Is Canada a country?
According to Wikipedia, World Atlas, the CIA Factbook and Britannica, Canada is a country; in fact, the second largest country in the world. However, Quebec sovereigntists have long claimed that Canada is not a real country. At the other end of the. . . .whatever we are . . . in a Macleans article published in 2018, Scott Gilmore is categorical that “Canada is not a country.” Prophetically, seven years ago, Gilmore pointed out that
One lesson that the last 20 years has reinforced is that there are far more black swan moments, completely unanticipated game-changing events, out there than we realize. It is almost inevitable that this country is one day going to face some unexpected shock.
As a co-founder of a theatre company committed to producing Canadian plays, then a teacher, and a professor of Canadian Literature and Drama, I have been dealing with the question of “Canadian nationalism” for fifty years. This “black swan moment”—with the President of the USA musing aloud about Canada becoming a 51st state— is the first time in my experience that Canadian politicians, journalists and the citizenry in general have, at the same time, shown interest in engaging with the question.
The Paradox of Canadian nationalism
The paradox of Canadian nationalism is that Canadians love Canada but they don’t like nationalism. The solution for the last 50 years now has been to imagine Canada as a “cultural mosaic,” a state with many nations and cultures. Much as I value and celebrate multiculturalism and what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “different ways for belonging,” I recognize the challenge of finding unity, or even consensus, in our diversity. In this our moment of existential crisis, what appears to be holding us together is disdain for Donald Trump. It’s not enough.
What are we?
Gilmore underlines that “ We love to revel in our progress as a ‘post-national’ state.” Then he asks rhetorically, “So if Canada is not a people, not a nation, possibly not even a nation state, what are we?” In the reverse psychology of the 1970s, the answer was that Canada was/is a colony. In theory, in 1867 we ceased to be a British colony and became a country, but as of 2025, we are still requiring an oath of allegiance to King Charles III. We don’t even have an up-to-date constitution. We most typically hear about the repatriated archaic constitution when one premier or another threatens to use the “notwithstanding clause” to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms created in 1982. Canada has yet to resolve its treaty issues with First Nations. And without any official declaration, in all practical terms, we have become a branch-plant colony of the USA. Or, as the Chinese Foreign Minister told our Ambassador, “You are lapdogs of the United States.” (Gee! Why would the Chinese think that?)
Gilmore’s Answer
Gilmore’s answer to his rhetorical question: “we remain the same colour on the map not because of a strong sense of shared identity or a common purpose, but because we simply haven’t had much of a reason to split up. Yet.” Then came Trump 2.0. In my last post, I expressed some glimmer of hope that Canadian reaction to Trump would cause us to do the one thing that makes us a country . . .act like a country. I’ve seen lots of nationalist elan from my friends and the citizenry in general. Some politicians have begun to say the right things: noting the willingness of Canadians to respond unitedly to Trumpian threats, talk of bringing down interprovincial trade barriers, and diversifying trade.
Canada as an “imagined community”
Since the late postmodernist period, since 1983 to be precise and the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the expression “imagined communities” has been used in academic circles to sidestep uncomfortable discussions of nationalism. “Nations,” according the Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, are just one of many “imagined orders,” fictitious believed-in realities that allow us to develop and progress together. If Canada is going to be a “real country,” beyond disentangling from the domination of the US economy, culture and federation, we must do the very hard work of imagining the Canadian nation, daring to share and receive its cultures and histories with one another, and find reasons for pride and celebration and unity.
