Andrew Averay: The Founding Peoples are not enough

They are integral, but they do not tell us what Canada is for in the modern world.

(The 1812 War Memorial in Ottawa.)

For Canadian conservatives, the resurgence of nationalism in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs has been accompanied by questions about what makes Canada distinct from other countries, and especially from the United States.

In contrast, most on the Canadian left have felt no significant need to interrogate what it means to be Canadian. To the general bewilderment of conservatives, they have not even felt it necessary to reverse earlier affirmations that Canada is a racist, colonialist and genocidal entity before hoisting the flag.

These differences in outlook suggest a continued affinity between Canadian nationalism and the political left that is likely unique among Anglosphere countries.

In the United Kingdom and the U.S., to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand, nationalism is generally associated with the political right, and presents potential liabilities mostly for the political left. In Canada, it is the political left that instead appears to more naturally avail itself of Canadian national identity, while presenting potential liabilities for the political right, as it did during the 2025 Canadian general election.

The traditional explanation for this phenomenon, which Eric Kaufmann echoes in a recent contribution, ties it to concerted efforts by the Liberal Party of Canada to remake Canadian identity from the 1960s onwards.

As the story goes, the demise of the British Empire was also a demise of Canada’s original identity. Progressive Canadians, most notably Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, seized the moment to recast Canada in the image of postwar liberalism. And because the progressive-coded symbols that resulted from those efforts continue to define Canada, it continues to be natural to view Canadian national identity as being itself inexorably left-wing.

This account of the left-leaning inclinations of Canadian nationalism allows us to understand why the Canadian left instinctively grasped at national symbols in response to American tariffs, notwithstanding the fact that those adhering to left-wing ideologies in Canada had spent the past decade attacking the country’s very legitimacy. It also seemingly explains why the Canadian left got away with casting conservatives as the enemies of Canadian nationalism, even as many of these same conservatives had just spent a decade defending Canada’s heritage against progressive attacks.

On that telling, Canada’s nationalism is a nationalism born of the 1960s. Attacking Canada’s pre-1960s symbols is therefore not incompatible with being properly Canadian: if anything, it is a prerequisite.

Unfortunately, this explanation for Canada’s left-coded nationalism is incomplete, while the prescriptions that arise from it tend to miss the mark. Kaufmann once again offers an illustration. He is correct to identify Canada’s “Founding Peoples” narrative (English, French and Indigenous) as a potential basis for a conservative Canadian nationalism. However, we must recognise the extent to which the pre-1960s British Imperial identity was always insufficient to ground a proper Canadian nationalism, and why any attempt at simply “returning” to that narrative is doomed to fail.

The problem with the Founding Peoples narrative is primarily a function of the response it tends to generate from progressive Canadians, who conceive of it as needlessly exclusionary.

But as some conservative commentators have pointed out, the situation prior to 1960 was not one where two (or three) Founding Peoples had been living in relative harmony. In part because of the nature of the British Empire of which they formed part, these peoples could not even truly be said to have been participating in the construction of a shared society. Fate had simply made them parties to the same constitutional arrangements, under which members of one group (the English and those assimilated to their culture and language) enjoyed a dominant status.

In other words, while Pearson and Trudeau may have had ideological reasons to recast Canadian nationalism in the language of postwar progressive liberalism, their efforts were undertaken against the backdrop of a real problem that predated the demise of the British Empire: the lack of a singular, organic vision of what Canada is. With the Empire gone, and the relative unity that it could impose from without on the constitutional arrangement called Canada removed, this lack of shared identity became all too apparent. This intractability in turn made the emergence of a progressive, left-coded nationalism much more likely than the alternative.

A similar failure to grapple with the limits of Canada’s pre-1960 identity appears in George Grant’s 1965 tract, Lament for a Nation: the Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. In it, Grant famously affirmed that “the impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada”. The claim was that Canada’s wholesale import of American liberalism as a substitute for an older, English-style conservatism had foreclosed any possibility of Canada’s continued existence as a truly separate nation, and turned its eventual absorption by the U.S. into an inevitability.

For Grant, the older, organic and thus “conservative” identity that had formed the backbone of Canada’s identity under the British Empire had also provided cover for the various groups that had been brought together by historical accident. As against these organic identities, liberalism, which he associated with the U.S., militated towards the erasure of all particularity and the construction of a homogeneous culture. In the North American context at least, that could only mean the eventual disappearance of Canada as a distinct entity and its annexation by the U.S.

In truth, Grant did not fully appreciate the extent to which his own conservative priors had limited his understanding of what nationalism and national identity could encompass. He had assumed that the loss of an organic Canadian identity meant that Canada as such could no longer exist. But that identity had never existed, or at least never existed in such a way as to permit the construction of a properly Canadian nationalism. Yves-François Blanchet has called Canada an “artificial country”. Canada may not be an “artificial country”, as Blanchet believes, but it is an incomplete one.

What Grant should have said, and perhaps meant to say, is that the lack of a coherent Canadian identity had already foreclosed the possibility of a specifically conservative Canadian nationalism.

Fortunately for Canadian conservatives, Grant’s conclusions in this respect were somewhat premature. They were rooted in a set of Aristotelian assumptions that he, like most who adhere to broadly “conservative” perspectives, tacitly apply to nation-states in much the same way that they apply to anything else. Under these assumptions, there exists a direct connection between what something is, and what that thing is for.

To be something is to be oriented towards a purpose or end, what the ancient Greeks called a telos. To say that England is English, France is French and Canada is Canadian, is on this view to comment not just on what these countries are, but on what they should be: i.e., English, French and Canadian, respectively.

However, this conception of national identity is far from the only one. It does not strictly follow that the lack of a coherent sense of what Canada is precludes entirely the possibility of taking a position on what Canada is for, and therefore the advancement of some version of a distinctly Canadian “identity”. Progressive Canadians, who are by and large unburdened by concerns for Aristotelian essences and the proper order of things, have long operated under these alternative premises.

Indeed, the progressive tends to disregard the concern for what Canada is entirely. Instead, the progressive abides by an instrumental conception of purpose, according to which what a thing is for is something to be imposed upon it from the outside.

For the progressive, it thus does not matter that England is English and France is French, because what England and France are for is independent from what they are. Potentially, England and France can be for anything at all, based solely on the preferences of the speaker. England may be English, but it can be for the pursuit of universal human freedom. France may be French, but it can be for the realisation of universal human dignity. Ultimately, England need not even remain English, nor France remain French.

If Canadian conservatives are to offer a serious alternative to progressive Canadian nationalism, and thus break the unique left-wing connotations of Canadian nationhood, they need to understand the advantages of this second approach to the construction of national identity. Especially in the context of contemporary Canada, where the question of what it means to be Canadian remains difficult to answer at best, the progressive’s instrumentalism means he is able to articulate a shared national purpose that can be imposed notwithstanding the lack of a shared underlying identity.

To compete with progressives on Canadian identity, Canadian conservatives must be willing and able to promote (and impose) a vision for Canada that is equally detached from any assessment of what Canada currently is.

As it turns out, this is the approach that was adopted by most of the countries whose national identities we now take for granted, and whose nationalisms now skew squarely to the right. France was not always French. Indeed, French nationalism is often thought to have been invented by the French revolutionaries.

Englishness, though it claims to be deeply organic, is in many ways the product of concerted reforms undertaken in the 18th and 19th centuries (to say nothing of those undertaken even earlier under Henry VIII). Even more starkly, Germany and Italy did not even exist as countries until the 19th century and, in the latter case, did not share a single national language until well into the 20th.

These countries all offer examples from which Canadian conservatives can and should draw inspiration. Yet another source of inspiration, ironically enough, should be the U.S.

While the U.S. has always lacked a true core identity on par with the English and the French, American nationalism is also unlike Canadian nationalism in its right-wing rather than left-wing connotations. This is because of its unifying social vision. Even if Americans are not a distinct people in the same way that the English and French are distinct peoples, America itself represents an idea, and specifically an idea rooted in the American Revolution and the institutional arrangements to which it gave birth.

At this point, purist Canadian conservatives will no doubt raise objections. American nationalism, so defined, is nothing more than the liberalism that George Grant decried. It also represents a form of nationalism that has at least tacitly been copied by Canadian progressives. Canada, too, is an idea, or a set of ideas: a mosaic, not a melting pot, where people come to be who they already are, and not to adhere to some common civic ideology; a “post-national” country that deliberately rejects the necessity of a “mainstream”.

All of this is true. Yet, it does not foreclose the possibility, and the need, for Canadian conservatives to propose a unifying vision of their own. Whether that vision takes a form closer to the European model of nationalism, or of a “civic” nationalism similar to that which has long been thought to characterise the U.S., is largely immaterial.

Canadian conservatives must be willing to propose a vision of what Canada should be, of what Canada is for, that transcends the limitations of what Canada presently is, to say nothing of what Canada was, or else continue to suffer the consequences of Canada’s progressively-coded nationalism.

Certainly, this conservative vision of what Canada is for might even include a callback to the narrative of the two (or three) Founding Peoples. At the very least, this vision will need to find a way to bring those distinctive peoples, or their remnants, together. But to be effective, and to potentially displace progressive Canadian nationalism, it must also be more than merely backward-looking.

Instead of lamenting the loss of an organic Canada that never existed, Canadian conservatives can and must propose a vision of Canada that is able to transcend the differences that divide Canadians with a view to constructing a truly common future.

Andrew Averay is a social studies teacher and writer with interests in politics, current affairs and education policy.