By Ari David Blaff
Sunday, October 02, 2022
Canadians have a lingering insecurity that most people outside the country aren’t aware of. Unlike the United States, which actively shrugged off its British overlords, Canadians gradually — and legally — evolved into an independent nation. Canada’s steady march towards self-government required constant wrangling, incrementally seeking to prove its worthiness, and therein lies our deepest fear.
Buried in this struggle is a wracking self-doubt over who we are as a people. Canadians have a soft spot for shows of independence because it’s something we lack. Our leaders have long sought to compensate for that by highlighting Canada’s uniqueness, but no matter how hard we try, it just never works.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a classic example of this. The summer protests and riots following George Floyd’s death were an irresistible topic for the prime minister. During an anti-racism protest in Ottawa, Trudeau took a knee. Political opponents to the left of Trudeau’s Liberal Party pressured him to respond to Donald Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric at the time. Canada, Trudeau told the world, was watching events in the U.S. with “horror and consternation.”
These episodes are par for the course for Trudeau’s tenure. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Trudeau called it “horrific,” tweeting: “No government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.” But Trudeau wasn’t satisfied with simply shaming the U.S.: He made it a priority to reassure American women that Canada’s abortion clinics remained open for business.
Predictably, following the Uvalde school shooting earlier this summer, it was Trudeau who led the way politically. Surpassing other world leaders who expressed their condolences, Trudeau mobilized the legislature to pass new restrictions on gun ownership. “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse,” Trudeau stated.
You won’t hear Donald Trump or Joe Biden putting down Canada this way. America has a deep sense of history anchored in a powerful culture. There’s no need to scan the horizons and look beyond to find something that resonates within. But our Canadian leaders perpetually search abroad to frame domestic debate because our political culture and national identity are so hollow and meaningless that we must look elsewhere to stay relevant.
When Canada celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2017, the New Yorker provided a good glimpse into the amorphous cosmopolitanism that Canadian identity has become. When the author interviewed a recent American émigrée to Canada about the occasion, the woman mentioned that grocery stores were selling commemorative bread in “Canada 150 packaging, and there are a lot of special cookies,” but said that overall the festivities struck her as “a very surface-level celebration. It’s vague notions of diversity, rather than really getting into Canadian history.”
Rousing stuff, eh?
The feeble national glue that struggles to bind Canadians together flows from our lack of a creation story. Canada was officially founded in 1867, but it was allowed only limited powers of self-government “to deal with all internal matters,” deferring to Great Britain on questions of foreign policy. In the aftermath of World War I, Canada struggled before finally winning a seat at the table during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
“Canada had emerged from the war convinced that it mattered. The war had simultaneously reinforced the nation’s Britishness and its sense that Canada should have more control over its destiny,” historian J. L. Granatstein writes. For prime minister Robert Borden, “this meant more control of foreign policy in Ottawa — not independence but autonomy, a neat halfway house that could be defined in many ways.”
In 1931, Britain granted the British Dominions (of which Canada was a member) further legislative independence in the Statute of Westminster. Still, Canadians couldn’t control the highest law in their land. It took us nearly another half century to fully outgrow the vestiges of our imperial legacy by repatriating our constitution from the United Kingdom.
Fittingly, Canada developed a “middle power” foreign-policy mentality. No, Canada was not a hegemon, but many Canadians felt stifled in their nation’s role as the angsty younger brother in the Anglo–American alliance. Canada could leverage its position and influence instead of being a pawn dictated to as a “satellite” of America or Great Britain. But efforts to flex our national-independence muscles and make up for lost time never panned out. This effort ended in embarrassment for Canadians as we failed twice in the last decade to secure a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council despite full-scale efforts and millions of dollars spent.
Our prolonged, legalistic, and consultative journey to independence still confounds many Canadians. American historian Robert Winks surveyed a group of Canadian high-school teachers in the 1980s to get to the root of this very question and couldn’t find any consensus. Some said 1867; others 1931. Nothing was widely shared. “When people literally do not know when they became independent, their view of the process of governance, of law, and of what is meant by independence is likely to differ from that of those who are certain of the precise moment when they leapt full blown from the head of Zeus,” Winks wrote.
This is the insecurity that many Canadians feel and our political leaders reflect. Sure, there are common symbols, as the maple leaf, BeaverTails, and Tim Hortons, but ask a Canadian on the street how strongly he feels about his Canadianness, let alone asking him to define it, and you’ll get a blank stare. Pew’s 2017 survey of national identity found Canada to be among the lowest-ranking countries when respondents were asked if national identity was strongly tied to birthplace, Christianity, or language. Our state-sanctioned multiculturalism reinforces the belief that anyone from anywhere can seamlessly become a Canadian. This calls to mind the familiar adage: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
Justin Trudeau and his followers have fallen for anything. When unmarked graves of indigenous children were thought (incorrectly) to have been discovered last year in British Columbia, a former Canadian minister called it “Canada’s George Floyd moment.” Once again, here comes America to rescue Canada. It is the water Canadian politics unconsciously swims in, and it defines a deep truth about our country: that despite all our wrangling for independence, we remain a prisoner to our own political culture. However much we strive to denounce and scoff at Americans, the simple fact is: We need you.
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