Is Trudeau responsible for declining Canadian pride?

Conservative intellectuals say so, but I think they're missing the bigger picture.

If there’s one quote Justin Trudeau gets an unfair amount of flack for, it’s this one he gave to The New York Times Magazine’s Guy Lawson in 2015:

[Justin Trudeau’s] embrace of a pan-cultural heritage makes him an avatar of his father’s vision.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he claimed. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

On the one hand, Trudeau is making a rather banal point here: diverse democracies lack a “mainstream” that can be defined by anything other than common values.

On the other, he is obviously lying.

The ambitious phrase “postnational state” implies a country that has completely shed any pretence of being definable by traditional nationalistic characteristics like race, religion, and language, and Trudeau simply does not believe Canada is a country like this. Much of his governing agenda has marched confidently in the opposite direction, in fact.

Canadian nationalism tends to be a very top-down, Ottawa-directed thing, and Trudeau’s government has been little different from its predecessors in celebrating and strengthening all the clichéd pillars of Canadian identity in the fashion Canada’s patriotic elites have traditionally demanded.

Such pillars include:

• Official bilingualism generally and the promotion of the French language and francophone culture specifically,

• the entrenchment and exaltation of the British monarchy’s presence in the Canadian political system,

• the dignified veneration of the Canadian armed forces and Canada’s military history,

• and the uplifting and integration of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities and culture into the mainstream Canadian story.

On all these fronts, there is little doubt that Trudeau is a sincere believer. He has passed immigration initiatives designed to grow the Francophone presence both in and outside Quebec, introduced an array of coins, stamps, banknotes, and medals to celebrate the reign of King Charles, unveiled grand new monuments and delivered superlative speeches honouring Canada’s military past, and incorporated indigenous art, language, dance, music, costume, and spiritualism into virtually every state-sponsored event he’s presided over. None of this feels terribly postnational.

Canadian elites in journalism, politics, and the broad public intelligentsia — especially the right-of-center ones — clearly suffer some degree of cognitive dissonance about this. Trudeau’s 2015 “postnational” quip is often held as a sort of Supreme Truth that all other facts about his government must be subordinate to, even when this requires ignoring observable reality. I’ve heard elites hallucinate positions Trudeau has never come remotely close to expressing — “he hates the monarchy,” for instance — simply because they feel like the sort of things a “postnational” prime minister would do.

Elites believe the “postnational” myth about Trudeau because it serves as a kind of useful shorthand for ascribing a coherent motive to his actions that might otherwise seem inexplicable — a kind of reverse version of the old adage to “never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” After all, for Trudeau to be as unpopular as he is, and for Canada to be failing across as many metrics as it is, surely begs an explanation. The idea the prime minister hates his own country — his own nation — offers order to the chaos.

Yet Canadian elites do themselves a disservice when they misunderstand Trudeau this way, as it becomes a path to deepening their misunderstanding of the country itself, which has rarely shown much interest in the sort of national shibboleths those in and around the federal government consider existential. If Trudeau has undermined Canadian pride and made the country ashamed of itself and its people less proud to be Canadian (which polls seem to show), it’s because he has betrayed a quite different understanding of the country; an understanding defined far more by material conditions than old-fashioned nation-state sacraments.

The Canadian dream, said Will Ferguson, is “success without risk.” Like most observations about Canadians, this one carries an implied “unlike Americans…” prefix, but there is truth to it. Patriotic middle class Canadians often believe their country is good to the extent it functions as a stable, safe, bourgeois utopia, in which life’s most important bills are paid by someone else (healthcare, retirement) while everything else (real estate, food, gasoline, etc.) is cheap and abundant. There is no gun violence or endemic poverty, and if that means the citizenry are too complacent and risk-adverse to produce an Elon Musk, well, that’s a fair trade.

Throughout the Trudeau years, Canadian elites, in my mind, have often stubbornly misunderstood what really bothers people about how Canadian culture has changed during this decade, and instead assume middle class Canadian voters are bothered by the same sort of high-level offences against the dignity of the Canadian nation as they are, rather than the more immediate practical manifestations of Trudeau’s misgovernance.

Is the declining fate of the Canadian oil and gas industry, for instance, problematic because it reduces Canada’s geopolitical standing as an energy power at a time when Putin’s belligerence has exposed the dangerous, paradoxical dependence of many NATO members on Russian energy? Or because it’s one more thing contributing to high gas prices?

Are woke teachers and professors who emphasize the importance of “decolonizing” the curriculum obnoxious because they’re fostering dangerous disrespect for Canadian history in a way that undermines the heroic legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald and other nation-builders? Or because they’re filling students’ brains with useless theories at a time when practical skills are what’s necessary to triumph in a competitive job market?

Should militant pro-Palestine protestors be hated because they’re undermining Canada’s credibility as a stalwart defender of Israel in the wake of October 7, or because they make Canadians feel unsafe at the mall?

Pierre Poilievre has shown excellent instincts when it comes to these sorts of questions. His rhetoric of Canadian pride consistently puts the sustainability of the middle class lifestyle front and centre, reserving his floweriest language for descriptions of the small dignities of bourgeois life Trudeau’s government has stolen, and Pierre promises to restore (“...a cold drink in one hand and a hard-earned paycheque in the other.”)

This, to me, seems the most sustainable vision of Canadian patriotism, one more likely to serve as the basis for a broad and inclusive “core identity” than the grand historic narratives and “Two Founding Nations” symbology favored by much of the Laurentian establishment. It offers the best theory of why Trudeau has failed, and with it, the best vision of what Conservative success should resemble.