Will 2025 be remembered as the year Canadians re-embraced nationalism?

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Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.

Nationalism has many different forms, from benign feelings of pride to aggressive chauvinism. Some speak idealistically of civic nationalism, quizzically of economic nationalism, or suspiciously of ethnic nationalism. And in Canada, there is Quebec nationalism and the search for greater autonomy by a myriad of Indigenous nations. All of these made their mark in the past year, and will continue to shape events in 2026.

Let’s start with the basic idea of national self-determination – that a people have the right to govern themselves and chart their own future. Who would have thought that, for Canadians, this principle would ever been called into question? But while we may have been prepared for another round of “America first” protectionism following the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January, the U.S. President’s sudden interest in annexation caught us by surprise.

The idea that Canada might cease to exist as a sovereign country provoked a strong reaction: many Canadians postponed or cancelled plans to travel to the U.S., stopped buying American wine or bourbon, or relentlessly searched for “Product of Canada” labels in grocery stores. Our surveys picked the highest unfavourable opinion of the United States in over four decades of polling, a growing recognition that our neighbour was behaving more as an enemy than as a friend, and – most decisively – an almost universal rejection of Mr. Trump’s proposal that Canada become the 51^st American state.

Our sense of national pride, however, experienced only a modest boost. In the spring of this year, the proportion saying they are very proud to be Canadian rebounded from a previous low, but remained below the levels seen in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s. Most Canadians are at least somewhat proud of their nationality, but for some, less emphatically so than in earlier decades. This is especially true of Conservatives, who lament the direction the country took after their party lost power in 2015. Most Conservatives would still reject Mr. Trump’s overtures, but that rejection has not been strong enough to reinvigorate their sense of pride in a country that keeps re-electing Liberal governments.

What has been reinvigorated in Canada this year is economic nationalism – a tradition as old as the country itself, that seeks to reinforce the country’s political independence by promoting economic self-reliance and east-west internal trade. In the late 1980s, Brian Mulroney appeared to have purged economic nationalism from our toolkit when he prevailed over John Turner’s campaign against the proposed Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement. That first trade agreement was soon superseded by the North American free-trade agreement and then by globalized free trade under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. As the economy recovered from the recession of the early 1990s, public support for the new era of rules-based free trade also grew.

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Now we are waking up to a world where no one plays by those rules – at least not the Americans, our largest trading partner, and not the Chinese either, who for a brief moment appeared as a tempting Plan B. In response, we have dusted off our history textbooks to reread the tales of Sir John A. Macdonald’s national policy, and ostensibly recommitted ourselves to the joys of trading with one another. If only our provincial regulations and our energy and transportation infrastructure were up to the task.

It is tempting to pat ourselves on the back for embracing a Canada-first mentality on the economic front, without succumbing to the jingoism and xenophobia that characterizes the policies of America-first Trumpism. But there is always a risk that self-congratulation leads to a smugness that can blind us to our own faults.

Rising concerns about immigration levels in Canada have been driven more by a loss of confidence in our ability to build the housing and other infrastructure needed to support a fast-growing population, than by a suspicion of immigrants themselves. But the calls for more restrictive immigration policies – now heeded by the federal government – have opened up space for more nativist sentiments to be expressed. At the same time, our newfound enthusiasm for nation-building energy and infrastructure projects risks sparking conflict with First Nations, whose own nation-building agendas may not always align with ours. Canadians may react with growing impatience when they find out that the process of securing free and prior informed consent can neither be fast-tracked nor circumvented just because we feel besieged by U.S. tariffs. Under such circumstances, we can’t take it for granted that a resurgent Canadian nationalism won’t be tinted at all by shades of national chauvinism.

This tension between liberal and illiberal strains of nationalism is also evident in Quebec, these days most notably around the policy of laicity (laïcité). The current Coalition Avenir Québéc government is attempting to resuscitate its popularity by widening restrictions on religious symbols and accommodations for religious practices. The Quebec government’s protection of these measures through the use of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause has been watched enviously by other provincial governments. The governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan may not be motivated by ethnic nationalism, but they are certainly enthusiastic about challenging the notion of a Charter-based civic nationalism, which places individual rights beyond the reach of the whims or prejudices of the majority.

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The situation in Canada can hardly be compared to that in the United States, where, the Bill of Rights notwithstanding, armed guards are sent to patrol city streets at the whims of an unstable President. And finding the perfect balance between civil liberties and the will of the majority will always be a work in progress. But if Charter rights are increasingly seen by provincial governments as an à-la-carte option that they can pick and choose, it will be harder to claim that Canada is immune from the temptations of populist majoritarianism. This, too, raises questions about where Canadian nationalism is headed.

Finally, there are the implications of Quebec nationalism for the Canadian national project – a perennial issue that will come to the fore should the Parti Québécois return to power in 2026. It would be ironic in the extreme if the resurgent Canadian nationalism triggered by Mr. Trump’s talk of annexation ends up coinciding with a third referendum on sovereignty that risks breaking the country apart.

Quebec nationalists have often posed a challenging question to other Canadians, which runs as follows: why is it so obvious that Canada should remain separate from the United States, as a sovereign entity able to chart its own distinct course on the North American continent, but so unthinkable that Quebec should do the same? The best answer to this challenge is a pragmatic one, resting on the claim that Quebec’s distinct language and culture are ultimately more likely to survive and flourish within a larger Canadian federation. But that claim needs to be backed up with actions that not only promise, but deliver, security and respect for Quebeckers and for francophones across Canada. We can expect the extent of Canadians’ commitment to this idea to be debated once again in 2026.

All of these flavours of nationalism that shaped events in Canada in 2025 will continue to swirl around us in 2026. We will wave the flags and sing the anthem and cheer on the athletes at the Winter Olympic Games – and sit on the edges of our seats as the men’s and women’s hockey teams play the Americans for gold. We will find comfort in our denouncements of Trump’s distasteful America-first rhetoric while reducing our own intake of immigrants and cutting back on our foreign-aid spending. We will see how much prosperity “Buy Canadian” policies will bring us. We will be challenged by Quebec nationalists to explain why Canada’s quest for independence is so much more noble. We will be equally challenged by First Nations to account for which nations stand to benefit from new “nation-building” resource projects.

All of this is as it should be. We are and always will be a deeply multicultural society and federated country, hanging on next to an aggressive and sometimes expansionist United States. Our various expressions of nationalism will keep tying us up in knots, and for that we should be thankful. Canadians are better off when we are not only humble, but exasperated by the need to keep justifying and rethinking the terms of our own existence. There is no shame in having only enough national pride to get by. And struggling to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable claims to rights and status is what genuine democracies do. This ongoing soul-searching is our true national sport, the one at which we can be shyly confident of outperforming all others – though with luck we will take home ample gold from Milano Cortina as well.