The Canadian identity crisis
Thousands of academics have gathered in Toronto this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from whether poutine is a form of cultural appropriation to the ampersand as a symbol of gentrificatio
From a turtlenecked German to an angry Scot and a randy English spy, Mike Myers has made a career of mocking other national stereotypes.
His recent memoir, Canada, flips that comedic perspective on his country of birth, and the result is curiously unfunny, according to sociological research to be presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, opening Saturday at Ryerson University in Toronto.
More than just a drearily serious reflection on Canadian niceness from a guy better known for gags about asparagus pee, the book is a revealing case study about the role of the state in Canadian identity, according to Patricia Cormack, professor of sociology at St. Francis Xavier University.
“It starts to get really heavy for something written by a comic,” Cormack said. Myers comes off as an “apologist” for cultural statism, in which everything good in Canadian culture is attributed to state organs like the CBC, public transit and free health care, and everything bad is glossed over or ignored.
This perspective is revealed in Myers’ demand for a new national mission statement, and in his prescriptions for how Canada ought to return to the Golden Age of his childhood in suburban Toronto, in what Cormack mockingly describes as “a kinder, gentler and state- sponsored world.” His explicitly “nationalistic framing” makes for “an interesting intersection of humour, celebrity, autobiography and blatant nationalism ... and even statism.”
Myers’ Golden Age was the period before he left for England as a young man, long before he became a celebrity in America, roughly between Expo 67 and the Summit Series of 1972, when Canada was the “next great nation,” increasingly preoccupied with its own uniqueness. Today, as Myers writes, Canada has “drifted away from its mission of urgently forging an identity.”
Cormack began her study by wondering what it was about the early 1970s that allows such an “intertwining of state, pleasure and nostalgia” for middle- class white men like Myers. She argues “it seems to hinge on the cliché of anglo- Canadian identity crisis and the importance of the state in fixing this crisis.”
By “state,” she means those aspects of official Canada that endure through changing governments. For a comic, Myers seems unusually reluctant to trouble the clichés about the state’s role in creating and preserving Canadian identity, she argues.
In this respect, Cormack observes that Myers is like Rick Mercer, a “state celebrity” who fearlessly criticizes particular politicians, governments, bureaucracies and corporations, but rarely turns his critical wit on the state itself.
Instead, Mercer’s best- loved clownish antics are supported and promoted by the official organs of state, which he celebrates and softens, as he plays the jokester finding the lighter side of a serious uniformed official. So while some nations might explicitly invite nationalist pride by parading missiles down the main streets of their capitals, in Canada, the invitation is more subtle, as Mercer drives an army tank on a lark or pals around with the Ottawa Police tactical unit.
“To make it fun, you have to whitewash it,” Cormack said.
Other countries do not fret about lack of identity quite like Canada does. Identity debates in Britain, for example, are usually about preserving a widely understood and accepted national identity against foreign influence, as in the Brexit debate, or the integration of immigrants.
In the U. S., the worry is usually more about the corrosive power of the state on individuals, both in the libertarian sense of freedom from regulation, and the socialist sense of protection from heartless capitalism.
But in Canada, all the talk about our lack of identity simply “invites the state to fill it,” Cormack said.
This i dea, that being Canadian means desiring the state, is a theme of her book, Desiring Canada, co- written with James F. Cosgrave, professor of sociology at Trent University Durham, who is also presenting at the Congress. She gives the example of CBC Radio. “Sometimes you feel the content is not the point,” she said. “The point is that you’re listening to it. The medium is the message.”
For Canadians, the danger is that when they find their identity in the state, the state becomes “stripped of history” and harder to criticize.
This erasure of history is a common t heme i n Canadian scholarship. The common line is that we are the product of evolution, not revolution. We have not bled on the sacred battlegrounds of Waterloo or Gettysburg, and so in some sense we have no history, and we are only haunted, as the poet Earle Birney put it, by our lack of ghosts.
Cormack says Myers retreads this familiar idea, that we have no violent history. “I suppose that means no appropriation of indigenous lands, no residential schools, no internment of Japanese, no head taxes on Chinese, no forced sterilization, no turning away of Jews, no spying on gay civil servants,” she said.
For a sociologist to analyze humour in this way is vulnerable to the criticism, best expressed by E. B. White, that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, in that you learn a bit, but the frog dies.
But by showing how desperate Canadians are for the cultural nourishment of Heritage Minutes and NFB documentaries, sometimes without even realizing it, Cormack gets at a deeper conclusion, in line with the old joke (referenced by sociologist Jim Conley of Trent University in his paper on “funny sociology” for the conference) about how many sociologists it takes to change a light bulb.
Answer? None. The problem isn’t the light bulb, it’s the system.