It’s been a tough year for us Canadians. Between

• a stalling economy and rampant inflation,
• internal political polarization, and
• the spectacle of our neighbour consuming itself in an identity crisis,

we’re all a little, maybe more than a little, fatigued.

Recently, Vivek Ramaswamy - a man who I reject both personally and politically - published an essay in the New York Times titled ‘What is an American’ to help crystallize his movement’s raison de combattre.¹ While I reject his politics and his worldview, I found his central provocations holding a mirror to my own experience with my national identity. In a world where old certitudes are dissolving and we feel so unmoored in our identities and realities, I find myself asking the ever-so-important question: what does it mean to be Canadian?

This question was seeded for me during a discussion with Brendan Samek on the Build Canada Discord. He asked me simply:

what does Canada mean to you?

This was arguably the most thought-provoking discussion I’ve had with anyone in my recent memory. Even though I was able to give my visceral, albeit poorly strung, thoughts on the matter, this question forced me to reconcile my relationship with my country, and I’m extremely glad to share with you, the most formalized interface I have with my sense of nationalism. It forced me to move beyond the easy answers — that we are simply “nice”—and articulate a positive definition of our nationalism. This essay is that answer.

What is Canada to Me?

Canada, to me, is the world’s most ambitious experiment in building a nation-state around pragmatism—institutional problem-solving through negotiated compromise rather than ideological purity—collaboration, and positive-sum social organization. Not because we have perfected these values, but because we have built a mechanism for self-correction that has repeatedly extended the boundaries of belonging when we fall short. The road has been plagued with grave strife—but so has its repair.

The Racial Exclusivity of the Founding

However, as romantic as the above statement is, the journey here was not a seamless progression. Canada was founded by the Fathers of Confederation, all of whom were ‘white’ colonial subjects of the British Empire, built on top of a pro-European immigration & settlement policy, a history of Indigenous dispossession and genocide, and indentured servitude from members of other ethnicities and races.

I don’t state this to be performatively contrite; I’m stating this because it’s historical fact: Canada’s early conception of national identity was explicitly racialized. But here’s the irony: buried in that same founding, was the fundamental contradiction that would save the nation. The men who excluded on the basis of race were also forced to accommodate differences in a way that created infrastructure for future inclusion.

How Anglo-Franco Rivalry Created the Infrastructure for Pluralism

Baked into Confederation was the idea of the ‘binational compromise’, not as a unitary nation-state. The British North America Act of 1867 needed to accommodate two founding groups (or dare I say, nations) who:

• spoke different languages
• had different legal traditions
• practiced different religions
• and most of all: harbored deep, sectarian animosities.

Anglophone and Francophone Canadians couldn’t agree on anything - so they built institutions that were respectful at best, tolerant at worst of differences. Separate schools (Section 93), provincial autonomy (Section 92), negotiated federalism.² This ‘infrastructure’ of institutionalized pluralism was made present; it just stopped at race.

Canada didn’t invent multiculturalism; Canada stumbled into its preconditions by accident of its founding compromise. These same mechanisms used to manage Anglo-Franco hostility could later be extended to accommodate other differences.

Proto-Civic Nationalism for Those Who Looked the Part

Wilfrid Laurier (PM from 1896-1911) had articulated this vision decades earlier. To quote him:

“We are here a nation, composed of the most heterogeneous elements—Protestants and Catholics, English, French, German, Irish, Scotch… In each of these conflicting antagonistic elements, however, there is a common spot of patriotism.”³

He also raised the Chinese head tax from $50 to $500 in 1903. A few years later, Crown subjects from erstwhile British India were denied entry into Canada purely on the basis of their race. The Order-in-Council P.C. 1911-1324 explicitly banned “any immigrants belonging to the Negro race”.⁴

22000 Canadians of Japanese heritage had their citizenship and property stripped. Aya Suzuki asked a simple question: ‘What are we fighting for? Not that the same treatment the Nazis gave the Jews be practiced here in our own country!"⁵

The paradox of Mackenzie King

William Lyon Mackenzie King, our longest-serving Prime Minister, personified this dichotomy. On January 1, 1947, he enacted the Canadian Citizenship Act, effectively severing our identity from the British Empire. For the first time, we were not “British Subjects” — we were “Canadians.” It was a bold act of civic nationalism that created the legal container for a distinct people.⁶

But in the very same year, King stood in the House of Commons and declared that Canada had a right to select immigrants to preserve the “fundamental character of the population,” explicitly warning against “large-scale immigration from the Orient.”⁷ He built the house of Canadian citizenship—civic, independent, distinct—but he tried to lock the door to anyone who wasn’t white.

He laid the tracks for a multicultural nation while trying to keep the train exclusively European.

These faultlines weren’t contradictions of Canadian nationalism; they were boundaries on it. While there was a real, civic, vision, it only applied to those who looked the part.

The Reckoning: Pragmatism Without Principle

Canada didn’t de-racialize (if it ever did) because of some moral awakening. It was forced to reckon with its own history because the old order stopped working. After 1945, the Empire was no longer a force for good; it was (thankfully) morally discredited in the war against fascism. The labour market needed workers from beyond Europe. The Cold War made racism a diplomatic liability as Canada joined Western Bloc and competed with the Soviets for the hearts and economies of the newly post-colonized nations.

Pragmatism drove the change. The unfortunate truth is that the same pragmatism that opened the immigration policy to the points system, was also the same that built the residential schools, and justified the Sixties Scoop.

This brutal damnation forced me to ask the question: does Canadian pragmatism bend to power, or does it bend to an idealist sense of a just society?

The answer, I believe, is both—but not equally. In the short term, pragmatism bends to power: the residential schools, the head tax, the internment camps. But in the long arc, the same pragmatic infrastructure that enabled exclusion also enabled correction. The mechanisms built to manage Anglo-Franco difference could be extended to manage racial difference. The institutions built to exclude could be reformed to include. This is not a defence of the original sins—it is an observation that the system contains the tools for its own repair. Whether we use them is our choice.

The Forge of Social Democracy

Between 1944 and 1982, Canada built the institutional infrastructure that would transform civic nationalism from theory to practice. Two parallel experiments—one in Saskatchewan, one in Quebec—created the participatory institutions that define Canadian belonging today.

When Tommy Douglas’s CCF government implemented universal hospital insurance in Saskatchewan (1947), then full Medicare (1962), it wasn’t just healthcare policy—it was nation-building through participation.⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹ You became Saskatchewan (and later Canadian) not by ethnicity, but by paying in and receiving care. When doctors struck for 23 days in 1962, the government refused to yield. The institution survived because it created solidarity through shared stakes.

Meanwhile, Quebec’s Révolution tranquille (1960-66) arrived independently: Hydro-Québec nationalization, public hospitals, secular education, the Quebec Pension Plan.^12131415 Different traditions (Western agrarian populism vs. post-Duplessis Catholic modernization), same outcome: state-built institutions that created belonging through participation, not bloodlines.

Here is the crucial point: these parallel experiments, emerging from both founding nations without imitation, proved that civic nationalism wasn’t imposed—it was discovered. The infrastructure of difference, originally built to manage Anglo-Franco hostility, could create a national identity anchored in doing (participating in Medicare, public education, pensions) rather than being (ethnic descent).

Pierre Trudeau: The Architect of Constitutional Syncretism

Pierre Trudeau understood something that neither the CCF nor the Quebec nationalists fully grasped: these parallel experiments could be unified without being homogenized.

A Quebecer who rejected Quebec nationalism, Trudeau had studied at Harvard, the LSE, and Sciences Po. He recognized that the “infrastructure of pluralism” created in 1867—negotiated federalism, official language rights, and separate schools—was not just a hack to manage Anglo-Franco hatred. It was a blueprint for a multi-racial pluralist nation-state.

His insight was that this infrastructure could be codified and universalized. He didn’t invent the logic of Canadian difference; he upgraded it from “gentlemen’s agreement” to “constitutional law.”

Trudeau took the specific mechanisms used to manage the Anglo-Franco rift and embedded them into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) as permanent features of the state.^16171819

This was not a new invention. It was the constitutional formalization of the pragmatic compromises that had held the country together since Confederation. He took the “infrastructure of difference” and made it the supreme law of the land.

This wasn’t splitting the difference. It was creating something new from the combination - a constitutional order that neither Douglas nor Lesage could have built alone.

The Complication: Quebec’s Absence

Quebec didn’t sign. René Lévesque felt betrayed by the “Night of the Long Knives” - the late-night deal between Trudeau, Chrétien, and the anglophone premiers that excluded Quebec. Patriation remains an open wound in Canadian federalism.

And yet: Quebec operates under the Charter anyway. Quebecers invoke Charter rights in court. The federation holds through functional collaboration without formal consent. This is very Canadian: incomplete consensus, unresolved tension, functional collaboration anyway.

The Constitutional Bridge to Reconciliation

The Constitution Act, 1982 did something else remarkable: it embedded both the Charter and Section 35 Indigenous rights in the same document. Section 35 was added largely through Indigenous advocacy - a last-minute recognition that “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.”²⁰

This was not Trudeau’s vision. It was the opposite: a constitutional acknowledgment that Indigenous peoples held prior and distinct rights predating Confederation itself. Section 35 didn’t integrate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian project - it acknowledged that they were always already here, with their own governance and sovereignty.

The Failure of the Oath: The Indigenous Test

If Canada is truly organized around this positive-sum social organization, then our relationship with our Indigenous peoples is not just a policy failure—it is the deepest failure of our experiment.

The “oath commonwealth” requires that all members participate and are protected by the whole. But the original Canadian oath was racially exclusive. It was a covenant between English and French that explicitly required the dispossession of Indigenous nations to function.

This is where the tension lies today: The Charter (individual rights) and Section 35 (collective Indigenous rights) exist in a necessary constitutional tension. One pulls toward liberal individualism and universal citizenship. The other pulls toward collective rights and treaty federalism.

This tension is not a bug—it is the engine of our modern identity. We are one of select few nations in the world attempting to balance aggressive liberal individualism with ancient, constitutionally protected collective rights. Whether we succeed in balancing this equation is the ultimate test of the Canadian experiment.

The Honest Acknowledgement

Any claim about ‘Canada’ as a ‘successful experiment’ must internalize the truth that this experiment was conducted on dispossessed land, at the cost of Indigenous civilizations and governance systems. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the residential schools constituted ‘cultural genocide’ - a systematic government-sponsored attempt to destroy Indigenous culture, language and family structures.²¹ They documented testimony from over 7000 individuals; speaking of physical, emotional, verbal and sexual abuse.²² The Commission found records of 4,037 deaths at the schools, and the burial sites remain unknown.²³ This wasn’t collaboration. This was elimination of the highest order. There was absolutely nothing ‘positive-sum’ about forced assimilation.

John Ralston Saul posits that Canada is fundamentally a ‘métis’ nation - shaped by Indigenous influence (our name literally means ‘village’ in Iroquois) more than we acknowledge.²⁴ Core Canadian values - egalitarianism, negotiation over violence, balance between collectivist and individualist values - are not products of our European heritage, but products of centuries of Indigenous-settler interaction.²⁵

The Case for Continuation

What distinguishes Canada from settler colonies that simply completed the project of elimination? We stopped short. We established treaty relationships (which were poorly honoured) but legally binding. We created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a decade ago from when I am writing this, it issued 94 calls to action. Over 85% of those requiring federal leadership are now completed or underway.

The question is whether reconciliation can be absorbed into the Canadian project in the same way that social democracy was. Can the ‘infrastructure for institutionalized pluralism’ genuinely expand to include the ideas of Indigenous sovereignty within a united Canada?

The Test of Sincerity

If our identity is about the civic participation in shared institutions, then reconciliation cannot be a side project - it is the completion of the project of nation-building. A civic nationalism that excludes First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples is not a civic nationalism at all; it’s just polite soft-ethnic supremacist nationalism. This hard work is one that remains unfinished and requires consistent upholding. These ‘hiccups’ aren’t small stumbles - they are the deepest failures of our Canadian experiment. Whether we address them determines if this thesis is proven or falsified.

The Institutional Foundations of Achievement

Canadian achievement has never been about bloodlines. It has been about institutions that embed civic values—public good over private profit, multilateral cooperation over unilateral dominance, rules-based order over extraction.

When Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin in 1921, they sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1. Banting declared: “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”²⁶ This wasn’t ethnic altruism—it was a civic ethos: medical breakthroughs belong to humanity, not shareholders. Banting believed it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a life-saving discovery. That principle—public good over private gain—is institutional, not racial.

When Lester B. Pearson proposed the first UN peacekeeping force during the 1956 Suez Crisis, earning Canada the Nobel Peace Prize,²⁷²⁸²⁹ he wasn’t acting on Anglo-Saxon diplomacy. He was leveraging Canada’s commitment to multilateral institutions: the UN, NATO, rules-based conflict resolution. Pearson’s legacy embedded peacekeeping into Canadian identity—not as an ethnic trait, but as an institutional value that any Canadian, regardless of origin, could participate in and uphold.

The Canadarm (1981) was built by the National Research Council of Canada—a government institution—and given freely to NASA’s Space Shuttle program.³⁰ For 30 years, Canadian public institutions built the robotic infrastructure of human space exploration. This wasn’t a private venture or ethnic genius—it was state capacity channeled toward collaborative achievement.

Even Canada’s economic and trade strategy reflects this: we were a founding GATT signatory in 1947³¹—the same year Saskatchewan built Medicare. Both were institutional commitments to rules-based cooperation over zero-sum competition. Today, Canada is the only G7 nation with free trade agreements with all other G7 members.³²³³ Trade diplomacy is pragmatism institutionalized: building wealth through negotiated frameworks, not imperial extraction.

These achievements prove the thesis: Canadian capacity comes from civic participation in shared institutions, not ethnic descent. Anyone can join the NRC, uphold peacekeeping values, or contribute to public healthcare. The door is open to those who participate, not those who belong by blood.

The North American Eidgenossenschaft

What Switzerland Exemplifies for Us

Let’s take Switzerland, for example. At its time, the idea of an ‘Eidgenossenschaft’ - translated to ‘oath commonwealth’ - was a radical idea. They are a nation-state of four official languages and an historic Protestant-Catholic division, but a nation nonetheless. This Eidgenossenschaft is materialized as a community-bound commitment to shared institutions.³⁴³⁵

The Swiss call this Willensnation - a “nation of will.” Unlike an ethnic nation (defined by shared blood and history), a civic nation is defined by shared participation in public life. You are Swiss not because of your bloodline, but because you choose to participate in Swiss institutions: direct democracy, cantonal federalism, armed neutrality. Ernest Renan, the French philosopher who asked “What is a Nation?” in 1882, viewed Switzerland as the paradigmatic example of a civic nation - identity defined by what you do, not who you are.³⁶

Canada as the Neo-Eidgenossenschaft

If we take a look at our social realities, to me, I feel as though we live a neo-Eidgenossenschaft. Through our national trajectory, we have constructed something remarkably similar - a North American “oath commonwealth” built not on medieval pacts, but on post-war social democratic institutions.

Consider what binds Canadians together:

• Medicare: We all pay in; we all receive care. Participation creates solidarity.
• Official bilingualism: Not that all Canadians speak both languages, but that both languages have constitutional standing.
• The Charter: A shared framework of rights that applies from coast to coast to coast.
• The CPP/QPP: Collective pension obligations that transcend provincial borders.
• Public education: Funded by the state, accessible to all, producing a common civic literacy.

These are our “eternal pacts” - not signed in blood, but built through legislation, lived experience, and constitutional entrenchment.

From Trudeau’s Synthesis to Canadian Eidgenossenschaft

Here’s the connection: Trudeau’s Charter was the constitutional codification of Canada’s Eidgenossenschaft. The parallel experiments - Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec - built the substance of Canadian social democracy. Trudeau built the constitutional framework that made it permanent.

You don’t become Canadian by sharing ethnicity with the founders. You become Canadian by participating in these institutions - by paying into Medicare and receiving from it, by accepting the Charter’s constraints, by acknowledging (even if imperfectly) the obligations of reconciliation.

The Problem of Race in the Eidgenossenschaft

But here is the tension we cannot ignore: race was the original boundary of this proto-Eidgenossenschaft. Laurier’s “common spot of patriotism” was reserved for those who looked the part. The Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese internment, the head tax - these weren’t aberrations. They were the terms of the founding contract: pluralism within European whiteness, exclusion beyond it.

The infrastructure of pluralism was ethnicity-neutral in design, even if its application was racially bounded. The mechanisms for managing Anglo-Franco difference - negotiated federalism, separate schools, provincial autonomy - weren’t inherently racial. They could be extended. And they were: the 1967 Immigration Act replaced racial criteria with the points system; the 1971 Multiculturalism Policy recognized Canada as multiethnic, not just binational; Section 15 of the Charter enshrined equality rights.

But this extension remains incomplete. Formal citizenship is now race-neutral. The Charter guarantees equality. But substantive belonging - felt membership in the national community - remains stratified. The institutions may be formally open, but the experience of participation differs by race.

This is the unfinished work of the neo-Eidgenossenschaft: not just formal access to institutions, but genuine recognition within them. The civic nationalist vision promises that participation creates belonging. Whether that promise is kept for all Canadians is still being tested.

The Vulnerabilities and the Cure

The Eidgenossenschaft is fragile because it relies entirely on the competence of the state.

When the institutions work—when Medicare is accessible, when the economy grows, when the military is respected—the identity is strong. The “oath” is validated by the benefits of participation.

But when the institutions fail, the identity dissolves. Today, our military is underfunded, our healthcare systems are creaking, and our economic productivity is lagging. We accept 18-week wait times for MRIs,³⁷ years-long housing waitlists, and procurement failures—outcomes unworthy of a nation that built the Canadarm and gave insulin to the world.

This is why we feel “unmoored.” It is not because we have forgotten who we are. It is because the mechanism of our belonging is broken. If being Canadian means participating in world-class institutions, then the decline of those institutions feels like the loss of our soul.

The cure is revitalization.We need to rebuild the state capacity that validated the oath in the first place. We need to fund and cure the rot in the military, fix the healthcare system, and unleash our economic potential with the same aggression that built the CPR or the Canadarm. We need to revitalize our enthusiasm for participation in the nation.

Consider the standard we once held ourselves to. We are the nation that gave the world the pacemaker,³⁸ the electron microscope,³⁹ and the Blackberry. When the world needed a way to deliver mRNA vaccines during the pandemic, it was Dr. Pieter Cullis at UBC who developed the lipid nanoparticles that made it possible.⁴⁰

We are a nation of high performance. So when did we start accepting mediocrity in our institutions?

Why do we accept 18-week wait times for an MRI when the target should be at least, an OECD median?³⁷ Why do we accept years-long waitlists for housing when the target should be manageable? Why do we accept a military that struggles with procurement and is plagued with sexual assault scandals, when we have the technological capacity to build a force that can hold its own against larger armies?

If we do this, we will not just recover our identity; we will summit even higher peaks than we did before.

The Burden of Performance

Because our identity is civic (based on doing) rather than ethnic (based on being), it is not a guarantee. It is a wager.

Ethnic nationalism is essentialist. A German is German by blood; the state’s incompetence cannot revoke his identity.

Civic nationalism is instrumentalist. It must be earned. It requires the institutions to actually work. This is both its vulnerability and its moral superiority: it keeps us accountable.

This is why I will never be an ethnic nationalist. Racism is the crudest form of identity—it assigns worth based on ancestry rather than contribution, and demands conformity to stereotype rather than participation in shared life. It is the antithesis of everything the Eidgenossenschaft stands for. Our history is rife with it. But we learned from it—imperfectly, incompletely, but genuinely.

Where We Stand

The Eidgenossenschaft is aspirational, not achieved. The work is incomplete. The racial boundaries of the founding contract have been extended, but not erased. Indigenous reconciliation remains unfinished. Substantive belonging is still stratified. Institutional performance is declining.

But here is the pattern: the institutions have evolved before. The borders of belonging have expanded before. The infrastructure of pluralism, originally built for Anglo-Franco compromise, has been extended—to non-white immigrants, to official multiculturalism, to Charter equality rights, to Indigenous constitutional recognition.

The Clarifying Moment

Canada’s traditional foreign policy has rested on two pillars: the rules-based international order, and a stable relationship with the United States.⁴¹ Unfortunately, both of these pillars have received their largest shocks in recent memory.

This is not a crisis. It is a clarifying moment. For decades, Canada was complacent about identity because the American umbrella made hard choices unnecessary. We could take the “special relationship” for granted.

Without that umbrella, we are forced to ask: what holds us together on our own terms?

And here is what I find remarkable: we have an answer. Not a perfect one. Not a completed one. But a mechanism that has worked before and can work again.

Strategic Independence

The Eidgenossenschaft isn’t just internal—it shapes how we present ourselves to the world. Strategic independence is the external expression of civic nationalism: a nation defined by participation in shared institutions will naturally seek partners who share those values, rather than subordinating itself to a hegemon.⁴²

In October 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney toured shipyards in South Korea to evaluate bids for Canada’s new submarine fleet.⁴³ This was more than a procurement deal; it was a geopolitical statement. By actively choosing to build critical defence infrastructure with partners like South Korea and Germany, rather than defaulting to American supply chains, we are declaring our strategic independence.

We are building “horizontal” alliances with other developed middle powers who share our commitment to rule of law, rather than relying “vertically” on a hegemon that is no longer reliable.⁴⁴ This is the foreign policy of an oath commonwealth: partnerships based on shared institutional values, not imperial dependency.

When South Korea and Germany compete to build our submarines, they are not just selling hardware—they are recognizing that Canada is a partner worth having. When immigrants from every continent compete for a place here, they are voting with their feet for the future we’re building. That is not nothing. That is the world telling us the experiment is worth continuing.

What is Canada?

I am not claiming Canada has succeeded or is done. I am claiming it has a mechanism that has repeatedly succeeded in the past—and that mechanism is still available to us.

Canada is a neo-Eidgenossenschaft—an experiment in building a nation-state not on blood, but on pragmatism and institutional collaboration. We are an “oath commonwealth” where positive-sum social organization isn’t just a policy goal; it is the very mechanism of our existence.

Not in an exceptionalist or supremacist sense. But in the sense that we have, through accident and design, built something that works: a nation where difference is managed rather than eliminated, where institutions create belonging rather than bloodlines, and where the project remains unfinished precisely because we hold ourselves accountable to its own standards.

What Does It Mean to Be Canadian?

Being Canadian isn’t about belief. It is about participation. It’s about paying into institutions and receiving from them. It’s about accepting our social contract—including official bilingualism, the right to fair healthcare, the Charter as a binding social force, and reconciliation as necessary components of our survival.

Why I Reject the Post-Nationalist Framework

Through the historical evils the country has both created and endured, I understand Trudeau Jr.’s impulse to claim Canada is a “post-national state”—a polity defined purely by administrative values, with no core identity. It’s an effort to transcend the blood-and-soil nationalism that has caused so much suffering to members of our nation, and worldwide.

But I think he is wrong. A post-national state has no identity, and therefore has nothing to hold it together when the institutions strain. A civic-national state has identity, but those roots are moored in what you do, not what you are.

Switzerland has been doing this for over 700 years; Canada has been doing this for 80. The experiment is young. The experiment is fragile. The institutions are straining. The boundaries of belonging are still contested.

But every generation before us faced the same question—and every generation chose to extend the covenant rather than contract it. 1867 included only British and French elites; 1947 extended to European immigrants; 1967 opened to non-white immigration; 1982 enshrined equality and recognized Indigenous rights; 2015 committed to reconciliation.

The pattern is there. The mechanism works. The question now falls to us.

Will we extend it further, or let it contract?

References