On July 1st, Canada marked 150 years since its Confederation as a nation. Beyond this date milestone, there is a very real cause for celebration as the significance of its longevity has material implications for the global community.
As the second decade of the twenty-first century winds down, this improbable country may well be the only truly immigrant nation left (excluding city states). Conservative and Liberal governments have consistently shown enduring adherence -- with varying levels of enthusiasm – to the belief that immigration has value, as does the majority of the population. Canada took in an estimated 300,000 newcomers in 2016, 48,000 of whom were classified as refugees, and around 85% of permanent residents eventually became citizens. While terrorist acts in France, Germany and Britain heightened concerns about those coming from certain parts of the world, Canada still generally welcomes people from all faiths and corners. The greater Toronto area is now arguably the most diverse city on the planet, with half its residents born outside the country while other population centres like Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Montreal aren’t far behind. Annual immigration accounts for roughly 1% of the country’s current population of 36 million.
Canada also has had a surfeit of positive recognition recently. In 2016 such luminaries as US President Barack Obama, VP Joe Biden and Bono, no less, declared “the world needs more Canada. The ‘Economist’ magazine proclaimed that “Liberty Moves North: Canada’s Example to the World” on its cover, illustrated by the Statue of Liberty haloed in a maple leaf and wielding a hockey stick. On the night of the US election Canada’s official immigration website crashed, apparently due to the volume of traffic caused perhaps by Americans wary of their untested and eccentric new commander in chief.
2016 was also the year when the public in many countries turned angrily against immigration, blaming it for a variety of ills -- real or imagined -- as embittered emotion overwhelmed dispassionate discourse, whipped up by opportunistic political figures offering simplistic blame for complex societal ills. Alongside the rise of this nativism has emerged a new (or previously dormant, depending on one’s view of history) nationalism that scarcely denies its roots in distinctly overt racial overtones: the US elected a narcissistic reality tv star whose main policy plank was building a wall, Britain voted to leave the EU in large part in reaction to immigration and globalization, and rightwing political parties threatened to shape the national discourse in France and the Netherlands.
Compared to such stances, Canada’s continual commitment to inclusion might at face value appear naive. It isn’t. As with many industrialized ‘First World’ nations there are practical reasons for keeping the doors open: declining birth rates and an aging population began slowing Canada’s natural growth rate, adding to already heavy health care costs (it has a creaky universal health coverage model). Ten years ago, two-thirds of population increase was courtesy of immigration. By 2030, it is projected to be 100%.
The political philosophy is simple – appropriately managed immigration is vital to economic competitiveness and national existence. Bipartisan governments have repeated it, statistics confirm it, and the reality of strolling the streets reinforces it: diversity fuels, not undermines, prosperity.
But as well as practical considerations for remaining an immigrant country, Canadians, by and large, are also philosophically predisposed to an openness that other states find bewildering, even reckless. Current prime minister Justin Trudeau, articulated this when he told the New York Times Magazine that Canada could be the “first postnational state”. He added: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
Whatever one thinks of that remark from a leader who makes frequent use of verbal overkill and more than occasional hyperbole, it failed to cause a stir. Could any other G20 politician say such a thing? Perhaps Barack Obama, for a brief moment following his epochal election in 2008, But globally at this moment? The thought is simply too radical.
For Europeans, despite all the indignant self-righteous sound and fury of a post-Brexit reality, the nation-state model still remains sacrosanct, never mind how relevant it may be to an era of dissolving borders and widespread exodus, much less a contradiction of the federated EU model. The modern state --- loosely defined by a somewhat coherent racial and religious group, ruled by internal laws and guarded by a national army -- took shape in Europe. Try telling an Italian or French citizen they lack a “core identity” and see how many teeth you get to keep.
In contrast, the remark was unexceptional to Canadians. This is not a nation with an overweening need to loudly assert a national character type. In fact, Trudeau perhaps inadvertently, voiced a chronic anxiety among Canadians: the absence of a shared identity, despite the best efforts of predecessors like his father to create the basis for one.
He was outlining, a governing principle about Canada in the 21st century. Canadians don’t talk about ourselves in this manner often, and don’t yet have the vocabulary to make their case well enough. Even so, the principle feels right. Odd as it may seem, Canada may finally be owning its identity through the malleability of its current lack of one.
Postnationalism is a frame to try and understand the ongoing experiment in filling a vast yet unified geographic space with the diversity of the world’s religions and races. It is also a half-century old intellectual project, born of the country’s awakening from colonial somnolence. But postnationalism has also been in intermittent practise for centuries, since long prior to 1867. In some sense, Canadians have always been thinking differently about this vast, continent-wide landmass, using ideas borrowed from Indigenous societies. From the moment Europeans began arriving in North America they were made welcome by the locals, taught how to survive and thrive amid multiple identities and allegiances.
That welcome was often betrayed, in particular during the late 19th and 20th centuries, when settler Canada wrought egregious harm to Indigenous people. But, if the imbalance remains, so too does the influence: the model of another way of belonging.
Can any nation truly behave “postnationally” – ie without falling back on the established mechanisms of state governance and control? The simple answer is no.
Canada has borders, where armed guards check passports, and a military. It asserts the occasional territorial claim, such as over the Northwest Passage, or parts of the Arctic within what it sees as its sphere of control.
It can also be argued that Canada enjoys the luxury of thinking outside the nation-state box courtesy of its elephantine southern neighbour. The state needn’t defend its borders too forcefully or make its army overwhelming in size (the military, while being highly-regarded for its training and professionalism, is exponentially too miniscule for a nation of such vast and varied geography), and Canada’s economic prosperity may be as straightforward as continuing to do 75% of its trade with the US. According to the US Trade Representative’s office Canada in 2016 was the 2nd largest goods trading partner with $544.0 billion USD in total (two way) goods trade during 2016. Goods exports totaled $266.0 billion; goods imports totaled $278.1 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada was $12.1 billion., which puts the nation in Donald Trump’s sights as ripe for imbalance ‘correction.’
Being liberated from the conventional economic and military stresses that most other countries face gives Canada scope and the confidence, to experiment with more radical approaches to society such as the occasionally uneasy attempts to find a long term solution to the thorny issue of cohabitation between French and English solitudes.
Nor is there uniform agreement within the country about being post-anything. Canada has been described as the “the greatest hotel on earth,” a double-edged observation that can be negatively interpreted in that some newcomers may view the country as nothing more than a convenient transit point or escape chute, offering security, business or real-estate opportunity, with no lasting responsibilities or loyalties attached. Until recently, the influx of many mainland Chinese paying above market value for homes in cash while maintaining actual domiciles outside Canada gave rise to anger over soaring home prices and led to a general tightening of regulations to discourage such behaviour.
Conversely, many Canadians believe that they do possess a set of normative values, and want newcomers to prove they abide by them. Politicians have suggested that potential immigrants be screened for “anti-Canadian values,” while a minister in the previous Conservative government, wanted to set up a tip-line for citizens to report “barbaric cultural practises”. In the last election, the outgoing prime minster, Stephen Harper, tried in vain to hamstring Trudeau’s popularity by creating a wedge-issue debate about the hijab, which boomeranged and actually lost his party votes.
To add to the mix, the French-speaking province of Quebec already constitutes one distinctive nation, as do the 50-plus indigenous First Nations. All have their own perspectives and priorities, and may or may not be interested in a postnational frame.
In short, the nation-state of Canada, while wrapped in less bunting than other global partners, is still recognisable. But postnational thought is less about holding hands, singing “Kumbaya” and shredding passports. It’s about the use of a different lens to examine the challenges and precepts of an entire polity, economy and society.
Though sovereign since 1867, Canada remained in the British empire’s shadow as a dominion for nearly a century after. Not until the 1960s did it create its own flag (the Maple Leaf) and have its anthem (O Canada), and it was only 1982 when Pierre Trudeau re-patriated the constitution from the UK, adding a visionary Charter of Rights and Freedoms that enshrined permissiveness and tolerance. He also introduced multiculturalism as official national policy. The challenge, then, might have seemed to define a national identity to match.
This was never going to be easy, given the duality of colonial overhang and American cultural influence.
Marshall McLuhan, of “medium is the message” fame, saw in Canada the raw materials for a dynamic new conception of nationhood, one unshackled from the state’s “demarcated borderlines and walls, its connection to blood and soul,” its obsession with “cohesion based on a melting pot, on nativist fervor, the idea of the promised land”. Instead, the weakness of the established Canadian identity encouraged a plurality of them -- not to mention a healthy flexibility and receptivity to change. Once Canada moved away from privileging denizens of the former empire to practising multiculturalism, it could become a place where “many faiths and histories and visions” would co-exist.
That’s exactly what happened. Following the British and French, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian and later Italian, Greek and Eastern European arrivals reinforced the growth of Canada in its first 100 years and the positive impact of successive waves of South Asians, Vietnamese and Caribbean immigrants have greatly transformed the interracial mix into a microcosm of the world at large. The last several decades have been marked by an increasingly deep diversity, particularly featuring mainland Chinese, Indians and Filipinos. This is clearly reflected in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet – 15 men and 15 women including an Afghan refugee, a minister of Somali origin. two aboriginal members of parliament and three Sikh politicians.
Canada may lack a definable identity in the American or European sense but it is already has a powerful, definable “concept of welcome” with tremendous capacity for multiple identities and multiple loyalties. It is a nation where people belong, yet are ok with differences.
This is a unique situation. In other countries, an occasionally violent independence movement like Quebec’s might have led to sectarian violence. Despite from a period of occasional; violent separatist agitation culminating in letter bombings, kidnappings and a murder in 1970, Canada and Quebec have been compromising with each other, battling at the ballot box instead of the streets. Being a relatively young nation, Canada’s journey and ultimate identity are still far from complete, and while its propensity for internal; dialogue and compromise might seem indecisive and interminable, it evolves by responding to newness without fear or need for a “nanny state”.
Nationalism, nativism and voters turning to ‘men on horseback’ like Trump or Duterte will persist in 2017 or 2018 or even 2027. People will still cross national borders, legally or not (and some will die trying). But denial, standing your nativist ground, doing little or nothing to evolve your society in response to both a crisis and, less obviously, an opportunity: these are reactions, not actions, and certain to make matters worse. Already history is shifting to balance this tendency with the election victories of moderate Dutch and French governments and a marked swing in favour of Jeremy Corbyn’s UK Labour Party over Theresa May’s Tories. Canada will keep doing what its doing.
If the pundits are right that the world needs more Canada, it is only because Canada has had the history, philosophy and possibly the time to do some of that necessary thinking about how to build societies differently.
Call it belonging.