The fact that Donald Trump’s rapacious musings about Canada becoming “the 51st state” overlapped with the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week had some pundits looking for a link. Several settled on the notion that Trudeau had in some way invited the annexation overtures; that the prime minister’s supposedly “postnational” Liberal administration had created a country so devoid of identity and prideMany cited a recent Angus Reid poll documenting a slump in patriotism. that it was all but inviting foreign conquest.“Deconstruct a nation, and it does not hold,” said Tasha Kheiriddin in the National Post. Chris Nelson in the Calgary Herald blasted Trudeau for destroying “old symbols and customs” and replacing them with “nothing.” The writer Wesley Yang confidently announced that “the derogation of Canadian nationhood was the explicit, openly avowed project of the Canadian political class” under Trudeau, while a headline on a column by John Ivison declared “With our ‘post-national’ leader it’s no wonder Trump thinks we aren’t a real country.”
Such editorializing inevitably winds up back at the most consistently over-cited and overblown quote of Trudeau’s tenure, the one he gave to the New York Times Magazine’s Guy Lawson in 2015 about Canada being a “postnational state” with no “core identity.”
On the one hand, Trudeau is making a rather banal point here: diverse democracies by definition struggle to define what’s “mainstream” beyond common civic values.
On the other, he is obviously lying.
The ambitious phrase “postnational state” implies a country that has completely shed any pretence of being definable by traditional nationalistic characteristics like race, religion, and language, and Trudeau simply does not believe Canada is a country like this. Much of his governing agenda has marched proudly in the opposite direction, in fact.
Canadian nationalism tends to be a very top-down, Ottawa-directed thing, and Trudeau’s government has been little different from its predecessors in celebrating and strengthening all the clichéd pillars of Canadian identity in the fashion Canada’s patriotic elites have traditionally demanded.
Such pillars include:
- Official bilingualism generally and the promotion of the French language and francophone culture specifically;
- the entrenchment and exaltation of the British monarchy’s presence in the Canadian political system;
- the dignified veneration of the Canadian Armed Forces and Canada’s military history;
- and the uplifting and integration of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities and culture into the Canadian story.
On all these fronts, there is little doubt that Trudeau is a sincere believer. He has issued immigration directives designed to grow the Francophone presence both in and outside Quebec, introduced an array of coins, stamps, banknotes, and medals to celebrate the reign of King Charles, unveiled grand new monuments and delivered superlative speeches honouring Canada’s military, and incorporated Indigenous art, language, dance, music, costume, and spiritualism into virtually every state-sponsored event he’s presided over. None of this feels terribly postnational.It’s likewise worth remembering that to the extent Trudeau’s cultural agenda has displayed an aversion to the “old ways,” it’s continued trends of the Stephen Harper years. Former immigration minister Jason Kenny, a great champion of multiculturalism, bragged about raising immigration rates to 50-year highs. Harper himself apologized repeatedly for the cruelties of Canada’s past, including his 2008 apology to the victims of residential schools—a dramatic act that helped solidify the schools’ central spot in the Canadian history canon.
Canadian elites in journalism, politics, and the broad public intelligentsia—especially the right-of-centre ones—clearly suffer some degree of cognitive dissonance about all this. Trudeau’s 2015 “postnational” quip is often held as a sort of Supreme Truth that all other facts about his government must be subordinate to, even when this requires ignoring observable reality. I’ve heard elites hallucinate positions Trudeau has never come remotely close to expressing—“he hates the monarchy,” for instance—simply because they feel like the sort of things a “postnational” prime minister would do.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks on as athlete Rosie MacLennan waves the Maple Leaf after being named as the flag bearer for the Summer Olympics Thursday July 21, 2016 in Ottawa. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press.
Elites believe the “postnational” myth about Trudeau because it is a useful shorthand for ascribing a coherent motive to his actions that might otherwise seem inexplicable. After all, for Trudeau to be as unpopular as he is, and for Canada to be failing across as many metrics as it is, surely begs an explanation. The idea the prime minister hates his own country—his own nation—offers order to the chaos.
Yet Canadian elites do themselves a disservice when they misunderstand Trudeau this way, as it becomes a path to deepening their misunderstanding of the country itself, which has rarely shown much interest in the sort of national shibboleths those in and around the federal government consider existential. If Trudeau has undermined Canadian pride and made the country ashamed of itself and its people less proud to be Canadian, it’s because he has betrayed a quite different understanding of the country; an understanding defined far more by material conditions than old-fashioned nation-state sacraments.
The Canadian dream, said Will Ferguson, is “success without risk.” Like most observations about Canadians, this one carries an implied “unlike Americans…” prefix, but there is truth to it. Patriotic middle-class Canadians often believe their country is good to the extent it functions as a stable, safe, bourgeois utopia, in which life’s most important bills are paid by someone else (health care, retirement) while everything else (real estate, food, gasoline, etc.) is cheap and abundant. There is no gun violence or endemic poverty, and if that means the citizenry is too complacent and risk-averse to produce an Elon Musk, well, that’s a fair trade.
Throughout the Trudeau years, Canadian elites, in my mind, have often stubbornly misunderstood what really bothers people about how Canadian culture has changed during this decade, and instead assume middle-class Canadian voters are bothered by the same sort of high-level offences against the dignity of the Canadian nation as they are, rather than the more immediate practical manifestations of Trudeau’s misgovernance.
Are woke teachers and professors who emphasize the importance of “decolonizing” the curriculum obnoxious because they’re fostering dangerous disrespect for Canadian history and undermining the heroic legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald and other nation-builders? Or because they’re filling students’ brains with useless theories at a time when practical skills are what’s necessary to triumph in a competitive job market?
Should militant pro-Palestine protestors be hated because they’re undermining Canada’s credibility as a stalwart defender of Israel in the wake of October 7? Or because they make Canadians feel unsafe at the mall?
Pierre Poilievre has shown excellent instincts when it comes to these sorts of questions. His rhetoric of Canadian pride consistently puts the sustainability of the middle-class lifestyle front and centre, reserving his floweriest language for descriptions of the small dignities of bourgeois life Trudeau’s government has stolen and that Poilievre promises to restore (“…a cold drink in one hand and a hard-earned paycheque in the other.”)
This, to me, seems the most sustainable vision of Canadian patriotism, one more likely to serve as the basis for a broad and inclusive “core identity” than the grand historic narratives and “Two Founding Nations” symbology favoured by much of the Laurentian establishment. It offers the best theory of why Trudeau has failed, why the country feels weak and depressed, and with it, the best vision of what Conservative success should resemble.
