Greg Koabel: National pride Is good. National paranoia is not

In this season of surging Canadian nationalism, it’s worth remembering that defining ourselves in opposition to the United States is both an old reflex and a risky one. While understandable, even necessary in certain contexts, excessive anti-Americanism has sometimes led Canada and Canadians down dangerous, counterproductive paths. No case illustrates this better than that of George Taylor Denison III, a man who let hostility to the United States overtake his judgment, his patriotism, and ultimately, his future.

From the beginning, Canadians have distinguished themselves from Americans. Our national story begins with the Loyalists, those Americans who fled north after the Revolution because they remained faithful to the British Crown. That loyalty, and the suspicion of American republicanism that came with it, became a cornerstone of Canadian identity. It was defended on the battlefield in the War of 1812, tested again during the Hunter invasions of 1838, and sustained by successive generations of Canadians wary of American power: military, economic, and cultural.

These concerns were not irrational. We share the world’s longest undefended border with a superpower that dwarfs us in size, strength, and swagger. Keeping Canada distinct in such a shadow requires effort. But it also requires balance. Our prosperity and our security have always depended on managing the American relationship wisely, not defiantly. Anti-Americanism, when it becomes more than a posture and tips into dogma, can blind Canadians to reality and trap us in self-defeating fantasies. George Denison’s story shows how far that can go.

Born in 1839 to a prominent Toronto family steeped in Loyalist pride, Denison was raised to distrust the American experiment. His grandfather fought in the War of 1812. His father was a Tory stalwart in the colonial militia. George, the eldest son, inherited not just the family name, but also its sense of grievance and duty. While he trained as a lawyer, his passion was military service. At just eighteen, he took command of the York Dragoons, an elite cavalry unit originally bankrolled by his family when the government cut funding. This wasn’t a militia post in name only — it was the stage on which he hoped to prove his worth.

His moment came with the American Civil War. As the Union and the Confederacy plunged into conflict, most Canadians watched with anxiety and ambivalence. Around 50,000 would fight in the war, nearly all for the North. Black Canadians, abolitionists, and liberals cheered the Union cause and its fight against slavery. Others, more cautious, feared the consequences of an increasingly powerful and battle-hardened United States. But George Denison saw something else: a chance to relive the Loyalist struggle.

From the start, Denison viewed the Union not as a force for emancipation or unity, but as a threat to Canada’s survival. He issued pamphlets demanding Canadian mobilization. After the Trent Affair — when Union forces intercepted a British ship carrying Confederate envoys and nearly provoked war with Britain — Denison’s alarm turned into obsession. He predicted that when the Civil War ended, a massive and victorious U.S. Army might look north for its next conquest.

But where most Canadians sought diplomatic caution, Denison embraced the Confederacy.

He didn’t just sympathize with the South. He idealized it. To him, the genteel plantation class mirrored the Tory aristocracy his own family represented. Both were noble orders resisting the march of liberalism and industrial capitalism. Denison admired Confederate general Robert E. Lee as a kind of modern demigod. When he visited Lee in Virginia after the war, he spoke of the general with near-religious reverence.

His support wasn’t just sentimental. Denison opened his home to Confederate agents and couriers. His uncle was a Confederate colonel who visited Toronto during the war. When the South began plotting espionage and sabotage from Canadian soil — raiding banks in Vermont, organizing jailbreaks on the Great Lakes — Denison didn’t merely cheer them on. He joined in.

In 1864, Denison commissioned the construction of a steamer called The Georgian, intended to function as a Confederate commerce raider on Lake Erie. It was a reckless, illegal project funded in part by the Confederate treasury and led by Jacob Thompson, the Confederacy’s chief agent in Canada. Denison gambled that his elite status and Canadian birth would shield him from suspicion. They didn’t. The ship was seized before it could sail, and Denison was publicly exposed as a Confederate collaborator.

It ruined his political ambitions. He had hoped to enter public office, perhaps even serve as Canada’s minister of the militia. But no government wanted to antagonize Washington by appointing a man so visibly tied to America’s enemies. He remained active in public life as a police magistrate, as a military theorist, as a founder of the nationalist Canada First movement, but his dream of leadership was over before it began.

Denison’s trajectory is a cautionary tale. His fixation on the American threat led him to support slavery, undermine his country’s neutrality, and betray its long-term interests. Even as Canada was profiting from Union trade and preparing for Confederation to better withstand the continent’s changing dynamics, Denison chose ideology over pragmatism.

He wasn’t alone in fearing American might. Many Canadian leaders in the 1860s recognized that Britain was no longer willing to guarantee colonial security. The response of the Fathers of Confederation was not to sabotage the United States, but to build a stronger Canada. They believed in joining forces across the colonies, creating new rail links, and founding a national government capable of defending and defining itself. That was the patriotic response — not Confederate collaboration, but Canadian cooperation.

Denison, for all his fervour, got the national project backwards. He saw Canadian identity as a permanent rear-guard action against the United States. In doing so, he mistook resentment for vision. Canada didn’t need to fight the U.S.; it needed to manage the relationship, harness it, and at times even embrace it — without ever losing itself.

That remains the challenge today. Nationalism is back in vogue, and many Canadians, weary of American influence, are once again tempted to define ourselves by what we are not. But that path can lead to absurdity and isolation. The U.S. remains our largest trading partner, our key ally, and our cultural mirror. To pretend otherwise is to indulge in a denial that has costs.

Canada will always need a measure of independence, a sense of self, and the confidence to resist the gravitational pull of American politics and culture. But we must also be wary of turning anti-Americanism into a political program. The lessons of George Denison are clear: when national pride becomes national paranoia, everyone loses.

Greg Koabel is the host of The Nations of Canada podcast and author of The Making of Canada: An Epic History in Twenty Lives.