Those who want to give up on Canada and sell out our nation cannot call themselves Canadian Patriots.
Whether a nation survives depends in large part on tangible factors.
Do you have defensible terrain?
Do you have a large enough population?
Do you produce enough weapons?
Have you built meaningful alliances?
However, there are also intangible factors that matter.
Do people believe your country is worth defending?
Do people have the will to fight?
Do people have the willingness to sacrifice in the face of foreign aggression?
And these intangible factors can often offset the lack of tangible ones.
Ukraine has far less land, far fewer people, and far fewer weapons than Russia. But their will to fight, their ingenuity, and their strength – combined with assistance from allies who helped close the weapons gap somewhat – has helped Ukraine to survive.
Israel has repeatedly fought for its survival against far larger foes and has managed to succeed due to the will to endure, the will to accept sacrifice, and the will to constantly innovate.
Many other countries have learned this lesson the hard way.
France possesses a powerful military and nuclear weapons because it knows the cost of being unprepared to defeat fascist aggressors.
Poland is a military powerhouse because they know independence is best secured by having credible military power.
But for both countries to build credible and tangible power, they both had to get the intangibles right. They needed to believe their country was worth defending. They needed to be willing to accept short-term sacrifice for long-term gain. They needed to invest significant sums in their own domestic defence industries.
In short, they had to make a clear national choice to empower those who advocated for strength and resolve, rather than giving in to those who advocated cowardice and surrender.
Remember, France and Poland spent time (far more time in Poland’s case) under foreign subjugation. Both saw many of their own citizens collaborate with those who invaded (Vichy France & Poland’s Communist puppet-state administrators).
In both cases, the loss of sovereignty was preceded by years of internal division and demoralization.
The right-left split and extremist violence in France – combined with war-weariness and a sense of malaise – held the country back from building up its military power, and poor military leadership led to a stunning collapse in the face of German aggression.
Poland was also divided, with the country trying to assert control over various territories that had been parts of other countries/empires. Political and cultural tensions led to internal division that withheld strong unified national action, leaving the country fragmented and unprepared for German aggression and then Soviet aggression (though even a unified and industrialized Poland would have struggled to survive against the joint fascist-communist invasion). Poland also depended on allies who were unwilling to go all in when it mattered most.
Strength and resolve
There is a clear lesson here for Canadians.
At a time when authoritarian states like China and Russia are feeding their war machines, and at a time when even our friends like the United States are less reliable and potentially threaten our sovereignty, Canada can ill-afford to listen to those who give in to cowardice and seek to sell us out.
Instead, we need strength and resolve.
A key thing to look for is those who offer practical ideas for strengthening Canada and contrast them with those who try to demoralize anyone who supports making Canada more resilient.
For example, if someone says it’s ‘impossible’ for Canada to rebuild our military by claiming we can’t afford it or nobody wants to join, they are simply being dishonest. Canada has more fiscal room than most of our NATO allies, and 70,000 people tried to join the CAF last year alone.
We cannot and must not give in to doomerism.
Canada has a proud military history. We have one of the world’s largest economies. We are technologically advanced, with our Artificial Intelligence sector being in the top 10 globally. We have a strong aerospace sector. We produce some of the world’s best Light Armoured Vehicles. We have powerful alliances – even if the U.S. is considered unreliable for the time being, we have allies like France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Thus, there is no reason we can’t build a powerful domestic defence industry. There is no reason we can’t have one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world. There is no reason we can’t defend our own territory and be a top NATO contributor.
All it takes is the will to make it happen, and a sense of real patriotism.
Real patriotism
Many so-called ‘Canadian Patriots’ have become the biggest advocates for selling Canada out to the United States.
It’s a stunning level of hypocrisy.
Selling Canada out to Donald Trump is about as unpatriotic as it gets.
Trying to turn Canada into a state – wiping out our status as a sovereign nation – is the opposite of patriotism.
And those who just want to give in to Trump must realize that refusing to retaliate if tariffs are imposed would be tantamount to inviting every other country to bully us, making things worse in the long run. We must retaliate with counter-tariffs so others learn that Canada cannot be messed with without paying a price.
What this country needs is real strength and real patriotism, patriotism grounded in respect for our fellow Citizens (even when they vote differently than we would like), a focus on building up our own industries, respect for our military history and a desire to perpetuate that history by building a powerful CAF, and a recognition that Canada’s history and values are something to be proud of rather than something to be apologized for or ceded to another country.
It also means building a strong and resilient Canada that is proactive, rather than reactive. Regardless of whether tariffs are imposed or not, we’ve learned a lesson that overreliance upon the United States is dangerous. We cannot be put in this position again, which means we need much more self-sufficiency in terms of military production, we need pipelines built across the nation to get our resources to new trading partners, and we need to deepen our military and economic ties to other democratic nations.
True patriotism means building up Canada, not selling Canada out. With this in mind, we will need to call out fake patriots if tariffs are imposed.
There will be Canadians who seek to blame other Canadians for Donald Trump’s actions. They will try to convince us that the economic pain we face from Trump’s tariffs is a reason to give up our sovereignty. In effect, they will seek to use the pain of Canadians – pain inflicted by Donald Trump’s tariff actions – to destroy our status as an independent nation and they will seek to reward a foreign country for imposing economic devastation upon us. As they do so, they will call themselves ‘Canadian Patriots’, but we must not let them get away with such an inversion of reality.
In the face of an economic assault based on lies, we must hold on to the truth, even when it’s unpopular or inconvenient to do so.
In the weeks and months ahead, Canada may go through significant economic pain, but we cannot allow that to divide us. We must show strength and resolve and show that we have what it takes to defend our country and ensure Canada remains a sovereign nation.
Spencer Fernando
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