Canadian conservatives have a patriotism problem

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Does Canadian conservatism have a problem with patriotism? Do some conservatives feel a greater loyalty to their ideology than their country?

Does this lead them to side with Donald Trump and the United States against Canada, in a dispute that turns in part on whether Canada should exist as a country, separate from the United States? Does it also lead them to favour the separatist side in the coming referendum in Alberta, which is also about whether the country should exist in its current form?

Have conservatives become so embittered by a century and more of Liberal dominance of Canadian politics that they have made the same mistake Liberals so often make, of equating the country with Liberaldom – and in repudiating the one rejected the other?

It’s not me asking these questions: It’s their fellow Canadian conservatives. Alarmed by the flood of online conservative commenters rushing to take the American side in the Trump administration’s series of assaults on Canada’s economy, security and sovereignty, some leading conservatives have lately been moved to issue some quite stark warnings about where this is taking the movement.

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“Canadian conservatives,” Matt Spoke, a board member of the uber-conservative Canada Strong and Free Network, wrote on X: “Remember that you owe your loyalty first to other Canadians (even those you disagree with), before giving it to conservatives in other countries – no matter how much you might share ideology.”

“It should not be a challenge for the right to balance genuine admiration for American civilization with opposition to the often outrageous treatment Canada receives from the current U.S. administration,” writes the conservative columnist Geoff Russ, in a strong piece decrying the “rabble of ‘pick-me’ Canadians who swallow any cynical attacks on Canada hook, line, and sinker.”

Indeed, it should not be a challenge. So why is it for so many conservatives, and Conservatives? In part, the right is going through something of the same agonies the left went through a century ago, when the Soviet Union was still viewed in some circles as a beacon of progress. Forced to choose, as they saw it, between their country and their ideology, a great many “fellow-travellers” took up the Moscow line, some even to the point of treason.

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Now it is Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement who exerts a similar hold among some on the right. It is hard to call it conservatism: Virtually nothing of what Mr. Trump says or does is recognizably conservative, in any coherent sense of the word. But it is what a great many self-professed conservatives have lately decided they believe, being less conservatives because they believe in certain principles than people who embrace whatever principles “conservatives” are supposed to believe: Identity before ideology.

That’s their privilege – until it collides with the national interest. As Mr. Spoke writes in a follow-up piece in the conservative magazine Without Diminishment: “There is nothing conservative about subordinating our country’s interests to those of another country.” Ideological or partisan affinity is no excuse. “Conservatism does not exist so that conservatives can feel solidarity with other conservatives … The country does not exist to serve our ideology.”

It is, of course, entirely legitimate to criticize the Carney government for its handling of relations with the United States. And there is much to criticize, on an issue that was central to the Liberal message in the last election campaign. But the gist of many of these critiques is that the American position is always the reasonable one, and that it is Canada who is always the one out of line.

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Again, on a given issue that may well be the case: supply management, for example. But the tone of these comments is that Canada is necessarily in the wrong on any issue, more or less by definition. If there is a problem between our two countries, it must be our fault; at any rate, the onus is always on us to resolve it.

That would be craven at the best of times, but in the face of the manifestly unreasonable positions of the Trump administration – including their declared desire to annex the country – it calls into question not only the critics’ judgment but their loyalties.

But the conservative loyalty problem is broader than mere enthusiasm for all things MAGA, and long predates it. In virtually every other democratic country, patriotism is the province of the right. Only in Canada has it been the monopoly of the left.

That is in part a legacy of Canada’s historic insecurity relative to the United States, which seemed to legitimize arguments that we needed a larger role for government than they, if not to defend us against assimilation into the American empire, then as evidence in itself of our supposedly innate differences.

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But it is even more a legacy of Conservatives’ historic insecurity relative to the Liberals’. Inarguably, Canadian patriotism has been manipulated and distorted over the years to serve Liberal ends, from the self-serving and exclusionary list of supposed “Canadian values” to the very colours of the flag – a case made to devastating effect in the journalist Peter Brimelow’s influential 1986 book The Patriot Game.

It was tempting to come away from it believing that the whole thing was a con – not just Liberal nationalism, but the very idea of a Canadian nation, in all its regional, linguistic and racial complexity. Indeed, Mr. Brimelow had his own agenda: not merely the deconstruction of a particular brand of Canadian nationalism, but a kind of anglo-essentialism, in which English-speaking Canadians would inevitably, once free of their Liberal blinders, give up on trying to placate French Quebec and embrace their common destiny with their co-linguals to the south.

That, too, has a long tradition in this country. Mr. Brimelow himself was largely channelling Goldwin Smith, the Anglo-Canadian historian whose 1891 book Canada and the Canadian Question argued the case for annexation more passionately and at greater length than any American. It has echoes even today. “I can’t help but wonder what our lives would be like now if we had joined the U.S. 250 years ago,” the conservative, and Canadian, journalist Terry Newman posted on July 4. “I am not convinced we made the right choice.”

It’s one thing to argue this as a theoretical curiosity. Maybe the U.S. should not have declared independence from Britain! But when it is something of a live issue – when the President of the United States is threatening to use “economic force” to annex us? Too often conservative critiques of this country read, not as “here are some problems Canada is facing and here is how we can fix them,” but as “this country is fundamentally broken, and the proof of that is right next door.” The motto of the Order of Canada is “they desire a better country.” It doesn’t mean another country!

But then, is it any worse to favour destroying Canada by absorption into the American colossus than it is to favour destroying it by breaking it apart? What is truly remarkable is the willingness of some on the right – the far right, for the most part, but not exclusively – to carry water for both the Trump administration and the separatists.

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Alberta separatism, in particular, is an avowedly conservative project. The galvanizing issue is not language or culture, but an argument that Albertans and other Canadians hold fundamentally dissimilar views about the role of the state – more crassly, that other Canadians are fleecing Albertans to pay for their tastes in government. Meanwhile, conservatives have increasingly taken to citing Quebec, and Quebec nationalists in particular, as their inspiration – not only for the powers they have wrested from “Ottawa,” but for their willingness to use the state to impose a monoculture on society.

The leader of the People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier – a registered federal party, aspiring to elect MPs to the Parliament of Canada – has gone so far as to announce that his party would support the “yes” side in any future referendum on both Alberta and Quebec. Supposedly this is intended merely to force the issue of “Restoring Provincial Autonomy,” a strategy that has in the past led many Quebeckers to vote “yes,” and which many Albertans are toying with today.

The objective, radical decentralization, is one on which reasonable people – and patriots – can differ. But patriotism precludes tactics, for whatever end, that amount to threatening the country’s existence. You can’t pretend to love your country while you are holding a knife to its throat.

Well, this is a democracy. No one says you have to love your country. But no one says people have to vote for you if you don’t. And so far as people have reasons to doubt whether Conservatives love their country, they won’t.

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This is not a phenomenon unique to Canadian conservatives. The MAGA movement’s very slogan seems to betray a contempt for America as it is, as opposed to the one they imagine once existed. They seem at war with virtually every institution of American government and every value of American life. Even in a society as polarized as the United States, so lacking in shared truths, this has begun to catch up with them.

For their part, the Liberal government, under Justin Trudeau, seemed at times to take a view of the country as stained, irredeemably, by the sin of colonialism. And that proved part of their undoing – when it began to seem that his government was moved less by a practical concern for improving the lives of Indigenous people than by a kind of moral preening, with the country as a prop.

People would like to be governed by people who actually care about their welfare. But even more, they would like to be governed by the kind of people who have the country in their bones – who are loyal to the country, because they are loyal generally.

Why patriotism? To believe in the goodness of the country – not in its perfection, or even in its superiority, but in the idea that it is broadly good that it exists – is merely an extension of a belief in the goodness of things: that the world is good, that life is good. None of these beliefs are empirically provable. They amount more to a theory of existence, an ontology if you will.

You love your country, in the end, because it is your country. You love it out of gratitude for what has been handed down to us by our ancestors. You love it out of solidarity with those who are living here now. And you love it out of ambition for what it might mean to generations yet to come.

That’s not a moral obligation. It’s just a healthier way of being.