President Abraham Lincoln warned in 1858 that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” That is, a regime which is either indifferent or ignorant of the principle that founded it has already started to dissolve, even if its institutions keep running for a while. Sen. Stephen Douglas (D., Ill.) at the time thought that the Union could last forever if each territory voted on its own fate and nobody asked the ends for which its nation served. Lincoln saw that a people which doesn’t care about first principles have nothing left to bind them together once interest and appetite pull in different directions.
Canada has spent a century and a half testing Douglas’s theory. On Monday evening, the results came in.
The Parti Quebecois (PQ) won nearly sixty seats and will form a minority government, a few seats short of the sixty-four necessary for a majority. The PQ’s leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, campaigned openly on another independence referendum with one caveat: that it will be held only after President Donald Trump leaves office in 2029. In his victory speech he vowed to “continue to dream and visualize that country,” and assured his faithful that “that dream will be realized one day.”
Ottawa ought to read that carefully. When a secessionist names a date, he has issued an ultimatum. St-Pierre Plamondon is telling the Carney government to give Quebec what it demands or watch him spend three years building a majority for leaving. Support for independence sits near 30 percent — low by historical standards — which is precisely why he needs the three years. The weak man asks for time. When the strong man responds with silence, time is usually all the weak man requires.
At the same time, Albertans will head to the polls on October 19 to decide whether to hold a referendum of their own on leaving Canada. Two provinces, at opposing ends of the map and of the ideological spectrum, are flirting with secession simultaneously. Whether either leaves is of secondary importance. The flirtation itself is the diagnosis.
The Return of the Founding Crisis
Canada has been here before. In fact, it began here. In 1839, Lord Durham, sent to report on the civil war in the Canadas, found “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” His report was the first serious attempt to transform the British North American colonies into one nation. Durham believed the warring could end only if the two peoples, French and English, were united under a single allegiance and common political good. His remedy of assimilation failed. The nation fell back on accommodation, and Confederation in 1867 was the result: a bargain among provinces, railway men and colonial administrators, struck to pay debts and build a market. It was never a common good.
The United States, by contrast, declared itself into existence on the truth that all men are created equal, and when called into question, fought the bloodiest war in its history to vindicate it. However bitterly Americans have quarreled since, they have quarreled over the meaning of a fixed and shared principle. Their divisions are arguments within the same horizon. Canada, instead, was founded on a settlement, and a settlement lasts only as long as the parties find it profitable. A settlement has no Gettysburg Address because it has nothing to which to rededicate itself.
So Canada has returned to its founding crisis, and it has returned weaker than it left. Durham counted two nations. Today, Quebec itself acts as a nation within Canada; Quebec has its own language laws, its own “nation” recognized by Parliament, and now a government pledged to independence.
Alberta increasingly speaks the language of a nation wronged. Indigenous peoples, holding land rights affirmed by the courts, claim the standing of nations in their own right, some with sovereign territories that cut across provincial boundaries. Durham worried about two nations in one bosom. There are now several, and the bosom has no idea what it is supposed to be holding.
The Post-National Experiment
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that the nation has deliberately disarmed itself. In 2015 Justin Trudeau told the New York Times that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” and proudly called Canada “the first post-national state.” The remark was more revealing than its author intended.
Over decades, Canada has deliberately erased both the memory of its founding as well as any longing for its founding principles. Our schools teach the founding mainly as a list of crimes. Our symbols are renamed, our statues taken down, our first prime minister was even removed from public squares. Our political class takes it as an article of faith that having no national identity is a sign of moral sophistication. A nation can survive debating its principles. It cannot survive deciding, as a point of pride, that it has none.
The consequence follows naturally. If there is no core identity, there is no common good. If there is no common good, citizens owe each other nothing beyond what they find convenient. Once convenience runs out, there is no argument for staying together. St-Pierre Plamondon and the Alberta separatists are taking the post-national state at its word. They are only being consistent. Ottawa told them there was no Canadian nation, and they believed it.
The Bogeyman Fails
Having emptied itself of principle, the Canadian establishment reached for the only substitute remaining: a common enemy. Christine Frechette’s CAQ, in power only for six months, ran a thirty-nine-day campaign about Donald J. Trump, whom she called “her real opponent.” In the third leaders’ debate, she demanded an urgent meeting with Carney and suggested Americans were secretly helping the PQ destabilize Canada. Hours later she admitted there was no evidence. The electorate answered by shutting out the CAQ entirely — from seventy-nine to zero seats.
The Montreal Gazette even reported that the PQ asked for a meeting with State Department officials. A similar story about Republican strategists meeting Alberta separatists made headlines. Quebec voters saw all of it and voted for the separatists anyway.
British Columbia confirms this pattern. David Eby’s NDP, led by one of the loudest anti-Trump premiers in the country, is failing to turn that hostility into votes in the most left-wing province in Canada, the laboratory of the progressive movement’s most reckless experiments. If hating Trump can’t win in Vancouver, it can’t win anywhere.
The failure tells us something. A people with no shared idea of the good can be bound by a shared fear only temporarily. Fear fades, and the bogeyman leaves office in 2029. Meanwhile Canadians are asking about immigration, crime, and the price of groceries, the ordinary questions every citizen eventually puts to every government. Answering them with a scowl at Trump is an abdication and the electorate can tell.
The Test
Pollsters will reassure us that Prime Minister Mark Carney remains popular in each of these provinces. But, he was not on any of these ballots. A prime minister’s popularity belongs to him. Unity belongs to the nation, and it is draining away while he is admired. Carney is a central banker by training and governs as one: competent and yet plainly uncomfortable with the question of what makes a people a people. Tariffs, rumours of a snap election, and two secessionist movements now bear down on him at once.
Canadians should be grateful that Washington has not yet seen the opening in front of it. An administration with modest strategic sense would circumvent Ottawa entirely and court the provinces one by one, offering trade and attention to Alberta here and Quebec there. Divide and conquer is the oldest maxim in statecraft, and Canada has done most of the dividing already. If the United States pursues it, Carney will be negotiating trade on behalf of a nation that no longer speaks with one voice. Beijing, Tehran, and the West’s other adversaries are watching too, and they won’t announce their intentions.
Lincoln knew a nation can survive war, depression, and the worst leaders history can supply. What it cannot survive is losing the conviction that it is one nation bound by a common good. Canada has spent a generation abandoning that very conviction and calling the result progress. It has returned to Durham’s crisis with less to answer it than Durham had. Canada is not one but many, and that is the crisis.
Mark Carney must now find a reason for Canadians to belong together that his predecessors spent years teaching them to forget. St-Pierre Plamondon has already started the clock.
Dimpee Brar is a Religious Freedom Fellow at the Democracy Fund. She is a writer and commentator whose work can be found in the Daily Wire, the Federalist, American Spectator, and Washington Examiner. You can follow her on X @isthisdimpeeb.
