Will the Valium we need be Scheer?

In the legendary words of Montreal Gazette cartoonist Aislin, “OK. Everybody take a Valium.” That advice was clearly needed when Aislin put it in the mouth of separatist Quebec premier- elect René Lévesque the day after his election in 1976. It’s also needed now as Canada goes through a kind of nervous breakdown on questions of race (widely agreed to be an outmoded 19th-century concept) and racism (widely believed to be epidemic today).

When you’re young, nothing seems to change. When you’re old, all you see is change. I came of age politically and in most other ways in the mid-1960s. What a different country 100- year- old Canada was! In those days, Statistics Canada produced an annual Canada Year Book, a compendium of data it distributed to schools and libraries in the snail- speed ways that were all we had in those days. Centennial year’s Canada Year Book reported on the ethnic background of Canada’s population as revealed in the 1961 census.

People with roots in the British Isles accounted for 43.8 per cent of the total. “Other Europeans,” including from France, were another 53 per cent, which gets you to 96.8 per cent of the total. We didn’t have the term “visible minority” in those days — first because we weren’t so deeply into political euphemism but also because we had almost no visible minorities. The census did report that 0.7 per cent of us were “Asiatic” while another 0.2 per cent were “Negro.” White privilege? If there was such a thing, almost everybody had it.

In total, the country’s 1961 population was 18 million, half what it is today. Which means Asian visible- minority Canadians totalled 126,000 people, while “Negro” Canadians were another 36,000. Together they were a little more than Prince Edward Island’s current population. This was a very white country, a “snow-white” country, as critics argued.

It’s still majority white. But what we now call “the visible minority population” is up to 22.3 per cent, almost one in four, more than 10 times its population share in 1961. In the 2016 census, more than seven million Canadians categorized themselves as “visible minority.” In 1961, seven million was the population of Ontario, then and still the country’s biggest province.

Talk about change. In the past six decades Canada has added an Ontario’s worth of visible minority people. A country that was fundamentally or systemically racist would not have done that. And a country in which one in four people are visible- minority must have real trouble maintaining the systemically racist structure it so often and so casually is accused of having. If nothing else, we have jet airplanes now. Canadians who consider themselves oppressed have many more alternatives than they did in the 1960s.

How did this dramatic transformation of Canadian society happen? The Diefenbaker and Pearson governments made our immigration policy essentially colour-blind by switching over from national and regional quotas to a points system in which people’s skills and credentials predominated. In effect, we went from race and nationality bias to skills and education bias. The effect was to bring us some of the world’s most talented people from some of its most impoverished countries. Such poaching raises moral questions we have never really discussed. Rather, we have left the choice of whether to come with the individuals involved — a strategy for decision-making (leaving choices to individuals) our public policies should rely on more often.

Has the integration of seven million people who do not look like 1961 Canada always gone smoothly? No. Have there been acts of outright or subtle racism, whether verbalized or not? Yes. Many humans, maybe most humans, feel most at home with people from their own background, who share their social knowledge and history. At times life can be hard for people who come to or are born into a society where the majority of people are not like them. Though we should aspire to be colour-blind my guess is we will always be aware of colour.

Is Justin Trudeau a racist? Are most Canadians at least subconsciously racist? Only when the word’s meaning is so elastic as to make it virtually meaningless — and despite what people in our universities may think. ( That the residents of such socially hypoallergenic institutions could be persuaded racism is all around us is one of the paradoxes of our age.)

Wise advice I picked up in the 1960s reading biographies of the recently-assassinated president Kennedy, another charismatic, not-quite-normal, rich man’s son who did well in politics, was from British military historian Basil Liddell Hart: “Avoid self- righteousness like the devil. Nothing is so self-blinding.” It was one of Kennedy’s favourite aphorisms.

Justin Trudeau and his government have been nothing if not self- righteous — on the environment, on feminism, on inequality, on their own moral superiority to all things not “progressive.” As wonderful as it is to see self-righteousness punctured so abruptly and emphatically as it was last week, a better result from Brownface-gate would be a general, society- wide deflation in self- righteousness. There may be a few real racists in Canadian politics, as there are in Canadian society. But most politicians, like most of the rest of us, are well-meaning but flawed human beings generally deserving of the benefit of the doubt.

I wonder if the Valium we take after our recent collective frenzy will be in the person of Andrew Scheer.