Every century or so the Canadian left gathers at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in downtown Calgary to inagurate a new era of progress. In 1932 it was J.S. Woodworth and the gang in 1932 at the founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (which would become the NDP). On July 13, 2025 it was Team Advantage, Shama Rangwala, André Goulet, Roberta Lexier and Rob Rousseau.

This live recording begins with a discussion of what the Progressive Publics symposium is all about before saying goodbye to the NDP with a brief history. Then the team discusses the possibilities of a socialist project to come. With live heckling from the audience! (Mostly Jeremy Appel.)

Support our podcast! Rhetorical and real threats to Canadian sovereignty pose a tough question to critics of the Canadian state: Do we align with liberal nationalists in defense of the Canadian project or do we remain skeptical?

In this episode Team Advantage traces a brief history of Canadian nationalisms, including earlier attempts at imagining a socialist national project, in order to better understand the current moment of rising nationalist sentiment. We ask if it's even possible to extricate a good Canadian nationalism from the history of colonial land theft and genocide that undergirds this state, revisit the one time Canada was actually cool, and offer trenchant critiques of Canadian civic statuary.

Works Cited

• Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels - Erica Benner
• Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism - George Grant
• Canadian capital and secondary imperialism in Latin America - Todd Gordon and Jeffery Roger Webber
• La tentation québécoise de John F. Kennedy - Jean-François Lisée
• Responding to Donald Trump with a popular democratic project for Canada - Marcel Nelson
• Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada - Kari Polanyi
• Becoming Native in a Foreign Land; Sport, Visual Culture, and Identity in Montreal, 1840-85 - Gillian Poulter
• Mohawk Interruptus - Audra Simpson
• Louis Riel - Thee Headcoats

Related Episodes

• Imagined Alberta: Western Canadian National Fantasies
• The Waffle, the NDP, and Full Breakfast Socialism

• Maple Revolutionaries - The Economist
• The North will rise again: pensions, politics and power in the 1980s - Jeremy Rifkin
• Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism - Quinn Slobodian
• Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism - Kwame Nkrumah

• Kenney’s Great Albertan Pension Robbery

Support our podcast! Team Advantage sits down with Bryan D. Palmer on his stop through Calgary to discuss his new book, and discuss how labour and anti-colonial movements have historically challenged the Canadian state. We ask what it might take to forge a united front and what the present moment of Canadian Nationalism might mean for left politics.

Buy Palmer's book from Lorimer Books or your local independent bookseller.

Further reading recommendations from Bryan Palmer:

• Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Coulthard
• Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson
• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes
• Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State by Shiri Pasternak

WARNING: This episode begins with slam poetry. Team Advantage subjects themselves to some favourite books of UCP ministers and Western Standard columnists in search of the intellectual basis for justifying an independent Albertan nation. We find bad poetry, absurd race science, and convenient economic motivations. We contend that there is a long-standing nationalist rhetorical tradition in this province, place this tradition within a broader history of nationalism, seek out it's through-lines and examine how such rhetoric spreads out from the writings of right-wing cranks and enters more mainstream discourse.

Primary Sources

• Canada and Her Colonies by Alwyn Bramley-Moore
• The Unfinished Revolt by John Bar and Owen Anderson
• Mavericks by Aretha Van Herk

Secondary Sources

• Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
• Nations and Nationalism since 1780 by Eric Hobsbawm
• Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo
• Of Passionate Intensity by Trevor Harrison
• Dreamscapes of Modernity by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim
• Land as Pedagogy by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

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The Winnipeg Police Service is 100 years old - a century they've used to repress dissent, censor media, bungle investigations and devour city budgets. Author James Wilt joins Team Advantage to discuss his new book, Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police which explores this history of policing, resistance, and what a vision for a Winnipeg beyond police might look like.

• A Local History of Queer Abolitionist Organizing and a Call for Police Abolition by Leon Laidlaw
• Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sara A. Seo
• Disaggregating the Policing Function by Barry Friedman
• An Equity-Based Review of Police Involvement in Schools: The School Resource Officer Program in the Louis Riel School Division by Fadi Ennab
• Bar None Winnipeg

It’s election season in Bubble City, the ultra-protected enclave that keeps the rich safe from the mutants of the so-called Uninhabited Zone. When veteran officer Swamp Cop embarks on a dangerous undercover mission, politics just might wind up coming between him and his beloved partner, Officer Schitt. Team Advantage chats with Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson, authors of Justice Warriors Vol. 2: Vote Harder, and discusses the quaint features of placid Canadian life.

Follow Matt Bors on Twitter @mattbors and BlueSky @mattbors.bsky.social

Follow Ben Clarkson on Twitter @benclarkson and Bluesky @benclarkson.bsky.social

Purchase Justice Warriors: Vote Harder direct from Matt's webstore or wherever fine books are sold.

This past year saw a sequence of labour unrest: Teamsters locked out of both CPKC and CN railways, Westjet mechanics striking over Canada Day long weekend, Air Canada pilots reaching a last-minute deal, grain terminal workers in Vancouver striking, and dockworkers getting locked out in Montreal. How is the post-war labour "peace" holding up, and should we be thinking and planning beyond the Rand formula?

Thanks to Adam D.K. King for joining this episode. Read more of his work here, and follow him @AdamDKKing1.

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