A brittle national identity

The Prime Minister thought it offensive that the flag should fly with dignity in the wake of the discovery of unmarked graves at the sites of multiple former Indian residential schools. Miller and others who share her view find the singing of the anthem offensive. If you look behind both of these, the implicit message is that Canada as a nation state is fundamentally illegitimate, because of original sins that go back to Confederation, whether racism or patriarchy or any number of possible reasons.

Even before the recent assault on symbols of Canadian nationhood, Canadian national identity has been remarkably brittle and shallow as compared to many other countries, most notably our neighbour to the south. One obvious difference is that Americans fought a revolutionary war to free themselves from British colonial rule, whereas in the case of Canada, the new Dominion was created at the stroke of a pen when the British North America Act received royal assent.

Another crucial difference is that the founding premise of Canada was based on a compromise between the two main European settler groups, the British and the French, meaning that right from the get-go, there wasn’t a shared language, history or culture that united all Canadians.

Indeed, those differences boiled over a century later with the separatist movement in Quebec. More recently, we’ve seen the rise of Western alienation, in the news again as the Trudeau government prepares to penalize the oil and gas industry which are the economic mainstays of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

One of the roots of regional separatist movements is the reality or perception of unfair dealing by the federal government. As former prime minister Stephen Harper recently noted, Canada’s approach of riding roughshod over the energy producing provinces to meet climate change mitigation targets is unheard of anywhere else. One explanation could be Trudeau’s zeal to fight climate change at any cost, but a more cynical and plausible explanation is that he doesn’t rely on Western Canada as a vote base, so perhaps he can safely ignore the burgeoning anger.

The absence of a shared national narrative and the persistence of regional identity politics both conspire to chip away at a shared national identity. It’s very striking that when asked what defines the Canadian identity, so many people will point either to socialized medicine, multiculturalism, or hockey. Can you imagine a Swede or Norwegian defining their national identity in this way, even though they too have socialized medicine, are increasingly multicultural and are pretty good at hockey. But they also have a shared Nordic mythology that permeates their language, literature and culture, that helps define who they are as Swedes or Norwegians. We have little comparable in Canada.

Is it time for Canadians to reimagine the national identity around shared goals and values that we can all relate and aspire to, that go beyond superficial features of the country such as a system of medicine that is hardly unique to Canada? We often forget that national identities are not immutable and unchanging. Indeed, the political scientist Benedict Anderson famously described nation states as “imagined communities.” In other words, being Canadian is constituted by the stories, the ideas, and images that we all share.

Nationhood is about more than symbolism, but it cannot do without symbols, such as a national flag or a national anthem. Remembrance Day, replete with symbolism, affords us the opportunity to honour those who sacrificed their lives to create a plural and tolerant society in which we have the luxury to debate questions about our identity.

NATIONHOOD IS ABOUT MORE THAN SYMBOLISM.