2015 to a global equity firm, Searchlight Capital. This is a different sort of “Buy Canadian” campaign. For that matter, the double doubles in those ads come courtesy of Restaurant Brands International, a conglomerate headquartered in New York. And the product advertised by the 2000 “I am Canadian” rant is owned by Molson Coors, with global headquarters in Chicago. Some of our best souvenirs are really better symbols of other things. Even Gay Lea, which is Canadian, registers for me more as the dairy group that bought a beloved local co-op, the Black River Cheese Company, and promptly moved the cheese-making operations to a central facility. You can still buy the cheese and other goods at the little cheese factory on the creek in Milford, Ontario, but the curds are no longer made there—it’s just a facade. I am hopeful that the symbolic campaigns will nudge us to something more substantive. Instead of nationalism, we could adopt a robust localism. Canadians could be moved to support not just Canadian-owned businesses but enterprises in their cities, their towns. Even before a trade war, some did, choosing these places over Starbucks or Walmart, going into shops where they talked with other people from their city rather than simply ordering off Amazon. Perhaps the current mood will encourage more of this, root us more to community and place, though tough economic times will make it harder. Maybe a generation of tots will discover, via Mr. Dressup, children’s programming that wasn’t made in the past three years, with the constant corporate impetus to “age up” the language and mimic pop trends of the moment. (Four-year-olds don’t have an in-built need for the latest, most globally popular entertainment; it’s something they’re taught to want.) Maybe more of us, seized of our collective identity, will visit a park or another city and explore the beauty of this country (if a US boycott gets us there, so be it) or volunteer to help the two-thirds of Canadian organizations that already face a shortage. Maybe a generation of adults will return to restaurants, instead of resigning themselves to the soggy, cold version of food brought to their door by SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats while they scroll through Facebook. Flags and anthems may allow us to share a laugh or a moment of solidarity we need now. But the best way of being proudly Canadian may be to occasionally escape the algorithmic, very online, mostly American world and actually live in this place.The post The Limits of True Patriot Love first appeared on The Walrus.