On Saturday night, I joined millions of Canadians to watch Prime Minister Trudeau’s galvanizing speech in response to Trump’s tariff threats. It was the best speech of his career, I think, partly because it pulsated with nationalistic pride. Trudeau’s enthusiasm for Team Canada, as he called it, surprised me; just a few years ago he was boasting to the New York Times that Canada was on its way to becoming “a post-national state.”
I confess I felt my heart swell when Trudeau talked about Canadians priding themselves on braving the cold, waving the Maple Leaf and coming together. I grew up in a country infused with his father’s vision of a strong national identity that held together a multicultural, multilingual society. But over the last decade or so, we’ve yanked down statues of founding prime ministers and hung our heads in shame over our role in colonial history. Discomfort or even disdain for Canadian nationalism became so commonplace that at my son’s public high school, most of the teenagers refused to stand for the national anthem each morning.
So I was gobsmacked to hear Trudeau proclaim on Saturday: “We have our own identity, our own story, our own values.” Do we? If so, what are they? University of Toronto political science professor Robert Schertzer asks that question in Maclean’s this week and sums up what a lot of us are thinking. “The one positive of Trump’s tariff threat is that it has re-stoked a need for nationalism,” he writes.
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—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s
