by Cameron Scott

Created on: February 09, 2010

Canadian nationalism is the pursuit of Canadian interests and pride in a pure Canadian identity. This isn’t as simple as it looks!

For one thing, most of us don’t really know much about the Canadian identity. It’s a hard thing to define. We live in the shadow of the United States, so it’s easy to know what we are not. A lot of Canadian angst has been poured out over this. We excruciate over what America thinks of its younger brother. Add in Great Britain, France, and Quebec, and we’ve got enough family dysfunction to fill a soap opera.

The truth is, the United States doesn’t really think about us all that much. Neither do Great Britain or France. If there’s an American universal health care debate going on, we become either the Promised Land or the Great White Canuckistan. Either way, it’s not like we’re really a threat. We walk softly, but we don’t carry a big stick. (It’s really more of a toothpick.) After the debate dies down, we’ll be forgotten again.

It’s a strange thing, because usually nationalism is linked with a powerful military. How else are you going to protect your interests if you don’t have a strong military? So we are building up a small fleet of icebreakers and other patrol boats to guard all that coastline from sea to sea to sea and establish our sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. There is a Canadian nationalist cause for you. Everyone knows that if a sea passage has the same country on both sides, that sea passage is obviously part of the country’s internal waters. We aren’t belligerent, but we’re going to fight for it, with words and with photo ops on Hans Island.

Of course, we’re going to lose. It’s in every other country’s self interest to define the Northwest Passage as an international strait. We stand alone on the world stage.

In any other country, nationalism would then make us pull out the guns. We’re not going to do that. We just aren’t that kind of people.

It’s not that we won’t fight or can’t fight. The history books are full of Canadian military heroism. As far back as the North American War of 1812, before Canada ever existed, Canadians fought to protect their borders. But there has to be something worth gaining out of the fighting. If we were to fight over the politics of the Northwest Passage, everyone would lose.

Many people think Canadian nationalism is a leftist idea.

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