I repeat: My fellow Americans, do not put a Canadian flag on your backpack. It’s pathetic, embarrassing, and in fact deeply un-American. Here’s why.
American travelers have allegedly been putting Canadian flags on their backpacks, or other travel paraphernalia, for decades, in an effort to disguise themselves as North America’s most popular anglophones. I am not convinced that I have ever been in the same room/hostel/long-distance bus as someone who’s done this, but there are plenty of contentious Twitter posts. The conversation around it has grown in volume since January 2025, as various American policies have been let’s say somewhat unpopular abroad. [“In the YouGov EuroTrack survey conducted in February 2025, US favorability in Europe has fallen by between six and 28 percentage points since August 2024.”]
Here’s why this is the dumbest thing to do, and it’s more complicated than just unfairly trading on Canadian politeness.
#1: It assumes people are aggressively invested in where you, a tourist, are from, when this is in fact a deeply irritating thing to think.
No one cares! No one cares about you! Imagine sitting at a regional tourist attraction, or your local airport, or the café at an Upper Midwest Hy-vee, and someone approaches you with a giant Kazakh flag, and is like, “Don’t worry, I may speak Russian, but I am a humble Kazakh.” You would be like – bro, this is very random, and also you are probably Russian, and also please stop bombing Ukraine!!!!!!!!!
Now imagine that same person simply pays for a ticket to visit the Dubuque Museum or Art, or with no great fanfare gets on their flight, or buys a yogurt and quietly eats it in the Hy-vee café, and you would not even notice, and that is how this whole thing should have gone.
I hate the Twitter conversations around this, which give the opportunity to mean-spirited people to dunk on dummies, but the mean-spirited people are generally right when they say that Americans think too much about how they must resort to hijinx like this to protect themselves overseas, which is a highly toxic example of Main Character Syndrome.
For the most part, and that “for the most part” clause is doing a lot of work we will unpack elsewhere, people don’t care about the tourist wandering through their hometown — they care about their kids and their crush and their divorce settlement and their own version of Love Island.
Please don’t do any of this.
#2: It fails to correct actual problems for Americans traveling internationally.
We are a loud people. Our indoor voices are the same decibels as many peoples’ outdoor voices and our outdoor voices are their space voices. I say this as someone who lives above a narrow Parisian street, and every summer, when my windows are open, must provide unwitting and unwilling witness to five U.S. tourists shouting about how good dinner was at 2 a.m. (If you heard someone shouting “Shut the fuck up, you’re embarrassing all of us,” that was me, but only once, though I think about it a lot.)
Americans can slap a Canadian flag on their backpack all they want, but the second they open their mouth—boom! The jig is up!
— RJ Fleetwood (@free2bgr8ful) June 25, 2025
It is a hateful stereotype, but also a too-frequently accurate one. Talk quietly outside and you will preempt the need to steal Canadians’ cultural identity, because no one will even know you’re American, and of those who know, even fewer will care (see #1).
There are other giveaways for spotting Americans overseas, just as there are for many people who are traveling far from home, but for Americans, this one is the worst, most evident, and most common.
TL;DR: There are very few reasons, while engaging in most tourist activities overseas, that your nationality should come up in a meaningful way.
#3: It’s cultural theft.
There are differences between cultures, especially in how they conduct themselves in public. (In my experience, most of these cultural markers fall away in progressively more intimate quarters.) Some are forward, some are reserved. I do not think it is a controversial statement, to say that Canadians are more polite/reserved than we are, and perhaps we are more exuberant/obnoxious than they. (Every positive quality has its negative shadow quality.)
Being polite, and even reserved, tends to make you better company when traveling overseas, because no one likes shouting tourists (see #2). If we Americans want to be seen as polite, conscientious travelers, then we should simply act that way, and be a small part of reshaping our reputation overseas, rather than stealing something that belongs to Canadians.
#4: Speaking of, we should especially not be stealing from Canadians.
Many Canadians are rightfully very, very, very angry at the U.S.
Imagine that China threatened to annex the U.S. in a true and serious way, or to impose economic sanctions that would deeply injure our economy. And then imagine that Chinese travelers pretended to be American, and sewed American flags on their backpacks, to trade on our reputation as polite and conscientious travelers (this is hypothetical, remember).
Wouldn’t you absolutely hate them????? Wouldn’t that be the worst????
#5: It’s deeply un-American.
To be “American” is to be many, many things. At its best, it means to be no-nonsense and straight-talking. It means to look at situations squarely and deal with them honestly.
Millions of Americans voted for a political platform that affects people outside our borders, in some cases deeply, and in other cases grievously. [According to a May 2025 NPR Report, “Aid groups say USAID cuts are already having deadly consequences.”] U.S. participation in NATO, or a lack thereof, has real consequences for Europeans — and for Americans who’ve benefited considerably from its shared power.
There is a price to pay for peacing out of long-standing alliances, and additional costs for unpleasant conduct [A CNN headline from February 2025 reminds us that “Vance turns on European allies in blistering speech.”]
I think the odds of a European verbally assaulting an American because they’re American are vanishingly low, but I also think that should this happen there might be some value in understanding the cost of these policies, and these attitudes. Better to understand these costs — again, to look at them squarely.
If your country is doing something that makes strangers shout at you on the street — maybe it is a good thing to know this????
#6: It assumes we live in a world that “hates us because they can’t be us.”
This is ridiculous. But it rubs alongside the reality that all of our actions have consequences — and that those consequences can be good, as well. You will still see the American flag in certain quarters of Normandy, where 2500 U.S. soldiers died on June 6, 1944, in an effort to liberate France from fascism.
This created lasting, if not eternal, goodwill. It actually might be a very worthwhile exercise, to consider where the American flag is waved, with respect, by people who are not American, and consider what we might have done there, to warrant that respect, and to consider further how our current actions might differ from those.
Once we honestly reconcile those two things, we might not even need to steal Canadian social reputation scores to go to the Louvre without feeling like someone’s going to yell at us.
BTW, the best/easiest way for Americans to meet French people is by playing pickleball. Here’s how to do it.
