All is not well in Canada. Don't shrug
If the eyes roll at yet another discussion of “the Canadian question,” then, it is not because the question is hackneyed, but because all too often the answers have been. Or perhaps it is that we have been asking the wrong question. All those windy essays on the theme of “who are we,” all those tendentious surveys on what makes us distinct, all those attempts to distill the “Canadian identity” from whatever collection of alleged national traits happen to occur to the writer -- all imply that whoever or whatever we are, it is enough. All that is required to knit together this unravelled country is to discover ourselves more fully, to be more authentically who we are, to embrace our contradictions. Narcissism, in other words, as the writer John Fowles defined it: “when we grow too old to believe in our own uniqueness, we fall in love with our complexity.”
This will not do. More to the point, it has not done. All is not well in this country, and at bottom of most of our national dilemmas is the same unanswered question: not who are we, but why are we? It is a question our nationalists have tended not to ask, preferring to take our existence as a given: We exist because we should. We should exist because we do — if pressed, because we’re “different,” different from, you know, them. But a country that cannot quite think why it should exist -- or hasn’t bothered to try -- will be less able to hold firm when that existence is challenged. Or if the best it can offer is “because we’re different,” then it can have no answer when centrifugal minorities within its midst announce, “hold on — we’re different from you.”
A refocused debate -- one that asks, not what is our identity, but what is our purpose -- need not, therefore, be an academic or pointless exercise. Indeed, it is essential. If we do not define a common purpose for ourselves, a raison d’etre in the most literal sense, we will never achieve the unity that we lack -- the unity that we need. By unity, I do not mean we must all be of one mind. Quite the contrary: I mean the willingness to accept our differences, without threatening to break up the country over them. And by accepting our differences, I do not mean just in the easy way, of live and let live, that a liberal state makes possible, but in the hard way -- that is, where a decision goes against us. The willingness of the minority to accept the verdict of the majority is essential to democratic government, and it will only arise so long as majority and minority feel that they are part of the same community. That is simply not true at the national level, and it does no good to pretend otherwise.
To read some of the encomiums to our vaunted Canadian talent for compromise -- the notion, as Adam Gopnik puts it, that we have provided “a model for the world [of] common sense, toleration, co-existence” -- you’d never know that we’d spent most of the last fifty years with a knife at our throats, bargaining for the country’s life. Nor would one suspect that national government had become, for most purposes, impossible: that we could not enforce a common market within our borders, nor uphold common rights of citizenship, nor even pursue a coherent foreign policy, for fear of how one province or another (mostly one) might react. We cannot defend these national objectives, because the very idea that we are a nation -- to which that national government is answerable, and from which it derives its legitimacy -- has disappeared. The Parliament of Canada may be so bold as to recognize “the Québécois” as a nation, but it would not dare to say the same of Canada. We are a superstructure, a federation, perhaps a country -- but never a nation.
So the failure to ask the why question, to define a purpose for ourselves, to make the moral case for Canada, is of more than intellectual import: it has practical, real-world consequences. Indeed, it is surely one consequence of our national drift and confusion that so many of our most talented citizens, including our two celebrated Maclean’s debaters, have chosen to leave over the years -- as they continue to do. And these symptoms of our national malaise in turn are the source of a deep-seated spiritual crisis, the more profound for our indifference to it. It is embodied in that most Canadian of gestures, the shrug. We have taught ourselves to accept that, of course, our best and brightest will inevitably leave; that, of course, our national government is powerless to act; that, of course, should one-half of the population of one province vote to destroy the country, the rest of us would have no choice but to go along.
This last is the most damaging of all. We may never fully appreciate the harm done to our sense of self from indulging the separatist threat for so long: five decades in which we accepted, in effect, to live in the conditional tense, our survival contingent on making periodic sacrifices to the separatist minotaur and his nationaliste handlers. Secessionism, or the tolerance of it, relativized our very existence, and with it everything else. For if we cannot even say, as a first principle, that it is wrong, it is impermissible that our country might disappear from the world, then we will not stand for anything.
If we are ever to break out of this slough we must begin by shedding our apathy. We have to understand that it matters, this question of Canada. It matters, because Canada matters: Canada, not just as it is, but as it might be -- as a moral project, not just “a nice place to live.” We have to understand that there is more to life than mere existence; that identity is a chimera, incapable of definition except by the crudest sort of reductionism; that nations, as much as individuals, need meaning and purpose in their lives.
We have to stop catechizing the dogma of pragmatism: compromise is a virtue, but it is not the only virtue. We have to stop telling ourselves that we are a small country, and as such entitled to a small country’s expectations of itself. We aren’t that small, as it happens, in population: only in influence. We have to stop fetishizing our differences. We have to stop celebrating our mediocrity. We have to stop pretending that our weakness is our strength, stop splitting the difference -- as if we were some sort of neutral power, lacking either in commitment to our ideals or obligations to our allies. We have to stop shrugging our shoulders. We have to stop rolling our eyes.
4/02/2008
