On the eve of Canada Day (formerly called Dominion Day to mark Canada as a dominion but God forbid we should make reference to the Bible or treat Canada as more than a land-mass), it is important to define the country not in comparison to others but as itself.
It is no easy task.
The United States was once a British colony and still has vestiges of British influence in it.
(Sidebar: the state names of Virginia and Georgia, for example.)
Even France bank-rolled the Revolutionary War, a favour to be returned during the Second World War.
Yet the Americans do not regard themselves as European.
They pride themselves as a fledgling nation of makers and doers and value the freedoms most countries do not have.
The Japanese do not compare themselves to their Chinese or Korean neighbours.
They stand upright with centuries of history and tradition behind them and each day they straddle the lines of post-modern Western influence with their own identity as a nation and a people.
Canada does not do any of that.
Squashed by British and French influence, Canada forged itself as a nation where a man could re-invent himself in a terrain so forbidding that only the heartiest remained.
Canadians proved themselves in both world wars, punching above their weight. Though they were lumped in with the British forces, they were nothing like them. They were an off-shoot, an orphan of different origins that stood quietly in the back.
It was only after the war that Canadians began to be unsure of themselves.
The blight of political multiculturalism, the brain-child of notorious Canada-hater, Pierre Trudeau, moved people further apart.
(Sidebar: rather like Mark Carney's sad attempts to decouple Canada from the US, its centuries-old trading partner. It's not that Canada is European, it is that we cannot afford to be like or in the vicinity of the Americans.)
No one is connected if they are decidedly different and antipathetic to one another. Rejecting the groundwork of the country - its language and traditions, for example - is admitting that nothing in this country is of value, that rejecting it is like rejecting some nuisance we can do without.
Like the rule of law?
And then there is the odious anti-Americanism, the result of envy and inferiority. Couple that with unaccountable elected officials and their admiration for a greedy dragon, one can see how Canada falls woefully behind.
We are not American, and we certainly aren't British or French.
It's time to state what we are:
Below the swell of goose-vs-eagle elbows-up patriotism that continues to gush through the nation lies an undercurrent of worry: half of Canadians feel that we’re losing a collective sense of what it means to be Canadian.
The finding was made by a new Postmedia-Leger poll released in advance of Canada Day, which asked respondents whether they feel, in the last four to five years, that “Canada has been losing a shared, collective identity of what it means to be Canadian.” Fifty-two per cent of replies were “yes,” while only 30 per cent were “no.”
The poll also measured a tremendous amount of national pride: 83 per cent of respondents claimed to be either “very proud” or “somewhat proud” of their country, with only 15 per cent stating they were not.
Thirty-four per cent of respondents felt their pride had grown in recent months, a sentiment felt prominently among the 55+ crowd, and among Liberal voters — a confirmation of the boomeristic character of the anti-Trump “Canada is Not for Sale” crowd.
(Sidebar: that's not being proud of being Canadian. That's being anti-Trump. Ask where these old idiots go from November to April.)
Among all recent-pride feelers, 83 per cent credited U.S. President Donald Trump for their deepening emotions. (Another 21 per cent of Canadians claimed to feel less proud in recent months, which most attributed to the recent federal election).
So, despite being incredibly proud to be Canadian, a good number of us are starting to wonder what common ground we share with our countrymen that makes us distinctly Canadian.
It’s a crisis of identity that, based on pure numbers, makes sense. Canada has changed, fast.
Some numbers for comparison: in 2001, 18 per cent of the Canadian population was comprised of immigrants; in 2022, the immigrant share reached 23 per cent, the emphasis shifting to Asia and the Mideast. Trudeau-era immigration policies boosted intakes far beyond what was seen in the Harper years, and jetted off to extremes post-COVID. In 2022, the population grew by three per cent (1.1 million people) since the year before.
Canada for many years managed to keep public sentiment on the side of immigration by maintaining high bars to entry, selecting only the immigrants we needed, and favouring those who have a greater potential for assimilation.
Foreign students developed a reputation for being rich, or eager to become Canadian, or both.
(Sidebar: is that so?)
Immigrant adults were known for being self-supporting, often with some prestige from professional or business backgrounds. Refugees were known for being grateful and hungry to contribute back to their new home. They came from all over the world, and it was fine — they joined Canadian-born nationals in their love for the country.
The quality simply couldn’t be maintained with volume. A liberal approach to student visas — which quadrupled the number of permit holders from 2011 to 2024, placed them at 2.5 per cent of the population last year. Fraud ensued. Last fall, Statistics Canada found that one-fifth of international students weren’t actually studying. Students too poor to afford a life here were scammed, strip-mall diploma mills grew, and the credentialed newcomers they churned out — noticed by their Canadian counterparts to be increasingly incapable of reading and writing in English — continued on their quest to receive citizenship.
Indeed, language barriers (the non-English and non-French kind) are increasingly presenting themselves to doctors, health-care staff and police. Some provincial governments get around this obstacle by releasing information in numerous foreign languages. Even the private sector is jumping on board; stand in line at a TD Bank and you’ll be treated with a slew of ads clearly targeted at new arrivals.
Canadian job seekers, meanwhile, have noticed arise in ads seeking Punjabi speakers (and in Vancouver, Mandarin). These preferences come at a time when the employment prospects of Canadian youth, who once easily filled many entry-level jobs, have steeply fallen to a jobless rate of 13.4 per cent. It’s a source of frustration for both Canadian-born English-only speakers and their immigrant non-Punjabi counterparts.
Many newcomers are still happy to assimilate, but not all — and as the total number of new arrivals grows, so too does the number of those who barricade themselves in enclaves and hold on to old, sometimes un-Canadian values. Edmonton and Calgary police both had to defuse Eritrean riots in 2023; a Montreal elementary school had to suspend 11 Muslim teachers amid allegations of creating a toxic, sometimes violent environment; anti-Israel protests have become a regular feature of Toronto and Montreal, correlating with high immigration in the last decade from Muslim countries.
Making matters worse is a national attitude that sends the message to newcomers that Canada is racist, hateful of its Indigenous people and has a history in strong need of being painted over.
(Sidebar: this again?)
All of this, Canadian officials will probably say, is a good thing. “Diversity is our strength” is a phrase that has been uttered in Parliament 135 times; government documents often tout the Canadian mosaic model of multiculturalism. But regular Canadians, for the most part, never wanted this: in 1993, Angus Reid found that 57 per cent of the nation wanted minorities to “be more like most Canadians”; in 2016, 68 per cent were found to believe that “minorities should do more to fit in better.” There’s a common-sense understanding, which could be acknowledged more openly in the early 2000s, that diversity can also offer challenges to overcome.
This is still the dominant view: in its June study, Leger found that 64 per cent of Canadians believe immigrants should be encouraged to embrace Canadian values and leave behind incompatible elements of their home cultures, melting-pot-like. Only 22 per cent favoured the mosaic model. There’s some wisdom in that.
**
Canadian schools got rid of the Lord’s prayer a generation ago. It didn’t fit with a modern diverse Canada. It has been replaced by land acknowledgments.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the school system didn’t operate this way — when Indigenous history and contemporary concerns were not a major focus. There has been a lot of progress to rethink how we approach the Canadian past.
But there’s also the Canadian tradition of turning a good thing into a stupid mess.
These young children know that they need to respect Indigenous cultures — and know that these cultures were sophisticated and fascinating. That’s what they’ve learned.
But what they don’t have are the lessons from an earlier time that would balance out this new appreciation. Instead, their lessons speak against an earlier way of thinking about the country. Without that earlier knowledge, what these kids are getting is the now off-balanced focus on reconciliation, relationships to the land, and inclusivity.
What they lack is the broader story of the settler societies that created Canada — about the dynamism of centuries of progress from the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment to the creation of modern forms of democracy, liberalism, and parliamentary institutions. Yet, this isn’t part of the elementary curriculum.
This isn’t the fault of any individual teacher (many of whom are wonderful).
It is, though, about the excesses of a cultural shift — well-intentioned — but also clueless as to its unintended consequences.
This Canada Day, perhaps it’s time to take a lot of the knowledge that’s baked into those pioneer villages dotted across the country and put it back into the curriculum.
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