During the 2025 tariff dispute and President Donald Trump’s repeated suggestions that Canada become the 51st U.S. state, Canadian musicians answered with songs of patriotic humor, cross-border friendship and defiance. They also used familiar public performances to make a political point: at a February 2025 hockey championship, singer Chantal Kreviazuk altered a line in Canada’s national anthem to emphasize sovereignty.
These examples are a reported snapshot, not a census of Canadian protest music. Emily Abrams Ansari, an associate professor of music history at Western University, located songs through social-media feeds and YouTube searches. Her analysis shows a varied response—and raises questions about whose version of Canada gets represented when music calls for national unity.
How Canadian musicians responded
Ansari’s analysis, published by Western News on March 13, 2025, describes several dozen songs she located on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Her search terms were “Canada tariffs song,” “51st state song” and “Canadian patriotic song.” That number reflects her own search results, not the total number of songs, their popularity or their reach.
The responses ranged across rock, metal, reggae, country, folk and pop. Some were newly circulated songs; others changed the meaning of familiar performance. Their tones ran from playful patriotism to open defiance. In Ansari’s reading, the frustration in the songs was directed at Trump, not Americans as a whole.
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Five ways the songs expressed resistance
Humorous patriotism: Tom Green’s “I’m a Canadian”
Tom Green’s “I’m a Canadian” celebrates recognizable markers of Canadian identity, including nature, cold winters, food and sports. Ansari reads its humor as self-deprecating rather than exceptionalist: it expresses affection for Canada without claiming that the country is superior or defining belonging by excluding others.
Friendship across the border: Jim Cuddy’s “We Used to Be the Best of Friends”
In a folk style, Jim Cuddy’s song recalls shared U.S.–Canada experiences and moments when Canadians supported Americans. Rather than treating the neighboring country’s public as the target, it appeals to a history of friendship and presents the political dispute as a rupture in that relationship.
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Sovereignty: “Canada is Not For Sale”
Some songs answered the 51st-state rhetoric directly. “Canada is Not For Sale” emphasizes the Canadian flag and Canadians’ rights, making national sovereignty its central message rather than using shared history or humor to persuade.
Defiant unity: “Elbows Up Canada!”
“Elbows Up Canada!” draws on a hockey phrase associated with Gordie Howe and a gesture by Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live to signal readiness to resist. Ansari notes that its AI-created video shows early settlers and briefly depicts Indigenous people in traditional dress or regalia beside a Canadian flag. That image was unusual in her sample; it should not be taken as evidence that Indigenous perspectives were broadly represented.
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A changed anthem line: Chantal Kreviazuk at the 4 Nations Face-Off
On February 20, 2025, before the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game in Boston, Kreviazuk changed “in all of us command” to “that only us command” while singing Canada’s national anthem. Her publicist confirmed to the Associated Press that the change was a response to Trump’s 51st-state remarks. AP reported that she explained the decision this way: “because I believe in democracy, and a sovereign nation should not have to be defending itself against tyranny and fascism.”
Kreviazuk also said, “I don’t think it would be authentic to me to be given a world stage and not express myself and be true to myself.” Canada won the game 3–2 in overtime.
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What the songs say about national belonging
The examples differ not only in sound and tone but in whom they address and how they define Canada:
- Humorous and self-deprecating: Green’s song speaks primarily to Canadian listeners through familiar national symbols, without making an explicit claim of superiority.
- Conciliatory: Cuddy’s song invokes shared history and addresses the relationship with Americans as something worth restoring.
- Assertive: “Canada is Not For Sale” centers sovereignty and the rights of Canadians.
- Mobilizing: “Elbows Up Canada!” uses a sports metaphor to frame resistance as a collective stance.
- Interventionist: Kreviazuk’s lyric change used a nationally prominent ceremony to make a concise statement about sovereignty.
Ansari places the songs in a country where, in her account, loud expressions of nationalism had been comparatively uncommon outside sporting events in recent decades. She also notes that Canadian nationalism is complicated by provincial separatism, Indigenous rights and the history of reconciliation, as well as by the pandemic-era use of the flag by some opponents of public-health restrictions. Those histories give calls for unity a particular tension: shared symbols can bring people together, but they can also obscure differences within the country.
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Ansari’s analysis raises the possibility that patriotic expression could become more hostile, but does not establish that as an outcome. The songs instead provide a snapshot of musicians negotiating how to express resistance without necessarily turning it into hostility toward Americans.
What this snapshot leaves out
Ansari’s search relied on English-language terms and social-media platforms, so it does not establish a complete picture of Canadian musical responses. She calls for deeper attention to Québec-specific, francophone and multilingual work. Her sample also under-represented Indigenous and self-identified immigrant perspectives, and most songs made little or no reference to Indigenous Peoples or to Canada’s ethnolinguistic and racial diversity.
The brief Indigenous image in the “Elbows Up Canada!” video is therefore an exception within the sample, not a substitute for Indigenous voices or evidence of broad inclusion. The analysis is best understood as a view of selected songs circulating during a specific political moment, rather than a definitive account of who sang, listened or felt represented.
Quick Recap
Sources
- Emily Abrams Ansari, Western News, March 13, 2025. The university notes that the article reflects the author’s perspective, not official university policy.
- Stephen Whyno and Ken Powtak, Associated Press, February 21, 2025, on Kreviazuk’s anthem performance and the game.
- Scroll.in’s March 18, 2025 republication of Ansari’s analysis.
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