This paper describes three eras of state building and higher education in Canada. Higher education in 'Old Canada' before WWII was mostly a small collection of colleges that bore imprints of American and British institutions and provided personnel needed to develop a vast and sparsely populated territory. The 'Hey Day of Canadian Nationalism' from 1950 to 1990 greatly expanded universities and colleges in a broader project of modern state building and social uplift, borrowing organizational models from mass-access American state colleges. The third era, 'Transnational Nation-Building,' spanning the past 20 years, uses Canadian degrees and diplomas to lure selective immigrants who seek Canadian citizenship and entrée to an emerging transnational class of English-speaking professionals. That strategy, along with a series of converging forces, is leveraging Canadian colleges and universities to implicitly adopt a new institutional path. We end by discussing insights that the Canadian case may provide for comparative understandings of higher education and state building.