(5,022 words.)
When I was young, I was frequently exposed to the negative opinion average Canadians held toward their Southern neighbors. Whether these beliefs were genuinely held or performative is unimportant; the sentiment was common and you felt culturally compelled to mirror this opinion to fit in.
For example, comedian Rick Mercer built a career in part from “Talking to Americans,” a man-on-the-street segment where he would quiz random Americans on their knowledge of Canada with the intention of making them look buffoonish, a live audience laughing in the background. The consensus was Canadians were more tolerant, enlightened, and hey let’s just come right out and say it, intelligent than Americans, who were by contrast violent, brutish, and ignorant.
(It’s a lot of this.)
I never accepted this prevailing narrative when I was even presented this fact by my teachers, exposed as we were to American media and many of these proponents listing all the Americans they know that are Not Like the Other Americans. George W. Bush was the quintessential Yank, but George Carlin spoke to their soul.
My alienation was compounded when I started personally meeting more Americans, and I noted how they challenged the stereotype that Canadians are more polite, as well. It just seemed like something we were required to believe as a pillar of our identity.
Canadians and Americans actually have much in common. For one, if a European starts expressing an opinion, we both start yelling at them. Is uncorking on Europeans enough to forge a New Atlantis? Let’s discuss.
It would be easy to reflexively believe that all Anti-American sentiment was a convenient mythology, but the unfortunate reality is there is a long history of civilizational tension between these neighboring nations, and much of that tension can be justified even if the average Canadian is unaware of these sources.
This history must be reckoned with if any substantial relationship is to be formed as we enter a period of geopolitical upheaval. The reasons Canada remains attractive have increased since confederation, especially opening Arctic trade routes and continental defense capabilities.
As of this writing, Canada has been entertaining more assertive diplomatic relationships with Europe, China, and conceivably any nation that can offer an alternative to America. Canada has previously attempted these manouvers, in fact it was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who pursued a trade deal with China through a direct relationship with Chairman Mao at a time when the international community was attempting to isolate the emergent Communist regime. America naturally took this as a direct slight against them, and in the proceeding decades Canada has enjoyed CCCP infiltration of our political, intelligence, academic and business institutions. This is before we broach the culpability of Chinese organized crime working hand-in-glove with the government to control the flow of fentanyl into North America.
This is all to say, we have been here before and we understand all too well where this relationship leads. It is my belief that America presents a preferable alliance than China, as Canada at present must find one regional hegemon to fall into the orbit of. Fanciful as European connectivity may be, this nation is in the position where it will inevitably become a client state to a larger power at least in the foreseeable future and a multipolar world is likely to see Canada as yet another colony for resource extraction.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that the Great White North will remain at this compromised status indefinitely, but for now a larger dance partner must be selected.
With that in mind, we must extrapolate the fraught relationship between America and Canada to figure out if there is a path towards the ultimate goal of Canadian sovereignty.
The Illusion of Confederation
Canadian Confederation was primarily ignited as a response to American expansionism, and this is how it was sold to the provinces. From the outset it was clear that trade was destined to direct southward, so a schematic was drawn up proposing East to West trade, presenting a territorial unity that would economically benefit the emergent populations.
These conversations were occurring during an era where it was becoming clear that the oversights of Britain and France were waning, and with their attention drawn to calamities in Europe, the colonies of North America would be left to fend for themselves. After the American revolution, concerns of American dominance became more profound, especially along the West coast which would spell continental domination for the encroaching American borders. Quebec was of special interest at the time, as recounted by author and politician David Orchard, whose book “The Fight for Canada” chronicles 4 centuries of American Northward aggression.
One John Adams, who would become the second president of the United States, refused to give up the conquest even after a resounding defeat at the siege of Montreal, losing nearly half of his 8,000 troops. After retreating back to Philadelphia, his proclamation rang “the Unanimous Voice of the Continent is Canada must be ours!”
“It seemed inevitable that the United States would gain the entire west coast. Britain seemed almost resigned. The Times of London wrote that if the colony wished to join the United States, “the Mother Country will in no way seek to prevent annexation.” […] From Ottawa, John A. Macdonald wrote to the British government: “No time should be lost … in putting the screws on Vancouver Island, and the first thing to do is to recall Governor Seymour, if his time is not yet out. We shall then have to fight only the Yankee adventurers and the annexation party proper, which there will be no difficulty in doing if we have a good man at the helm.” The U.S. purchase in 1867 of neighbouring Alaska quickened the annexationists’ momentum.” – David Orchard, The Fight for Canada
These were not intellectual debates concerning the spirit of national identity; this was strictly about materialist survival and whether or not groups that had bled to defend the civilization they carved out across generations deserved to be absorbed by yet another foreign entity that would designate them colonies for resource extraction. It was daring to dream of something greater.
The game of sovereignty is simple: you either have enough mass, power, and strength of will to resist, or you don’t. Canada gambled that it could achieve this.
First and foremost was the financial incentive of unification. This was during a time when the region was defined by centuries of bloody conflict, not only from American military incursions but between the groups that were already in what would later become Ontario and Quebec; Aboriginal tribes, rival colonists, and competing business concerns were in a constant state of war.
Canada was born out of conflict and a desperate drive for survival.
“Canada’s history was nothing if not bloody. For the better part of a hundred years the French and their aboriginal allies, especially the Wendat, warred with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy of Five Nations—and that war had roots in conflicts that dated back even before the French settlements. Quebec City has been attacked and laid siege to numerous times—the bloodiest of which left much of the city in ruins. Montreal was nearly wiped out by an Iroquois attack in 1660; the city was later fought over by British and French armies, and endured occupation by an American force in the Revolutionary War. […] Rival fur empires clashed in the Northwest with wholesale slaughter at places like Seven Oaks; the French and British battled on the seas of Hudson and James Bays; the Inuit fought repeatedly with their Dene and Cree rivals, who were also at war with each other; and the Great Plains warfare between the Sioux, Blackfoot, Plains Cree and other First Nations raged for centuries.” – Adam Shoalts, “A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land.”
The seeds for Canada’s current situation were sown back in the conflagration of colonization and tribal conquest. The War of 1812 was but one flashpoint in a seismic shift occurring in the region, an exclamation point at the end of one very long run-on sentence spelling out blood and soil. Canada was able to marshal its forces and repel a foe of oversized force, thus earning it the right to stand apart and negotiate its own convoluted path of reconciliation between Anglo, French, Aboriginal, and European Diaspora peoples.
The Aboriginal element, while crucial to explorers such as Cartier and Champlain in their quests to give form to a continent that had no full conceptualization before they set foot on its untamed shores, should not be mistaken as equal to the other interests. While these tribal bands mythologize their ancient populace as overwhelming, data gathered by historians such as Stephen Leacock shows otherwise. As a result, they have not and will not be integral to the future of Canadian sovereignty.
“The early Jesuits reckoned the numbers of the Iroquois at about a hundred thousand; in reality there seem to have been, in the days of Wolfe and Montcalm, about twelve thousand. At the opening of the twentieth century there were in America north of Mexico about 403,000 Indians, of whom 108,000 were in Canada. […] But even if we accept the more general opinion that the Indian population has declined, there is no evidence to show that the population was ever more than a thin scattering of wanderers over the face of a vast country. […] The explorer might wander for days in the depths of the American forest without encountering any trace of human life.” – Stephen Leacock, “The Dawn of Canadian History.”
The fragmentation along colonial lines is seen as a feature rather than a bug, but the base economic incentivization combined with the demarcations between founding settler lineages means the discourse of provincial separation is ever present. Quebec being the loudest voice, followed by Alberta and recently even British Columbia. Provincial separation is often dismissed as unrealistic, but parsing the grievances put forward by each region reveals severe dissatisfaction with the economic promise of confederation, along with disproportionate control exerted by the state’s center of power in Ottawa. Like a marriage, the conversations speculating upon separation are enough to sabotage the essential bond required to be greater than the separate parts. These fantasies, if unrealized and unaddressed, will create a prison of self-destruction.
Canada’s first industries were trading outposts aligned with foreign powers, and this foundational relationship with nationalized ownership constrained the shape of its preferred business model. The large, centralized organizations characteristic of the fur trade had their political counterpart in bureaucratic government; this framework persists to this day. This centralized economy grew to independence in a brief window of time wherein capital moved in response to economic forces driven by Western dominance.
During the Second World War and the immediate postwar period Canada attained a level of economic strength and maturity which enabled her to export capital on a large scale, even contributing to the financing of the British postwar reconstruction. Despite Canada’s tendency to define itself along the lines of resource extraction and agriculture, it boasts some of the most renowned universities in the world and is responsible for a remarkable number of engineering feats. It makes little sense that Canada should boast such an academic legacy – legacies of engineering, of technological innovation – but this speaks to the dynamism achievable with the old stock population.
This would all change as the 20th century proceeded, and the sovereignty forged though confederation would be slowly unwound.
Betrayal of the Economic Class
The promise of East-to-West political economy disintegrated altogether during the years which followed the Second World War. While American military pressure was consigned to trivia, their ever-present stranglehold around Canadian business development tightened. The subsidiaries of large American-based multinational corporations have replaced the operations of the earlier European-based mercantile venture companies in organizing the supply of manufactured goods and, increasingly, resource extraction. According to Kari Levitt, author of Silent Surrender, looking at the figures from as far back as 1963 shows 60% of manufacturing industry, 75% of petroleum and natural gas and 59% of mining and smelting were foreign controlled. As of 2025, America as a singular investor owns the most assets, controlling in one instance 47% of oil and gas extraction.
“Canada’s relationship with the United States is not primarily due, as is often claimed, to the strong ties of trade that exist between the two countries. Rather the pattern of commodity trade reflects the ties of corporate integration through the agency of direct investment by American companies. The basic decisions on investment and expansion of Canadian industry are made in New York, Detroit or Chicago, not in Toronto or Montreal. The satellitic status of Canada is reinforced, as in the old mercantile system, by the network of exclusivist favours, preferences and privileges negotiated from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the United States.” – Kari Levitt, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada.
For Canada, concern about the degree of control exercised by U.S. corporations was first expressed when the promise of an economic boom in the 1950s was followed by three years during which per capita income did not rise at all, concurrent with a dramatic series of purchases of established Canadian businesses. Efforts to discourage takeovers or to repatriate some to these subverted sectors are still widely regarded as misguided nationalism. Trade protectionism in the form of “cartels” – the Dairy Farmers of Canada being a prime example – is routinely dragged in the press because many Canadian voters simply want cheaper American milk. The same arguments are made for the telecom and airline markets.
International corporations have evidently declared ideological war on the inconvenient nation state, at least as far as the vassals of the Greater American Empire are concerned.
The fact of the matter is the Canadian business class – and the elites that govern the productive centers of the country – view Canada as an economic zone to be exploited. Their goals are primarily to make the country attractive to foreign investment and tolerate when it is financially occupied. The story of the Avro Arrow is illustrative of how Canadian engineering acumen was ultimately subservient to its American counterpart in the form of their Bomarc missile as a requirement of enteringNORAD.
The geographic centers of Canadian power we behold now – the Laurentian Elites, the Quebecois Elites, and the Western Elites to name the major ones – appear to be more or less in lock step with this sentiment, even as they independently flirt with separation from Canada. From the Molsons to the Westons, from the de Lotbinières to the Mannixes, you would be hard pressed to find one of Canada’s dynastic families that isn’t either overtly or covertly jockeying for the most foreign investment possible.
The existing business class cannot give effective expression to Canadian nationalism because it has been absorbed into the the realm of global corporatism wherein America sits at the very center.
While Canada can claim American imperialism as a driver for unification, on what do we blame selling out that very unity, a betrayal which has seen us return to the previous Southward trade orientation? One reason provincial separation is so forecastable is each province can imagine a future with its largest trading partner. If the calculation of sovereignty is broken, can we even blame China for moving in, especially when invited? What about India when Canadian NGOs are beckoning that jaundiced biomass with promises of easy cash?
We can certainly loathe the environments caused by these groups, but we must also admit we make it easy for them. Canada broadcasts to the entire world that it desires their huddled masses because their citizenry is decadent and dying. Most immigrants repeat as much if pressured. On the most hostile tilt of this sentiment, they describe themselves as a swarm feasting on a desiccated corpse, one deserving of humiliation. Who is to argue when Canadians experience a proclamation of their degradation with every land acknowledgment?
The collapse of the promise of confederation was codified relatively recently, at the tail end of the 20th century.
In the 1970s the Trudeau government in Ottawa became very concerned about the rapidly growing levels of foreign ownership and foreign control in this country, which had reached 38% of all non-financial-industry corporate revenue. The Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA) was created to address this, which managed to drive that number down to 27%; still high, but moving in the right direction.
This resistance would be short-lived, and once more it was the homegrown political class to blame.
After his election in 1984, one of the first things Brian Mulroney did was abolish FIRA and establish Investment Canada, an organization charged with soliciting foreign investment. Soon after, a startling 96.6% of the new foreign investment in Canada was for takeovers, with a diminutive 3.4% allocated for new business investment.
As Canadian shareholders were eliminated, corporate boards were substantially reduced in size and more American directors were added, as were more U.S. CEOs and board chairmen. Gradually this alters the character of the private sector even further, which proceeds to project a more unified voice towards the political class.
“During the free trade debates in the 1980s, big business sold the deal to Canadians as if it was essentially a trade deal which would get rid of tariffs and reduce the price of imported goods coming into Canada. The BCNI and friends rarely, if ever, mentioned all the other important aspects of the agreement relating to foreign investment, energy and resource sharing, and other clauses intended to permanently tie the hands of government, and many, many more unprecedented departures from previous Canada—U.S. arrangements. […] Precisely the same sort of misleading tactics are now being employed in the corporate and political campaign to push us into an inescapable American embrace.” – Mel Hurtig, The Vanishing Country
As tempting as it may be, we cannot lay the blame entirely at America’s feet; how could we, when those charged with defending the national interest are so willing to deconstruct the system from within?
From exports to corporate ownership to trade agreements, Canada is currently dominated by American interests and any move against this will be interpreted as harming the American position. Assigning blame is less important than assessing the situation, and the situation is thus: Canadian Nationalism represents a direct threat to American economic interests, and any Nationalist will be treated accordingly.
Sovereignty In Numbers
If there’s one narrative policymakers, business leaders, and academics appear to encircle is that Canada needs more people. The answer they have settled on is mass migration, at one point promising only educated and skilled workers to address labour shortages, but presently admitting the country needs more people to address a declining birthrate and provide vaguely defined “economic benefits.” Most have come to terms with the plainly obvious negative impact this had on the real estate market, but it is now generally understood that the murky economic benefits refer to creating a consumer base to prop up the GDP while scrambling to inhale scraps of tax revenue to support our hobbling welfare system.
When tallying all the justifications for Confederation, one throughline can be driven across them all: between cultural affinity and economic guarantees, the animating belief was “we can do this on our own.” That was the flame that ignited the inferno of the nation. Does Canada still possess that spirit?
Canadian self-determination can be found in two different versions: Liberal (both major partisan groups) and Traditional (marginal radical groups.) The former says that Canada is a multicultural post-nation, the latter says that we must look to the Old Stock Canadiana of Confederation to locate an identity to return to. Is Canada best defined as an economic zone that simply needs more human capital – usually though mass migration – to scrape together relevance on the global stage? Or is there something deeper that defines us apart from every other Western country? No substantial relationship can be brokered with the world’s most consequential empire just south of the border until we apprehend awareness of ourselves as opposed to braying “what’s in it for me?” with a tattoo across our foreheads that reads “SLAVE.”
It is common for nationalists to aim their attention towards history. Nostalgia flows viscously in all nationalist circles, but especially so in Canada where many yearn to return to the mysterious frontier of an earlier century. We fly the Red Ensign flag, we speak of Loyalists the way Americans laud Patriots, and we proclaim that “Old Stock Canadians” are the foundation of the nation. But what of this Old Stock, and how rigid was this foundation resisting influence?
Doug Saunders in “Maximum Canada” builds the case that Canada has always struggled with maintaining its population, hemorrhaging residents and migrants alike into America. During most decades of the nineteenth century, Canada sent more people to other countries than it received as immigrants. When the largest emigration boom in history was sending more than 40 million people from Europe to the New World, Canada suffered a net migratory loss—mostly to the United States.
One might assume this phenomenon is on account of migrants intentionally using Canada as a springboard to greener pastures due to the lax border enforcement, but it appears to be an ongoing trend with citizens as well.
Mass migration as a driver of growth for the Canadia project is not a new idea. In response to the political crises of the late 1830s, Britain decided that its Canadian colonies needed a major immigration push in order to displace Lower Canada’s francophones and Upper Canada’s U.S.-born population. Even the most conservative politicians knew that the long-term success of Confederation would require more people. Its first thirty years involved a near-constant campaign to persuade people, mainly British, to settle in Canada.
The struggle to bring in familiar settlers was compounded by the fact that the territory that would one day be known as Canada was already awash in Americans. By 1812, Upper Canada had 100,000 residents and 90 percent of them were U.S.- born. The ruling officials in Upper Canada (the Family Compact,) and Lower Canada (Chateau Clique) resented that alien population. These elites answered first with a ban on Americans immigrating to Canada and on U.S.-born residents of Upper Canada taking the oath of citizenship or holding land.
This cocktail of isolationism mixed with thirst for financially-minded immigration has seemingly defined Canada since its earliest days.
This has even inspired movements such as the Century Initiative which endeavors to achieve a population of 100 million Canadians by the year 2100. This is an adaptation of Sir Wilfred Laurier’s dream of reaching 60 million by mid-20th century, the goal the same now as it was then: achieve economic sovereignty through sheer population numbers and create a self-sustaining marketplace separate from the US.
“The 100-million figure seems to be a constantly rediscovered benchmark of Canadian success, as measured by economic analyses. In 1968, a group of scholars, policy advocates and business leaders formed the Mid-Canada Development Corridor Foundation, which argued that for a sustainable and independent economy Canada required a population of at least 100 million.” – Doug Saunders, Maximum Canada
Experts are quick to point out that there must be qualitative measures alongside quantitative ones; some of the poorest countries on Earth are also the most population dense, after all. It’s a matter of attracting the talented, and those appealing to some abstract notion of tolerance. The problem was that many of the most ambitious minds are consistently pulled into the gravity well of American liberty so antithetical to the Canadian project.
A choice example is Alexander Graham Bell, a towering figure Canadians proudly claim as one of their most cherished minds. Bell came from Scotland to Brantford, Ontario in 1870, using it as his base for experimentation. Ultimately, he left for Massachusetts and took American citizenship in order to find the investors, laboratories, and circles of creative talent he needed to invent the telephone.
To this day we see a steady flow of innovative minds splitting off towards Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, and other creative hubs offering cultures of entrepreneurship. While some say that this is the result of more populous urban centers, another explanation identifies the difference of character between the two nations. It is difficult to start a business in Canada, and if you have ever attempted to you could easily come to believe the country despises small businesses.
Between the taxes and bureaucratic red tape, the message is loud and clear: Fuck Your Lemonade Stand.
Could it be that Canadians on average just think differently despite being inundated with American culture for over a century? To put a finer point on it: what is Canada’s relationship to liberty?
John Farthing, author of “Freedom Wears a Crown,” interrogated this question thoroughly and identified an anti-Republicanism lurking within the Canadian psyche, claiming further this offered a Third Path around the struggle between Libertarian Individualism and Marxian Socialism he saw dominating the dawn of the 20th century. He viewed society from a Spenglarian perspective: a living organism rather than a collection of individuals serviced by, and making demands of, the state. In this sense, the nation itself is a withering form born of the 18th century and nationalists are engaged in a losing war to emulate their neighbors to the South much the same way the elite classes are attempting to play the game of mass migration to achieve a comparable population.
We understand that even skilled migration, whatever the justification given, is secretly initialized as a financial stopgap to keep the fetid organs of the state quivering on. Let us consider the opposing view: finding answers in the past. We must understand what made the founding communities unique and what drove them to assert this glorious, bombastic, cruel separation initially.
Farthing takes a distinctly Anglo perspective on the True Canada, despite the name itself deriving from the French Canadiens. He claims the British tradition has two characteristics: a king and an organic order, where a kingdom is essentially an organic order of growth. A king is the personal center of an order rooted in freedom and one that defies all possibilities of mechanical or mathematical explanation. Deny its true expression and the result is a hydra-headed array of substitutes; managerial elites, institutional rebellion, puppet politicians, and a cycle of elected leaders who serve foreign governments.
“There is an alternative for Canadians: to make the reign of Elizabeth II another Elizabethan age; claiming from the first Elizabethans an inheritance already ours by right and drawing from the past the essential elements of greatness in the present; a process of evolution in the true sense. We are the fortunate heirs of the greatest and richest tradition in the life of man; we need only to claim our heritage. Since the reign of Elizabeth I was precisely the time both of the Reformation and of the Renaissance in England, the realization of any new Elizabethan age must consist in our coming to see the meaning of the other, and in our carrying its work forward.” – John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown
In Farthing’s view, the three principles of king, law, and people are fully resolved in the ideal of the King-in-Parliament, a core element of all commonwealth countries. This is contrasted against the American Constitution which conceptually focuses more on the people. This highlights the primary division between the American and Canadian collective psyche: Order vs. Liberty.
How can we find a king? Republican Nationalism bewitches us into believing we can craft a democratic process to locate one. As we discussed in previous entries, the best we can attempt is creating an environment where forces beyond our control – our comprehension – can pull one from the volcanic schisms in our society. To begin we must understand the traditional, perhaps ideal, nature of the Canadian organism and how our struggle for sovereignty must necessarily appear different from the American Empire otherwise we will rhetorically gravitate closer to their frame of reference and ratchet ourselves closer to the very status we were trying to avoid: a vassal state granted the singular purpose of revenue generation.
To be clear, this is also how China views Canada, as does Russia, as does any regional hegemon that is making economic appeals to Canadian leadership. Frontiers demand to be occupied by adjacent powers, and by our own carelessness Canada has signaled to the world that it may be the last great frontier begging for manifest destiny.
President Trump caused a wave of indignation during the annexation controversy by saying it was at least partially inspired by Canada’s inability to project power throughout its arctic territory. As demeaning as it might feel to entertain such flippant flirtations with military conquest, Trump unfortunately has a point.
The nature of geopolitics is that everyone gets away with precisely what they can get away with, they assume control over what they are able to, and the only way to guide this reality is resistance. Canada resists performatively. If the nation desires sovereignty it must rediscover the sheer force of will that drove the insane dream of unification to begin with. Without this we are doomed to oscillate wildly between elected leaders both foreign and domestic.
Allegiance with America is preferable to anyone in Eurasia, but we are presently ill equipped to court any of them. Despite this, we have explored the history of American expansionism, subversion, and political agitation that has justifiably maintained an air of trepidation amongst the populace. We cannot chart a course onward unless this is reconciled.
One day Donald Trump will not be president, what will happen then? The only wrong answer is the one Canada has its hands gripped tightly around: “we’ll see.” One day Justin Trudeau stopped being Prime Minister, what happened then? The political ecosystem was insufficiently radicalized to provide a space for a new king or kinglike figure to emerge and restore order. To summon a leader of sheer will we must ourselves exert such a will on an atomic level to completely regenerate the mad dream of Confederation. Otherwise we deserve whatever happens to us.