This article was originally published in Maclean's.
I immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 2010, pushed across the Atlantic by the economic devastation of the global financial crisis. Like so many who’ve made similar journeys, I fell in love with this country, and I count myself extremely lucky to teach Canadian politics for a living. But I’ve also always been struck by the insecurity that permeates Canada’s national identity. I was infused, from a young age, with Ireland’s age-old political and cultural traditions. Canada’s essence, by contrast, is often criticized as being about little more than not being American—a pretty threadbare sense of national purpose. And yet, in the midst of a trade war and threats of annexation, Canadians have suddenly rediscovered their national pride.
I’ve spent this election campaign thinking about why this is, and thinking about another export from the Emerald Isle, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who was probably the most fiercely nationalistic father of confederation. The contours of his own life—from would-be American patriot to a Canadian nationalist—explains why getting our elbows up against our neighbours has suddenly returned like muscle memory. This was a man who helped conceive of Canada right from the beginning as a counterpoint to the worst excesses of America’s messy democracy. And maybe more than any other founder of this country, he still offers the most profound justification as to why not being American is, in itself, a meaningful and important part of being Canadian.
In his early 20s, McGee participated in a violent, aborted revolution to free Ireland from British rule. In 1848, he fled across the Atlantic and became a major player in the Irish-American community in Boston and New York. As an anti-imperial revolutionary, he was attracted to the United States, a country founded in a rejection of the British monarchy—he even dallied with manifest destiny, which held that the entire North American continent was America’s for the taking.
But in the 1850s he began to sour on the U.S., growing repulsed by the growth of the “Know Nothing” movement—a group that trafficked in anti-immigrant nativism, conspiracy-mongering and political extremism. The parallels to Trump’s MAGA movement are striking. Initially a secret society, and later a formal political party, the Know Nothings had a penchant for instigating riots in cities with large immigrant Catholic communities. They encouraged the most vulgar, moblike tendencies that the democratic spirit can animate: tyranny of the majority and persecution of minorities. McGee came to see the United States as a society afflicted by these kinds of demagogues: mob leaders, in his words, who lived “only in agitation, turmoil and sedition.” To McGee, their type couldn’t be unscrambled from the American omelette.
In 1857 McGee moved to Montreal to escape what he saw as the “diseased love of excitement” inherent to American political culture. The relative prosperity and political inclusion of Irish Catholics in Canada was, for McGee, emblematic of the more conciliatory spirit at the heart of Canada’s social contract. He emerged as an influential MP, and a travelling salesman for the idea of a federal union that would be created explicitly as a bulwark against American expansionism, which was in full swing at the time. The U.S. under the sway of the Monroe Doctrine, which claimed the entire western hemisphere as a site of unadulterated U.S. hegemony; and the “ripe fruit doctrine,” which went something like this: if British North America could be strangled from access to American markets, its economy would wither, and it would fall from the branch of Britain and into the warm embrace of America, like a plump ripe fruit.
19th-century American expansionists thought this was inevitable, and it’s easy to see why. The provinces comprising British North America—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada (i.e. Ontario and Quebec)—were divided by political squabbles and linguistic divisions that threatened constantly to tear them apart. And as the Union army moved toward its victory over the Confederacy, a turbo-charged sense of triumphalist manifest destiny emerged in America. Canada was divided, politically weak and economically dependent on the motherland. The idea that the fathers of confederation could ever strike a workable deal to unify the young country, commanding support from the hardened representatives of the would-be provinces, seemed laughable.
It might have remained that way if not for the very threat of annexation, which lit an almighty fire under their breeches. McGee found a willing political—and drinking—partner in Sir John A. Macdonald. The two fiery Celts infused their nation-building project with the pervasive anti-Americanism that still lingered in the colonies from the War of 1812 and the American Revolution. They marshalled belief in the moral superiority of parliamentary democracy, of responsible government and of the Crown over America’s republican alternatives. The horrific bloodshed of the American Civil War, a conflict fought over the right to human bondage, was the latest evidence that the false egalitarianism of the American founding was destined to overpromise and underdeliver.
McGee cast resistance to this disorderly and expansionist regime as a noble national imperative. In the Confederation debates of 1865, the legislature of the province of Canada debated the proposed federal union with the maritime colonies. McGee delivered a now-famous speech describing the territorial threat of the U.S. to Canada as existential and inevitable:
“They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and they purchased it; they coveted Texas, and stole it; and then they picked a quarrel with Mexico which ended by their getting California.”
He stated that Canada must not “run the risk of being swallowed up by the spirit of universal democracy that prevails in the United States.” This spirit, for McGee, inevitably involved submitting to the demagoguery and sectarianism he had witnessed firsthand. “We can hardly join the Americans on our own terms, and we never ought to join them on theirs,” he said. This is a clear message that as Canadians, we do possess our own terms. McGee would have understood them as a sense of mutual respect for diversity, existing within a unifying social order.
All of this still exists today in our country. It’s in our parliamentary system, which combines strong executive power with accountability to the legislature; in our imperfect but continued attempts to respect the original contract between the English and French communities, while honouring commitments to an expanded federation and multicultural population; and in our recognition of the ongoing stains of colonization and the duty to pursue reconciliation.
These are our terms. Canada today is an improbable creation born of the strength of conviction of diverse politicians united by a rejection of Americanism.
And, of course, it still retains all the echoes of its founding squabbles and divisions. Sir John A. Macdonald’s vision of tight central control from a powerful government in Ottawa, while the provinces took care of the local minutiae is long gone. Today, Premiers Danielle Smith of Alberta and François Legault of Quebec openly beef with the basic terms of federalism, clamouring for ever-more provincial autonomy. But it has always been this way. Even in Sir John A.’s day, premiers commenced wringing every drop of jurisdiction for themselves, waging intergovernmental feuds scaffolded on grievances real and imaginary can be exhausting.
And today, looking at the economic havoc wreaked by the modern Know Nothings, by Trump’s tariffs and by the lawlessness of deportations to Central American gulags, our country’s relative merits fall into relief, in spite of our disagreements. Our federalism is dynamic and elastic enough to accommodate the regional and demographic diversity that was at the core of the national project McGee drove home with such rhetorical flourish. It can be wearying, but it is ours. One stock gag that I regularly deploy in the lecture hall is that our decentralized federalism is both the best and worst thing about Canada.
In a scintillating speech delivered in May of 1980, a week before the first Quebec sovereignty referendum, Pierre Elliott Trudeau gave one of the great modern masterclasses in summoning the spirit of McGee. He mobilized McGee’s vision for Canada as “thoughtful and true; nationalist in its preference, but universal in its sympathies; a nationality of the spirit.” This contrasts with the chauvinism of U.S. annexationists, in McGee’s time and ours.
The leaders of our federal parties would do well to try and channel that greatness as they make the final push toward election day—just over two weeks after the bicentennial anniversary of McGee’s birth. They’ve already tried, in their respective ways. Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s election campaign has mobilized his party’s traditional patriotic assets—bilingualism, multiculturalism, the Charter, CBC—alongside some bespoke additions for the moment (that endearing but wooden video with Mike Myers). Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is not shy about telling people he likes Sir John A. Macdonald, and he’s proven capable of marshalling McGee’s searing tone. Given the sympathies of his party base, he seems unlikely to go full McGee in rejecting America and Americanism. But to meet the moment, our leaders will need to do exactly that—to vociferously articulate Canada’s own terms. Carney certainly isn’t much of an orator, but in a speech outlining Canada’s response to the then-latest round of tariffs, he quoted a nine-year-old student’s hopes for Canada’s future. The student expressed her “dream of a safe but clean Canada, that is not the United States.”
Electrifying? Not even a little, but it gets the last part right.
Dónal Gill is Assistant Professor (LTA) of Canadian Politics at Concordia University.
