Displaying the Canadian flag, booing American sports teams, and “buying Canadian” has greeted Trump’s tariffs and his imperial rantings about making Canada the 51st state.
This remarkable upwelling of Canadian nationalism represents an historical moment, a renewed willingness to take a stand for Canadian independence from Donald Trump’s Empire, Inc. It has birthed a movement to take the “Pledge for Canada.” bringing together well-known figures declaring their willingness to defend democracy and Canadian sovereignty.
In British Columbia, the NDP government’s recent Throne Speech declared “We will never be the 51st state. Not now or ever.”
We are in an uncharted political waters. Could this be the beginning of a historical shift in relations with the United States?
Brandishing the maple leaf, however, poses challenges. As a symbol, the flag has multiple meanings, and in a period of turmoil it may stand for varied agendas, hidden or otherwise. Need we remind ourselves that the last avalanche of flag-waving was by the so-called “Freedom Convoy.” No wonder that for some people the Canadian flag represents fear.
No question – this is an important moment that merits serious engagement and constructive conversations to clarify an agenda that may change our worlds.
Some are suggesting we need an ‘all-of-Canada’ approach. This is true but unfortunately some people brandishing the flag are the very people who led the charge for continental integration.
The fact is, we are not all in this together.
Class and race matter
Just as in Trump’s America, billionaires here are on the move.
The Business Council of Canada has lost no time in raising its flag, advocating massive fossil fuel expansion, new pipelines, nuclear energy development, and militarization of the economy. Only months ago it called for deeper integration with the US national security state.
The far-right has been put on the defensive, and everyone, from Pierre Poilievre to Doug Ford, is wrapping themselves in the flag. The Liberal Party, the architects of continental integration, are hoping to reinvent themselves under Marc Carney.
Even among allies, challenges abound.
In British Columbia, the social democratic NDP’s throne speech offered an economic agenda to “speed up of permitting and regulatory promises,” and expedite an “initial 18 major projects” of resource extraction.
Twelve of these projects, stated the BC government, “are majority First Nations-owned.”
This “drill-baby-drill” mentality prompted Glen Williams/Malii, head of Gitanyou Hereditary Chiefs and Grand Chief Stewart Philip to write recently that lurking beneath plans for energy self-sufficiency are giant US corporations such as Blackstone Inc., key allies of Trump.
They demand the Eby government listen to First Nations. “To be clear, that does not mean listening to and prioritizing those First Nations communities that support fast-tracking natural resource extraction projects in their territories over those who do not,” they stated.
The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs also reiterated their commitment to opposing “large-scale destructive resource projects” and demanded that governments at all levels ‘uphold the United Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [UNDRIP].’
UNDRIP is not mentioned in the Pledge for Canada nor in the NDP throne speech. Are such omissions just an unfortunate oversight? Or is something else going on?
We live in a system of racial capitalism in which, as Ruth Gilmore Wilson puts it, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” This radical notion, once a given among many socialists, deserves consideration given today’s flag-waving.
The Pledge for Canada suggests that we will “meet the challenge as previous generations have done.” The NDP Throne Speech goes one better, asserting “Throughout history, British Columbians have risen to meet the moment. When Britain stood alone in Europe against the Nazis, Churchill made a desperate appeal for more military equipment. British Columbia answered the call.”
That’s true. But where was British Columbia two years earlier when the Chinese people were desperately seeking help in the war against Japan’s 1937 invasion?
My grandfather, a veteran of World War I, returned from that war to take Kwantlen land (Stó:lō Nation) and, in the next war, worked for New Westminster MP Tom Reid, a key architect of the uprooting and exile of Japanese Canadians during the war.
After decades of redress for Indigenous peoples and racialized others, to suggest we now take up current challenges as did ‘generations past’ seems out of sync, indeed, a ‘whitewashing’ of the past.
Have we forgotten how a previous generation turned away Jewish refugees on the ship St. Louis in 1939? Or how previous generations imposed racist immigration laws, including the infamous 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act?
Referencing Churchill may please remaining monarchists, but for many people, Churchill is a symbol of racism and settler colonialism. “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails,” he once told his close friend. After the war he hoped to revitalize the Conservatives by running on a “Keep England White” platform.
Surely we can do better than previous generations?
Elephants in the room
Things are moving quickly. Canada’s foreign minister, Melanie Joly, in defiance of the Trump officials boycotting South Africa’s chairing the G-20, was recently in Johannesburg offering assistance to the South African government to counter Trump’s boycott. This is a positive signal of a willingness on the part of some to chart an independent course for Canada.
Signals are one thing. Substantive change another. Moving forward, governments as well as civil society organizations cannot avoid two elephants in the room – Palestine and China.
To become preoccupied with Trumps attacks on Canada while ignoring what is arguably a genocide in real time in Palestine, or to suck up to Donald Trump by defining China as ‘our common enemy,’ as did Doug Ford recently, is simply unacceptable.
Never has it been more important to put an end to the institutional anti-Palestinian racism that has led to the silencing of Palestinian voices and their supporters, including Yves Engler recently arrested by Montreal police for challenging Zionism on social media.
David Eby, premier of BC needs to lift the gag order preventing NDP MLAs in BC from speaking out on Palestine.
Changing the channel on China does not mean alignment with China. It means normalizing relations and opening conversations, moving towards non-alignment in international affairs. A recent Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives twelve-point radical program suggests:
“A common front to deepen trade linkages away from the U.S. would be in everyone’s interest, perhaps including alternatives to the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency. Mexico remains a vital ally that Canada cannot throw under the bus—we hold more sway over the U.S. when we work together. Re-evaluating our relationship with China, which has deteriorated due in part to Canada lining up with the U.S. on tariff issues, would also force Trump to take notice. For example, we should revisit the imposition of tariffs that currently keep low-cost Chinese electric vehicles out of the Canadian market.”
Surely in an era when the far-right remains potent, threatening social gains including 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, a preferred counter-program should unite working people and be assertively anti-racist, internationalist, critically feminist, and centre the communal and holistic knowledge of First Nations.
The iconic First Nations leader, George Manuel (Secwepemc/Neskolith), wrote that wherever he travelled in the Indigenous world, he found a common attachment to the land: “This is not the land that can be speculated, bought, sold, mortgaged, claimed by one state, surrendered or counter-claimed by another.” It was the “land from which our culture springs […] like the water and the air, one and indivisible. The land is our Mother Earth. The animals who grow on that land are our spiritual brothers.”
This traditional knowledge brought Indigenous peoples from around the world to c̓išaaʔatḥ/Tseshaht territory (colonial: Port Alberni) in 1975 to found the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, with George Manuel becoming its first president. It helped create the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982, leading to the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007.
Fifty years later, as we confront Trump’s Empire, Inc., such sacred knowledge has the power to reinvent and unite all social movements that seeks to protect the land, the earth, and all its living beings.
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