By Don Curren
“I believe that Toronto, already the most diverse city in the world, will become a global center for fighting the spread of fascism, and I believe I can help in that transformation.”
The above quote comes from a recent Substack piece by the American philosopher Jason Stanley.
It’s an interesting piece, an impassioned defence against an assertion from the historian Adam Tooze that Stanley had committed an “unethical act” by relocating from Harvard University to the University of Toronto in 2025.
Stanley is one of three prominent US scholars who moved to the University of Toronto, specifically the university’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the other two being Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore.
You can read Stanley’s piece here and the remarks from Tooze that prompted it here.
The point of this piece is not to rehash their disagreement, but rather to suggest that Stanley is right about the potential for Toronto - and Canada, in general - to become a formidable bastion in the fight against fascism.
Elsewhere in his piece, Stanley makes this observation: “I do in fact think United States has a longstanding fascist tradition, based foundationally on anti-Black racism, xenophobia, and whatever elements have coalesced into a genocidal transphobia.’
I agree with Stanley.
But I also believe Canada, so close and so similar to the US in many other ways, does not have a longstanding fascist tradition.
In fact, if anything, it has a longstanding tendency toward antifascism.
Before I get into the substance of my argument, a note of caution: the assertions I’m going to make aren’t intended in any kind of unequivocal, absolutist way.
This is an essay, in the original sense of a probe, or foray or experiment.
Things are complicated. The US may have a longstanding fascist tradition, but it also has a longstanding, and robust, tradition of anti-fascism.
And Canada, although unusually resistant to fascistic tendencies, has had some isolated instances of homegrown fascism - and also lots of other manifestations of ugly, far-right extremism and racism.
But I believe that for reasons embedded deep in its socio-political DNA, its origins and its history, Canada is particularly resistant to fascism, and I will explore some of those reasons here.
One more preliminary note: “fascism” is a notoriously elastic term.
So, I propose to adopt a definition of fascism I encountered recently.
It’s from Roger Griffin and appears in his book The Nature of Fascism. I found it in an article entitled Why Fascists Always Come for the Socialists First by Matt McManus on the Current Affairs website.
Here it is:
“Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism.”
The core of the definition is in the word “ultranationalism.”
The “ultranation” referred to isn’t the existing nation state a Fascist movement originates from. Rather, it’s a re-imagined cultural, and often racial, entity that embraces the adherents of the movement, and rejects everyone else.
“(Fascists) project the existence of an ‘ultranation,’ which rarely conforms to the actual boundaries and citizens of an existing nation-state,” McManus writes. “They insist that the ultranation is the total locus of meaning in people’s lives, and that it needs to be restored.”
An “ultranation" defines itself in part by the rigid exclusion of Others. In Nazi Germany, the ultranation was the German Reich, with its imagined “Aryan purity” and its intended of annihilation of Jews and other ethnicities.
In the MAGA movement, it’s the white, male supporters who form the core of Trump’s supporters.
“Palingenetic” refers to the tendency of fascist movements to cast themselves as restoring the ultranation to a period of former, lost glory, a “Golden Age” when the ultranation reigned supreme until it was overwhelmed by immigrants, global conspiracies against it, decadence, etc.
The definition clearly corresponds to the key elements of Trumpism, with its unquenchable hatred of immigrants and its rhetorical objective of making America “great again.”
For this reason, I believe it’s appropriate to identify the Trump administration as fascist, even if its version of fascism is a particularly weak-minded and incoherent assemblage of the usual elements.
But the definition also suggests one of the key reasons that Canada is inherently resistant to fascism: there is no “ultranation” in Canada.
When Canada was created by Confederation in 1867, it was constructed out of two different peoples, Quebec and English Canada.
There’s no “ultranational” core in Canada, and that’s a major impediment for would-be fascists in Canada.
It’s hard to rally your supporters around an ultranationalist, exclusionary vision when your nation has two peoples - when it has an Other embedded in its very essence.
This might sound reminiscent of Justin Trudeau’s musings about Canada being a “post-national” state.
Then Prime Minister Trudeau told the New York Times Magazine in 2015 that Canada could be the “first postnational state,” adding: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
Instead, its identity is defined by its various communities and shared values of inclusion, Trudeau argued, according to a 2017 piece in The Guardian by Charles Foran.
A similar point was made much earlier by Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian theorist of media, culture and technology.
“Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity,” McLuhan said in 1963.
I believe Trudeau and McLuhan were partially right. In a sense, Canada’s identity is a composite of the many communities it comprises, and the underlying values that make it possible for them to live together.
But the process of living “without an identity” itself becomes a kind of identity.
It’s never a settled affair.
The marriage of French and English Canada has not been easy. Marriages seldom are. And a key theme in Canadian history has been the continuing evolution of that relationship, an ongoing dialectic that is at times contentious and even embittered, and at other times fertile and celebratory.
The knowledge of “how to live without an identity” that McLuhan refers to never comes in a final, definitive form. As conditions change, that knowledge has to change and evolve in response.
And the dialectic of living without a settled identity has expanded to include more players with the advent of increased immigration and multiculturalism since the 1960s and ‘70s, and the belated recognition of the need for a just reconciliation with the aboriginal inhabitants of Canada in more recent years.
It’s been called a mosaic, but it’s also like a kaleidoscope in that it’s dynamic and evolving.
Either way, it’s hard to look at Canada’s constantly evolving “non-identity” and see some singular, “ultranational” core to make the centre of your populist mythology.
It would seem extremely difficult to convincingly advocate a mythology based on an ultarnation and exclusion in a society fundamentally defined by inclusion.
Which doesn’t mean that people haven’t tried.
There have been fascist movements in Canada’s past, most notably in the 1930s, when Nazism was in the ascendant in Germany, Mussolini was in control of Italy, and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was at its zenith in the United Kingdom.
Given that Canada culturally was still struggling to emerge from the shadow of its colonial fore-bearers at the time, some of the activity in Canada, at least that in English Canada, seems to be imitative of what was going on in the UK.
Fascist activity in English Canada in the ‘30s gradually coalesced under a group headquartered in Toronto called the “Canadian Union of Fascists” that was explicitly aligned with Mosley’s organization.
In Quebec, there was an organization called the Parti National Social Chretien (Christian National Social Party), “which advocated anti-communism and the banishment of Canadian Jews to the Hudson Bay area,” according to Wikipedia.
The PNSC was spearheaded by a man named Adrien Arcand.
“A journalist by trade, Arcand was a loyal monarchist, devoutly Catholic, extremely antisemitic, and generally delusional,” according to an historical article on the TV Ontario website written by Jamie Bradburn.
“Fascism, as practiced in Italy and Germany, gained a tiny foothold (in Canada) during the 1930s,” Bradburn writes.
Arcand was chosen as the director of the National Unity Party of Canada, an umbrella group created through the merger of his PSNC with various Fascist groups in English Canada in the mid to late 1930s.
The apex of the united Fascist movement in Canada seems to have come on July 4, 1938, when Arcand addressed a crowd estimated at around 1,500 at Massey Hall in Toronto. A contemporary report from the Daily Star indicates the crowd dwindled to about 800 as the various speakers droned on, according to Bradman’s article.
Nearby on Yonge Street, group of between 600 and 900 angry anti-fascist demonstrators gathered, Bradburn writes. “Police prevented the gathering from storming the hall, making four arrests,” he writes.
Perhaps more tellingly, a few blocks north at Maple Leaf Gardens, between 10,000 and 12,000 attended an anti-fascist rally.
Arcand continued his quixotic quest to bring fascism to Canada for the next couple of years, but it came to an abrupt end a couple of years later when he and other party officials were arrested in May 1940 when the NUP and 15 other political were organizations banned due to Canada’s involvement in World War II.
The decision to imprison political leaders such as Arcand and the leader of the Canadian Technocracy movement, Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman is, of course, open to criticism as a violation of basic rights and an overreach by the government.
But it seems clear that European-style fascism did not win much favour with Canadians before the crackdown.
And the decision to ban the movement could be seen as part of the decision Canadians made, collectively and institutionally, to dedicate themselves to opposing tyranny and aggression in general, and fascism in particular.
For it was in World War II that Canada secured its permanent and unassailable bona fides as an opponent of fascism. It joined the war more than two years before the United States and made a disproportionately large contribution to defeating Hitler and Mussolini.
Think what you will of my theory about Canada being constitutionally hostile to fascism, in at least two senses of the word “constitutionally.” History demonstrates that in practice it has been staunchly anti-fascist.
But I don’t mean to imply Canada’s multicultural identity and anti-fascist history mean that “It Can’t Happen Here,” to borrow the title of the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis that depicts a Trump-style populist plunging the US into a fascist dictatorship.
(Interestingly, Lewis depicts Canada as resisting the fascist tide in his book, and offering support and sanctuary to American anti-fascists. I wrote about it in this blog post in 2024).)
The mutability of culture and society in a world where social-media influencers and uninformed podcasters wield decisive influence over how people think means that, in essence, all bets are off.
Just look at how quickly the US has morphed from a constitutional republic to a fascist autocracy. And how rapidly and completely much of its decision-making elite acquiesced to that.
I would never be so complacent as to deny that the same kind of thing could happen in Canada.
Our future won’t be determined solely by our largely anti-fascist past. It will also be determined by the choices that Canadians - and Canada’s leadership - make now, and in the coming days, weeks and months.
With regards to our leadership, I’ve believed for the last year or so that our prime minister needs to act as Winston Churchill did when the United Kingdom faced an existential threat from Nazi Germany: he needs to tell us, with clarity and eloquence, how serious the situation is.
He needs to tells us how difficult our struggle to build a more secure, sovereign and resilient Canada will be, imbue us with the confidence that we can do it, and remind of us of the ideals of freedom, equality and compassion that make the struggle worthwhile.
He made a good start with his speech in Davos on Tuesday.
It was an impressive, thoughtful piece of rhetoric. But as some commentators have pointed out, Carney’s policies so far haven’t been entirely compatible with the stance implied by Tuesday’s speech or by his rhetoric on the campaign trail last year.
Substantive policies and eloquent speeches will both be needed if Canada is going to live up to its potential as a defender of democracy and redoubt against the spread of fascism and other forms of tyranny.
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