By Mark F. Proudman
CANADIAN NATIONALISM works in favour of the left, as demonstrated by the election of Apr. 28. The nationalist reaction to President Trump’s 51st state and annexation talk propelled the Liberals, not long ago written off, back into power for the fourth time, over the more right-wing Conservatives. Often considered a right-wing phenomenon, in Canada left-wing parties speak the language of nationalism more easily and more authentically than the parties of the right. This has not always been the case.
Canadian nationalism has been a nationalism of the left for about 60 years. For most of the previous two centuries, our nationalism had been a nationalism of the right, assisting parties of the right rather than those of the left or the centre. The Tories spoke the language of duty, loyalty, and empire more easily and with greater authenticity than the Liberals, let alone socialists. If we need a date, 1965, the year of the maple leaf flag, will do as well as any, though obviously a mass of feeling and opinion as amorphous and as permeative as a national ideology does not come into existence on any given day.
Nationalism of the Present
The Canadian nationalism of the present is internationalist, social democratic, and socially liberal, when not directly leftist. Canadian nationalists often present Canada as a North American Sweden, and prefer to see Canada as a Nordic rather than an Anglo-Saxon country. Sweden’s just-ended neutrality, and its strident opposition to the Vietnam War, commanded particular admiration. The Nordic countries were seen, with some reason, as social democratic and socially liberal, at once more caring and egalitarian than the free-enterprise capitalism that nationalists see in the United States, and also more socially tolerant, especially in matters of sex and race. As always with powerful ideologies, these claims contain an element of truth, but also of complacency and self-congratulation. The self-regarding aspects of Canadian nationalism invite mockery, but are, for all that, politically powerful.
The internationalism of Canadian nationalism dates to the liberal internationalism of Pearson, and raises Pearson’s ostensible invention of peacekeeping during the 1956 Suez crisis to the status of a founding victory. This puts Canada and Canadian nationalism in the curious position of valorizing the betrayal of close allies, a habit continued by the transnational progressivism of recent policy, and amplified by the left’s hostility to the United States.
Nationalism of the Founders
Our current nationalism — internationalist, social democratic, socially liberal, and progressive in ideological colour — stands in striking contrast to the ideology of the Loyalists and their imperialist successors. That earlier ideology was traditionalist, hierarchical, and confidently imperial. The focus of loyalty was abroad, a focus rooted in a national and ethnic identification with England. It was an ethno-cultural focus that provided a global outlook.
The earlier loyalism was Christian and Anglican, initially favouring the creation of an Anglican establishment on the English model. As time went on, it retreated into a more ecumenical Christianity, building alliances with Catholicism, especially in Quebec, and with other protestant denominations. Loyalist nationalism was socially conservative in the current sense, if only because social conservatism and the nuclear family were not in question.
There is a continuity between the old nationalism and the new, both containing strong elements of communitarianism, rejecting the individualist free-market capitalism and classical liberalism imputed to the United States. While the earlier nationalism used tariffs to force trade into an east-west pattern in the service of an imagined Canadian and imperial community, the more recent type sees social programs as a primary component of the Canadian polity, and hence identity. The communitarianisms of right and left share a motivating element of anti-Americanism, and both recruit ideology to the service of economic aims and interests.
Social liberalism is an area of radical difference between the old nationalism and the new: what would Bishop Strachan have said of gay marriage, or George Grant of gender ideology? The difference is immense, but the element of anti-Americanism remains: Canada’s secular tolerance is placed over and against the supposed intolerance of the evangelical Americans, implying, when not openly vaunting, an easy and self-regarding contrast between our enlightenment and their bigotry. We have famous novelists writing books against the social conservatism of the Americans.
Nationalisms, Left and Right
Nationalism is usually thought of as a rightist type or pattern of ideology, for the obvious reason that a nationalism by definition attributes special status to the favoured nation, and is therefore in its nature anti-universalist and hierarchical, as some are necessarily more favoured than others. And nationalism is usually and by inclination traditionalist and conservative: without traditions, however confected, there would be no nation to conserve, and little upon which to base claims to exceptionality. No nationalist can ever say, “our nation is pretty much like all the others, with perhaps a few parochial quiffs.”
THE LEFT, BY contrast, is in theory egalitarian and universalist, and therefore at least implicitly anti-nationalist. While history furnishes plenty of counter-examples, starting with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, from whose seating position in the national assembly we get the language of left and right, the nationalisms of major countries usually land on the right. The English nationalism of Powell, Thatcher, and Farage certainly fits that expectation, as does the French nationalism of Le Pen père et fille. “Make America Great Again” is nothing if not exceptionalist, and commonly seen as right-wing.
There are numerous left-wing nationalisms in today’s world, mostly in the global south or third world, from China to southern Africa, often with their roots in the anti-colonial revolutions of the postwar era. The nationalisms of Latin America likewise are normally found on the left, and usually possess also an anti-American animus: Mexico comes to mind, “so far from God, so close to the United States.”
A pattern emerges: central, hegemonic, systemic, or imperial (terminology varies) powers place their nationalisms on the right, while the nationalisms of insurgent or anti-imperial countries locate themselves on the left. The movement of Canadian nationalism from right to left mirrors this broad if implicit logic: when once we saw ourselves as a major part of an empire stretching from palm to pine, an empire on which the sun in its global orbit never set, we have in living memory reversed that orientation, becoming sceptics if not opponents of empire. We comport ourselves as a tribune of the third world, and as better than the old imperial powers, not to mention the current imperial power.
The left, if it is anything, must be universalist. A favoured nation thinking itself better than the others does not fit with the universal egalitarianism of the left. The leftwing nationalisms of the post-war era rescued themselves from this contradiction by claiming to be the vanguards of universal progress, sometimes universal revolution. Trudeau the Lesser’s claim that Canada was a post-national state without a fixed identity was the reductio ad absurdum of these claims to embody universality while saving a national specificity through a claim to superior progressivism.
The Canadian nationalism of the present day is hostile to the leading power of our age, a change exactly congruent with the shift of our nationalism from right to left. This shift of allegiance was a 180-degree reversal: from one of loyalty to the centre to one of disloyalty, often sullen, unspoken, and passive-aggressive, professing to be a good ally (we’ll get to that 2%, one day), but all the more bitter and deeply felt for that. The great constant has been hostility to the United States.
Derivative Character
National ideologies have been described by scholars as “thin” versions or employments of widely current ideological movements. For all their claims to authenticity, nationalisms are neither unique nor original, but rather derivative and even imitative. Nationalisms usually serve the purposes of state bureaucracies, and such institutions take their ideas not from ground-breaking scholarship, never mind original thought, but from the prevailing winds. They have no choice: their aim is power, and they must use the language and the ideas already present.
This is why nationalisms cluster: the 19th century saw a proliferation of liberal nationalisms, the 1930s of authoritarian nationalisms, and the post-war period of anti-colonial nationalisms. The nationalisms of the present age speak the language of diversity and inclusion, sometimes with the appropriate name checks to neo-Marxist academic fashion, an observation that fits the aspirant nationalisms of the fragments of the once-United Kingdom as well as it does that of the European Union. The nationalisms of other Commonwealth settler states such as New Zealand and Australia fit the same pattern.
THIS BRINGS US back to contemporary Canada, whose nationalism went from the crew-cut international good citizenship of Pearson, through the sideburns and lapels progressivism of “Trendy Trudeau,” arriving finally at Trudeau the Lesser’s post-national state with no fixed identity. The movement, like the aesthetics, has been leftward.
The movement of Canadian nationalism from loyalty to the Anglo-Saxon West to a rejection of that heritage tracks with disturbing precision the deeper loss of self-confidence within the elites of what the New Left Review — that most sophisticated exponent of academic Marxism — still calls the Anglo-Saxon world. This congruence points to the facts that in the Anglo-Saxon world, here at the centre, the right is the side of cultural self-confidence, the left that of “decolonial” self-abasement, and it is the left that is in charge.
A Nationalism without Content
The British nationalism of the Loyalists and their followers, over almost two centuries down to a time in living memory, motivated our contributions to victory in two world wars, our country’s greatest achievements. We remember Vimy on occasion, and Juno from time to time, and sometimes Dieppe (normally giving an anti-British inflection to any account of the command errors behind it), but forget that in the Kaiser’s Battle of April 1918 the Canadian Corps was the only force standing between the Germans and the Channel, forget the long and dangerous convoys of the U-boat war, forget the RCAF’s losses over Germany, and forget the many Canadians who fought in obscure places from the Scheldt to the Aleutians.
However atavistic some may think its symbols, the achievements of the old Canada stand as a rebuke to the self-regarding moral superiority that now makes speeches at the UN and takes a shameful pride in the discomfiture of our closest allies. This, of course does not stop the nationalists of the present from claiming vicarious credit for the achievements of men whose worldview they despise. The ideologues of the state have to talk about something, and more recent pickings are thin.
WE HAVE IN THE nationalism of the state based at Ottawa a series of parallel reversals: Canadian nationalism went from right to left, from loyalty to the imperial centre to hostility to the central power, from a proud Anglo-Saxonism to cultural self-abnegation, from Christianity however ecumenical to an aggressive secularism, from social conservatism to social leftism, and most decisively from an overt attachment to the West to a self-regarding affectation of indigeneity, from an accurate claim to represent a dominant civilization to a frivolous claim to subalternity. Behind these reversals lies a great continuity: a hostility to the United States, now the only remaining Western great power.
This points to the central character of the current iteration of Canadian nationalism: its emptiness. If all nationalisms are to a degree derivative, even imitative, ours is exceptionally thin. The end of empire coincided with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and it is no accident that the conjuncture reflected a deeper loss of Western and more specifically Anglo-Saxon self-confidence. Bereft of purpose, we seized first upon the ostentatious red-rose Third-Worldism of Trudeau the Elder, and have now descended to the post-national nullity of Trudeau the Lesser’s identity without an identity. Canada’s nationalism, parodic as ever, leapt with the enthusiasm of a convert from the old loyalty to the new disloyalty, remaining as always a secondary consequence of larger events it barely perceives and refuses to understand.
We are left with the great question that motivated our ancestors over the better part of two centuries: what is the nation for, and what does it do? Are we Canadians any longer a source of strength or weakness to the West? And what would Dorchester do now?
Mark F. Proudman has a D.Phil. in English history from the University of Oxford, and has worked in the defence and information systems industries for many years. He substacks at markfproudman.com and is on X (Twitter) @mfproudman This column originally appeared in the print edition, vol. 15 no. 2, Summer 2025.
