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How Canadian nationalism is evolving with the times - and will continue to do so

How Canadian nationalism is evolving with the times - and will continue to do so

Canada News.Net03-07-2025
Tariffs imposed on Canada by the United States have fuelled a surge in nationalist sentiment that played a significant role in the outcome of April's federal election.
Mark Carney's new Liberal government has signalled an interest in pursuing nation-building projects that hearken back to an earlier period in Canadian history.
Economic, cultural and social policy in Canada has often served the purpose of building national unity to facilitate cohesion and collective action. But some commentators have cautioned Canadians to dampen their reinvigorated sense of pride in their nation.
Those on the right view Canadian nationalism as an obstacle to neo-liberal economic policies while the left perceives it as irredeemably flawed.
For people on the right, free trade and globalization are thought to produce the best economic outcomes, and nationalism obstructs those outcomes. But those on the progressive left argue that Canada was founded on racist policies and settler colonialism, so nationalism should be rejected because of this original sin.
Both perspectives - and the public discussion of Canada's national identity more generally - remain mired in confusion over the nature of nations. As a political philosopher, I have worked to clear up this confusion by determining what nations are and how they evolve.
In the 19th century, French scholar Ernest Renan outlined a definition of nation that has yet to be improved upon. For Renan, a nation consists of two things: the daily commitment of a people to continue to live and work together and a collective memory of a shared past together.
In contemporary times, Irish social scientist Benedict Anderson described nations as "imagined communities," since the character of the nation is determined by the limits of the collective imagination of its citizens.
These are subjective definitions of nations because they define national communities in terms of the identification of their members with the community.
There are other, more common objective definitions of a nation involving identity, including shared ethnicity, religion or culture. But these definitions have long been criticized since many national identities transcend ethnicity, religion, culture or any other identity markers.
A national community is distinct from a state. The state constitutes the formal political institutions of a society, while the nation is the community of people within that society who view each other as compatriots. This is why the phrase "the people" is often used as a synonym for the national community.
While some nations are stateless, in other cases, multiple nations co-exist within a single state.
In Canada, there is the Quebecois nation and many Indigenous nations within the Canadian nation. Although they are distinct, states and their governments will often build national identities around themselves to enable cohesion and collective action. Canada's national identity was systematically shaped by successive governments - from Confederation onward - to build the society that Canadians live in today.
The character of a particular nation is not fixed.
The beliefs, practices and culture of the people who choose to live and work together can be shaped into anything they collectively decide on. A nation can adopt new values, redefine its membership or have one of its definitive characteristics fade from prominence.
Accordingly, there is no reason to think that moral failings of a national community's past must compromise it forever. A nation can, and sometimes does, recognize its past failures and become something better.
A distinction is sometimes drawn between "patriotism" and "nationalism," with the most famous being made by English social critic and novelist George Orwell.
For Orwell, patriotism is devotion to a particular way of life without the desire to force it on other people, while nationalism denotes an impulse to seek power for one's nation. Patriotism, then, is a benign, ethical form of partiality to one's nation.
Other thinkers have sought to explain how national identities and communities can be cultivated in an ethical way, described by Israeli philosopher Yael Tamir as "liberal nationalism."
The liberal nationalist, according to Tamir, seeks to construct a national identity that adopts the correct ethical values. They hope to harness the energy of nationalism to build a nation committed to liberty, inclusivity and progress.
In 1867, George-Etienne Cartier described the Canadian identity that he and the other Fathers of Confederation sought to create as a "political nationality." He viewed Canadian identity as being defined by shared principles rather than language or ethnicity.
More than 150 years later, political theorist Michael Ignatieff made a similar distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism. In an ethnic nation, citizens identify with each other because they belong to the same ethnic, religious or cultural community. Meanwhile, in a civic nation, the people unite behind certain civic principles, like a commitment to democracy.
Cartier's concept of a political nationality was crucial to making sense of the political experiment that was Confederation. Having mostly abandoned their efforts to assimilate the French-Canadians, the British settlers in North America would now join with them to build a new national identity instead.
In his recent book, historian Raymond Blake explains how Canada's post-Second World War prime ministers, through their speeches and public statements, reshaped Canada's national identity.
Up through Louis St-Laurent, various prime ministers would refer to the "deux nations" origin of Canada as inspirational. British and French settlers had come together despite their differences to build a new society together, they pointed out.
As time went on, it became clear this definition of Canada's national identity wasn't nearly inclusive enough, making no mention of Indigenous Peoples.
The multicultural character of Canadian society was increasingly acknowledged by the government and Canadians at large until it was central to Canada's identity. Canada's national narrative has been reframed in recent years to recognize Indigenous Peoples as one of the three founding pillars of Canadian society. This evolution exemplifies exactly the change citizens should expect in a national community.
This transformation in Canadian national identity shows that national communities can change over time - including, perhaps, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's threats against Canada.
In the end, Canadians decide what sort of nation they want to inhabit. Canada's political nationality has proven more resilient than even some of its founders might have anticipated, but not for lack of effort. There will always remain the work of building a better nation - and it's work worth doing.
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It includes a brief mention of 'the Freedom Movement' under a one-paragraph sidebar labeled 'Climate denialists and the Culture Wars.' Here, the report briefly acknowledges that climate denial is merging with other conspiracy theories to 'drive acts of serious violence or terrorism.' Among the hybrids identified are 'conspiracy theories about government attempts to restrict individual freedoms (e.g. 'climate lockdown').' But the majority of the document — some 90 per cent of the text — focuses on threats posed by environmentalists. 'In Canada, a significant increase in the frequency or severity of extreme weather is likely to drive radicalization to violence and increase the threat from environmentally focused terrorists in the medium to long term,' the report states. It further predicts the 'increased use of extreme weather events in propaganda by violent extremists to radicalize and recruit new supporters, notably by assigning blame for climate-driven disasters on specific groups (migrants, politicians, industries, etc.).' Headings that follow include 'Eco-terrorism,' 'Violent fringes of the environmental movement,' and 'Eco-Fascists.' CSIS did not reply to queries about this report from Canada's National Observer. Asked whether the organization views eco-radicals as a greater threat to national security than right-wing groups like the Freedom Convoy, a spokesperson wrote by email: 'CSIS's 2024 Public report — available online — provides a detailed overview of how CSIS views the current global threat environment.' That report, however, only mentions 'climate change' once in passing, without naming any specific related threats. It says nothing about eco-terrorism, climate denialism or the Freedom Convoy. James Turk, director for the Centre for Free Expression, reviewed the document. The CSIS Integrated Threat Assessment Centre is a specialized organization whose job is to look at the rise in terrorism and other threats, so it makes sense the report doesn't dwell on the 'culture wars' and climate denial, he said in an interview with Canada's National Observer. But viewing the environmental movement through the lens of terrorism creates an environment where the discussion shifts from how to limit radicalization rather than how to limit the damages of climate change, he said. 'Let's prevent the problem rather than figure out how we're going to police the outcome if we don't remedy the problem,' Turk said. Who's scarier, eco-terrorists or right-wing radicals? It's common for protesters from all ideological backgrounds to feel unjustly persecuted by police. But for all the complaints from Conservatives and Freedom Convoy members over their rough treatment at the end of their blockade, the Convoy's start was marked by an unusual level of police cooperation. 'The big question was why the police did not enforce any laws for that particular group,' said Joao Velloso, a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa. When truckers started pulling into downtown Ottawa, he noted, police didn't even hand out tickets for illegal parking. 'It's quite scary that police can decide to not enforce any laws. That's quite dangerous for democracy.' Images of police officers shaking hands and taking selfies with protesters emerged not just from Ottawa, but also from other convoy blockades throughout the country, like the one in Coutts, Alberta, where some of the protesters were later found to have been stockpiling assault weapons. Each of these groups was blocking critical infrastructure, collectively inflicting billions of dollars of damage on the national economy. This paints a stark contrast to the treatment given to environmental and Indigenous protesters who target infrastructure. During the Fairy Creek protests against old growth logging on Vancouver Island in 2021, RCMP officers were filmed tearing the masks off protesters before spraying them point blank in the face with pepper spray — tactics a judge later declared illegal — for blocking a logging road. Two years before that, during the Wet'suwet'en protests against BC's Coastal GasLink pipeline, RCMP dispatched snipers ahead of a militarized arrest of Indigenous protesters and journalists, generating international headlines. It is hard to compare how various protest groups are treated because with all the different factions and protest methods it's rarely an apples to apples comparison. For example, the 'Freedom Convoy' protests were exceptional because the protesters utilized huge hard-to-remove trucks, which he says may have thrown a spanner in the police response in Ottawa. While Turk emphasized it's 'hard to generalize' which groups are perceived and treated as a bigger threat by the state, overall, 'people who see themselves as defenders of the environment have been treated more harshly than people who are promoting the exploitation of the environment,' Turk said. In Canada, property rights and trespass law 'are used to justify harsh treatment of many progressive protests' including ones that interfere with logging, pipelines and energy infrastructure or advocate for Palestinian solidarity, he said. Many environmental, climate and land defender movements go against the status quo — anchored by the political, economic, legal and corporate landscape in Canada — and are therefore likely to be perceived as a threat, Turk added, nodding to the immense power and influence of fossil fuel lobby groups both in Canada and the US. Powerful lobby groups influence the political agenda and seek to shape views on national threats, whether it pertains to war or climate change — and right now, it appears fossil fuel interests are shaping the narrative, Turk said. 'When we talk about who we're afraid of, we're afraid of the left,' said Meaghan Daniel, a Montreal lawyer who has defended activists and Indigenous protest movements across the country. Daniel has roots in activism herself, and was deeply involved in the left-wing G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, where 1,100 people were arrested in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The police chief in charge of that operation, Bill Blair, was later put in charge of CSIS and the RCMP as public safety minister. 'For a long time we've seen extensive surveillance and infiltration of far-left groups, but we didn't see that [with the Freedom Convoy],' Daniel said. ''We didn't even see the acknowledgement of far-right groups until about a decade after the G20.' That helps explain why authorities were caught 'flat-footed' by Convoy groups in 2022, when they seized critical infrastructure all across the nation with almost no effort to prevent them until it was too late. 'I think they were really surprised at the existence of far-right extremist organizing.' Even after all levels of government awoke to the scale of the threat, the way police finally ended the Convoy protests was far more peaceful than similar actions against major left-wing acts of civil disobedience. Almost no arrests were made, and in the end only three people were criminally charged. During the Wet'suwet'en protests, RCMP arrested 74 people in four separate raids. At Fairy Creek, the number of arrests once again surpassed 1,100 and many were prosecuted. 'If you look at all the mass incarceration events, they're almost entirely left-wing,' Daniel said. At the same time, Daniel agrees that the Crown's recommendation of 7 and 8 year jail terms for Lich and Barber, respectively, is far longer than typical for protest organizers. 'I don't want to see a huge, long jail sentence happening,' she said. 'Aggressive policing only ends up radicalizing people. Whenever forceful removal of a protester happens, usually that protester in turn doesn't become more compliant and trusting of the state. The opposite happens.'

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