Canadian National Identity

~ Clarissa

I first discovered the concept of a nation-state when I was starting my Master’s degree in Canada. I’m talking, of course, not about “a country” but specifically the way of being a country that is a nation-state. That it needs a group of people to come together and articulate what the “we” inhabiting it is like. And rewrite the history to make the “we” either eternal or necessary. And create a canon of artists, statesmen and achievements that justify the “we” and make the artificiality of the nation unimportant. I had left Ukraine which was clearly failing its historic chance of nation-building. Today, there’s not a person in Ukraine who doesn’t agree that this crucial work wasn’t done, and we are now seeing the tragic results of that.

Overjoyed by my discoveries as all young graduate students are, I started bugging every Canadian in sight with questions about what the Canadian national identity is. What I discovered was that people couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve references to the US. “We are not the US” is the underpinning of the Canadian identity, which means there is no identity. If you ask me to tell you about myself and I explain that I’m nothing like my colleague Heidy, you’ll think I’m a weirdo with no personality.

Canada has a lot of material for its nation-building. The two cultures of the Anglos and the Gauls are a great basis for identity. The Nordic nature. When Spain lost its colonies, it built a whole identity from the barren landscape of Castile. The Spanish identity isn’t “we are not the French.”

Canada has a fascinating literature but try finding it at a Canadian bookstore. I regularly engage in this exercise and it’s back-breaking work because there are no aisles called “national literature.” Canadian books are diluted by the sea of American lit that is, understandably, more vast. It doesn’t occur to anybody that people should have a chance to go to the store and find their national literature without tons of additional effort.

The important events of Canadian history have all been shat on. All that people are told about their history is how bad it was. Imaginary genocides are promoted while real achievements are never discussed.

Ask a Spaniard what the Spanish identity is, and you’ll immediately hear about the greatness of the Spanish language, how Spain got half of the world to speak its language, how Cervantes, and how Lope, and how Calderón. Ask a Frenchman , and you’ll hear about the Republic and laicisme and Enlightened philosophers. Ask an American , and you’ll hear about “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. Ask a Canadian, and the first thing you hear is “unlike Americans, we have free healthcare”, the emphasis being on “unlike Americans ” because even Cuba has free healthcare and what a big whoop that is.

Cubans, by the way, spent a century thinking about their national identity. The Caliban, sugar versus tobacco and what that symbolizes. Then, they ditched all that and took the road of “we are not Americans”, and we see where that led them.

The sad reality that a crucial Canadian election became about Trump should be a wake-up call. Liberal, conservative, or NDP, any Canadian should be unhappy with this fact. If you don’t want to be a 51st state – and you absolutely shouldn’t want it – don’t act like one. Don’t vote for or against Trump. Vote for your own nation but first figure out what it actually is.

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Published by Clarissa

17 thoughts on “Canadian National Identity”

  1. Choosing a toxic identity that makes one vulnerable, smaller, and less able to exercise moral agency is always self- and other-destructive.

    Black America has a similar problem, as do Jewish-Americans.

    Some identities, such as Russia’s or the alphabet-Pride people don’t fit into the reactive-identity problem, but are clearly toxic. If either switched to something from Christendom, whether Orthodoxy, or America’s home-grown faiths (ala Billy Graham), it’d be a blessing for everyone.

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    1. And the worst part is that it wouldn’t even be hard to come up with clear, valuable markers of Canadian identity. All one would need is to let go of self-hatred and learn to love one’s history.

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    1. That’s what’s upsetting me. Vote Liberal if you believe that this is better for the country. But don’t vote because Trump. I am yet to hear from a single person who voted Liberal who wouldn’t immediately reference Trump when I ask why. That people don’t see how pitiable this is stuns me.

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      1. I did say some, our general knowlege of history is only slightly better than that of the USA. Look at the map, much of the red are people frightened by the necessary austerity that Conservatives would most likely implement.

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  4. “bugging every Canadian in sight with questions about what the Canadian national identity is”

    When I as an American who’s never been much interested in Canada think about that I get a two part answer: Quebec and Canucks and Native Americans…. in general I actually find Quebec more interesting than France in most ways (not least because traditional French disdain for everything Quebecois).

    When it comes to English speaking Canada I think (and I am completely serious here) that Second City TV did more for creating a separate idea of Canada in the US than just about anything else. But Canadians mostly laughed nervously and tried to distance themselves from it as much as possible.

    I’m not talking about Great White North (although that was the most famous) but something like Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice (a parody of both a certain kind of Canadian movie and a particularly esteemed very serious Canadian movie). It was a bit like watching some British comedy, funny on the surface, but I also know I’m missing lots of cultural cues. I just saw the first episode of a newer Canadian comedy, Shoresy, and I honestly couldn’t understand more than half the dialogue (very fast with lots of hockey references that left me confused). Not sure if I want to watch more…

    A big problem is that I think Canadians, despite their insistence on not being Americans, have a yuuuuge inferiority complex about anything they do that’s more Canadian than American, but I think that’s where a separate identity can come from.

    On the other hand, the intention to bring in ever larger numbers of Indians and Chinese probably kills that idea dead and a separate Canadian identity will be: suckers who went all in on globalization long after the rest of the world started stepping away from it.

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    1. When I manage to dig out some Canadian authors from the mountains of immigrant lit that gets feted and promoted in Canada, it becomes clear that Canadian literature is very different from the American. As in, very very different. I did not expect to find that when I started this research. If there is a very separate literature, that means the identity is there. It needs to be described and explicated but it’s very much there. This is the work that national elites did in every Western nation in the 18th and 19th centuries. That exercise gave rise to my profession of literary criticism. I can give a list of people who did it in Spain or in Ukraine. I’m sure this work was done in Canada at some point. It has to be found and used for nation-building.

      Nation -building has an algorithm that has long been discovered and described. Follow the algorithm and it will work.

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  6. OK, but how can they not “vote against Trump” when he’s threatening to annex the country? Managing the relationship with Trump is Canada’s #1 issue now.

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    1. Honestly, “threatening”? “Annex”? It’s precisely this manipulative language that the Liberals used to manipulate people. The Canadian economy is in the absolute toilet. The healthcare system is a mess. The housing is downright prohibitive. Homelessness has spread to even such climatically inhospitable areas as Montreal. The immigration is insane and too big to get assimilated even in a century. Racial and ethnic tensions that nobody even heard about 15 years ago are getting out of hand. Fentanyl that nobody heard of either has become a huge issue. But no, let’s vote for the same guys who created all this because Trump something. Threats! Scary, scary threats.

      I can’t even.

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      1. “I can’t even.”

        Nobody even noticed that the Abacus Data questionnaire did not offer immigration as a choice, despite the fact that every single choice offered, other than Trump, are all very heavily negatively influenced by excess immigration. Such deliberate misdirection is how political manipulation actually works ;-D

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