In Search of Canadian Identity

 by Mark Wegierski

Canada, which Pat Buchanan once called a “Soviet Canuckistan”, has serious problems combating the ceaseless self-undermining of its military forces and traditions. But it is also having a difficult time defining a coherent identity for itself. For example, there have been frequent calls to eliminate the traditional oath to Queen Elizabeth and her heirs and successors, as a condition for receiving Canadian citizenship. Since the 1960s, Canada, which was once proud of its British heritage, has increasingly redefined itself by its “uniquely compassionate social-democratic political culture”, expunging other, more traditional and meaningful bases of national identification.

Canadian political and cultural leaders have based this new national “identity” largely on an embrace of the lifestyles, customs, and traditions of Canada’s latest immigrant groups. But if Canada is to be defined by its multiculturalism – that is, by the cultures brought here from the outside, especially in the last few decades – then this implies that there is actually no such thing as Canadian identity and culture. So why bother funding the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), or the Canada Council for the Arts?

Former Canadian ambassador Martin Collacott’s report for the Fraser Institute and books by Daniel Stoffman and Diane Francis have challenged this hitherto unquestioned immigration/multiculturalism consensus in Canada, but such contrary opinions are given little hearing.

In the last forty years, Canada has experienced a massive repudiation of traditional notions of national identity, which had flourished for hundreds of years. The English-Canadian and French-Canadian nations existed long before the formal establishment of the Dominion of Canada in 1867. However, today Canada is a cultural laboratory, having severed its roots in history, Christianity and the countryside. While it may not be surprising that British identification has melted away since the collapse of the British Empire in the 1950s, there has been little attempt to construct a more positive identity for English-speaking Canadians.

French Canada has its Quebecois nationalism, but English Canada has become a mere geographic area, a sterile “zone” with no true identity.  It has become socially and culturally American, borrowing many of the negative aspects of the United States – its vulgar pop culture, its strident political correctness, and its litigiousness. Indeed, perhaps the only remaining national institution that indirectly promotes social and cultural unity in Canada today is ice hockey!

Unfortunately, cultural interchange between Canadians and Aboriginal peoples has all but broken down in favor of establishing heavily subsidized Aboriginal “sovereign nations”. The Aboriginal peoples of Canada – Indians, Metis, and Inuit – have historically been subjected to severe persecution. However, their current attempts to wrest vast territories and resources at the expense of other Canadians, as well as their exclusive claim to the status of a native-born majority – immemorially tied to the land – delegitimates French- and English-Canadians’ senses of identity, reducing them to mere interlopers rather than founding nations.

Likewise, it is possible to be tolerant towards immigration and immigrants without implying that English-Canadian culture should disappear. Presumably, there should be some kind of dynamic interplay between the culture that once overwhelmingly defined the country and the cultures of those arriving later. If newcomers, encouraged in their truculence by government policy, continually refuse to take even small steps towards allegiance and assimilation, the eventual result may be ethnic chaos.

The longstanding dominance of the federal Liberal Party has exercised an increasingly distorting influence on the Canadian social, political, and cultural milieu. The Liberal Party has viewed immigration and multiculturalism as vehicles for assuring (or intensifying) their electoral predominance. It has almost been forgotten that Toronto, before the 1960s, was a conservative, Tory bastion, and was called “Tory Toronto”. The Liberals have faced little opposition. Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s attempts to imitate the Liberal strategy by raising immigration to about a quarter-million persons a year from the 54,000 or so in Prime Minister Trudeau’s last year in office was an unmitigated disaster for the Tories. In addition, the lack of real conservatism in the federal Progressive Conservative party led to the formation of the Reform Party in 1987. From 1998 to 2000, the Reform Party endeavored to broaden its appeal, transforming itself into the Canadian Alliance.

In 2003, the Canadian Alliance and the federal Progressive Conservatives merged, calling themselves the Conservative Party, significantly dropping the “progressive” adjective. Stephen Harper was able to hold the Prime Ministership from 2006 to 2015, but he pursued “ultra-moderate” policies even when holding a parliamentary majority in 2011-2015. The Liberals came roaring back in the 2015 federal election. Maxime Bernier has raised the banner of revolt against the current-day Conservative Party, with his recent founding of the People’s Party of Canada.

As a result of Liberal Party dominance, issues of Canadian and English-Canadian identity are rarely discussed today. Yet to live without some kind of authentic, meaningful national identification is to live a disfigured existence. In the rush to hyper-political-correctness, the nation itself has virtually been lost.

Some Canadian traditionalists, confronted by the intractability of Canada’s federal Liberal regime, are looking for a “provincialization” of Canada, or even arguing for amalgamation with the United States. However, the federal Liberal Party and the taxpayer-funded CBC continue to stifle the debate about Canadian national identity, proclaiming themselves as solely able to define what constitutes “Canadian nationalism” (even as that term, so popular among the Canadian Left in the 1970s, is increasingly abandoned).

To reinvigorate English Canada’s identity, the best elements of Canada’s British heritage should be combined with elements of Aboriginal culture plus any valuable aspects of the new Canada. This would create an entity that might withstand disintegration in the long term.

Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer and historical researcher. An earlier version of this article appeared on the Hudson Institute website