Will 2025 be remembered as the year Canadians re-embraced nationalism?

The following essay was published in The Globe and Mail on Saturday, December 27, 2025.

Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.

Nationalism has many different forms, from benign feelings of pride to aggressive chauvinism. Some speak idealistically of civic nationalism, quizzically of economic nationalism, or suspiciously of ethnic nationalism. And in Canada, there is Quebec nationalism and the search for greater autonomy by a myriad of Indigenous nations. All of these made their mark in the past year, and will continue to shape events in 2026.

Let’s start with the basic idea of national self-determination – that a people have the right to govern themselves and chart their own future. Who would have thought that, for Canadians, this principle would ever been called into question? But while we may have been prepared for another round of “America first” protectionism following the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January, the U.S. President’s sudden interest in annexation caught us by surprise.

The idea that Canada might cease to exist as a sovereign country provoked a strong reaction: many Canadians postponed or cancelled plans to travel to the U.S., stopped buying American wine or bourbon, or relentlessly searched for “Product of Canada” labels in grocery stores. Our surveys picked the highest unfavourable opinion of the United States in over four decades of polling, a growing recognition that our neighbour was behaving more as an enemy than as a friend, and – most decisively – an almost universal rejection of Mr. Trump’s proposal that Canada become the 51^st American state.

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