Our country has been under attack for several months. While this attack has not manifested as bombs and bloodshed, it has, nonetheless presented Canadians with an existential threat to their collective imaginations. A tide of hostile American political rhetoric has worked to construct a problematic caricature of Canada and its people. We are, apparently, a country filled with freeloaders, undeserving of the economic and military protection given to us by the United States.

            In response to this, Canadians across the country have sought to (loudly) vocalize our national identity and, in doing so, differentiate ourselves from our star spangled southern neighbour. For example, each of Canada’s (living) former Prime Ministers co-authored an open letter, instructing Canadians to “show the flag as never before” in response to the “threats and insults from Donald Trump.” In Montreal, Quebec, hockey fans booed the American national anthem. Later, millions of Canadians watched as the Canadian flag was raised in the TD Garden arena in Boston, Massachusetts following Canada’s Four Nations hockey victory over the United States. In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford donned a baseball cap declaring that “Canada Is Not For Sale.” And since then, tens of thousands of the hats have been sold. A group of British Columbians spent hours in the cold carving a giant 100 by 25 meter Canadian flag into the snow so it could be visible to planes landing at the Kelowna airport. And in a recent statement to CNN, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emphasized how proud Canadians are of being Canadian, and that “[o]ne of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”

            These displays of national pride come at a time when Canadian patriotism could a use an adrenaline shot to its heart. Indeed, statisticians have noted a consistent decline in national pride amongst Canadians for years. In the wake of President Trump’s threats and insults, however, Canadians seemed to have found unity, collectively rallying around the maple leaf. An online Angus Reid poll, for example, conducted between December and February, reported a ten percent increase - from 49 percent to 59 percent – in Canadians who describe having a ‘deep emotional attachment to Canada.’ But – before we lose ourselves in a poutine-fuelled nationalist fever dream, we must ask ourselves: what exactly is the Canada that we are ‘deeply attached’ to? What does it stand for? And – more importantly – do we agree?

            After our thick maple-flavoured coating is stripped away, some features of who we really are not all that attractive. We are, for example, a settler colonial country that continues to engage in human rights abuses against our Indigenous populations. The Indian Act, for example, is a deeply racist piece of legislation designed to control and assimilate Indigenous Peoples, yet has remained good law for nearly 150 years. Indigenous reservations across the country still do not have access to clean drinking water. And Indigenous Peoples are grossly overrepresented within our criminal justice system, making up 30% of provincial/territorial admissions to correctional facilities in 2022/2023, despite representing only 4% of the overall population. So serious are these abuses, in fact, that in response to the imposition of Canadian sanctions against China for the commission of human rights violations against ethno-religious minorities, the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded, noting that “Canada’s Indigenous people still face systemic racial discrimination and unfair treatment”, and “[i]nstead of dealing with it, Canada chooses to smear and vilify other countries.”

            The racism and discrimination experienced by Canada’s Indigenous Peoples serve as the backdrop against which the experiences of other ethno-cultural groups are set. And despite decades of government-sponsored initiatives designed to promote multiculturalism and the equality aims of the Multiculturalism Act, anti-immigrant sentiment has been on the rise in Canada. According to a 2024 poll conducted by Environics, 58% of Canadians now believe the country accepts too many immigrants. This is a 14% increase from 2023 and builds on a 17% increase over the 2022. Much of this anti-immigrant sentiment has been directed at South Asians, with hate crimes against members of various South Asian communities increasing by 143% between 2019 and 2022, according to Statistics Canada. This ideological shift amongst Canadians has compelled both Liberal and Conservative political leaders to openly discuss cutting immigration.

            And so, we, as Canadians, now find ourselves in a peculiar political position. The existential threat posed by the Trump administration has compelled Canadians to not only re-evaluate our political and economic relationship with the United States but has given us a unique opportunity to re-imagine our identity in ways that go beyond saying, “well, we’re not American.” We can move beyond stereotypical expressions of national identity that require blind allegiance to the flag and question both the source and contents of that national identity. In doing so, we can direct this nationalistic fervour towards the re-building of a Canadian identity that acknowledges the painful experiences of Indigenous Peoples and concedes the insufficiencies of our multiculturalism. Without this form of introspection, we risk perpetuating an ill-formed idea of Canadian identity.