What can this man mean? What on Earth is there left to be loyal to? To say that one wishes the country to remain whole is one thing, but to invest this numb instinct for the status quo with the ideal of loyalty suggests there is some active virtue to it. Surely, after all, some nations do not deserve to exist. What is it about the Canadian species that qualifies it for preservation?

In truth, not one in a hundred of those who profess to be loyal Canadians has the foggiest idea of what he is talking about. The country may remain as a geographic or political construct, but the idea of Canada - the animating principle, which alone allows us to believe that this existence is the right one, that what is should be - has long since disappeared. Whatever was noble or true or even coherent about Canada as an idea was beaten out of it years ago.

We are about to see the conclusion, that is, of a 30-year experiment in nationhood. The thesis of its progenitors in the political class was that a nation's conception of itself could be indefinitely suspended, its political structures endlessly rearranged, its history rewritten, every one of its symbols redecorated, without sustaining irreparable damage to its psyche. The past two generations of Canadians have thus inhabited a country in which everything, absolutely everything, even the country's existence - especially the country's existence - was up in the air.

The result of this prolonged episode of vandalism has been to loot the idea of Canada of any meaning. Canada has for many years been little more than a flag of convenience, to be used or discarded as suited one's needs: a piggy bank for the improvident, a haven for the mediocre, a synonym for socialism, a clutch of petty jealousies masquerading as a federation.

Canada is in this sense truly the first post-modern country on Earth. Not only have we elevated the sociological group and sub-group into the sole arbiter of identity, we have made it national policy. Not only are we a nation of victim groups - the Indians, the French, the United Empire Loyalists and beyond - we have defined ourselves collectively as a victim nation.

Most particularly, we have embraced with evangelical fervour the doctrine that all truth is relative, that nothing means anything unless it is ground through the mill of group interests. That everything was true, and nothing, was indeed the epistemological foundation of the Charlottetown accord, a document whose best defence was that, after all, it was only the Constitution: a text, that is, to be deconstructed like any other. It wasn't supposed to mean anything.

In Canada, by consequence, the most basic axioms of nationhood - that a nation-state is defined by common rights of citizenship, say, or by a common and undivided market - are subjects of great controversy, the argument dividing not so much on their merits or defects, but on whether it is appropriate even to express a preference for one state of affairs over another.

And so when it comes to cases, having lost the language of principle to the random usages of pragmatism, we are mute. What are we to say to native groups who assert their sovereignty in defiance of the law, when the same illegality has been the accepted cornerstone of three decades of debate over Quebec? How do we chastise members of the Royal Canadian Legion for excluding those they regard as alien from their meetings, when we are funding other groups to do the same?

It's not enough to say, as did The Globe, "remember what you fought for." That's easy: They fought for Canada. But the Canada they fought for, the object of their loyalty, no longer exists.