I Get Elbows Up—But Are We *Sure* Nationalism is the Move Right Now?

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: Shutterstock

 
 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t start thinking about the semiotics of national flags until relatively recently. Not that I didn’t know they hold meaning, because duh. But I didn’t always think critically about what that meaning was, how it could differ for different groups of people—and especially not how it could change. When I saw cars driving by, Canadian flags fluttering in the wind, I knew it was either for Canada Day or that some kind of international sporting event was happening. Similarly, when I saw people people wearing little Canadian flag pins, my reaction was generally an internal, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ if I even reacted at all.

But then, the trucker convoy. Suddenly, the sight of the Canadian flag made me feel almost nervous. I wasn’t sure about the meaning being conveyed; were we still celebrating Canada in a relatively low-key way? Or did the flag in this context actually mean that the person waving it was a raging racist who saw this country as white and believed I could never be a ‘real Canadian’? Hard to tell, and because of that ambiguity, kind of scary.

Of course, I’m using the flag here as a stand-in for a particular type of nationalism, one that veers into jingoism, patriotism’s aggressive, chauvinistic and violent cousin. Which is why it has been… interesting, let’s say, to see Canadians enthusiastically embrace nationalism over the past few weeks. I know—we don’t like tariffs or Trump, and it has been funny and unifying to make those feelings clear by booing rival hockey teams and using slogans like “Elbows Up.” (The pettier the better, right?) But it’s still disorienting to see so much pro-Canada messaging and symbolism, as if the trucker convoy and its attempted re-making of the flag’s meaning just… didn’t happen. So, let’s talk about it.

White supremacist viewpoints have been steadily gaining ground in Canada for years—but the convoy supercharged its growth

I’m making the connection to the trucker convoy not just because it was an inflection point for me, but also because it genuinely changed Canada. A recap: We basically knew right away that the trucker convoy was organized, at least in part, by far-right figures known for espousing white supremacist views. Organizers collected donations using GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site that has become the go-to fundraising tool for the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse, Alex Jones, the Proud Boys and other far-right groups—and according to PBS, of the $9.58 million collected via the site, 44% came from U.S. donors, leading then minister of public safety and emergency preparedness Bill Blair to characterize the convoy as “a largely foreign-funded, targeted and coordinated attack on critical infrastructure and our democratic institutions.”

The ‘protests’ themselves were a safe haven for white supremacist, neo-Nazi viewpoints. For example, in addition to the Canadian flag, demonstrators carried other far-right symbols: variations of the Gadsden, Molon Labe and Patriote flags, as well as upside down Canadian flags, all of which have been adopted by far-right extremists. Oh, also Nazi and Confederate flags, of course.

There was also a lesser known, but still deeply problematic faction that established a presence at these demonstrations—white Christian nationalists. As Christine Mitchell, adjunct professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Saskatchewan, explained in The Conversation back in 2022, “Christian nationalism [is] the connection between Christian identities, American national identities and political beliefs. What I see here, in front of Canada’s Parliament buildings, is an expression of that same white Christian nationalism, positioning the ‘truckers’ as the remnant that will heal Canada. The combination of the verse, the signs and the Canadian flags indicates the combination of Christian identity, Canadian national identity and political beliefs. When we look at the context of the verse in 2 Chronicles on the truck cab, one might wager that those truckers assume Parliament is the temple that will be destroyed unless people turn from their sin. And the divinely-mandated mission is the overthrow of the Canadian government in order to further God’s mission of love.”

Regardless of the specific group these demonstrators claimed belonging to, the overall perspective was anti-government nationalism. The entire point of the convoy was to uphold an idea of Canada that was unconstrained by this country’s existing social order. The vision was a Canada for some people (white, Christian, politically conservative), which necessarily meant others (Indigenous, racialized, politically progressive people) were unwelcome. And by using the Canadian flag as an emblem of this worldview, it changed what it represents in the cultural zeitgeist.

I know, I know—a small group of people can’t unilaterally transform what something means for everyone. And for a lot of people, our current moment of nationalism is an attempt to reclaim the flag as a symbol. But two things: first, that small group grew, post-convoy. Yes, far-right extremists had a presence in Canada before. But the demonstrations attracted more people, and allowed these attitudes to become further entrenched. In September 2022, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (the oldest political foundation in Germany) and the German Embassy in Ottawa co-hosted an international conference on right-wing extremism, where experts quantified this shift. According to Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, there were about 20,000 white supremacists in Canada in 2016. Post-convoy, 10 to 15% of the population, or about 584,000 people, hold at least some far-right views—and the meaning they assigned to the Canadian flag likely changed with their political evolution. There are other signs, too. Take the growth of far-right extremist group Diagolon, which was founded in 2020. It’s what researchers consider an “accelerationist” group (that is, one that is “intent on accelerating or fomenting a civil war, overturning what they see as the current corrupt, illegitimate order,” according to Barbara Perry, director of the Centre for Bias, Hate and Extremism at Ontario Tech University), and while it started online via live stream, it has since gained enough traction to move offline, most recently with a cross-Canada, in-person “Terror Tour” that included stops in Ottawa, Kamloops and Kelowna.

Buy Canadian campaigns are less about economic change and more about rhetoric

That is obviously very, very different than the Elbows Up movement, which is largely centred on the exhortation to buy Canadian as a retaliatory action for Trump’s tariffs. (And, okay, mocking America whenever possible.) There’s just one thing: the evidence that campaigns focused on economic nationalism deliver long-term change is shaky at best. As Amanda Mull explained over at Bloomberg, if this worked as an economic strategy, you’d expect to see people make a sustained shift to purchasing more domestic than imported products, as well as job growth (or at least, fewer job losses) in the domestic manufacturing sector. But in the U.S., that historically hasn’t happened. Per Mull, “The biggest Buy American campaigns have been introduced during recessions and paired with onerous tariffs, both of which on their own reliably tank the number of goods entering the country, according to data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. The same data shows that once a recession ends, imports tick back up to their previous trend line very quickly.” It’s also worth noting that in today’s era of globalized supply chains, it’s actually very complicated to figure out if what you’ve purchased was produced domestically. And when it comes to participation in the labour force, despite many politicians calling for consumers to Buy American over the past 40 years, the country has never surpassed its 1979 peak in manufacturing employment. (While we are already seeing quantifiable impacts of this buy local campaign in Canada, experts have raised similar concerns about its long-term viability.)

So what do these campaigns accomplish in practice? A narrowing—both of what it means to belong in and to a country, and who gets to claim that belonging. As Mull put it, “broad-based Buy American movements historically reject not only foreign goods but also foreign or non-White workers, even those on US soil. In this way, at least, Buy American campaigns work beautifully: They take existing dissatisfaction and unrest among US workers and reorient it away from those wielding power domestically and toward a foreign threat. Suddenly the most important relationship in the labor economy isn’t between workers and owners, but between Americans and their foreign opponents—and big business can more easily cast itself as an ally of the everyman. They’d love to treat their workers well, if only they had the customers to afford to do it.”

The logic holds true here, too. There is a big-business connection for sure. Consider our very own grocery store magnate Galen Weston. Amid growing consumer interest in boycotting American products, Loblaw companies (Loblaws, Superstore, No Frills, etc.) began identifying made-in-Canada products to make it easier for consumers to make informed decisions. Too bad the same company also participated in an “industry-wide” price-fixing scheme that saw Loblaw and its competitors, including Metro, Sobeys and Walmart, overcharge customers for packaged breads, buns, bagels, rolls, naan, English muffins, wraps, pitas and tortillas for 16 years—costing shoppers about $5 billion. That, and more recent allegations of price gouging, are definitely giving ‘just pretending to be an ally of the everyman.’ But I’m even more interested in the first part, the philosophical overlap between rejecting foreign goods and rejecting people who are perceived as foreign. Because I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we are in a moment of profound anti-immigrant sentiment. According to a 2024 report from Environics, “almost six in ten (58%) Canadians now believe the country accepts too many immigrants, reflecting a 14 percentage point increase since 2023, building on a 17 point increase over the previous year (2022 to 2023). This is the most rapid change over a two-year period since Focus Canada began asking this question in 1977, and reflects the largest proportion of Canadians who say there is too much immigration since 1998.” (Emphasis mine.)

It’s worth thinking about the deeper message of Elbows Up

Now, I know correlation is not causation. But do we really think it’s possible that the convoy played no role in this unprecedented shift? Because I don’t think so. It’s far more likely that the convoy, as a social, cultural and political moment, actually changed Canada, and in the process complicated the symbolism of the Canadian flag. And now, so many of us are participating in a similarly exclusionary rhetoric, without really thinking about it.

I admit that I am a particularly nationalistic person. I mean, I’m not immune to the excitement around international sporting events and I participate in the diaspora wars as much as any other Caribbean person, so it’s not like I have zero sense of national pride. But in general, that’s not really how I negotiate my identity. I also don’t feel totally comfortable talking about ‘loving’ this country. My feelings—as an immigrant, a racialized woman and a non-Indigenous person who lives on stolen land and benefits from the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people in this country—are too complicated for that kind of blanket statement.

That being said, I get the appeal of Elbows Up. I’m also not saying people shouldn’t fly the flag, or buy pro-Canada chocolate. Swapping made-in-Canada products for the imported U.S. items on your grocery list is morally unobjectionable to me. But I am interested in encouraging some critical thinking about the ideas we’re being asked to buy into, and whether they really serve us. Because countries are not physical constructs, they are ideological ones. So I think in this current moment of pro-Canada rhetoric, it’s fair to ask what ‘Canada’ actually means. What does it stand for? What are its values? And what does it say that at a time of raging anti-immigration sentiment, pro-genocide policies, political fragmentation and increasing inequality, so many of us are finding comfort and satisfaction in claiming something that won’t claim us all back?

A little light nationalism in the face of manifest destiny is basically a Canadian past-time at this point, and that’s all well and good. But we’ve seen what happens when other places lean heavily on national identity (namely: America). So as we’re reacting to this attack on our sovereignty, we should at the very least be wary of where that can lead.

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PoliticsStacy Lee KongDonald Trump, Elbows Up