Front Burner - What is this new Canadian patriotism?

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Canadian pride reached a fever pitch after the NHL 4 Nations Cup last month and it hasn’t showed any signs of slowing down since. Sales of the Canadian flags are up. American liquor and beer have been pulled off the shelves in stores throughout the country. “Elbows Up”, a war cry and tribute to Gordie Howe’s signature defensive move, has been trending on social media. But in a country that, according to polls, saw declining national pride for decades, what is our national identity? And how do you build a forward-looking and also inclusive, patriotic society? We wade through the good, the bad and the ugly of Canadian patriotism with David Moscrop, a freelance journalist and political scientist, and Jeet Heer, author and national affairs correspondent at The Nation.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Here's a question for you. What's your email address saying about your Canadian business? First impressions matter, and your email says a lot. It's your customer's first look at your brand. A custom.ca email shows you're credible, professional, and proudly Canadian. It signals you do business in Canada. For Canadians, show you mean business from the get-go. Get your custom.ca email now at yourcustomemail.ca

and let your email do the talking. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It's been a month since Canada won against the U.S. in the NHL's Foreign Nations Cup, a tournament that came to symbolize Canada's real political and economic tensions, with Washington and President Donald Trump. McDavid scores! Connor McDavid wins it for Canada! Canadian pride reached a fever pitch and it hasn't showed any signs of slowing down since. Sales of Canadian flags are up. American liquor and beer have been pulled off the shelves in stores throughout the country.

Elbows up, a war cry in tribute to Gordie Howe's signature defensive move has been trending on social media. Even my colleague, CBC radio host Jeff Douglas, aka the I Am Canadian guy from the Molson commercials from the early 2000s made a comeback. But instead, now it's We Are Canadian. And for those who haven't appeared to get with the program, people like Kevin O'Leary, Danielle Smith, Wayne Gretzky. Well, they are dealing with people calling them traitors. But in a country that, according to polls, saw declining national pride for decades until

recently spiking back up, What is our Canadian identity? And how do you build a forward-looking and inclusive patriotic society? And what does history tell us about what this moment of heightened Canadian patriotism could bring? To talk about Canada's reckoning with national pride in the face of threats to our sovereignty, I am joined by David Moskrop, a freelance journalist and political scientist. Hi, David. Hello. Great to have you.

And I am also here with Jeet here, a author and national affairs correspondent at The Nation. Jeet, hey. Oh, good to be here. It's a pleasure to have you both. So obviously, we're seeing this huge resurgence of nationalism right now, but not that long ago there was a lot of questioning and hand wringing around the idea of Canadian national identity. And David, I'll start with you.

What do you think it means at this moment to be Canadian? Oh, it's a small, easy question off the top. Just roll with it. We've sorted that out. That's no problem at all. Well, I incidentally think the moment of national pride and energy reflects a trend that isn't exactly new in this country, which is to find pride in the country in reaction to an external threat.

That's not novel for Canada. That's a pretty common expression and source of nationalism. But it's particularly come to light in threats from the United States, which makes a lot of sense because if you think of nationalism as a way of understanding yourself, not just internally, but as opposed to something else, then this is something that triggers that, something that pulls together what a scholar once called an imagined community, because it's really, really tough to bring all these people together across a disparate land.

But now we have a common cause to rally against an external threat. Jeet, how would you define Canadian identity and how much of our identity you think is in opposition to America? Well, I think recently it has certainly been in opposition to America. And I think one could say even historically, but I think maybe another way to think about Canadian identity is that it's always been a way of telling us a story about our place in the

world. The sort of nationalism of the 19th and early 20th century seems alien to us because it was very much aligned with the British Empire. You know, with the demise of the British Empire that created the crisis of Canadian nationalism and it sort of led to the post-war era where we had to redefine Canada. And again, the counter distinction with the US was there, but it was also, I think at its best moments, a story about Canada's place in the world and not just being anti-American. Remember that Pearson won the Nobel Prize for his work in the Suez Crisis And there was the idea of Canada as a peacekeeping nation, as a nation that has international responsibilities, that has ties to the Commonwealth, to NATO, the United Nations, and can forge its distinct identity within these larger systems. And I think that the

current crisis is not just that Trump is threatening to make us the 51st state, but I think that the current crisis is not just that Trump is threatening to make us the 51st state, but I think more interestingly, it's also that Trumpism is a challenge to that international system that has been part of our self-conception. But just this idea of Canada as a peacekeeping nation, as sort of a reasonable actor in the post-World War II era. Do you feel like that fell by the wayside though in recent years? Yeah, no, I think so. And I think more broadly, a lot of that Canadian nationalism that I'm talking about, peacekeeping in foreign affairs, but then domestically sort of universal healthcare, robust support of the arts,

the sort of whole panoply of the welfare state, that really fell under a crisis long before Trump. And it started with the conservative and liberal governments of the 80s and 90s, with neoliberalism, with free trade. And so the sort of substance of Canadian national identity that emerged after the British Empire period was in all these institutions. And a lot of these institutions, they're still around, but they have been allowed to wither and aren't

functioning. And are no longer, as you said in the polling, perhaps no longer the source of pride that they once were. David, do you want to respond to that? Oh, I mean, I agree entirely with Jeet. I mean, one of the things I argued recently was I felt I had become a reluctant nationalist in part because I thought, no, no, we get to determine for ourselves how we want to live. Never mind the fact that for decades,

we've been selling out national sovereignty as we were warned against in the 80s and 90s to foreign trade deals, to foreign corporations who kind of set their own tone, who threatened capital flight if we try to pull anything too drastic. But when the threat from the United States became acute, I thought, no, no, we get to decide for ourselves how we want to live. And to Jeet's point, I think one of the ways I'm processing this moment is to ask myself, okay, what do we do with this crisis? We didn't ask for it, but we're facing it. So what can we build from it? Is there a time now to reassert national sovereignty and to rebuild things and say, well, we're going to rebuild the welfare state

and then start to build institutions we can be proud of like we did in the 1960s when it was Canada turning a hundred and we got, you know, national Medicare and so on and so forth. You mentioned being a reluctant nationalist, right? I know you've also written about how you have complicated feelings about Canada's history too, right? And just tell me how that fits into your reluctant nationalism as well. Yeah, I'm a leftist and we like to- Are you? That's a shocking considering what you just said. You can lead with that if you want. It's breaking news. You heard it here first.

But I nonetheless try to reckon with the fact that I think there's something good and useful in this country that ought to be preserved and there's potential that ought to be extended in social welfare programs in a general but frank consensus on the value of immigration and multiculturalism and so on and so forth. I'm like, well, let's fight for that. And yet we have to reckon with a past and present history of colonialism. The present part is very, very important. I'm coming to you right now from Ottawa, which is unceded indigenous territory, Algonquin territory. There's plenty of that throughout the country. We have to deal with the fact that our companies, foreign companies, particularly often resource companies like mining companies, particularly often industry resource companies like mining

companies get up to some pretty naughty stuff across borders, some pretty dodgy practices across borders. That we contribute an outsized share to climate change per capita from the resources that have made us so wealthy or some of us so wealthy here. That gives you a sense of some of those concerns. And so we kind of reckon with that past and that present, but not say, well, there's nothing good here, burn the whole place to the ground. I'm a post nationalist, you know, uprooted cosmopolitan. I'm like, okay, no, let's reckon with that and figure out a way to move forward and do better. But that's tough to do because there are genuine things we need to grapple with. And this gets an expression

that I'm not saying we shouldn't consider, but it sometimes sucks out all the oxygen from the room, which is we're just going to fight over statues of John A. Macdonald. We can do that, but there's broader, deeper material concerns we have to deal with too. I wanted to ask you guys about culture, right? The argument you often hear against our sense of national identity is because of this large shadow the US cast. The idea that so much of the culture we consume is from there, that all our talented people go there. It makes it very difficult for us to like have our own culture. And David, do you think living next to this political and cultural superpower has prevented us from really realizing who we are as Canadians.

It's become such a banal point to say, but I'll say it anyway, is if you live next to the global hegemon, both the military, economic, and cultural hegemon, and you speak not exclusively, but primarily the same language, it's going gonna be very, very hard not to absorb a lot of that culture, and we obviously have. And as the years went on, we broke down cultural barriers as well, both technologically and culturally, right? It's become very, very easy to watch

or get any American program, radio station, book, whatever it might be. And the close trade relationship has driven a lot of that and we've just become all mixed up together. And I was driving yesterday home from running around and Stan Rogers came on my Spotify. Down on the farm back among the family, wait for me to radio.

Hear the ladies singing to their men, dancing and healing toe, And I was, you know, I think Stan Rogers is one of the great cultural icons. He can stand up not just in Canada, but near and around the world. Gordon Lightfoot is another, you know, Anne Murray is another still. But I'm listening to Stan Rogers and I have this sort of visceral feeling of, you know, my God, we are a distinct people and we have our own stories and we have our own identity and we don't have to be a kind of branch plant culturally, economically of the United States. And then I keep listening to Stan Rogers, I'm like, you know what? This is a regional song. Ontario, you know, I've seen the place I'd rather be.

You're scum elix in the city of Toronto. Don't do a damn thing for me. I'd rather live by the sea. I've watched the bees. And, uh, as a lot of Gordon Lightfoot's songs are, as a lot of Stan Rogers songs are. But it reminded me, because I was thinking about that ahead of this, that we often forget that regional identities in this country remain profoundly strong, linguistically, culturally, in food, in the arts, and so on and so forth. Jit, would you agree with that?

Yeah, and actually I think that there's actually a ground for optimism. I think a lot of the earlier problems of Canadian nationalism came from the fact that it was an industrial era where media was big, media was Hollywood, media was the three networks, right? But now you're seeing a fragmentation of cultures through a proliferation of new media, which

allows a much greater range of cultural production and cultural sharing. And there's a way in which Canada can both reject this reactionary, trumpest, let's go back to a monoculture, and also actually celebrate the flourishing of diverse regional cultures that we have in Canada. Yeah. Just picking up on the idea there of this, of trying to reassert a reactionary monoculture, I'm just thinking like if we rewind a few years to 2022 when the Freedom Convoy had taken over Ottawa, there were flags everywhere and people were singing the national anthem all in protest. Even if they were a political minority to extent, you know, what do you think it meant for most Canadians that overt shows of patriotism or like associated

with this convoy and like the resistance to the Trudeau government in general? This is a government that has talked about Canadian identity being like post-national, right? I just want to read the quote here that Canada is the first post-national state, said Trudeau. There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. And just, you know, what did you think about that moment, the convoy moment? Well, I think the convoy moment sort of shows some of the dangers of having this being done from a top-down level.

I mean, I sort of agree with the idea of trying to be post-national or being aware of our differences. But I think in the form that it took of the Trudeau liberals, it was often this, well, we're going to have the cabinet this way and not organically connected. And that, in the time of COVID, allowed the opposition was able to present itself as, and especially through the convoy, as the, you know, we're both Canadians and we're rebels, which is very appealing.

But I think that particular moment has passed, but I think that would be a mistake. And what I worry about, you know, like for the center-left parties, and I guess the liberals, you know, like, for the center left parties, I guess the liberals most of all, is that if they win the election, they will try to reassert, you know, a kind of top down nationalism, which I don't think can quite work. And I actually don't think speaks to the moment. I think what we're seeing more positively is an organic nationalism that's really coming from people, you know, making

their own boycotts, coming to their own reactions. And I'm hoping in a more positive way, you know, starting to create more culture, more, you know, like looking to their own communities for you. What's your email address saying about your Canadian business? First impressions matter, and your email says a lot. It's your customer's first look at your brand. A custom.ca email shows your credible, professional, and proudly Canadian. It signals you do business in Canada.

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Live, March 30th at 8 Eastern on CBC and CBC Gym. The other thing I wanted to ask you both about is, uh... There's this other thing happening where people who aren't being sufficiently patriotic, or are not perceived't being sufficiently patriotic or are not perceived to be sufficiently patriotic in this moment are now being targeted, right? Wayne Gretzky has been called a traitor for his ties to Trump, which include attending his election night party and his inauguration and for not speaking out against the president's 51st state threats. CUPI, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, called

Alberta Premier Daniel Smith and Kevin O'Leary traitors for going down to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with people in Trump's orbit. And, Geet, I wonder, what do you make of this desire to, like, root out quote-unquote traitors during a time of heightened nationalism? Well, yeah, I mean, we have to be frank. This is part of what nationalism is. It is a community, and communities are historically defined by not just what they include, but what they exclude.

You know, like I think a lot of people from both liberal and left backgrounds are uncomfortable with the language of traitors. And I think maybe one way to think about it is that this is what can maybe happen to nationalism if there's not a more positive vision. I think nationalism really is only substantial and lasting and meaningful if it's part of a collective project. Healthcare, development of the North, the railway, you know, and I think that in this current moment, because there is no shared collective project that can help bring us together, the danger of just finding scapegoats becomes much more likely.

So I do think that, you know, like if we're gonna make the best of this, you know, like to use a crisis for its best efforts, I think that there is a real imperative for like to create a more positive nationalism because the danger of a more negative nationalism is always there. Look, guys, everyone may be united against Trump right now, but we're about to head into

a federal election and the divisions that existed before this trade war that we're in haven't gone away, right? They haven't necessarily gone away. Rising anti-immigration sentiment, for example, what role do you think this wave of newfound nationalism is going to play in the campaign? David, do you want to take that? Oh, yes. I think it's going to be one of the defining issues

of the campaign, certainly as we talk about how we're going to assert our national sovereignty, our national right in the face of Donald Trump. And so you're going to see a lot of discussion about putting Canada first, about securing domestic first, about securing domestic industry, internal trade, more reliable partnerships and defense. All of a sudden, all of these things that we talked around or about very, very lightly

are now front and center. And parties will all try to draw on the inherently emotional ties and power of nationalism. Because as Jeet has, I think, quite rightly pointed out a few times, you know, this nationalism is about stories and connection. And stories and connections are inherently bound up with emotion. And if you can capture and mobilize that, you can capture and mobilize voters. And political parties exist to win elections, even strictly speaking, the NDP.

So they're going to be working very hard to try to capture and mobilize all that to not just strengthen the country, which of course they wanna do, but get people to vote for them. So I think we're gonna see a lot of that. Let me ask you both, maybe, G, you wanna to field this first, you

know, of the parties right now, who do you think is doing the best job at marshaling those stories? I'm not saying who you agree with, necessarily, but who do you think is doing it effectively? Well, I think there's, on a federal level, it has to be the liberals. And I think the polling kind of bears this out. It is partially a kind of, you know, a wartime effect, right? And in some ways, you know, Donald Trump has declared war on Canada. He's declared that Canada should not exist.

And wartime, you have a rally around the leader effect and the liberals are presenting themselves as a government of national unity that can preserve the nation. And I think that's very effective. But I think, provincially, I have to give someone whose politics I don't like at all, but Doug Ford, some credit that he's able his Street Fighter persona, I think really speaks well to the moment. And you know, I saw like, mod Barlow, praising some actions that Doug Ford took. And you know, like, if you know, politics, Barlow's that is not we're not in Kansas anymore. You know, we're Yeah, totally. Yeah. You're, we're. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. You're like the premier of Ontario and everybody's calling you captain Canada. It's an interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And then, yeah. So, and in some ways, I mean, uh, I mean, I think that is the sort of the short term, um, effect will be a, you know, national unity government that rallies

around it, uh, you know, the longer term, The longer term, it could really rebound ultimately for the conservatives because if you have a negative nationalism, like us versus them, it could really appeal to a lot of reptile brain sentiments unless there's a more positive vision that's offered. I keep going back to this, but you know, like, there's early ways in which, you know, if you want to draw a contrast with Trump, you could say, well, you know, Trump shows where xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment goes. And, you know, like right now, there are a lot of scholars in American universities that are losing their funding and losing their visas. And, you know, I think Trudeau basically did a lot of damage with how he treated international students.

But there's a way that what Carney or other political governments could redeem that and say, we're gonna create a program to welcome scholars in America that are in trouble and that we will help them continue their scholarship. They're welcoming Canada because we welcome immigrants. And you could, you know, have a more positive story that is not just about blaming Wayne Gretzky, you know, but is about,

like, a positive future and a positive role that Canada could play in the world. Where again, we're not just doing this for the nation. This is like the type of world we want to breathe. David, let me just ask you specifically about the conservatives and Poliev. I'll just quote from a rally that he had back in January. We need to honor our past and our shared values. We need to honor our past and our shared values. We need to live out the dream that started with John A. McDonald. Yes, I said John A. McDonald,

who believed in an independent and sovereign Canada. We need to uphold our heroes, stop tearing down our symbols. You know, of course, to which the Green Party responded by tweeting, hey, Polyev, in case you forgot, Johnny McDonald was an open and proud white supremacist whose Canadian dream involved the cultural and physical genocide of indigenous people. And just, I know that you are no fan of Pierre Polyev,

but do you think the strategy will be helpful for him in this election cycle? I think it probably will draw more people in than at any other time in recent history. I think there's still going to be a liability there, but I think anybody who disagrees with him when he says these things was not super likely to vote for him in the first place. I think for most people, they're not probably deeply read on Canadian history. It's not something they think about a lot. It leaves the battle over John A. MacDonald for the culture warriors who want to use it to try to score political points. But what Polly Ev is trying to do, the broader project there, is to reassert a Canadian identity that celebrates our entire history across the board. And MacDonald is important for him because he's also a

conservative icon, right? But very few conservatives will respond when you say, okay well let's talk about McDonald and say the national policy and what that looked like compared to what you want. And then it's like, well hold on a second. So it's slightly complicated but it doesn't matter the emotional connection that he's going for will probably stand a shot at resonating. But I will add this really quickly because it just reminded me of an interesting historical parallel that also speaks to an earlier question. If you go back to the 1980s, people were calling Brian Mulroney a traitor because he wanted to pursue free trade with

the United States. And there's a now famous or infamous ad, probably the second most infamous in Canadian history, where a member of the government, a diplomat is meeting with an American lobbyist or corporate stooge and erasing the Canadian border between the US. Since we're talking about this free trade agreement, there's one line I'd like to change. Which line is that? Well, this one here, it's just getting in the way. Just how much are we giving away in the Mulrooney free trade deal? Our water, our healthcare, our culture, the line has been drawn. Which side do you stand on? The liberals aired this and so the Tories were seen as traders. Fast forward to now and now the position is flipped because you're a trader if you don't want free trade. And it's interesting because it's like what it points to

the point that that history can be used as a tool in different ways at different times depending on the context and what people are trying to do with it. Okay, gentlemen, thank you very much. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Alright, that is all for today. Frontburner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Ali Janes, Lauren Donnelly, Joytha Sengupta, Mackenzie Cameron, and Marco Luciano.

Our video producer is Evan Agard, and our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.