ABOUTMay 4, 1783 my ancestor William Fraser landed at Shelburne after a nine-day voyage from New York as part of a fleet of thirty ships carrying some 3,000 desperate Loyalists to Nova Scotia.
Frazier, born in Scotland, worked in the engineering department in New York, but he, his four brothers and their families had to flee revolutionary mobs who confiscated property and tarred and feathered the losers of the war.
Shelburne was crowded with displaced people—both black and white—living on rations coming from the Crown while they urgently cut down trees to build houses for themselves in their new home.
Fraser died shortly after arriving in Shelburne, leaving a son, John. The boy was only three years old when his mother died. Although he had four uncles in the city, life must have been hard for him because when he was twelve or thirteen, he absconded on a fishing boat bound for St. Margaret's Bay, up the coast towards Halifax.
This fisherman, James Boutilier, took the boy in with him. The Boutiliers, French Protestants, came to Lunenburg in 1750 to escape the threat of persecution by Catholics. John became part of the family and married Boutilier's daughter, Susanna, in 1809. When their daughter Sarah was nineteen, she married Thomas Maher, a twenty-year-old Irish shoemaker recently arrived from County Kilkenny, where Catholics lived under British oppression.
He was my five times great grandfather and today I fish for mackerel and sail in the same waters where he and Boutilier fished for mackerel and sailed their boats.
All these people were refugees and were not much different from the Ukrainians and Syrians who came here. They all found prosperity in Nova Scotia: peace, order, the ability to make a living without much religious or political violence, and to fish whenever they felt the need.
I find it remarkable that a Catholic who fled Protestant rule married the daughter of a Protestant who fled Catholic rule. They wisely turned away from the hatred of the old world.
I've been wondering more about their lives since US President Donald Trump began calling former 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 am deeply shocked by Trump's threats. I wondered if he would be able to get us to join his country.
I spent fifteen years as a political journalist in Ottawa and realized that the best way to figure out what might happen next was to look at what happened under similar circumstances in the past. And that's why I've spent a lot of time in recent months studying Canadian history—the history of our nationalism, our relationship with the United States—and thinking about my ancestors. I can report that my research has helped me feel calmer and less afraid.
I have come to the conclusion that Trump's actions are nothing new. This is the normal pattern in relations between Canada and the United States: America dominates, and Canada self-determines in response. I've come to realize that Canada's whole goal is to create space between frozen waste 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 sometimes complain that there is no Canadian identity other than anti-Americanism. I say, so what? We approach this honestly. A fundamental political alliance – between First Nations, French Canadians and Loyalists – was created in opposition to the American Revolution.
The story begins in 1763, at the end of the Three Names War. Europeans call it the Seven Years' War, Americans call it the French and Indian War, and French Canadians call it La guerre de la Conquête, the War of Conquest, because it ended with the conquest of Montreal. I suspect my ancestors in Nova Scotia were delighted, but for the people of New France it was a disaster.
The British were victorious but were exhausted and defeated, and King George III wanted to spend less money on musket battles in the distant, snowy colonies, so he did two things to try to create a new, permanent political order. One of these was the passage of the Quebec Act, which guaranteed French-Canadians the right to speak their own language, practice their own religion, and follow their own civil code. The other was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized Native land ownership and drew a line—the Proclamation Line—down the Appalachians and prohibited settlers in the thirteen colonies—from Virginia to Maine—from crossing those mountains in wars of conquest against Native peoples.
The story Americans tell themselves about their revolution is tariffs and tea, taxation without representation. They are such good storytellers that we believe them, but the real story is about the desire to conquer the land of the indigenous people. George Washington owned 7,000 acres of land in the Ohio River Valley that he couldn't use because it was occupied by Native peoples and the British government wouldn't let him go and remove them from the land. This is the real underlying motivation for the American Revolution, which began in 1775. This is not just my opinion. Ken Burns, the great documentarian, shares the same opinion. He said this in a podcast interview a couple of weeks ago. This fall he has a twelve-hour series about the American Revolution coming out.
During the Revolution, the Americans sent Ben Franklin to Montreal to try to persuade the French Canadians to join. They refused, as did most of the indigenous peoples, who had good reason to fear the Americans.
And we'll see why decades later. French Canadians, Loyalists and First Nations fought side by side in the War of 1812 when the United States, seeking to expand its borders and assert itself against Britain, invaded Canada. The result helped reinforce the sense that Canadians were creating something special. After the War of 1812, Americans began westward expansion into the Ohio Valley and eventually the Great Plains, as well as a series of genocidal wars against indigenous peoples, from the Trail of Tears to the Wounded Knee Massacre. This is a story of terrible violence and suffering. In Canada, we have consciously chosen a different path: the path of compromise, treaty-making and respect for minorities.
This is not the time to discuss our failure to honor the treaties we have signed, but I think it is important that Indigenous peoples remain among the strongest and most important defenders of the Canadian constitutional order, resisting secessionist arguments in Alberta and Quebec.
The alliance has endured and endured for a long time in the face of repeated American threats. Every time the issue of Canadian sovereignty came to a vote, Canadians ignored these 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 from American tariffs, and Laurier offered to negotiate a better deal. At a rally on King Street in the middle of the election, MacDonald discovered stolen telegrams that showed that Laurier's allies had conspired with the Americans to force Canada into annexation, and Macdonald won another majority government.
In the 1911 election, Robert Borden again fought Laurier over the issue of reciprocity or free trade with the Americans. Laurier wanted to increase exports and strengthen ties with the United States, while Borden opposed this, arguing that it would make Canada too dependent or even subservient to its southern neighbor. Borden won. What followed was a long period of deepening integration, beginning with World War I, continuing through World War II, and continuing until Trump's second election. Yet even during this long period of warmth and friendship, Canadians remained cautious: in the 1988 free trade elections, more voters supported candidates who opposed the agreement than those who favored it.
In the 2025 election, Canadians will once again vote for the leader they believe is most likely to protect Canadian sovereignty. During this campaign I traveled to Quebec to study the state of the Quebec sovereignty movement, and then to Alberta to investigate the activities of the increasingly dangerous-looking Alberta independence faction. I drank wine in Outremont with the Separatists and Budweiser at the rodeo in Taber, Alberta. I have come to the conclusion that the separatists in both places are loyal 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 respond to another country's flag, and it seems unlikely to me that we'll ever change our minds. Whenever I think about this, I remember the title of a novel by one of Upper Canada's best writers, Robertson Davies: What's in the bones. The name comes from the proverb: “What is brought out in the bones will come out in the flesh.”
This is a message about heredity and I think it is correct. Our Canadian nationalism is a legacy and one that will last. It's in our bones.
Adapted from How History Shapes Canada's Future Sovereignty, presented October 28, 2025. “Walrus Negotiations” Sovereign Canada.
