Two stories from the past month best illustrate the nature of American power in the current moment: one involves Canada, the other Venezuela. The first is about a country and its leadership strong enough to stand up for its own interests and reject a lop-sided deal offered by a hegemonic power, the second is about the exact opposite. It is telling that these occurred within a week of each other.
On August 29, the Trump administration, perhaps feeling spurned by the Carney government’s forceful rejection of a deal that it characterized as “asking too much and offering too little”, and not respecting Canada’s status as a sovereign nation, made a deal with Venezuela. This agreement, though few concrete details have been publicly released so far, seems to effectively carve off large parts of that country’s remaining oil reserves as an exclusive American economic interest, subject to the control of the American government rather than Venezuela’s.
Reports from inside the recently abandoned US-Canada trade talks seem to indicate that the Trump admin wanted to make a deal involving first refusal rights for Canada's oil, critical minerals and other resources on similar terms to that it just agreed to with Caracas, which is to say effectively reviving the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company model for the 21st century. The imperial power gets the spoils, and the subject nation gets the consequences, plus some payoffs for a certain elite caste to keep things quiet, while giving up the right to control what happens with its own naturally endowed assets.
The Trumpian worldview which Canada and its leadership are now forced to confront ultimately views Canada’s resources, industrial base and sovereignty in much the same way it does Venezuela’s or other countries subject to the "Donroe Doctrine". The major difference, of course, is that the United States is unwilling (as of yet) to apply military force to seize the former, but the similarity is unmistakable. A framework of imperial power projection that has long been applied to countries that the US thought of as too weak, poor or politically unstable to defend themselves is now in the process of being stretched onto erstwhile allies, including Ukraine (which was similarly offered a deal regarding critical minerals which would involve exclusive American access rights) and Denmark (which had to prepare for the very real possibility of a previously unthinkable US invasion of Greenland). No longer even a "branch plant" of the US, under this vision, Canada would be a vassal state or resource colony with ever-more limited control over what happens within its own geography.
Given these realities, it is obvious that the coming of the second Trump administration has prompted deep questions for Canada on topics ranging from trade to culture to defence. This has led to a number of drastic policy changes from the federal government, including large increases in defence spending, regulatory changes to move rapidly on major infrastructure, and deemphasis on climate change goals in favour of a push for more resource development. At the same time, it has sparked a deep soul-searching amongst the general population about what makes Canada a distinct nation from the United States and how much real power and ability we have to set ourselves apart. In the 2025 federal election, and in the by-elections which have occurred since, the defining ballot question was which party was able to better position itself to handle the changes emerging from Trump administration policy and convince the public it would be able to protect Canada’s sovereignty. In this context, federal politics moved sharply into a two-party contest between the Liberals and Conservatives, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) becoming marginalized and receiving their worst ever result, even worse than 1993, and the Liberals positioning themselves as the definitive defenders of Canada’s interests against the United States. In short, the question of sovereignty and Canada’s place in the world now plays out not just in the halls of power but in kitchen tables and liquor store aisles across the nation.
It would be tempting, if one already had a cynical take on American hegemony and its consequences, and warned of the dangers for Canada of close economic ties to the United States, to merely dance in the end zone (to choose an American phrase) at having been proven right by what has transpired over the past nearly two years. For anyone who can say without hesitation that the US was a mostly benign hegemon prior to Trump, I would invite them to ask an Iraqi or a Chilean how “benign” it felt for them. However, arriving at a now widely felt conclusion earlier than most is not the same thing as having a plan for the current reality. The social democratic left has a unique ability to address the question of sovereignty and bring ideas to the table that are not available to other political actors to address the challenge of the current moment for Canada, either due to either ideological precepts or loyalty to capital above nation.
As was recently articulated by Dónal Gill in his excellent article on the social patriotic tradition within the NDP, a strong position of left nationalism, distinguishing Canadian identity and interests from those of the United States, used to be a defining feature of movements such as the Waffle, which fought against growing American economic and cultural influence in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Though the tendency was not successful in winning the leadership of the NDP at the time, the spirit of the ideas that it brought forward were enacted in watered down policy form by Liberal governments in the 1970s, with crucial parliamentary support from the NDP. These include the Investment Canada Act to review foreign (mostly but not exclusively American) investments in the country for consistency with the national interest, Canadian Content regulations on broadcasting to resist American hegemony in culture and the creation of PetroCanada to harness the nation’s resource wealth for developmental purposes. However, in the decades since, issues such as environmentalism, the history of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples and the influence of certain globalized forms of progressive discourse have contributed to making nationalism, in particular in resistance to American hegemony, less of a prominent discursive feature in Canadian social democratic politics. As a first principle, though, the Canadian left must be willing to meet the political moment and reembrace sovereignty as an important cause, drawing on the lessons of international sister parties and movements, while defining its own path. This involves examining why left sovereignty fell out of favour and how it might be rediscovered, through learning from the experiences of global social democracies and articulation of concrete policy approaches.
I. Hotels and Graveyards
More than any specific policy tension, the lack of a coherent, consistent approach by the Canadian left to the question of sovereignty can be rooted in its relative absence in recent years of a positive idea about what Canada is as a country. Some of this is rooted in the inherent difficulties of forming a national consciousness in a country which has always been defined by a degree of pluralism, starting with English/French duality and later evolving into modern multiculturalism. This is different from the operating environment of European social democratic parties which takes place in countries which were conceived as nation-states from the beginning, representing political aspirations of a particular people who share a cultural heritage and background. Indeed, as these countries have become more de facto multicultural over time due to increased immigration, greater tensions have emerged within the electoral coalitions backing the social democratic parties there, often creating party splits or resulting in left-wing governments feeling forced to implement measures on immigration or cultural cohesion which would be seen as very harsh in a Canadian context.
Despite these real challenges, it is not impossible to formulate a Canadian national interest and vision of sovereignty which would advance progressive goals, but there are several tendencies of left rhetoric and action which have made recapturing the social patriotic tradition as outlined by Gill more difficult. Contra Gill, though, the lack of a clear social patriotic message from the NDP in the last federal campaign was not so much a result of vulgar Marxism but rather some distinct but related trends in Canadian political discourse which have overtaken it. These trends are not necessarily unique to the NDP but they are emblematic of a trend which has moved the centre of gravity in social democratic politics away from the shop floor and towards the office and the academy lounge.
The first might be called the "hotel" theory of the country each of us in separate rooms and passing politely in the lobby, but not part of a true home. This can be summarized by Justin Trudeau’s definition of Canada as a “post-national state”, without a core mainstream and instead defined by buy-in on “shared values”. The problem with this formulation, though it may initially seem tempting as a way of overcoming the very real hardship and conflict that national identity has and continues to lead to in many places, is that it fundamentally rests on the idea that we are not advancing a common project together as citizens, merely serving our own interests as individuals or members of sub-communities.
Taken to a logical conclusion, there would be no objection under this framework to Canada becoming the 51st state, as long as the American government that it occurred under was sufficiently in keeping with the social and political values of most Canadians. This would merely be the post-national state becoming larger, of no great loss to history and perhaps even a sign of progress. Indeed, the narrative of then-British North America as a stubborn Tory holdout from the Enlightenment ideals of the American Revolution would say that it was a deviation from the Whig theory of history that Canada even still exists. Needless to say, even under a Democratic President who promises better health care coverage or more social spending, the vast majority of Canadians would be unwilling to take this deal, and not only because American political volatility could easily take it away in four years. It would be a tragic abandonment of our unique history, culture and traditions, a final absorption into homogenized globalization and the destruction of anything of the particular left north of the 49th parallel.
The second flawed notion of what Canada is could be termed the "graveyard" theory, under which our sovereignty is treated as unimportant due to what has been done to, most prominently, Indigenous peoples, and others who have been or continue to be mistreated by the actions of the Canadian state. Trudeau was alleged to have gestured at this worldview via his apologies for various past Canadian government actions, but it is more present in certain sectors of academia and activism which present Canada as illegitimate in its own sovereignty due to its origins in settler colonialism.[1]
This article is not the place for a full accounting of everything that has happened in Canada’s history, but even if it is true that horrid things have been done at the hands of our government (and some have indeed been horrid), the country cannot hope to provide redress and repair for this mistreatment without itself being sovereign. For example, moving towards shared sovereignty with Indigenous nations in areas such as natural resource management or child welfare policy is a laudable goal but it is one that can only be advanced under current geopolitical conditions if the Canadian state itself retains the autonomy to do so. Threats which externally undermine Canada’s sovereignty ultimately take away the ability of everyone who is here now, regardless of how they came to be, to work together through our collective past (which belongs to a new Canadian citizen as much as it belongs to a descendant of the filles du rois) and create a better future.
For those who might eschew commitments to sovereignty altogether, there is the potential path of internationalism in the “no war but the class war”, “the workers have no nation”, mold. Aside from the fact that this position does not accord with the way Canadians are increasingly viewing themselves as more patriotic, the frank truth is that Communist and Socialist internationalism no longer exists in a real way as they did in the 20th century. One can have an internationalist mindset, as an individual, but there is no group at the international level with real heft to organize political activity across borders like the Second and Third Internationals actually had. In the current reality, we can wish each other well across borders in building our distinct projects, but the nation state is the key site of political action and sovereign ability to make change. This does not mean, for example, that Canadian social democrats should not attempt to hold Canadian-headquartered companies accountable for their actions in other countries and support the actors there trying to do so. However, it does mean recognizing that threats to our own sovereignty are real and deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms.
A variety of progressive oikophobia which implies or outright states that nationalism and sovereignty are good elsewhere but not at home due to our nation’s sins is not fit for the current moment and ultimately disparages the hard work of making a country which serves all its people. Talking points that Canada is nothing but "three oligopolies in a trench coat", or something far worse, betray a notion that our sovereignty is not actually something worth fighting for. Ironically, the decline of social patriotism amongst Canadian social democrats is itself a manifestation of greater American hegemony, with discourses often being exported from the United States via its hegemonic global media apparatuses and applied to Canada in a fashion ill-fitting our history.[2] The bad habit that Canadians have of finding our saviours elsewhere, (particularly in American politicians such as Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) is the most direct manifestation of this as it ultimately betrays a lack of faith in our own intellectual resources and organic political traditions.
II. Patria and Folkhemmet
Further, references to the United States’ particular political traditions that have now frequently become universalized are not even the best analogies for where Canada finds itself. Outside of the social patriotic tradition outlined by Gill in its British variant, which of course stands as a major historical influence on Canada’s social democrats, a place to start would be in our own hemisphere, where resistance to American imperial designs has been a longstanding feature of left-wing political discourse, inheriting a tradition of patria o muerte that began with colonial revolts against the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The full history of left-wing patriotic thought in Latin America vis-à-vis American hemispheric dominance is far too extensive to be detailed here, but a few recent stories demonstrate the current dynamics and have echoes with Canada’s predicament. The political response of social democratic governments in the region illustrates both the power and peril of left-wing patriotism as a political mode.
As a co-signatory of CUSMA and America’s largest trading partner, Mexico has very much been subject to a similar kind of economic pressure from the United States which ultimately seeks to undermine sovereignty. In the case of Mexico, this has been more targeted at its alleged use as a transhipment point for goods from China and the friendly attitude of the left-wing government currently led by Claudia Sheinbaum to Cuba. Mexico has navigated this through various methods, collaborating with (or more cynically capitulating to) the Trump administration on some areas such as counternarcotics operations while attempting to maintain economic sovereignty through increased domestic oil production and enhancing critical social welfare provisions. This project has been described by Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador as the “Fourth Transformation”, echoing earlier revolutionary periods in Mexico’s history such as its independence from Spain and the Revolution of the early 1910s. It is particularly interesting to note that some discourse in Canada has stated that Mexico has effectively been “ahead” of Canada in line for US trade talks, though it remains to be seen how substantive this is, as there has yet emerged no definitive deal on what the US views as outstanding trade irritants from either country.
The Workers’ Party-led government of Brazil, led by Lula Da Silva, has similarly been targeted by the US for tariffs based on a series of seemingly arbitrary justifications including its widely used and locally owned/developed Pix payment system and restrictions on US beef imports. The framing of sovereign control over digital platforms as a trade irritant is strikingly similar to Canada and should be no surprise given the tight alliance of the Trump administration with US tech capital. Many suspect that the tariffs are actually political revenge designed to antagonize the Lula government and boost the chances of rival Flavio Bolsonaro in the upcoming presidential elections. Much like the “Trump bounce” experienced by Mark Carney and the Liberals, however, this has had just the opposite effect on the Brazilian electorate.
A key dynamic which applies to Brazil as well as many Spanish-speaking South American countries is that the right-wing forces in these countries are in increasingly open alignment with the United States in general and the Trump administration in particular. The so-called “Shield of the Americas” initiative of right-wing led governments in the region is effectively a kind of Trumpist International, and the left in these countries, such as recently-retired former Colombian President Gustavo Petro have framed their opponents as imperialist stooges, the kind of “comprador bourgeoise” warned against in Marxist tracts of yore. The echoes of less overt but no less impactful US interventions in Latin America, aligning with right-wing forces to undermine patriotic struggles led by the left. In such a context, parties of the social democratic left are willing to engage in tactical alliances with non-leftist voices who are nevertheless resistant to US hegemony, in the interest of preserving sovereignty. For example, Lula in Brazil heads a governing coalition made up of a variety of centre-to-left parties which share a common goal of keeping the coalition led by Trump acolyte and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro out of power. Petro in Colombia similarly had to navigate a chaotic, divided legislature dominated by old line establishment parties in order to pass critical reforms such as major minimum wage increases and stand firm against US tariff threats.
The distinction between “national patriotic” and “comprador” bourgeoise has echoes in an emerging generational break in the Canadian business community which orients itself around the 1988 US-Canada Free Trade Agreement. Business-friendly political leaders such as former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley who have living memory of a time before the FTA and broader continental free trade are of course more likely to believe that the end of continental free trade would not be fatal. They have therefore encouraged Canadian leadership to be patient in dealing with the United States and not agree to a bad deal just because it is the one on offer. This is in contrast to some of Canada’s current business leadership, which, pushing for a speedy resolution to the trade conflict at all costs, is effectively advocating for the US position or at the very least blowing past the very legitimate objections of the general public on sovereignty and other grounds into a realm of pure economism. It ought to be possible for social democrats to make temporary, tactical common cause with the former for the purposes of rebuffing the latter, even if the policy conclusions they will ultimately come to will differ.
Similarly, the theory of folkhemmet (people’s home), a guiding ideology of the long-dominant Swedish Social Democratic Party makes a distinctly left-wing case for sovereignty, but in alliance with certain kinds of capital. Historically, in Sweden, this was smallholder farmers (which is a very similar alliance to the NDP’s predecessor Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, CCF) but better maps on to certain forms of sovereign capital willing to engage in national developmental alliances in the current context. As explained in a speech by then-Swedish Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, the guiding idea of folkhemmet is that:The good home knows no privileged or misfortuned, no favorites or undesired. There no one looks down on the other. There none try to gain benefits on the others expense, the strong do not oppress and plunder the weak. In the good home reigns equality, kindness, cooperation, helpfulness.
This can be summarized as an approach which makes the conditions of sovereignty work for all citizens with special attention to working class and disadvantaged people. This is done by extending commitments of sovereignty such as defence and autonomy into the social and economic realm in much the same way as social democracy aims to extend democratic rights beyond the purely political. In short, under folkhemmet, the state protects its citizens not just from external enemies but from internal privations.
This approach has been highly electorally successful and has created a kind of enduring hegemony in Sweden which even rival conservative governments only cautiously colour outside the lines of. Moreover, it has allowed Sweden to maintain relative independence of foreign and defence policy posture in relation to the United States; for example, its forthright denunciation of the Vietnam War and friendly posture towards Cuba under the Olaf Palme government.
III. Guns and Butter
Learning from the comparative cases above, left-wing approaches to protecting Canadian sovereignty could take many concrete policy forms, and this article is not intended as an extensive guide to every potential issue. However, two of which are the most controversial and fraught for the left can provide illustrative examples of how solutions can be offered which illustrate a path forward.
On defence spending, there has often been a dominant discourse on the left which can be summarized as “butter over guns”, making the case that spending on the military will crowd out social programs and enrich defence contractors. This is very similar to much more trenchant criticisms of the United States bloated and inefficient military budget, illustrating again how American-centric modes of political discourse have become imported extensively into Canada. However, if the United States is now truly a hostile actor to Canada’s national interests or is at the very least uninterested in maintaining its traditional posture of providing an iron-clad defence umbrella, this needs to be rethought and indeed is where most Canadians, traditionally skeptical of higher defence spending, have landed. As the Danes recently had to find out, sovereignty means nothing without the credible deterrence of hard power, including towards one’s ostensible friends, and a Canada which lacks this will quickly find its ability to act independently quickly eroded.
Recognition of the changed reality does not mean, however, that the NDP, or social democrats more broadly, merely needs to go along without criticism with the government’s defence agenda. Though Mark Carney has drawn praise for his announced intentions to change the reality that approximately 70% of Canadian defence procurement dollars have previously gone to American firms, the concrete progress on this has been slow going. The most prominent example of this has been the seemingly endless “ review” of the contract to buy F-35 fighter jets. Of course, steering defence procurement is notoriously difficult in Canada, and it should not be expected that a deeply entrenched reality would change overnight, but the left could be pushing for greater urgency on this file. To their credit, the NDP has urged the government to abandon the F-35 purchase and go with the competing Swedish Gripen fighter, a good example of an approach that would develop defence supply chains which lessen American involvement and reinforce sovereignty amongst like-minded middle powers. Going further, developing a truly sovereign defence industry would allow for Canada to place greater export controls to avoid weapons falling into conflict zones or being used by objectionable governments, and could allow for greater military-to-military contacts and alliances to be built with countries such as Brazil who are outside of the NATO framework and who feel more directly threatened by American power.
As well, it is right to ask where all the money for this build-up is coming from and what is being deprioritized in terms of social services or other necessary expenditures to pay for it, given the government’s reluctance to find new sources of revenue. A message of “guns and butter”, paid for with more equitable taxation, would likely find support, and reinforce the idea that all citizens, including the richest, have a stake in defending the nation.
Beyond discrete decisions on specific military platforms and how to pay for them, there is a broader critique that can be made that Canadian military culture at the leadership level is too interwoven with the United States military and too comfortable defaulting to alignment with it. An example of this can be seen in the leaking from inside the Department of National Defence regarding the F-35 purchase which seemingly has the purpose of advocating that the deal be concluded, valid objections to increased reliance on American technology be damned. Confronting this issue openly and pushing for concrete cultural change would perhaps be the most difficult challenge but it is one worth taking on. Military cooperation with the United States will likely always remain in some form absent an actual invasion of Canada or a much more serious rupture than currently contemplated in the structure of NATO. However, changing the default mindset from “Canada’s interests are always served by cooperation with the United States” to “does cooperation in this particular instance serve Canada’s interest” should be the goal. To be fair, it is not as though Canada has blindly gone along with any and every American military misadventure (Iraq and Vietnam being prominent examples which Canada wisely chose to sit out); the left can point to these examples, which most Canadians are rightly proud of as demonstrations of our ability to think and act for ourselves, and apply it more broadly. At the very least, the Canadian military should not be co-hosting conferences with American counterparts under the current conditions and given the gratuitous insults levied against us by American military leadership.
A potential method to achieve this cultural shift would be creating more of a citizen’s armed forces, along the lines of the WWII-era British Home Guard, which English socialists had a key role in conceptualizing and shaping. This would bring in people not from traditional military backgrounds, but who have an interest in serving the country with a lighter training regiment and reduced responsibilities who could be called up for duty on short notice in the event of a national emergency. An expansion of the armed forces of this type could also have beneficial effects in terms of increasing contacts between Canadians of different backgrounds and from different regions of the country, further building shared national consciousness, as well as having a rapidly deployable response service for domestic events such as floods and wildfires. The Carney government has made some indications within internal documents that it is examining the possibility of a much-expanded supplementary reserve to the Armed Forces, but a left vision could focus more explicitly on values of solidarity and social cohesion in formulating its purpose. Recent polling as well as increases in CAF recruitment have demonstrated a greater willingness amongst Canadian citizens to engage in national service of this type, which should be encouraged and shaped in a distinctly social democratic way.
IV. Power and Light
A second policy area where social democrats can make a unique policy contribution which centers sovereignty is around the debate on natural resource development. Much like “guns or butter”, this is too often trapped in a simplistic debate of “jobs or environment”, which a social democratic perspective, learning from but not carbon-copying other countries, could cut through.
A preliminary point should be made that insofar as we continue to exist in a world made up of states, Canada will need to earn money by selling states or entities in them things we make or extract; in order to guide this, we ultimately need to decide what we are and are not comfortable selling and how to sell it to gain the best return for our citizens in order to do the things we want to do (such as build up social services or develop sovereignty capabilities in other critical areas). Too often, the rightful concern around the environmental impacts of resource extraction and refining has led to a discourse of “anti-extractivism” which is against not just the oil and gas sector, where ultimately some sort of sunsetting will need to occur if any sort of liveable climate is to be maintained, but also the kinds of mining or power generation which are necessary for any sort of modern social life to occur. “De-growth” may have some merits at the margins in pointing out that GDP-per-capita is not the be-all, end-all of human happiness, but it is a poor guide for how to marshal natural resources effectively to engage in national development in a world of increasingly open imperial predation.
One of the biggest limitations for Canada in this respect is that we chose (with catastrophic stupidity, in my view) to largely exit the ownership role for the public sector within natural resources. Some of this is due to the constitutional designation of natural resources as a matter of provincial jurisdiction[3] which limits the ability of the federal government to control and direct one of Canada’s largest economic drivers. That said, despite barriers, PetroCanada was able to be created and if we had retained and developed it as a public enterprise, Canada could easily have been competing with Norway, with its now $2 trillion Oil Fund, in terms of harnessing natural resource wealth for the public good. The only comparable example in Canada, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, has been consistently undercapitalized and raided for various governments priorities over time, being a very pale imitation.
The key point of discomfort from the perspective of those on the left who prioritize climate change and other environmental concerns is that Norway, and countries similarly governed within social democratic traditions such as Denmark and more recently Mexico, are not intent on intentionally discouraging growth in their oil and gas sectors. Though they do make extensive efforts to reduce emissions associated with extraction (such as through carbon capture) and ensure their consumer economies as environmentally friendly as possible (almost all new vehicle sales in Norway are electric, for example), their view is that as long as global demand for oil exists, it ought to be fulfilled by producers who act in the most responsible way. This is suspiciously similar to the “ethical oil” arguments often advanced by acolytes of Canada’s oil and gas industry, but the main difference is that these other countries are categorized by extensive public, rather than private, ownership of resources. This ensures that their publics are truly benefitting from non-renewable resource development and that their governments can directly place environmental controls and conditions to reduce impacts, rather than relying on mechanisms such as tax credits, government co-investments, or subsidies to private companies which can often be manipulated to pad profits while not producing concrete outcomes.
If a PetroCanada 2.0 is nevertheless undesirable because it is viewed as the government acting in “sunset” industry, then the left could be proposing ideas such as a crown corporation for critical minerals (CopperCanada?), geothermal and nuclear power generation, public ownership of electricity grids, and so on. Some of this is already present at the provincial level in provinces which (wisely) chose not to privatize their electricity service provision, but we can go further. Such efforts would, of course, face extensive pushback from private companies active in these sectors, in much the same way that the Saskatchewan NDP government in the 1970s faced blowback when it partially brought into public ownership that province’s oil and potash sectors. But if the left is not meant to fight corporate power, it is not meant to do much of anything.
The goal of social democratic sovereignty on natural resources should be simply: the public has a collective interest in wise stewardship and universal, rather than corporate, benefit from natural resources and therefore ownership structures should be reformed to reflect this. The call for application of export taxes to the United States on commodities such as oil, natural gas and potash is one worthy of serious discussion, but beyond this we will always have limited control over these key “cards” in any trade or other negotiation as long as they are not publicly controlled. Moreover, we want to control these key drivers of the global economy to the extent we can and apply strong labour standards, environmental responsibility and Indigenous equity to them, or rather than continue in the status quo where the minerals powering the future are mined under effectively slave labour conditions in countries without functioning central states. These are arguments that it is very difficult to see either Conservatives or Liberals (their recent interest in publicly funding oil and gas pipelines notwithstanding) making but would resonate strongly with the desire for Canada to enact greater sovereignty. Just because Canada missed the opportunity to truly earn what it should have from past resource booms, does not mean we need to let the benefits of the technologies and energy sources booming now pass us by.
V. Towards Chez Nous
Despite the challenges described above, there is evidence that left wing actors in Canada’s politics are beginning to meet the sovereignty moment and revive the social patriotic tradition. A great example, who also happens to be by far the most popular premier in the country, is Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who has combined moderation and meeting of the public mood on issues such as public safety and consumer-facing affordability with an emphasis on a conciliatory approaches to issues such as resource development (creating a “Crown-Indigenous” corporation to guide major projects) and an unabashed optimistic spirit about Canada’s past and future. Nor does Kinew’s moderation on some issues mean that he isn’t willing to throw hard political punches and speak to classic anti-imperialist and anti-war themes. He has been the most consistent and forthright premier in his criticism of Trump, often in highly withering and politicized tones (see his speech at the federal NDP convention, blasting Trump's war on Iran as the "Epstein war"). Whether Kinew himself ever wants to move to the level of national politics, his is a spirit that is clearly winning accolades from the public and could, with adaptations to a broader national context, provide a roadmap forward for the left to provide a distinct vision to meet the sovereignty moment. This is not to say that Kinew’s government is beyond critique and certainly he has not engaged in as radical a political hegemony-shifting project as the Swedish or Mexican examples above. Nevertheless, he has shown that a social democratic approach can successfully meet Canada’s current realities and win over a large social consensus.
Much like Hannah Arendt defined existing in a political community for individuals, at the level of a nation, sovereignty is the "right to have rights". It is the first principle from which everything else we want to accomplish in collective political life as a country flows. This is why colonialism and imperialism would be objectionable even in the unlikely scenario where their material effects were entirely benign: they deny the agency of a people to act together in their own interests, substituting the judgement of an outside power. That is what the rejection of Trumpian and broader American encroachment is ultimately about. Canadians want the ability to define their future for themselves and to build their own country, not subject to the whims of anyone else no matter how powerful they might be, and with our own sense of what is valuable in the world.
Some "Elbows Up" rhetoric can be, for lack of a better word, cringey and paint too rosy a picture of Canada’s past and present challenges, but the underlying desire for Canadian sovereignty in this moment is an expression of an authentic need for roots, purpose and community that left-wing thinkers such as Simone Weil and Pier Paolo Pasolini would understand all too well. This moment, whatever its challenges, has given Canadians cause to consider what makes us unique in the world, in terms of our shared history, politics and traditions and why an overwhelming percentage of us do not wish to become American subjects, either de jure or de facto. Canadians, like most everyone else in the world, want to live in a country that is a homeland and a home, not a hotel or a graveyard; answering this desire calls not for blind patriotism, but a considered, aspirational approach to become the best version of our national self, on our own terms.
The traditions of Latin American left-patriotism and Scandinavian social sovereignty described above provide potential guideposts on what a social democratic, distinct from either small or large-l liberal, answer to the sovereignty question would look like for Canada in the current moment. A left nationalism fit for purpose would draw from their spirit of defining national sovereignty to serve and make space for all citizens, and from distinctly Canadian social democratic projects such as the CCF and the League for Social Reconstruction, meeting needs for defence from both external threats and internal hardships. Ultimately, though, what the modern Canadian version of this spirit looks like remains to be determined and will be just as unique as our nation itself. The opportunity for the Canadian folkhemmet to come into full flower is here: the question is, can our social democrats break with the discursive modes that have too often been locked in, and seize it?
Notes
[1] I am using this term neutrally; for my purposes, it is simply a description of historical fact that is also true of many other modern states.
[2] The left side of the political spectrum is not the only one guilty of this. Indeed, many have observed the increasingly Americanization of conservative politics in Canada which has reached a fever pitch with the social media “MAGA north” influencers of recent years. On the right side of the spectrum, one can think of references to rights under the First or Second Amendments made in Canadian discourse when they are, of course, not historically grounded. Interestingly, Quebec may be somewhat insulated from these discourse leakage effects due to the linguistic divide with Anglo-dominated global social and other media platforms.
[3] There is not the space here for a full explanation of the history behind why this is, but suffice to say that my perspective is that it was a decision hastily agreed to which has had major negative ramifications to towards the creation of a unified country.
Carter Vance is a policy analyst and researcher currently living in Gatineau, Quebec. He has experience working with governmental and non-governmental organizations in Canada, the United Kingdom, Dominica and Indonesia and has written widely on issues such as Canada's geopolitical and defence posture, as well as socioeconomic topics in Canada and abroad. He has served as a legislative researcher to several Members of Parliament and in the Senate of Canada. Mr Vance is also a writer and poet, whose debut novel, Smaller Animals, was published in November 2025. His occasional musings can be found on his Substack.