No is Enough

Katherine Alejandra Cross starts her ode to Canada by describing a 1988 election ad in which Americans demand, as part of NAFTA, that the border be eliminated and Canada be subsumed completely through the trade deal. I don’t remember that ad (I was four) but I remember the longer-lived anxiety it hoped to exploit. 

As a kid, I watched Progressive Conservatives criticize “reflexive anti-Americanism” and a supposed lack of distinct identity among Canadians. Self-consciously Canadian art and culture invited more ridicule from Canadians who wanted to support not Canadiana, but a grand national vision. 

Today, U.S. President Donald Trump and his deputies relentlessly twist the knife Trump has plunged into the economic, diplomatic, and emotional relationship between the countries. Conservatives still long for a national vision to define us. In this environment, I look back at that “anti-Americanism” differently. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Canada and the United States were great friends. With Mexico, we achieved something remarkable: the economic integration of almost an entire continent, an agreement (apparently) more stable and liberal than what Europeans were able to manage. We shared many visions of the future, we were deepening our relationships, we were cooperating at an unprecedented level.

When the distinction between what it meant to be Canadian and what it meant to be American was at its most superficial, touchy anti-Americanism and commitment to Canadian content (no matter how endearingly campy) were at their most politically salient. 

That stubborn insistence represented a collective “No” to erasing the political boundary that keeps Canada Canada. It was a “No” that permeated Canadian culture and annoyed those who thought we needed more to justify that boundary.

“No” is all that’s needed for sovereignty. No is enough.

No has always been enough for Canada. The revolution in 1776 didn’t create one country, but two: those who said “Yes” to the United States, and those who said “No” and stayed British.

The historian Graeme Thompson makes a claim that may seem curious to Americans who built a national vision around visceral opposition to kings: the simplicity of the requirement of allegiance to the British king is what made staying British attractive. British citizens in Canada did not need to buy into anything like the American national vision. They did not need to homogenize in a national melting pot. They didn’t have to speak English or join the Anglican church. They just needed to agree to be loyal subjects. Nothing more demanding could have held together the collection of peoples governed by British law in Canada. 

Under an umbrella of merely loyal subjects, many identities and visions were possible. Thompson argues that this simple, undemanding requirement was the precursor to the Canadian multiculturalism (once hotly opposed, now often taken for granted) that enables the respect of “nations” within Canada, whether Indigenous or French, as well as less formal but still robust subcommunities. When Canada liberalized and we became citizens rather than subjects, we had to be accommodating pluralists to hold the alliance that mere loyalty used to bind. We’ve often fallen short of the respect multiculturalism could enable us to extend to each other. But the essential quality of multiculturalism seems to have endured. 

Whether Thompson is right about its root cause or not, Canadian pluralism has a lot to do with our inability to settle on a national vision, goal, or meaning. But it’s a mistake to think that means there’s no Canadian vision. It just means there might be 41 million of them. If we frame it that way, it looks bracingly liberal in a world where that’s falling out of favour. 

Canadians are feeling more keenly than in decades the power that defiance can breathe into patriotism, but we are far from the world’s most inspiring example of what “No” can do. To find that, we should turn towards another target of the Trump administration’s betrayal—Ukraine. 

No one has said “No” more loudly than Ukrainians. Their “No” echoed around a shocked world when they defied and stopped a full-scale Russian invasion three years ago. It has rung out since as they endure Russia’s ongoing war. 

Russian propaganda attempts to undermine Ukraine by insisting that “No” is not enough. It complains about Ukraine’s lack of sufficiently distinct culture. It emphasizes where Ukrainians share language and religion with Russia, or have family and friends in both countries. Russian propagandists point to all of these things and insist that because they have insufficiently demonstrated their distinctiveness, Ukrainians must not want to resist. 

None of these things—language, religion, ethnicity, cross-border relationships—make a country a country. People do. 

So long as there are reasonably liberal institutions, and especially where there is easy exit, we can hear the people who live under those institutions when they’re asked what they want. Even imperfect liberalism lets us hear when people define themselves. We should hear Ukrainians proclaiming their sovereignty. Canadians should trust ourselves, too.

A full-scale invasion of Canada by the United States remains unthinkable. But we should still see parallels between propaganda attacks on Canada and Ukraine. It is the liberal international idea of equal national sovereignty that is under attack. We must not concede away liberal ideals within each country to defend sovereignty. We need to grasp those ideals more firmly than ever. Even when they can’t be realized yet, we have to refuse to let them go. 

We are facing an attack on the liberal order, and we have to say No.

Featured image is Happy Canada Day, by Irene Steeves