Poilievre's Canada First and its links to ethnonationalism

There’s a very specific look when a white man stands in the arctic in front of the plane that dropped him into town and behind a podium that says Canada First.

Plant a flag in the ground and you’d get the full colonial experience.

Yesterday, Pierre Poilievre announced that he wants to turn Iqaluit into a full-blown army base. From CBC’s military stenographer Murray Brewster, quoting Poilievre, “‘My Canada First plan will protect Canadians and give the brave men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces, especially the mighty Canadian Rangers, the resources they need to defend our North so we can secure our skies, seas and soil,’ he said.”

Soil? Does Poilievre support the end of permafrost?

Anyway, this new frame, Canada First, is what Poilievre has pivoted to in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. Canada First has quietly replaced Axe the Tax, a slogan that doesn’t work when your new opponents are also in favour of axing the taxing. Canada First. A bold statement that has been used by racists for generations, and that exposes that as the US lurches towards fascism, Poilievre would like to get a little piece of it.

Many people pointed to the fact that the Proud Boys have used “Canada First” as a slogan for a few years, but it’s origins go way further back than that.

Charles Mair and John Christian Schultz founded the first Canada First movement in the 1800s, after both escaped being executed by the provisional government of Louis Riel. The movement tapped into Orange Order sentiment, deep connections to Britain and a desire for Canadian independence in international affairs (Schultz would eventually become the lieutenant governor of Manitoba, Mair became most notable as a poet, and he was once publicly slapped and whipped by a Métis woman who took issue with his racist characterization of Métis people at Red River at a fancy dinner they attended together).

The men no doubt were aware that a nativist movement in the United States had also been using this language in their campaign too. The American Party was deeply anti-Catholic, worried that priests would be able to control huge voting blocks of Catholics who would blindly follow their leaders during election time. The rallying cry America First found favour among both parties, and became a rallying cry to keep the United States out of World War One.

Then, the slogan was adopted by the KKK at the height of their popularity, in the 1920s. Between the popular support for the Klan and the racist measures that were being passed by politicians regarding immigration, America First was wrapped up tightly with white supremacy and Protestantism. When WW2 came around, a new anti-intervention movement was born, but this time called the America First Committee.

Many supporters of intervention painted the America First Committee as fascist sympathizers and anti-Semites, something that one of its highest profile activists, Charles Lindbergh, denied (don’t read too far into his accepting a medal from. Hermann Goering himself, of course).

America or Canada first — inherently isolationist, demanding that the needs of us be placed above the needs of others internationally — remain powerful rallying cries to this day, and it’s easy to see why the slogans have been adopted by racists. When a party like the Conservatives have no real social project, they rely on vacant nationalism and latent bigotry to fill in the gaps of what is being expressed. It’s a perfect slogan that can bring together the hardcore racists with the ones who don’t think about race all that much but who might be sympathetic to a message that says let’s take care of ourselves before we take care of others.

The Conservatives know all of this and are trying to reach the full spectrum of people who are sympathetic to this notion, charges of racism be damned. But when I see relatives online sharing information decrying international development grants to help marginalized communities, and they sneer that this kind of help is communist bullshit that needs to be stopped, I see who exactly Poilievre is playing to with the language of Canada First. Their Canada is implicitly white. They don’t want to put the poorest workers first, or the workers who cannot get citizenship and therefore who cannot participate in democracy, or the people for whom public policy is a matter of life and death. No international aid. Canada First is for old stock Canadians.

Poilievre has a very big problem: he hasn’t had to talk about anything of substance because his entire campaign was based on attacking Justin Trudeau. Now that Trudeau is on his way out and Donald Trump has announced his intention to annex our country, Poilievre has been caught with his proverbial (thank god) pants down. He needed to pivot fast and what better to choose than old-stock colonial bigotry?

So when we see Pierre Poilievre in the arctic, a region that isn’t exactly Canada and which has its own right to exert its independence and sovereignty, in front of a sign that says Canada First, my first reaction is: time to make a Canada Fist.