I immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 2010, pushed across the Atlantic by the economic devastation of the global financial crisis. Like so many who’ve made similar journeys, I fell in love with this country, and I count myself extremely lucky to teach Canadian politics for a living. But I’ve also always been struck by the insecurity that permeates Canada’s national identity. I was infused, from a young age, with Ireland’s age-old political and cultural traditions. Canada’s essence, by contrast, is often criticized as being about little more than not being American—a pretty threadbare sense of national purpose. And yet, in the midst of a trade war and threats of annexation, Canadians have suddenly rediscovered their national pride.

I’ve spent this election campaign thinking about why this is, and thinking about another export from the Emerald Isle, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who was probably the most fiercely nationalistic father of confederation. The contours of his own life—from would-be American patriot to a Canadian nationalist—explains why getting our elbows up against our neighbours has suddenly returned like muscle memory. This was a man who helped conceive of Canada right from the beginning as a counterpoint to the worst excesses of America’s messy democracy. And maybe more than any other founder of this country, he still offers the most profound justification as to why not being American is, in itself, a meaningful and important part of being Canadian.

In his early 20s, McGee participated in a violent, aborted revolution to free Ireland from British rule. In 1848, he fled across the Atlantic and became a major player in the Irish-American community in Boston and New York. As an anti-imperial revolutionary, he was attracted to the United States, a country founded in a rejection of the British monarchy—he even dallied with manifest destiny, which held that the entire North American continent was America’s for the taking.

But in the 1850s he began to sour on the U.S., growing repulsed by the growth of the “Know Nothing” movement—a group that trafficked in anti-immigrant nativism, conspiracy-mongering and political extremism. The parallels to Trump’s MAGA movement are striking. Initially a secret society, and later a formal political party, the Know Nothings had a penchant for instigating riots in cities with large immigrant Catholic communities. They encouraged the most vulgar, moblike tendencies that the democratic spirit can animate: tyranny of the majority and persecution of minorities. McGee came to see the United........

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