By Daniel Béland

June 24, 2025

This Canada Day, there are at least two pressing reasons to think seriously about what it means to be Canadian. Both involve challenges to our national identity.

First, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Quebec referendum, which proved to be one of the greatest threats to national unity in history, as the “Yes” camp lost by only a very slight margin. Now, inspired partly by Quebec’s example, many Albertans support the organization of a referendum on their province’s independence.

A referendum has become more likely since Premier Danielle Smith lowered the number of signatures required on a referendum-activating petition in late April. This is the internal threat to national identity that could prompt a re-examination of what it means to be Canadian in relation to each other.

Second, at a broader level, US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about annexing Canada as the 51st state has called into question the very existence of Canada and, as a consequence, boosted national pride among Canadians and unleashed a parade of testimonials in the form of op-eds, slogans, and memes reminding America, the world and ourselves of how and why we are who we are.

This is the external threat to national identity that is already prompting a collective assertion of what it means to be Canadian in relation to America.

Strong expressions of Canadian pride were everywhere this winter during the 4 Nations Face Off hockey tournament, which the Canadian team won after beating the US team in an exciting and politically charged final game that received global media coverage. More recently, during the NHL playoffs, Canadians across the country cheered for the Edmonton Oilers, who had made it to the Stanley Cup finals before losing to the Florida Panthers.

As our national sport, hockey remains a marker of Canadian identity that transcends language, geography, and politics. Although sport and nationalism are often intertwined through the personal narratives of athletes and emotional investment in competition — a phenomenon that goes back generations with hockey for Canadians and with the Olympics and other sports in different cultures — we need to dig deeper to understand the sources of Canadian identity, which are internal, external, and sometimes greater than the sum of their parts when these two dimensions intersect, as they have amid the threat environment of Trump’s second term.

On the internal side, we can think of ethnic and regional distinctions, cultural practices, including sports and language, geography and topography, political institutions, and shared historical and policy legacies. On the external side, a country always defines itself partly in relationship to other countries, especially their immediate neighbours. This reality is even stronger when their neighbours are much more powerful than they are and appear as a potential threat to their territorial integrity and cultural identity.

The close relationship between the Canadian identity and US near-presence is a clear example of that, as Canadians frequently view themselves in the mirror of the United States, including in the context of sporting events, health care (i.e., universal coverage in Canada but not in the United States) and gun control (i.e., stricter gun laws in Canada than in the United States). Importantly, our identity relationship with the United States is asymmetrical, as Canadians think more about the United States on average than US citizens think about Canada.

This reality is also true in the social sciences, as it is more common for Canadian scholars to study the United States than for their US counterparts to study Canada, at least as relates to national identity. Yet, there are some key exceptions here, and a better known one is the work of late US sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006), who wrote his PhD dissertation in the late 1940s and published his first book in 1950 on the CCF in Saskatchewan, a rather exotic topic for a US scholar at the time.

During his extensive career, Lipset would continue to work on Canada and use this country as a way to reflect comparatively on what is specific to the United States. His most ambitious publication on the topic is Continental Divide, which appeared exactly 35 years ago. In this book, Lipset relies on historical and contemporary public opinion data to explore what he saw as major differences between Canada and the United States, two countries that have much in common but that also took distinct paths 250 years ago.

This is the case because, according to Lipset, Canada and the United States are the product of two different yet closely related historical trajectories that both came out of the American Revolution. While the United States built on a Whig, individualistic, and libertarian tradition, and an anti-statist political culture synonymous with checks and balances, Canada adopted a Tory, statist tradition emphasizing “peace, order, and good government,” to quote section 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867 (formerly known as the British North America Act).

On the internal side of national identity, we have deemed diversity a strength or, to put it another way; ‘the magic is in the mix’.

Although the two countries have changed quite dramatically since their revolutionary and counterrevolutionary moments, Lipset emphasizes enduring “value differences” between them.

In fact, Lipset finds evidence of a “continental divide” in many areas of society. In the US, higher crime rates, more police and lawyers, and greater income inequality point to a more individualistic society. In Canada, a larger welfare state, stronger labor unions, and the existence of an influential social democratic party (NDP) point to a more collectivist approach.

Despite free trade and economic integration, according to Lipset, “The United States and Canada remain two nations formed around sharply different organizing principles.” This type of thinking is a profound challenge to President Trump’s suggestion that Canada should be the 51st state, something it has tried to avoid becoming since even before it officially became a country in 1867.

While Lipset’s book remains an excellent and insightful read, it has been criticized extensively since its publication. Perhaps the most influential response to his now classic Continental Divide is Regions Apart by Canadian sociologists Edward Grabb and James Curtis, a 2010 book in which they argue that Lipset tends to exaggerate the cultural and social differences between Canada and the United States while downplaying the internal differences within each of these two countries.

As an alternative to the “continental divide” thesis, they claim that Canada and the United States are each divided into two main regions: French Canada and English Canada, and the American North and the American South, respectively. So here, instead of a “continental divide,” we have “four interrelated but separate ‘sub-societies’.”

Compared to Lipset, who emphasizes the impact of the American Revolution, they focus on what happened before and after it (e.g., French colonialism and the advent of slavery; the U.S. Civil War and modern Quebec nationalism).

Although Grabb and Curtis are probably right from a cultural standpoint, the idea of a “continental divide” remains legitimate when we look at political institutions (e. g, Canada is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system while the United States is a republic with a presidential system) and policy legacies (e.g., universal health care and stricter gun control in Canada).

Yet, even if we should not underrate these differences between Canada and the United States, Grabb and Curtis do something extremely helpful by drawing our attention towards internal differences that make Canada unique.

In addition to the presence of Quebec, the only majority French-language jurisdiction in North America, Canada is characterized by other strong internal identities that create a distinct cultural and political mix. This is the case with Indigenous peoples, ethno-racial minorities stemming from modern mass immigration, and provincial and regional identities beyond Quebec’s nation.

On the internal side of national identity, we have deemed diversity a strength or, to put it another way; “the magic is in the mix,” although we must recognize that the mix itself and the ways in which we understand it and each of its components change over time.

This is, for example, the case of Indigenous peoples who, through the process of reconciliation, are much more central to Canadian identity now than in the recent past. Here, Canada is getting closer to New Zealand, a country where the Māori are central to its contemporary identity, than to the United States, where Indigenous peoples are seldom visible in federal political discourse.

So here we have it: to properly understand Canadian identity we need to consider external factors, especially Canada’s relationship with the United States, but also internal factors, including and especially our country’s internal diversity, which helps make it unique and is quite different from the internal diversity of the United States (e.g., the United States is not an officially bilingual country and it has a proportionally smaller Indigenous and foreign-born population than Canada).

Although Canada’s internal diversity is sometimes perceived as politically challenging and even problematic, it is possible to see it as a strength that helps our country remain distinct alongside other factors, such as its political institutions and public policies, which we have control over, something we can use to strengthen Canadian identity while recognizing that in our country, just as in other places such as Singapore and Switzerland, our country’s magic lies partially in our mix, which we should celebrate while fully recognizing and accommodating its main components.

National identity is a complex alchemy of history, geography, political institutions, policies, and principles. And there is much, much more than an “artificial  line” that delineates Canada’s.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. He thanks André Lecours for his comments and suggestions.