No safe country, no safe flag – A tale of two Ottawas

I grew up in so-called Ottawa, the unceded and unsurrendered traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I was never so proud to live here as July 1, 2021, when Ottawa was transformed: not into a sea of red and white, but a sea of orange shirts. 

 

In the wake of the discovery of mass graves at Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, victims of Canada’s residential school policy, #CancelCanadaDay was trending, the slogan of the day was “No Pride in Genocide,” and we all wore orange in solidarity.

 

I was also never so horrified to live here as six months later, in January 2022, when Ottawa was occupied for six weeks by the so-called “Trucker Convoy.” It was a brazen display of confidence by the far right tolerated by Ottawa and Ontario police - and by the federal government. That is, until ordinary people started taking matters into their own hands to stop it, through mass marches and the blockade at Billings Bridge, which forced Trudeau to intervene with emergency measures well after damage was done. 

 

With the slogan “Make Canada Free Again” and many other openly fascist messages, the Convoy was a beacon for the Trump movement. And the maple leaf was all over it. If the Canadian flag wasn’t already dead in this town over Cancel Canada, it was even more dead over the Convoy. The Canadian flag became a symbol of outright fear. 

 

But in the wake of the Trump tariff war, the 60th anniversary of the Canadian flag on February 15 of this year gave politicians an opening to rescue the flag for their own purposes. Pierre Poilievre, BOTH a Trumpist AND an open Convoy-supporter, got a platform on “National Flag Day” in Ottawa for his vision to “put Canada first.” Not only does “Team Canada” include those who defended a far-right occupation of Canada’s capital, we now have to wave the flag for them. 

 

On February 15, a huge Canadian flag was skated down the Rideau Canal. The Ottawa Citizen published stories about ordinary people “taking the flag back from the Convoy.” But really, it was about politicians taking the flag back from its popular connection with Indigenous genocide. And about taking the heat off Canadian elites for their responsibility for the cost-of-living crisis.

 

But one Flag Day story in the Ottawa press quoted Alex Silas, the national executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, who at the time was a community organizer against the Convoy. He recalled a woman saying that her child would cower in fear when he saw the flag: “It was infuriating how the convoy could co-opt that symbol. It was co-opted and turned into something nefarious and scary that said, ‘If we don’t like you, you don’t belong here,'” Silas said. “It was a sign of how nationalism can be dangerous.”

 

Many in Canada right now might be returning tentatively to maple flag-waving as the only way to stand up to Trump. But mini-Trumps like Poilievre and Ford are trying to ride that same bandwagon, just like the Convoy. We should never forget the call of IdleNoMore for the Cancel Canada commemorations of 2021, which honour connections beyond borders:

 

“Instead we will gather to honour all of the lives lost to the Canadian State – Indigenous lives, Black Lives, Migrant lives, Women and Trans and 2Spirit lives – all of the relatives that we have lost. We will use our voices for MMIWG2S, Child Welfare, Birth Alerts, Forced Sterilization, Police/RCMP brutality and all of the injustices we face. We will honour our connections to each other and to the Water, Land, and Sky.”

 

An “undefended” border?

 

Much is made about “our longest undefended border” with the US. But everything about the tariff negotiations has been about defending that border against those who have always found it not only very much defended but treacherous: migrants, immigrants, and refugees.

 

Canada has long had a “Safe Third Country Agreement” (STCA) with the US for refugee claimants seeking entry to Canada from the U.S, notably at Canada-U.S. land border crossings. It identifies the US as a safe port of entry for refugees and therefore can deny them entry to Canada, barring certain exceptions. It has long been challenged as unjust by advocates of refugee rights. But there was a loophole that allowed irregular border crossings for asylum seekers.

 

The Roxham Road crossing was a remote street on the Quebec-New York border that became an unofficial entry point for asylum seekers from around the world. In 2017, a tent city of hundreds of Haitian refugees grew there by the day: they were fleeing the Trump administration’s curtailing of the temporary asylum granted them in the US following a devastating earthquake in Haiti. But because of the Safe Third Country Agreement, and the fact that Canada does not recognize economic hardship as grounds for asylum, they had to wait in limbo.

 

More than 100,000 migrants crossed through Roxham Road since 2017. Then in March 2023, Biden and Trudeau agreed to close the loophole: Canada and the United States announced the expansion of the STCA across the entire land border. 

 

This is not the only crackdown under Trudeau’s watch. At the end of 2021, he agreed to regularize undocumented people. But the number of deportations skyrocketed: the Migrant Rights Network, a national coalition of 40 organizations, exposed a 104% increase in deportations of undocumented people following Trudeau’s promise, an increase supported by many sources.

 

This is not Trumpism, it is the same scapegoating of refugees and migrants that is ramping up now around the world. In Canada, migrant international students, once cash cows for the underfunding of post-secondary education, are now scapegoats for lack of housing and jobs, under the Liberals. The tightening of the border predates the tariff deal between Trudeau and Trump. 

 

But the tariff deal shamefully promises a huge influx of resources to further increase border violence. It has nothing to do with fentanyl and everything to do with migration and facilitating deportation. Trudeau’s deal might have been a reprieve for documented workers on both sides of the border who will suffer from tariffs, but it is yet another nail in the border as a death sentence. 

 

If “we’re all in this together,” then forget about whether the border is open or closed to auto parts or orange juice: let’s open the border to people. It was open to US Vietnam war resisters when a movement on both sides of the border made it so. And now, US citizens might seek asylum as gender refugees, because their non-binary gender has been denied. For Rainbow refugees, will all those waving the Canadian flag also wave Trans flags to welcome them?

 

The question may not be about a safe “third’ country, but a safe second one. 

 

A tale of two (or three) anthems

 

In high school I exercised my right to free expression to not stand during the national anthem during opening exercises in homeroom. I was allowed to sit in a separate classroom but got a visit from a teacher who asked me why. I had many reasons, but I explained using the words of the Canadian anthem itself: glorification of militarism, an imposed Christian God, a monarchy and colonialism. So, hearing the US anthem booed at basketball and hockey games while the celebration of “our home ON native land” gets a free pass feels like hypocrisy.

 

There is no doubt that many currently booing the US (including by “Buying Canadian”) are actually just booing Trump. The last time there was mass booing of the US anthem at sports events was when the US went to war over the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Canada stayed out of it. A good reason to boo!

 

But it was mass protests in Canada and Quebec that kept Canada out of that war in 2003, when Liberal Jean Chretien was all over going to war for control of oil and gas. And that massive anti-war spirit allowed US war resisters to at least try to come to Canada, their stay shamefully refused by the Canadian state. 

 

The booing of the US anthem in sports leaves no room to cheer those Americans who are standing up to Trumpism: the brave people standing in the highway in California to stop ICE from deporting people, the brave teachers in Chicago protecting their young students from being tailed home by ICE to detain their parents, the brave brothers and sisters standing on the same kind of picket lines we are, against the same greedy CEOs. 

 

Not to mention US athletes who took the knee during their own anthem, first in 2016 when American football player Colin Kaepernick knelt during the US national anthem to protest the oppression of Black people by the United States, and then again after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. That brave gesture became a prominent symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

And let’s not forget the incredible boycott movement across Canada against Loblaw’s CEO Galen Weston for price-gouging and profiteering (not to mention stabbing his front-line workers in the back by canceling their COVID bonus). He does not deserve to benefit from the call to “Buy Canadian” though he is trying to erase all the truly grassroots pride that went into boycotting his crimes by hiding under his Canadian logo.

 

Seeking refuge under the maple leaf is no escape. Our mini-Trumps are wearing that maple as a fig leaf for their own agenda of deportations, scapegoating, and cuts to living standards. In the end, there is no safe flag, and no safe nation. 

 

But as IdleNoMore says, there is the Water, Land, and Sky. There is a safe country: the one we build across borders, between those of us who actually are connected. The international working class really does unite the human race, in all the ways that matter.