Canada Is in a Fight for Its Life

In a dramatically and newly uncertain world, Canadians are finding refuge in the familiar pastime of hockey.

First, it was the National Hockey League’s recent international tournament that culminated in Canada’s dramatic overtime win over the United States.

Days later, it was Canadian comic legend Mike Myers’ use of a hockey term — “elbows up” — to implore us to aggressively respond to U.S. attacks on our country while wearing a “Canada is not for sale” T-shirt.

Besting the United States on the ice was as satisfying as Myers’ intervention is timely. This is a moment for courage and candour, responsibility and resolve, for rallying behind that which makes us stronger and calling out those who would make us weaker.

Elbows up, indeed.

The disgraceful treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — whose country is under attack from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — by U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance was the exclamation point on the administration’s 40-day global assault on democracy and dignity.

From Elon Musk encouraging the global far right to Vance mocking disinformation’s threat to democracy to the White House’s efforts to challenge the sovereignty of its allies, the message team Trump is sending the world is one of cruelty and chaos, ignorance and idiocy.

That message hit home hard this week. Trump, who has been pressing for Canada’s economic destruction, public humiliation and, ultimately, political annexation since returning to office, launched an illegal trade war against our country March 4.

The same day, a Trump congressman mused about a military strike on Canada. The previous day it was reported that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, on a recent visit to a library famously intersected by the Canada-U.S. border, repeatedly crossed the marked line on the floor, declaring “U.S.A. number 1” on the U.S. side and “51st state” on the Canadian side. Outrageous as the behaviour was, at least the admitted puppy killer did not cause any further canine casualties.

Meanwhile, Canadians are fighting back. Led by a prime minister who delivered such a pitch-perfect speech it should give the blue Liberals who turned on his leadership pause, citizens from coast to coast to coast are expressing themselves in sports arenas, choosing to buy Canadian-made products in large quantities, and leveraging their personal networks and creative outlets to tell our U.S. neighbours how we feel.

As Canada works to guard its sovereignty from this unprecedented threat, we must not shy away from defending the international institutions, laws and systems responsible for major advancements in global peace, freedom and justice in the past 80 years.

Advancements Canadians have had a major role in creating. Advancements that are now at risk due to the actions and rhetoric of the current U.S. government.

Consider, it was Canadians who played a pivotal role in forming the United Nations, a Canadian who authored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Canadians who were at the forefront of establishing the International Criminal Court.

It was also a Canadian who created the concept of international peacekeeping, a Canadian who kick-started the nuclear disarmament effort, and a Canadian who rallied the West in opposing apartheid. Today, it is Canadians who are leading the global fight against disinformation and the protection of our shared environment.

Just as compromise has historically kept us united at home, collaboration has kept us strong abroad. Canada must weave the campaign to protect our national sovereignty and way of life into the wider international fight to preserve liberty and democracy. As former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy advises, we need to build and renew strategic global alliances.

As our country seeks out friends and allies abroad, we must be conscious of opportunists and appeasers at home.

Among those who would weaken Canada are individuals and organizations ideologically inclined to, or financially associated with, Trump and his band of “MAGA” Republicans.

Members of the Trump-backed “Freedom Convoy,” for example, have been quick to demonstrate they are not on Team Canada.

That’s also true, it seems, for Canada’s largest newspaper chain, the U.S.-owned Postmedia. Following the federal government’s announcement of retaliatory tariffs, the National Post proceeded to call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “a wuss” and urged Canada to return to “stroking” Trump’s ego while “giving him something,” further advising the government to not, in any circumstances, intervene to support Canadians financially devastated by the impacts of the tariffs, because “people will adapt.”

Additionally, prominent Postmedia columnists mocked Canadians’ fear over Trump’s annexation threats, lecturing that we should “get a grip.”

Unsurprisingly, Canada’s U.S. dark-money-supported think tanks are leveraging this moment to push their MAGA-style policies. The Fraser Institute has been encouraging an unprecedented economic union with the United States. The Montreal Economic Institute is pushing its radical anti-tax, pro-deregulation agenda. SecondStreet.org is promoting the possibility of a “$21-billion private insurance market” to disrupt medicare. For its part, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy seems to be just accepting U.S. narratives.

Most troubling is federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who once again failed to meet the moment. On the day the U.S. trade war began, Poilievre’s response was an atrocious, campaign-style speech focused on his Trump-adjacent politics rather than the welfare of the nation.

In between running down the country and repeating Trump’s lies about our border, Poilievre repeated his COVID-emergency pledge that he would not, in fact, have Canadians’ backs, dismissing any consideration of new government social spending. Poilievre’s plan to support Canadians affected by the trade war is to declare that “almost every penny of the tariffs collected should go to tax cuts,” declining to recognize that a tax cut is useless if you have no income because of job loss. Poilievre also reiterated his promise to eliminate the carbon and capital gains taxes, measures that benefit only wealthy Canadians. Finally, the Conservative leader made his customary pitch to unleash fossil fuel pollution by gutting environmental regulations, thus giving up the fight against climate change.

The parallels between Poilievre and Trump continue to be striking: both eschew norms of civility and decency, both are comfortable engaging with the far right, and both are intent on gutting the civil service, slashing foreign aid, ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and undermining public health science.

At a time when Canadians are searching for truth, familiar values and the sort of collective solidarity that government provides, Poilievre is clinging to his ideologically rigid vision of a society without shared responsibilities. Such an approach is what the scholar Timothy Snyder calls “freedom from” measures that ignore the critically important “positive freedom” characteristics necessary to remain safe from the risks of authoritarianism. As the public intellectual Adam Gopnik has previously noted, these dynamics are “un-Canadian.”

Perhaps such concerns are now being reflected in public opinion polls: Poilievre is leaving an increasingly negative impression with Canadians, according to Pollara, while Ekos Politics finds Liberal support is growing.

If Conservatives are concerned by these developments, they are not demonstrating it by changing course on a “Team Canada” approach. Remarkably, no Conservative MPs participated in a recent cross-partisan parliamentary visit to Washington to meet with U.S. lawmakers regarding tariffs, yet even the Bloc Québécois was represented. It has been reported that Conservative MPs are forbidden from joining colleagues from other parties on such official trips due to concerns from Conservative campaign chair Jenni Byrne, someone with her own noted affinity for Trump.

Nor has prominent Conservative MP Jamil Jivani denounced his close friend JD Vance, in spite of the vice-president’s treatment of Canada.

This is a time to choose. Canadians cannot and should not reason with the unserious, humour the deplorable or entertain the unthinkable. As Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, so eloquently stated, “we are very proud to be Canadian and we think we have a lot to be proud of.”

The response these last few weeks by my government, and by so many of my fellow citizens, to this existential threat to our country has been remarkable; I have never felt prouder to be Canadian.

Yet this fight is only beginning. Trump, Vance, Musk, the oligarchs and their allies are neither reasonable nor responsible. They will continue to lie, distort our democracy and threaten our sovereignty. It is why we must remain vigilant toward the values that characterize Canada and distinguish us from the United States, and reject any domestic contrarians who seek to distract, deceive or divide us. This will be especially true in the upcoming federal election.

As we carry on the fight for Canada, let us keep our elbows up, and remember to keep our heads up too.