HALF-BAKED NATIONALISM FOR A HALF-CENTENNIAL

Could it be that going all-in on a 150th anniversary... was a mistake? One hundred and fifty is sort of an awkward number to be the occasion for a grand national celebration. That the word “sesquicentennial” exists, and that it is only ever used to describe contrived festivals of this sort, seems like a hint.

Me, I would probably be unenthusiastic over a rounder number anyway. My suspicion and resentment of any state-led hoo-rah or whoop-up is probably about half politics and half personality. No doubt in 1967 I would have been writing columns grumbling about Expo 67 being a showcase for high-modernist delusion, doomed hopes for national unity, and brutal industrialism.

But, of course, there is much to be said for the grouchy view. From our vantage, we look back mostly on the fashions and design coups of Expo 67 and ignore the larger details. Any ordinary cultured person of 2017 whisked back to Expo 67 in a time machine would step out of the pod and recoil instantly at the sexism of signs blaring “Man And His World.” We would look askance at the abusive landscaping of the Montreal riverside. We would sprain our eyebrows raising them at the glorification of European explorers and the endorsement of an unjust world order.

We would know what attendees could only sense: that the old premise of Canada as two founding nations yoked together, combining complementary racial virtues to achieve material and spiritual progress, was about to enter an irreversible crisis. We would be aware that the city of Montreal was going to be a prominent victim of the crisis—that the technocratic ambition that made Expo 67 a success was destined to metastatize. (When I was very young it was still taken for granted that Toronto and Montreal were equals, twin capitals of one civilization. Canada has since become, like Britain, a land with one representative, dominant multiethnic metropolis.)

So maybe the grouches are usually right in the long run, and particularly about moral enterprises of the state, which are so often born and planned in a frenzy of self-congratulation and political calculation. Celebrating a 150th anniversary is inherently weird, but when I have pointed this out I have usually been offered the justification that Gen Xers like me missed out on Expo 67 by accident of birth, and probably will not make it to see Hadrien Trudeau preside over CanadaFest 2067.

This makes of the whole thing an odd form of intergenerational welfare. The premise of the party, or whether Canada merits one at all, is acknowledged to be beside the point. There is also the minor but persistent problem that Canadian statehood was more of a process than an event, and that 1867 as a date for the founding of Canada is merely the least incoherent of many possible alternatives.

The idea of Canada is in more trouble than it was in 1967, though even in 1967 it was too late to build a compelling founding myth upon the political machinations of white male “Fathers of Confederation.” Expo 67 looked forward, not back, but the idea of progress has fallen out of fashion. Our First Nations have succeeded in obtruding on the 2017 feast with a commanding, mood-ruining “ahem,” but this is just a manifestation of a wider trend—an overall moment in which the Canadian state and civilization are subject to a constant, harsh new light of self-interrogation, motivated by a perceived failure to share the material and libertarian accomplishments of a century and a half with aboriginal occupiers of our space.

This legitimacy problem, whatever you think of it as a proposition, is not just going away. The easy traditional methods of deflecting the aboriginal moral challenge—pointing out how well Canada works for descendants of immigrants from everywhere else on Earth, or celebrating the development of the country’s liberal legal order, as one might have expected us to do in 2017—seem destined to become ever less intellectually effective and convincing.

No radical solution to the legitimacy crisis is likely or conceivable. Not really being willing to bulldoze Centre Block or incinerate every Canadian flag in existence, we content ourselves with ritual, even poetic formulae, like the new habit of acknowledging on public occasions that Canadian territory is “unceded.” But this just makes the psychological problem worse.

Is Canadian history a single prolonged, conscious, intentional, continuing racist crime?

What is a liberal’s, or even a present-day conservative’s, answer to this question—“Yeah, sorta”? It is no wonder we have half-baked nationalism for a half-centennial: and that is probably what we will remember of it in 2067.