Worst national birthday, ever
WHY THE COUNTRY’S INTELLECTUAL CLASS DECIDED TO CELEBRATE CANADA 150 WITH AN ORGY OF SHAME
What’s your favourite Canada 150 moment? The $5.6-million temporary Ottawa skating rink that bans hockey, figure skating, cellphones and roughhousing? The tedious CBC series that supposedly “snubbed” Nova Scotia and FrenchCanadians? The “Cultural Appropriation Prize” and subsequent white-guilt meltdown? The Duck To Nowhere? So many memories. What a shame I’ll be dead for Canada 200.
When I think Canada 150, my mind’s eye casts back to the spring. I’m in a train travelling from Montreal to Ottawa. Not just any train, mind you, but a specially chartered Canada 150 “VIP” train carrying several cars full of writers, artists, philanthropists and assorted grandees.
It’s subsidized by the government of Canada, of course — part of the $500 million earmarked to these random junkets. Indeed, half the train’s passengers seem to be repping, cheerleading or bankrolling their own Canada 150 government-backed feelgoodery. There’s so much taxpayer money sloshing up and down the aisle that you can practically feel it wash up against your ankles when the train starts or stops.
This is a confession as much as an indictment: I was all in on this boondoggle.
In fact, I spent a big chunk of that April afternoon talking up a representative from another Canada 150 “Signature Project” — who was then in the process of putting together the guest list for a 23,000-kilometre “Coast-to-Coast-to-Coast” expedition to ferry lucky passengers from Toronto to Victoria via the Northwest Passage. As (then) editor of a plummy little arts-and-letters monthly, I told him, I’d be the ideal candidate to gush to the world about the glories of the Arctic.
Alas, I never got the gig. And good thing, too. Because if press accounts of the things that went on aboard that boat are to be believed, I would have jumped off and let the frigid ocean waters deliver me to the mercies of the afterlife.
According to one lengthy account by Ian Brown of the Globe and Mail, shipboard social life degenerated into shrill arguments about “cultural authoritarianism” and white supremacism. For those who tired of the sour, off-putting experience of debating Canada 150 on Twitter, here was a chance to have the exact same debates in Canada Goose jackets. From coast to coast to coast, the cruise helped confirm, our intellectual class has decided to celebrate Canada 150 with an orgy of cranky recrimination.
The sesquicentennial ushered in a bizarre rhetorical world wherein even the most harmless gesture carries harbingers of genocide. When the tour officials delivered a gift of hockey sticks to the Nunavut community of Clyde River, a passenger compared the gesture to “colonialists giving blankets (to First Nations), which gave them smallpox.” When a passenger mentioned how amazing it is that traditional Inuit were able to survive harsh Arctic winters, an Indigenous woman attacked the comment as an indirect justification of colonialism. And this was just the daytime itinerary. At night, passengers gathered in a common room to engage in “reconciliation” — which is to say, a frenzy of bitter racial accusations and melodrama. The whole horrifying exercise reportedly ended when a group of black and Indigenous Canadians prepared an impromptu manifesto containing “a list of instructions for white Canada.”
In Brown’s well-intentioned and earnest telling, all of this bitterness and animosity will somehow help everyone get to deeper truths about reconciliation. Indeed, he recites the Rword so many times (20 in all), that readers come to realize just how meaningless this sixsyllable cliché has become. In this way, Brown is a pitch-perfect stand-in for all the other cultural grandees who’ve tried to put a positive spin on our Canada 150 moment. As with the duck and the skating rink, and the other symbols of our supposed national bonhomie, it all feels forced and awkward — mortifying, even. Can we not just admit to ourselves that, sometimes, bitterness and animosity are just bitterness and animosity?
This isn’t a cranky white-dude essay about Indigenous ingrates who refuse to raise the flag on cue. Canada 150 celebrates the creation of a European-style nation-state on territory that, for millennia, was settled and roamed by First Nations and Inuit peoples. Their societies were systematically gutted through policies of dispossession, residential schools and, in some cases, murderous violence. Indigenous leaders had every reason to sit out the festivities.
But that wasn’t good enough for the organizers of Canada 150 Signature Projects. On the Arctic cruise, and a variety of similarly earnest events that I saw play out within my Toronto magazine-world bubble, Indigenous leaders were encouraged to show up so they could hear all the nice things that white people were saying about them. When they (understandably) refused to play that role in the assigned way, the wasp elites who oversee Canada’s lido deck suffered a collective aneurysm, and descended into full-blown moral panic — of which the Soviet-style humiliation and purging of Hal Niedzviecki by The Writers Union of Canada was only the most appalling example.
But such episodes did not play in isolation. And our shameful legacy of mistreating Indigenous peoples was not the only thing ruining the Canada 150 party.
In the months following the election of Donald Trump, Canadian writers published a steady stream of opinion columns in foreign outlets pushing back against the conception of Canada as a beacon of enlightened, democratic egalitarianism. In The Guardian, Charles Foran complained that Canada was being “overpraised.” In Slate, Jesse Brown denounced the “fantasy” that Canada had transcended “petty nationalism and xenophobia.” In The Washington Post, J.J. McCullough wrote an article headlined “The world needs to stop mindlessly fawning over Justin Trudeau.” On social media, I can attest, these articles were widely shared among academics, activists and writers.
In other words, the toxic anti-patriotism of the past year wasn’t just about a bunch of Rosedale junketeers coming to terms with their settler guilt, and forcing everyone else to march in lockstep. At some point between Canada 149 and Canada 150, a large bulk of our intelligentsia lurched suddenly from fretting that the world wasn’t sufficiently appreciative of our kinder, gentler multi-culti middle-power awesomeness, to fretting that the world — and, more importantly, Canadians themselves — were getting excessively hammered on Trudeaupian KoolAid. The question is why.
Because a single word — “Canada” — has described our country for the past 150 years, we sometimes imagine this nation to possess some timeless soul that can be discovered through study or collective self-reflection. But countries aren’t people. They’re artifacts, like corporations. They have no souls. Sometimes, their identities change radically from generation to generation, as with, say, Germany, South Korea and Iran in the late 20th century.
At law school in the United States, a professor taught me that his country effectively had had three constitutional identities, not one. There was the explicitly racist union of states that existed between 1776 and the Civil War. Then there was the more politically consolidated, robber-baron iteration of the U.S. that existed from the 1860s until the New Deal. And then there was the modern welfare state that FDR created, and which Americans still inhabit. It was a powerful model for explaining national transformation and identity. In adapted form, it applies equally to Canada.
For the first five decades of its existence, Anglo Canada existed as a sort of cultural and political sidekick to Great Britain — nominally independent, but substantively subservient. This changed during the First World War (though not as abruptly as modern Vimy mythology would suggest), and we started to adopt the outlook of a fully independent country — albeit one with a white monoculture outside of Quebec. Pierre Trudeau helped usher in a third era — in which Canada increasingly self-conceived as a sort of left-wing alt-America, whose identity in many critical areas of public life and policy — heath care, military doctrine, multiculturalism, bilingualism, government spending — was defined by an all-smothering neurosis in regard to the United States.
This neurosis had a profoundly stultifying effect on the Canadian marketplace of ideas. But at least it created a sense of common cause and a theme for national boosterism that transcended hockey and cold weather. Among leftists, in particular, every argument could be fought and won in exactly the same way: just target the person or party most vulnerable to the allegation of “American-style” thinking.
The reason that Canadian intellectual life has felt so strange and disordered in recent years — and especially during this sesquicentennial — is that the underpinnings of our third-wave national identity have been falling away since the financial crisis of 2008. The basis for our inferiority complex vis-à-vis the United States was the idea that Americans had a richer, betterrespected country than us, with a more important sense of national purpose. Those assumptions are no longer true. As recently as a decade ago, it would have been crazy to think that Canada’s PM would be a more sought after international visitor than the president of the United States. But in Britain, Mexico and countless other nations, he is.
You would think that this incredible turn of events would make Canadians proud. And in the case of those who describe themselves as “ordinary people,” I believe it does. But it also has had a disorienting effect on an intellectual class that suddenly has no organizing principle by which to create an ideologically acceptable sense of national identity.
Yes, Justin Trudeau’s pluralism and progressive values stand in pronounced contrast to the virtually troglodytic mindset of Donald Trump. But the act of waving the flag and yelling “hooray for our side” feels a lot like blind nationalism, which is anathema to the progressive mind. And so, with no other options at hand, Canadian leftists now find themselves consumed with the project of shaming those, both inside and outside our borders, who find inspiration in the many things this country has got right. And what better time to shame someone than at their own birthday party?
It is tempting to imagine that this whole melodrama will end when the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31. But I don’t think it will. The battle for the soul of Canada 150 was essentially a proxy battle for the soul of Canada’s fourth national identity.
Will Canada come to regard itself as a sunny, forwardlooking, pluralistic democracy that champions a generous social contract on a colour-blind basis … or a guilty, grievanceinfected patchwork of racial communities perpetually publishing angry manifestos and living in the shadow of bygone horrors?
I can’t say how the battle will end. But until it resolves itself, I would advise against prolonged travel by sea.
IT IS TEMPTING TO IMAGINE THAT THIS WHOLE MELODRAMA WILL END WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES MIDNIGHT ON DEC. 31. BUT I DON’T THINK IT WILL. WE SOMETIMES IMAGINE THIS NATION TO POSSESS SOME TIMELESS SOUL THAT CAN BE DISCOVERED THROUGH STUDY OR COLLECTIVE SELF-REFLECTION. BUT COUNTRIES AREN’T PEOPLE. THEY’RE ARTIFACTS, LIKE CORPORATIONS. THEY HAVE NO SOULS.