Off the shelf, up the flagpole: Canadian flags fly high in response to Trump

In Canada, the maple leaf is suddenly showing its colors everywhere.

The iconic flag is bolted onto the facades of brick homes. It’s planted on car dashboards. The city of Mississauga, next door to Toronto, this week raised oversize Canadian flags outside its city hall. It also removed the American flags that had been waving along the shores of Lake Ontario and in arenas where American teams often face off against Canadian hockey rivals.

Just a decade ago, newly inaugurated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Canada the “first postnational state” – a multicultural country bounded not necessarily by a flag but by modern shared values.

Today, with U.S. President Donald Trump launching a full-scale trade war and threatening to subsume Canada as America’s 51st state, that feels like ancient history, even if Alvin Tedjo, a Mississauga city councillor, says the move is “less anti-American and more pro-Canadian.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney, who took office on March 14, is unlikely to echo Mr. Trudeau’s definition of Canada as a place with “no core identity.”

“You might have been able to get away with it last year,” says Heather Nicol, director of the School for the Study of Canada at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. “But not this year, no.”

Indeed, in just two months, nationalism – albeit Canadian style – has proved to hold a powerful allure. “You can’t be post-national if you’re not national,” says Dr. Nicol. “[With] the Trump threat we define ourselves now as a state. We are the Canadian state. Not the 51st state, but the Canadian state.”

Mr. Carney has quickly struck a defiant new tone. “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life,” he said. “America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape, or form.”

Finding solidarity

This is not the first time the United States has threatened Canadian sovereignty. It’s a theme that predates the founding of Canada itself. Capturing the territory was a “mere matter of marching,” per the infamous words of Thomas Jefferson in drumming up support for war against the British Empire in 1812. But President Trump has articulated it more forcefully, and more often, than any time in Canada’s 158-year history.

In response, Canadians are running the flags up the pole – with the maple leaf conveying new meaning and a certain solidarity.

The Canadian flag, which is just 60 years old, has never cropped up everywhere from cars to lawns to gas stations, as the Stars and Stripes does in the U.S. But now, flagmakers and sellers across the nation are reporting that sales are soaring, according to media reports; meanwhile, Mississauga is the third city in Ontario to have ordered the lowering of American flags.

Anxious but angry, Canadians are boycotting American products and forgoing American vacations. “Buy Canada” campaigns are gaining ground from the top down and the bottom up. But Canadians don’t tend to like what they classify as American-style patriotism.

When the Freedom Convoy, a group angry at the government for vaccine mandates during the pandemic, flew the maple Leaf in 2022 during blockades in Ottawa, for example, it evoked the kind of nationalism that many Canadians eschew.

Yet the recent U.S. tone, says Mr. Tedjo, the city councillor, has pushed Canadians toward a renewed appreciation for what it means to be Canadian. “Canadians have rallied around the flag in the last several months,” he says. “I think it’s good for Canadians to understand how we’re different.”

Still, to be Canadian is also to be a neighbor, many Canadians say. At the pier at Snug Harbour, where Lake Ontario feeds into the Credit River, Roy Clifton says he has mixed feelings. The co-owner of a restaurant, who sports a Yankees cap, is not against Americans or their flag, but against their president. “It’s really sad what has happened. This is hurting Canadians, and it’s hurting Americans,” he says.

At Mississauga City Hall, Jordan Currie, a young writer, says she doesn’t trust the term “postnational.” It reminds her of “post-feminism.” To her, it’s clear that society has not yet moved beyond the need to fight gender inequality or nativism. She worries that the spat between Canada and the U.S. could bring out the worst nationalist tendencies in both countries.

When she sees the Canadian flags, like the new ones right behind her, “I’m not like, ‘ew,’ ” she says. She hopes it stays that way.