Canada’s 150th a time of celebration, renewal

Our future depends on a diverse, just society,

In this year, the 150th year since the formation of Canada, we have good reason to celebrate Canada’s founding. The deepest benefit from marking this anniversary will come from reflecting on the commitments that shaped our national history and on the way that they can guide us in tackling what we must do to assure our better future.

We should begin by recognizing that 150 years of stable, consistent nationhood is itself a political achievement. This long period of political order, not disturbed by revolution and regime change, is a record not matched in many nations.

State longevity is not a neutral fact, but reflects a vital political virtue.

A nation whose design has led to political stability means that the commitments and accommodations of its people can be based on a predictable public order, and this condition, more than any other, guarantees the liberty that allows citizens to shape their lives.

More than that, Canada’s longevity is a reflection of its inherent commitment to justice, or perhaps more accurately, its aspiration to be a just state. Canada was built on the idea of protecting minority ethnic and social communities from the oppressions of the national majority through granting special powers to vulnerable communities and giving them political recognition. The animating idea of Canadian Confederation was to develop a strong and self-determining nation while preserving national diversity.

Our sesquicentennial reflections should also include recognition of injustices.

It is through this admission that we are able to reinforce our resolve to be a more just nation; the history of national injustices helps us stay alert to the fragility of our best national principles and to a history of sometimes responding to national anxieties with harsh and discriminatory policies.

Certainly, the record of the failures of justice is not endless, but is serious enough to check an unbounded national pride and encourage in us an unbounded imagination for inclusion and just treatment.

Renewing our resolve to be a good society and a good state grows ever more important as we face intense political partisanship that drives us from trust and openness between each other and from tolerance for political differences – qualities of political life that are essential if democracy is not to become a machine for lurching between authoritarian extremes.

We must also manage with civic pride and grace our rapidly increasing ethnic and religious diversity.

We must strive to overcome the realities that successful inclusion of indigenous peoples into Canada’s channels of success and well-being remains a national failure, and that poverty holds far too many in thrall to a sense of low social value and hopelessness.

We should draw from the celebration of Canada’s national narrative a sense of the political dynamism – the record of our nation as a living and evolving tree – that will allow us to meet these challenges. Our past is worth celebrating, but only if it inspires us to meet the issues that we face.

From its beginning, Canada has not been built on the idea of a state for one’s own kind or for one’s own time. How could it be? Canada was built on the idea of a new nation brought into being through covenants designed to bring peace and reconciliation between diverse peoples. It was built on hope that a flourishing diverse nation held together by ideas of justice would succeed.

Our national history has not matched these aspirations fully, but they are, nevertheless, the part of our heritage we should remember and seek to embody in our national life.

Canada’s founding ideal that the strands of diversity would become bound into an effective nation through granting justice to all is still our ideal – not yet gained, but certainly not yet lost. What better time to renew and reinvigorate our original commitment than now – as we celebrate our becoming a nation?

John Whyte is policy fellow emeritus of the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Regina.