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I’m not here to make mates: Why Canada is better off without a unifying us Richard Warnica
For a brief period in my 20s, when I was on the brink of finally finishing school, I had a plan to move, after graduation, to Australia. I prepared myself for the move by absorbing as much Australian media as I could. In the process, I became fascinated by the fun-house image that country — another geographically huge, sparsely populated former British colony — can sometimes reflect back to ours.
Australia, like Canada, grapples endlessly with its own identity, though it does so with less fretting and more jocular twang. Like Canada, Australia has a long, acutely painful relationship with its indigenous people. Like Canada, it has been shaped by waves of immigration, sometimes restricted in overtly racist ways. And like Canada, it often struggles to define itself beyond what it isn’t —Great Britain in Australia’s case and the United States in ours.
What the Australian identity debate has, though, that Canada’s does not, is the concept of ‘mateship.’ Mateship, I assure you, is a real thing that serious people in that country discuss in very serious ways. In fact, when I was considering my Australian move, in the mid-2000s, mateship was the subject of sustained, high-level political debate.
The prime minister, at the time, John Howard, had tried to have mateship written in to the Australian constitution. He wanted immigrants to learn mateship and be tested on mateship before they could become Australian citizens. He had even used the concept of mateship to rejig the Australian political consensus, pulling it away from social democracy and toward Thatcherite conservatism.
To an outsider, the mateship debates seemed hilariously absurd. The word itself is undeniably silly. It means, as best as I can tell, that as mates, we help others and others help us. But inside Australia, the mateship wars were deadly serious. There were academic studies of mateship. There were mateship books. The papers quoted “frequent mateship critics.” There were analyses of mateship in the Great War, mateship in contemporary society, mateship and multiculturalism, mateship and misogyny, mateship as a litmus test for political belief.
I often think about mateship when I think about the endless, numbing debates we have in Canada about our own national identity. We are a flawed and fretful people, no doubt. We are forever obsessed, as many peoples are, by what it means to be us. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the discussion around Canada’s 150th birthday has already devolved into an orgy of identity fixation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Canada has its demons and angels that must be addressed. But from the outside, our obsessions — first and foremost with our squishy lack of a central us — must come off as eyerollingly odd.
The truth is, for an outsider, almost any debate over national character that isn’t outright frightening will look at least a bit little silly. It’s all mateship, really — vague and kind of meaningless but easy to exploit for political ends. That’s why I’ve always seen Canada’s lack of a unifying identity as a feature, not a bug. At its best, Canada is malleable. It’s difficult to pin down and thus hard to use as a weapon against anyone we decide doesn’t belong.
Because in reality, “national character” is more often about what people aren’t than what they are. It’s a tool used by politicians to create tribes. It’s about lines that get drawn so fights can begin. That’s why I’m happy enough to have Canada bumble along without that. If we settle on lines, we will draw them again and again, smaller and smaller each time. But if we can fail for another 150 years to decide who we are, we might just accidentally become something great.