Canada Is an ‘Accident’ Still Waiting to Happen
We have never had a clear, agreed-on understanding of ourselves. Is Trump’s trade war giving us a chance to develop one?
By Lawrence Solomon | Published by the Financial Post
Canadians are united as never before, not for love of their fellow Canadians but in fear and loathing of Donald Trump. But Donald Trump is merely the latest iteration of Canadians identifying themselves as non-Americans. Canadians have never been united in their sense of community with one another. Anti-Americanism aside, there has never been a universally shared Canadian identity.
Justin Trudeau put it well in a 2015 New York Times interview, when he explained that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Trudeau wasn’t saying anything novel. The absence of a core identity dogged Canada almost from its founding in 1867.
Early in the 20th century, Canadian journalist and politician Henri Bourassa lamented that: “We have in our country the patriotism of Ontarians, the patriotism of Quebecers and the patriotism: of Westerners; but there is no Canadian patriotism, and there will not be a Canadian nation as long as we do not have a Canadian patriotism.”
Angst over the Canadian identity also came from prime minister Arthur Meighen, who after World War I, identified the problem of “getting all our people to see that we have not a collection of unrelated sections.”
Quebec, the largest of those unrelated sections, would be better off if it left Canada, argued Jane Jacobs, a Canadian icon, who received the Order of Canada after advocating Canada’s breakup in her book, “A Question of Separatism.” The Canadian confederation is a “shotgun union that has proved neither happy nor fruitful,” she argued.
Marshall McLuhan, another great Canadian intellectual, noted that “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” Irving Layton, one of Canada’s great poets, riddled that “A Canadian is someone who keeps asking the question, ‘What is a Canadian?’”
Author Yann Martel, author of the influential “Life of Pi,” answered Layton’s riddle by defining Canada as an empty shell, a country of convenience for uncommitted passersby. Canada is “the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It’s a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.”
The most influential thinker of all when it came to Canada’s identity was Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who believed that “Canada is a country built against any common, geographic, historic or cultural sense.” To Trudeau, Canada’s absence of a national identity was laudable since, he explained, “for the past 150 years nationalism has been a retrograde idea.”
To ensure Canada never descended to base feelings of nationalism, he formalized Canada as a hotel for the world in 1971 by announcing multiculturalism as official government policy. Over the objections of Quebec, which wanted to preserve its sense of nationhood, Trudeau instructed federal agencies to promote all cultures through grants to media, universities and museums so as to diminish the importance of English and French, the two founding cultures: “there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian,” he declared in announcing the multiculturalism policy in Parliament.
Statistics Canada soon began to measure the success of multicultural policies. In the 1981 census, it identified but six ethnic enclaves in Canada. In the 1991 census it found 77 and by the 2001 census the number had exploded to 254, at which point the agency stopped counting.
Trudeau’s son, Justin, completed the project his father began by sidelining Canada’s English and French heritage. “Countries with a strong national identity — linguistic, religious or cultural — are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds,” he said in endorsing the opening of Canada to any and all. “In France, there is still a typical citizen and an atypical citizen. Canada doesn’t have that dynamic.” By adopting universal values, Canada has created the ersatz citizen who comes and goes, often holding multiple passports without need of any profound allegiance to any nationality, certainly not Canada’s. Those attributes help make Canada “the first post-national state,” as the younger Trudeau put it.
The nations within that post-national state, which do have a strong identity, may beg to differ. The dream of Quebec separatism, which remains alive in Quebec, once came within one percentage point of succeeding. Today, polling in Alberta shows a majority are open to leaving Canada.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau called Canada “an historic accident.” With Trump’s threats of tariffs testing Canadian unity by exposing Canada’s over-dependence on the U.S. and with Alberta now threatening independence, it seems more accurate to say it’s an accident still waiting to happen.
The original version of this commentary is available at the publisher’s website here.
Lawrence Solomon is a founding columnist at Financial Post, a columnist at Epoch Times, and a past columnist for the Globe and Mail. The Deniers, a #1 environmental best seller on global warming, was deemed one of the “10 Books That Drive The Debate” by the US National Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached at LS@lawrencesolomon.ca.
Image created by Generative AI.