My Family’s 240-Year Journey Shows Why Canada Will Never Bow to Trump

On May 4, 1783, my ancestor, William Fraser, landed in Shelburne after a nine-day sail from New York City, part of a fleet of thirty ships carrying about 3,000 desperate Loyalists to Nova Scotia.

Fraser, born in Scotland, worked in the engineering department in New York, but he, his four brothers, and their families had to flee revolutionary mobs that were confiscating property and tarring and feathering the war’s losers.

Shelburne was overcrowded with the displaced—both Black and white—living on rations from the Crown while they urgently cut down trees to build houses for themselves in their new home.

Fraser died soon after he arrived in Shelburne, leaving a son, John. The boy was only three when his mother also passed away. Though he had four uncles in town, life must have been hard for him because when he was twelve or thirteen, he stowed away on a fisherman’s sailboat bound for Saint Margarets Bay, up the coast toward Halifax.

That fisherman, James Boutillier, took the boy in. The Boutilliers, French protestants, had come to Lunenburg in 1750 to escape the threat of persecution by Catholics. John became part of the family, and he married Boutillier’s daughter, Susanna, in 1809. When their daughter, Sarah, was nineteen, she married Thomas Maher, a twenty-year-old Irish cobbler recently arrived from County Kilkenny, where Catholics were living under British oppression.

He was my five-times-great-grandfather, and today, I catch mackerel and sail in the same waters where he and the Boutilliers caught mackerel and sailed their boats.

These people were all refugees—not much different, in a way, from the Ukrainians and Syrians who have come here. They all found prosperity in Nova Scotia: peace, order, the chance to make lives without much sectarian or political violence and fish whenever they felt moved to do so.

It seems noteworthy to me that a Catholic who fled Protestant domination would marry the daughter of protestants who had fled Catholic domination. They were sensibly turning their backs on the hatreds of the old world.

I have been thinking about their lives more often since United States president Donald Trump started calling Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “governor” and threatening to make Canada the fifty-first state. The prospect of living under the Stars and Stripes is abhorrent to me, as it was to my ancestors, so I was deeply rattled by Trump’s threats. I wondered if he might succeed in forcing us to join his country.

I worked for fifteen years as a political journalist in Ottawa, and I learned that the best way to figure out what might happen next is to look at what happened in similar circumstances in the past. And that’s why I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the last months looking at Canada’s history—the history of our nationalism, our relationship with the US—and thinking about my ancestors. I can report that my research led me to feel comforted, less fearful.

I came to see that what Trump is doing is nothing new. This is a normal pattern in Canada–US relations—America dominates and Canada defines itself in response. The whole point of Canada, I’ve come to believe, is to create a space between the frozen wastes and the US. To be a place where people can follow a different model, where we recognize collective rights and live with less violence.

People occasionally complain that there is no Canadian identity beyond anti-Americanism. I say, so what? We come by it honestly. The founding political alliance—between Indigenous people, French Canadians, and Loyalists—was made in opposition to the American Revolution.

The story starts in 1763 at the end of a war with three names. The Europeans call it the Seven Years War, the Americans call it the French and Indian War, and the French Canadians call it La guerre de la Conquête, the war of the conquest, because it concluded with the conquest of Montreal. I suspect my ancestors in Nova Scotia were delighted, but it was a catastrophe for the people of New France.

The British were victorious but exhausted and broke, and King George III wanted to spend less money on musket battles in distant, snowy colonies, so he did two things to try to create a new, permanent political arrangement. One of them was the passage of the Quebec Act, which guaranteed French Canadians the right to speak their language, practice their religion, and follow their civil code. The other was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized Indigenous land title and drew a line—the Proclamation Line—down the Appalachian Mountains and forbade the settlers in the thirteen colonies—from Virginia up to Maine—from crossing those mountains in wars of conquest against Indigenous people.

The story the Americans tell themselves about their revolution is about tariffs and tea, about taxation without representation. They’re such good storytellers that we believe them, but the real story is about the desire to conquer Indigenous land. George Washington owned 7,000 acres of land in the Ohio River Valley that he could not use because it was occupied by Indigenous people, and the British government wouldn’t allow him to go and move them off it. This is the real prime motivation for the American Revolution, which kicked off in 1775. That’s not just my opinion. It’s also the opinion of Ken Burns, the great documentarian. He said so in a podcast interview a couple weeks ago. He’s got a twelve-hour series on the American Revolution coming out this fall.

At the time of the revolution, the Americans sent Ben Franklin to Montreal to try to convince the French Canadians to sign up. They declined, as did most Indigenous people, who had good reason to fear the Americans.

And we would see why decades later. French Canadians, Loyalists, and Indigenous people fought side by side in the War of 1812, when the US—eager to extend its borders and assert itself against Britain—invaded Canada. The outcome helped solidify the sense that Canadians were building something distinct. After the War of 1812, the Americans began their westward expansion into the Ohio Valley and, eventually, the Great Plains and a series of genocidal wars against Indigenous people, from the Trail of Tears to the massacre of Wounded Knee. It is a story of terrible violence and suffering. In Canada we self-consciously chose a different path, one of accommodation, treaty making, respecting minorities.

This is not the time to discuss our failures to observe the treaties we signed, but I think it is significant that Indigenous people remain some of the strongest and most important advocates for the Canadian constitutional order, resisting separatist arguments in Alberta and in Quebec.

The alliance is holding, has held for a long time, in the face of repeated American threats. Every time Canadian sovereignty was on the ballot, Canadians defied those threats and chose independence.

The first was 1891 when the exhausted, corrupt government of then prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald was challenged by Wilfrid Laurier. We were suffering under American tariffs, and Laurier proposed to negotiate a better deal. In a rally down on King Street partway through the election, Macdonald revealed stolen telegrams that showed allies of Laurier were conspiring with the Americans to force Canada into being annexed, and Macdonald won another majority government.

In the election of 1911, Robert Borden fought Laurier again on the issue of reciprocity, or free trade with the Americans. Laurier wanted boost exports and strengthen ties with the US, while Borden opposed it, arguing it would make Canada too dependent on—or even subordinate to—its southern neighbour. Borden won. What followed was a long period of deepening integration, beginning with the First World War, continuing through the second, and lasting right up until the second election of Trump. Yet, even in that long stretch of warmth and friendship, Canadians remained wary: in the 1988 free trade election, more voters backed candidates opposed to the deal than those in favour.

In the election of 2025, Canadians once again voted for the leader they judged most likely to protect Canadian sovereignty. During that campaign, I went to Quebec to research the state of the Quebec sovereigntist movement, and then to Alberta to investigate the increasingly dangerous-looking Alberta independence faction. I drank wine in Outremont with separatists and Budweiser at a rodeo in Taber, Alberta. I came to realize that the secessionists in both places are being true to their ancestors, their values and history. I can admire them, but I hope they fail, and I think they will fail, because there are more of us than there are of them.

Most Canadians don’t want to answer to another country’s flag, and it seems unlikely to me that we are ever going to change our minds. Whenever I think about this, I think of the title of a novel by one of Upper Canada’s best writers, Robertson Davies: What’s Bred in the Bone. The title comes from a proverb: “What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.”

It’s a message about heritability, and I think it is correct. Our Canadian nationalism is an inheritance, and it is durable. It’s in our bones.

Adapted from “How History Shapes Canada’s Future Sovereignty,” delivered on October 28, 2025 at The Walrus Talks Sovereign Canada.