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As most Canadians are aware, Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” the latest in his meme obsessed attempts to wage psychological war on Canadians. The move elicited a range of reactions across Canada, from defiance to bewilderment to laughter at the move.
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Many conservatives correctly pointed out, to all the people outraged at Trump’s move, that renaming objects and places for political ends was not unfamiliar to Canada. Canadian progressives have spent the better part of a decade doing just that, think of the Langevin Block that became the Office of the Prime Minister, the now Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) University, Sankofa square in Toronto (formerly Dundas), the Kichi Zībī Mīkan (formerly the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway in Ottawa), and the list could go on. Many conservatives, myself included, opposed these various name changes to serve ideological ends, and oppose the President’s latest troll as well.
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But this reaction from some conservatives, must not lead into a misplaced national self-loathing. A small slice of the Canadian right, the part that has spent a year and a half insisting Trump is not really a threat or wrong in his insults, have revelled in Trump’s mockery of our country with an implicIt “we deserve it” attitude. Canada is a woke, weak, poor and pathetic country in the minds of some of these people that deserve what its getting.
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The late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton decades ago coined a useful word for this. But at the time, he was describing a habit prevalent amongst left wing intellectuals, not the right. The term is “oikophobia” which means “hatred of home.” In hisbook England and the Need for Nations, Scruton wrote:
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“the seeming loss of national loyalty is a feature of our political élites … (who) have repudiated the national idea … No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us,’ and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’ Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.”
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Scruton was writing about the contempt with which Britain’s left wing intellectuals had come to treat their own country, but the description of “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’” feels especially apt to describe this now latent right wing form of oikophobia.
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Conservatives have been quoting that passage for decades, and it does capture the impulse behind toppling of statues, renouncing of national history and renaming anything that associates us with our history. So it is a genuine sad state of affairs that that last line quoting Orwell about this impulse to side with foreign powers now describes a small subset of conservatives in 2026.
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None of this is an argument for uncritical patriotism. You can think this country has serious problems, that the last decade has been a lost one for younger Canadians, that Ottawa is dysfunctional, and that Carney’s government has mismanaged the relationship with Washington, and still want the place fixed precisely because you love your country and not the opposite. Criticism of the government of the day or present state of affairs is not oikophobia, and the danger in times like the moment we are living in right now where passions are high is to create a binary where unless you are blindly uncritical of the government you are disloyal. This is wrong, but conservatives must guard against the impulse to go further and sink into a national form of self-loathing that leads you to siding with a foreign president insulting and demeaning our country.