By Jeremy Kinsman

June 26, 2025

The attachment Canadians feel for their country seems more emphatic than in years. We can predict Canada Day 2025 will be a celebration of ourselves as vibrant as Canada Day in 1967. We know why — because the President of the United States has threatened Canada as a country.

An existential threat — no matter the true motive or ultimate probability — can provide the certainty of knowing who we are not. Negative identity can help define the sense of self as much as positive does among the multiple identities Canadians carry.

Canadians have tended to look in recent years more to sub-national and other characteristics for primary self-identification — as Albertans, LGBTQ+, québécois, Sikhs, anti-vaxxers, environmentalists, Indigenous Peoples, feminists, libertarians and the many other cohorts to which we can belong and whose voices now have more platforms than ever before.

Multiple identities are normal. When serving as ambassador in Italy, I was reminded by Italians of how they tend to rank their group loyalties: family first, then their town, their football club, the Catholic Church, their political party, profession or vocation, region, and then, only then, the Italian state. Add personal identity features and it can be quite a smorgasbord. But where does being “Italian” figure? It is mostly when Italians go abroad that they identify primarily as Italian, subordinating their local and personal attachments.

Italians who emigrated in the great postwar wave merged their new Canadianness with their Italian selves, at least for the first generation. The Canadian government venerated this dual identification as multilculturalism.

“Multi-kulti,” Angela Merkel sniffed when Germans began to claim such a mosaic for Germany. Later, Chancellor Merkel would welcome more than a million seekers of asylum from the murderous Syrian civil war. “We can do this,” she said.

They did, but at the cost of disrupting identity, and hence, politics, prompting a sort of populist nostalgia for the “way things used to be”; partly a euphemism for misremembered ethnic or racial uniformity, partly a reaction to the pace and impact of change, and partly a growing mistrust of government, authority, and establishment ways of thinking. It can run counter to optimistic postwar themes in Europe that aimed to accommodate pluralism, breaking down national borders, and end forever Europe’s murderous wars. It has been, in effect, an effort to normalize dual identities between member states and the European centre.

French president De Gaulle was both a fierce nationalist and a believer that Europeans had to unite to pool enough sovereignty to gain sufficient scale to permit them together to address le défi americain. But he envisaged a union of sovereign elected states, not a political federation.

A European sense of identity did seep through, making multiple identies as normal as they are in Canada. English writer A S Byatt remarked about 20 years ago, before nationalistic identity confusion swept the UK in 2014, feeding the delusional wave of Brexit, “When I am in Britain, I feel English,” she said, in effect. “When I’m in Europe, I feel British. But when I go to America, I feel European.”

Multiple identities are fairly plastic in the way one feature can expand in response to context. It is happening now to Canadians, in response to challenges of our identity from the US President.

We don’t share the European populists’ phobia over immigration, except we do want the numbers to fit our infrastructure and capacity. Canadian identity remains bound up in our reality of successful diversity, rather than on national historical legacy. Our celebration is one of expectation, rather than of reverence for our past.

However, our political system of building governments democratically through riding-by-riding counts to determine who holds parliamentary power has in practice targeted particularities of local identity, even on issues of foreign policy.

It invites the question, “Where is the whole?” Justin Trudeau mused in a moment of radical chic reflection that Canada was becoming the first “post-national” state. Perhaps that is why he issued directives that Canada would have a feminist foreign policy. It was intended to radiate pride in Canada’s relative success in accelerating our pursuit of gender equity as a basic norm. But it is nonetheless only a part of the humanism we wish to project.

Back in the immediate postwar period of 1948, Foreign Minister Louis St. Laurent decreed that Canadian foreign policy would heed two prerogatives: to follow a humanist approach to the world, while focusing on our need to secure beneficial comity with our massive, American neighbour.

The American cultural colossus is overwhelming. As a Canadian university student in the US whose mother was born in Los Angeles, I found it a challenge to see how my country, and my identity, measured up. Well-meaning fellow students unfamiiliar with anything non-American couldn’t see much that differentiated Canadians. And, in truth, our own politics and ambitions back home did seem pretty wan when viewed against the excitement surrounding President John Kennedy, who so vividly sought a better world and a better America.

An existential threat — no matter the true motive or ultimate probability — can provide the certainty of knowing who we are not.

Of course, he was killed and as happens every couple of decades, the US roof fell in, over Vietnam. Canadian identity traction surfed on the impact of our own charismatic leader, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who aligned our country’s young people more with the spirit of San Francisco’s summer of love than with combat in Vietnam’s central highlands.

With US presidents, Trudeau’s reception was mixed. Nixon —notoriously uncomfortable around more charismatic politicians — thought he was some kind of radical, though Gerald Ford was friendly. Jimmy Carter was a true partner in world view, on human rights especially.

But in Ronald Reagan’s administration, problems surfaced over Trudeau’s nation-building agenda that aimed to reduce our vulnerability to US control over our economy. Moreover, Trudeau had no intention of keeping Canada in the modest foreign policy lane deemed appropriate by some Reagan officials for “middle power” countries.

My mentor and boss in Washington, Ambassador Allan Gotlieb, believed that securing beneficial bilateral arrangements with the US, was generally helped by alignment with US policy on most global issues. He estimated moreover that Canadian prestige abroad was bolstered by the evidence that we enjoyed a seamless economic relationship with the world’s most powerful economy.

I found over many years in Europe that Canada’s presentation as “the other North America” was appreciated even more.

The US did not welcome Trudeau’s “peace mission” in 1983 that sought to mediate on nuclear weapons issues between Cold War adversaries. But they grudgingly respected Trudeau for his greater influence in the Global South.

So did world opinion, which reflected back to Canadians’ sense of national identity, adding to our internationalist, and mostly humanist vocation. Helpful effective work abroad, sometimes in relationships or on issues where the US was not prominent, actually added to influence in Washington, at least with thoughtful figures such as Vice President George HW Bush, and secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker.

Brian Mulroney managed to address the duality of purpose on both global issues and the US that Louis St. Laurent had prescribed, and nailing down bilateral economic security we then believed resided in NAFTA. Jean Chrétien also managed to keep the duality of purpose in fine balance, even when defying US wishes over the invasion of Iraq, an act which reinforced our differentiated sense of national identity.

When I arrived in Brussels in 2002 as ambassador to the European Union, EU Commission President Romano Prodi, formerly Prime Minister of Italy (and a great friend of M. Chrétien) announced Canada’s inclusion as one of the EU’s six “strategic partners” (along with the US, China, Russia, India and Japan). He cited Canada’s advocacy of the Kyoto climate protocol, and initiatives to mobilize human security and sustainable development, observing too Canada’s exemplary model of pluralism and inclusion.

More recently, Canadian tourists, diplomats, and business people working abroad have heard the repeated question from many foreign friends, “What’s happened to Canada?”

We went inward. As my fellow Policy contributor Colin Robertson wrote recently, the notion the “world needs more Canada” has been supplanted by the reality that Canada “needs more world.”

While living in Europe since the Canadian election writ was dropped on March 28, I have seen Canada ascend to heights never seen before in media coverage and public attention — largely because of Mark Carney’s prior record of competent leadership, current defiance of President Trump’s declared presumptions about Canada, and ability nonetheless to work out a functional relationship with him.

Just this week, Prime Minister Carney entered a new security and economic framework with our European allies in order to hedge our over-dependence on the US and help kick-start Canadian growth. As Carney himself said, Canada is the most European of non-European countries; one more way among the many to accurately describe our national identity.

Given the dearth today of eminently successful leaders in the democratic world, Carney’s ambitions for Canada are striking others with a touch of envy. We should hold our breath, but nonetheless enjoy the moment on Canada Day.

A few weeks ago, I was on a train up to London from the English countryside and asked the attendant passing the drinks trolley for a coffee. He said there were two instant coffees available. “Which is worse?” I asked. “About equal,” he replied, with classic English irony.

A minute later, the impressively dressed woman seated across my table asked, “Are you from the States?”

“Canada,” was my firm reply.

“Oh. Excuse me. But well done, Canada.”

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.