Adams and Parkin: Will 2025 be remembered as the year Canadians re-embraced nationalism?
2026/01/05 2 Comments
Good reflections:
…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.
Source: Will 2025 be remembered as the year Canadians re-embraced nationalism?
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
Reinvigorating a sense of national pride is a great idea; xenophobia is not. Is there a way for a country to be proud of itself without denigrating those who immigrate there?
Well, I think Canada has largely done so, imperfectly, but the Trudeau government focussed too much on the faults and weaknesses. CPC has its bad elements but they also know that xenophobia is not a route to power while criticizing immigration management is legitimate.