A few months before the 1988 federal election, the editorial board of the Globe and Mail issued a resounding endorsement of free trade with the United States, defending the Brian Mulroney government’s recently negotiated deal as essential to the future of Canada. The agreement, it argued, will provide “evidence that Canadians can prosper in a highly competitive market, without the aid of artificial protection,” going on to denounce limitations on trade as “confessions of weakness.” At times, the Globe’s case was almost evangelical in tone. “Until these barriers are gone,” it declared, “the exhilaration that can come from a true sense of maturity will remain beyond our nation’s reach.”
As the federal campaign unfolded, free trade so eclipsed other concerns that the election took on the character of a single-issue vote. A front-page editorial by the Toronto Star framed things in precisely this spirit while also taking a radically different line than the one advocated by the Globe. “This is more than an election,” it asserted. “It is a referendum on what Canada will be.”
Where its more business-oriented competitor saw strength and maturity, the Toronto Star perceived a serious threat. “This deal,” it proclaimed, “strikes at the heart of our sovereignty, radically diminishing in energy, investment, agriculture, the environment and culture our ability to function as an independent country. In short, it strikes at our very capacity to maintain our distinctiveness.”
In their duelling invocations of threats, weakness, sovereignty, and identity, both editorials testified to the fact that free trade was ultimately about more than the dull machinations of cross-border commerce. With the victory of the Progressive Conservatives, however, the political passions elicited by the debate receded. Very quickly, the integration of Canada’s economy into US markets became about as Canadian as the Charter, medicare, or official bilingualism: a fact of life so broadly accepted that no politician or major party would ever openly campaign against it or contemplate the possibility of charting a more independent course.
Over the past several months, everything has changed. By threatening to impose crushing tariffs and musing about Canada’s economic annexation, US president Donald Trump has forced its leaders to contemplate the kinds of measures—retaliatory tariffs on US imports, the cutting off of hydroelectricity to the American northeast, the cancellation of multi-billion-dollar contracts with American multinationals—that until recently would have been unthinkable.
In his abrupt unravelling of the continent’s long-standing trade consensus, Trump has also stirred up something more visceral in the Canadian psyche. For the first time since the US invasion of Iraq, the Star-Spangled Banner is being booed before hockey games. Canadians are boycotting American products and looking on with approval as Kentucky Bourbon and Sam Adams are pulled from shelves. Opinion polls have identified a surge in national pride that cuts across the traditional divides of age, language, and geography. A more assertive Canadian nationalism than any we’ve seen this century has come roaring back, bringing with it not only a renewed patriotism but also an inchoate spirit of nation building with no equivalent in recent memory.
How should Canada deal with Trump’s America and his administration’s apparent desire to restructure old alliances and attack long-standing allies? Looking beyond the ongoing tit-for-tat of the current trade war, how should it reconfigure national policy and orient itself in a rapidly changing world? If the United States is indeed hell-bent on shutting out Canadian imports, how should Canada rethink its export-dependent economy in the long term?
Not since the late 1980s have Canadians faced such urgent questions about their relationship with their more powerful southern neighbour and about the future of their own country. As history has shown, a lot will rest on the answers we give.
By its very nature, nationalism is a difficult phenomenon to pin down. The idea that a state could have an identity, and that people could belong to it, first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. It was associated with romantic narratives of freedom and progress and, most often, fell under the purview of radical liberals and revolutionaries.
A century on, nationalism found one of its most influential champions in Otto von Bismarck, the conservative Prussian statesman who orchestrated the unification of disparate German-speaking territories into a cohesive nation. Nationalism went on to motivate some of colonialism’s greatest crimes while also animating the postcolonial movements through which many subjugated peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas won their independence. That tension has always been at the heart of nationalism. It is neither inherently left or right; can be religious, secular, civic, or nativist; and is sometimes several different things at the same time. Like all forms of identity, it tends to define itself against something, but beyond that, its exact contours are almost endlessly varied.
The history of nationalism in Canada is a good case in point. Since 1867, Canadian nationalism has been as motley and diverse as the country itself. But among nationalists of every kind, the presence of the American leviathan has invariably loomed larger than anything else. This is why, from Canada’s very inception as a nation-state, the trade issue has never been strictly reducible to the intricacies of economic legislation or the management of border policy. Without exception, it has also been enmeshed in deeper, more existential questions of culture and identity, inseparable from wider debates about Canada’s self-conception as a political community.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was mainly because the dominant culture was conservative, colonial, and British. When he staked the 1891 federal election on the preservation of tariffs, John A. Macdonald pledged to show “the Americans that we prize our country as much as they do and that we [will] fight for our existence,” adding, “A British subject I was born, and a British subject I will die!” Meanwhile, in championing a policy of free trade, the Liberal Wilfrid Laurier, born in what is now Quebec, would go down in defeat. Under the successive Liberal administrations of William Lyon Mackenzie King, trade was eventually somewhat liberalized. In the postwar years, however—as Canada grew more independent, democratic, and multicultural—the most vocal critics of integration with the US increasingly became progressive liberals and members of the social democratic left.
For left nationalists like Ed Broadbent or medicare’s patron saint Tommy Douglas, that opposition had nothing to do with preserving the country’s British character. Instead, they worried that the breathtaking extent of US control across key sectors of Canada’s economy could trap the country in permanent dependency. It was a concern made more urgent by our reliance on the extraction and export of primary goods, which risked turning Canadian companies into mere “branch plants” of US interests.
The problem, as they saw it, was twofold. Unless Canada reined in the influence of American corporations, its society and economy would increasingly be shaped by their priorities and interests. The diminishment of sovereignty was certain to follow, and as that happened, Canadians would be relinquishing not only good jobs and better-developed industries but their capacity for full democratic self-determination as well.
Drawing heavily on the same concerns, those who objected to the Canada–US free trade agreement during the 1980s didn’t oppose the removal of tariff barriers out of economic luddism or because they held an irrational animus toward Americans themselves. Instead, they worried that the dispute resolution mechanisms contained in the agreement (and retained by its successors, NAFTA and USMCA) ceded power to unelected bureaucrats. At the same time, the new trade rules dramatically limited Canada’s room to shape its economic policy while giving the much larger partner room to bend or ignore the agreement’s terms when convenient. The result, critics cautioned, would be a more unequal and less sovereign country with diminished capacity to determine its own destiny.
In important ways, this analysis has since been vindicated. Notwithstanding the economic growth that has occurred since the 1990s, Canada has steadily become a more stratified, less egalitarian society that more closely resembles that of the US. The free trade era has gone hand in hand with the era of neoliberalism—a now decades-long experiment that has weakened democratic governance (while expanding the power of corporations), eroded the welfare state, and made the worlds of labour and work much more precarious.
Our tax system has become increasingly regressive, our housing sector more financialized, our rates of social assistance and social expenditure less adequate. In 1998, the average disparity between a CEO’s and a worker’s pay was 104 to 1. Since then, that gap has more than doubled, and as of last year, the concentration of wealth at the top had reached the highest level ever recorded. The retreat of Canadian nationalism, in effect, has been coterminous with the retreat of democratic equality.
In response to Trump’s unprovoked policy of economic warfare, Canada’s politicians have at least temporarily re-embraced protectionism and ventured into ideas like new pipelines and deregulated interprovincial trade. Against the current political backdrop, however, policies such as these can sound a whole lot more novel and groundbreaking than they really are—reflecting a vision of nation building firmly within the prevailing orthodoxies of neoliberal Canada.
With a patina of nationalist rhetoric attached, it seems, virtually anything can be made to sound patriotic. In the hands of social democrats and progressive liberals who popularized it during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, “masters in our own home”—a phrase Mark Carney has taken up—once implied the nationalization of energy, the expansion of the welfare state, and a zealous commitment to activist government. Today, it can just as easily mean cutting the capital gains tax and subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
But in the wake of Trump’s threats, there’s a much more ambitious vision of nation building to be pursued and plenty of older questions that are worth asking again.
Do Canadians really want their country’s economic destiny so closely tied to the boardrooms of American multinationals and the shifting whims of Washington? Do they really want the power of their elected governments to protect Canadian workers and industries to be constrained by anti-democratic trade agreements? Do they want to live in a permanently stratified society or in one bound together by an ethic of solidarity, community, and social co-operation?
Substantively speaking, the only satisfactory answers to any of these questions will all involve rebuilding the capacity of the democratic state and wielding that capacity to intervene in the public interest. In the short term, this means we should be looking beyond retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts to more ambitious industrial policies that create good jobs and high-quality manufacturing. Instead of building pipelines and financing privately owned infrastructure, we should be exploring green options like the creation of an east–west electricity grid and fully national, fully public high-speed rail that will both fight climate change and consolidate our energy independence around clean and renewable resources.
Beyond those things, however, Canadians should be looking at the current trade war as an opportunity to think more profoundly about the nature of our institutions and the structure of our society. In this spirit, a renewed sense of national solidarity in the face of external threats can be made concrete through policies that begin to reverse the long march of social and economic inequality. The tens of billions some hope to see invested in new military equipment—at least some of which is ironically bound to end up in the hands of American arms contractors—could instead be used to end food insecurity, wipe out homelessness, and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.
Wartime planning once gave us full employment, expanded industrial production, and a wide array of Crown companies tasked with the oversight and execution of critical tasks. After 1945, the mass mobilization of people and resources found new expression in the likes of higher wages, public pensions, and the large-scale construction of social housing. Both the country and the world have radically changed since the mid-twentieth century, as have the crises both face. Yet there is no good reason not to meet the current moment in a similar spirit of egalitarian purpose and democratic ambition.
As geopolitical certainties fray, economic nationalism has begun to stir in Canada after several decades of deep slumber. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.
Luke Savage’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Washington Post, and the Toronto Star. He is author of The Dead Center (2022) and co-author of Seeking Social Democracy (2023).