Fairness is our national religion

We speak often of something called “Canadian values,” but even those who claim to believe in them never get around to defining what they are. It’s impossible. Canada is too huge and too disparate, and its citizens are too dissimilar, to have evolved a set of standardized values. We’re also too changeable.

In place of values we have something vaguer, something more like an instinct, or maybe an automatic reflex. We have fairness. We are not always fair, nobody could be, and sometimes our institutions are decidedly unfair, as when jails torture convicts with days and days of lonely, maddening solitary confinement.

But in just about every issue that gets discussed, we try to point our way to fairness. Without articulating it, or even passing a motion about it through Parliament, we have somehow agreed on this as a desirable quality.

It seems to count more in our collective lives than nationalism, tradition, economic success or global status. In its humble way, it almost amounts to a national religion.

In the crisis over migrants from the Middle East, most of us have reacted out of a sense of fairness. Canada has often in the past accepted immigrants from places run on rules different from ours — and profited by what those newcomers have done for the country. Hungarians, Ukrainians and many others have become excellent Canadians. Why should we, in fairness, discriminate against Syrians? Across the country many Canadians have put their money and their energy as volunteers behind the belief that families of Syrians can become good Canadians.

Prime Minister Mackenzie King said in 1947 that the people of Canada didn’t want our immigration policy to alter the character (he meant the ethnic identity) of the