I’m not a Patriot

3 days ago

We don’t need to shout our pride to prove it.

I served, I vote, I fly the flag proudly — but I’ve never once called myself a patriot. In Canada, we show pride differently. That’s not weakness. It’s our strength.

Maybe it’s because our version of pride was never built on shouting. It’s quieter — found in the act of service, in small kindnesses, in doing your part and moving on. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the louder the word patriot gets, the less it sounds like us.

It’s being used as a dog whistle, creeping into our social sphere, folded into niche ideologies, and intruding on what actually makes us Canadian — our humility, our decency, our sense of shared responsibility.

This 'essay' is my pushback.

Somewhere between our flag pins and our Tim Hortons mugs, there’s an unspoken rule most Canadians live by: we don’t call ourselves patriots.

We’ll wear the red and white, wave a flag on Canada Day, and sing O Canada with real pride — but you’ll rarely see “Canadian Patriot” in a bio. When you do, it’s often attached to an account railing about “globalists,” “the woke agenda,” or why the CBC is “state propaganda.”

That says a lot about how language, and national identity, evolve. “Patriot” isn’t a dirty word on its own. But in Canada, it’s one we’ve quietly retired, because it’s come to represent something that just doesn’t sound like us.

Canadian pride has always been quiet. Maybe that’s because our national identity was shaped more by cooperation than confrontation. While our southern neighbours declared independence in 1776, we were still negotiating Confederation almost a century later.

Our version of patriotism has always been more civic than revolutionary. We built our country through compromise and bureaucracy, not gunfire and manifest destiny. That legacy matters. It’s why we tend to express patriotism in deeds, not declarations, helping a neighbour dig out after a snowstorm, volunteering at the local rink, standing in the cold on Remembrance Day, or lining up for hours to vote.

We don’t need to shout that we love Canada. We live it.

For most of our history, patriot was an imported term. It belonged to someone else’s revolution, American, French, Irish, movements built on defiance. In Canada, loyalty was often the defining virtue. The Loyalists who fled north after the American Revolution shaped the country’s early politics and left a lasting mark on our culture: order, civility, deference to law over passion.

Between 1776 and 1785, more than 50,000 United Empire Loyalists resettled across what would become Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. They arrived with scars from revolution and a clear conviction: stability mattered more than spectacle.

Among them were figures who helped define the early shape of Canada:

John Graves Simcoe, a British officer turned founder of Upper Canada (Ontario) and its first lieutenant governor. He built York (later Toronto), banned the importation of slaves in 1793, and designed a province meant to contrast sharply with the American republic, ordered, loyal, and governed by law.
Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), the Mohawk leader and British ally, who led Loyalist Iroquois northward after the war. He secured land along the Grand River (modern Brantford), embedding Indigenous presence in the Loyalist narrative, even as colonial politics later betrayed those promises.
Laura Secord, whose family fled New England for Upper Canada; her famous walk during the War of 1812 later became a symbol of quiet courage and national resilience, exactly the kind of understated patriotism Canadians still admire.
Bishop Charles Inglis, the first Anglican bishop in North America, who established the church’s authority in Nova Scotia and argued that faith and loyalty were bulwarks against revolutionary excess.

Their collective influence created a nation that prized law, compromise, and civility, a place where politics would be debated, not fought. The Loyalists’ legacy runs like a quiet current through our institutions: measured discourse, parliamentary governance, the balance between rights and responsibility.

When Canadians hesitate to call themselves patriots, it’s not timidity, it’s lineage.

We descend from people who watched a country tear itself apart in the name of freedom and decided that peace and good government were freedom’s wiser form.

To call oneself a patriot in that early Canada might have sounded suspect, a whiff of rebellion in a colony that prized calm governance. Even during the 1837 Rebellions, those who called themselves “Patriotes” were seen as radicals, their movement swiftly crushed.

The irony is that their cause, responsible government, self-determination, later became mainstream Canadian values. But the label never recovered. Patriot came to sound like something foreign, even dangerous.

In the 20th century, Canada’s identity matured under the weight of global conflict. Two world wars, Korea, Afghanistan, peacekeeping, generations served, fought, and sacrificed. But when they came home, they didn’t call themselves patriots either. They called themselves veterans.

The national character that emerged from those decades was humble and service-minded. Pride expressed in silence, not spectacle. You’d see it in the faces on the Highway of Heroes, in the red poppy on a lapel.

Our national heroes didn’t seek recognition. Even today, many of us still don’t quite know what to do when someone says, “Thank you for your service.” We usually just mumble a quiet, “Thank you,” and move on.

Even during the Centennial in 1967, arguably our loudest moment of national celebration, the tone was earnest and optimistic, not triumphalist. Expo 67’s theme was “Man and His World,” not “Canada First.”

Fifty years later, in 2017, we marked Canada’s 150th with a different kind of pride, more outward, more confident. The country was draped in red and white: flags on porches, T-shirts in every store, concerts in every city. It wasn’t about proving greatness; it was about belonging, a national coming-of-age moment that still carried that familiar humility beneath the fireworks.

And lately, as we face louder voices from the South and renewed questions about our sovereignty, that quiet pride has found a firmer voice. Canadians are learning that you can defend what you love without becoming what you oppose.

In recent years, though, the word patriot made a comeback, but not the kind we wanted. Imported rhetoric from the U.S. blurred the line between patriotism and nationalism.

Movements like the “Trucker Convoy” and online “Maple MAGA” accounts started wrapping grievances in the flag. They adopted American slogans, freedom fighters, patriots, true Canadians, and used them as ideological filters: if you didn’t agree, you weren’t “real” Canadian.

That shift turned patriot from a civic identity into a litmus test. Suddenly, the word wasn’t about shared belonging, it was about exclusion.

And Canadians, being allergic to exclusion, quietly backed away.

You’ll still find “Proud Canadian” across social media bios, but rarely “Canadian Patriot.” The latter carries a tone we don’t trust anymore, too loud, too certain, too imported and not aligned to Canadian values.

We’re often accused of being too humble, too polite, too self-effacing. But there’s strength in that restraint. Canadian humility acts as a civic pressure valve, it keeps nationalism from curdling into zealotry.

Our anthem doesn’t boast about conquest. Our flag doesn’t carry a weapon or an eagle. Our national myth isn’t about domination, it’s about endurance. Surviving winters. Building community. Apologizing when someone else bumps into us.

That’s our kind of patriotism, unbranded, unshouted, and unmistakably ours.

Ask a Canadian what makes them proud, and you’ll get a list that sounds more like values than victories:

Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt families.
Multiculturalism that tries, however imperfectly, to include everyone.
Peacekeeping that values diplomacy over destruction.
Education and elections that are free, fair, and usually boring (the best kind).

That quiet pride is our civic immune system. It resists the infection of performative patriotism. It reminds us that love of country isn’t about who waves the biggest flag, but who shows up for their neighbours when the power goes out.

So no, we don’t call ourselves patriots.

We don’t have to.

The truest form of patriotism doesn’t demand the word, it earns it. It’s the nurse pulling a double shift. The firefighter who doesn’t ask who you voted for before saving your house. The soldier who stands guard quietly, not for glory but for duty.

That’s the Canadian way.

Maybe that’s our real national identity, pride without pretense.

We’ll belt out O Canada at a hockey game, cry at a Remembrance Day service, and still poke fun at ourselves on the way home.

We love this country enough to see its flaws and want it to do better. That’s not weakness. That’s maturity.

In an age when flags are used as weapons and “patriot” is too often code for rage, maybe the world could use a bit more of the Canadian kind, the kind that doesn’t need to shout.

So yes, we’re proud Canadians, not patriots.

And we’ll keep it that way.

Jason Butterfield signature.png

I’m Jason, a science fiction writer obsessed with the places where technology, military life, and human nature collide - often in spectacularly messy ways. With a background in tech and the military, I love crafting stories full of sharp dialogue, immersive worlds, and unexpected humor. Follow along if you enjoy these kinds of stories or want to learn more about my writing and upcoming novels.

Buy my latest Novel: