There is, it must be said, something truly Canadian about the flag fiasco. In what other country in the world could citizens be persuaded to fly the flag only if the government paid for it? Half a million discount patriots answered their nation's call, or rather called their nation, at 1-888-FLY-FLAG, and half a million free flags have been sent their way, at a cost to the treasury (so far) of $23-million. Operators are standing by.

If nationalism in Canada has been reduced to an infomercial, it has been a long time in the making. Canadians have been taking their country for granted, as the Prime Minister put it not so long ago, from the start. When Sir Isaac Brock set out to defend Canada from imminent American invasion in 1812, he was distressed to find the event aroused almost universal indifference among the general public, except for those recent arrivals in Upper Canada who actively welcomed the prospect.

In our time, the chief impediment to the emergence of a genuine sense of nationhood has been, oddly, the efforts of the nation-builders. For a generation or more, nationalism in Canada has been caught between two conflicting definitions of the nation, neither satisfactory in itself. On the one hand were the cultural nationalists, for whom the essence of nationhood was difference: namely, the profound supposed differences between Canadians and Americans. In pursuit of the chimera of national identity, the nationalists felt entitled to define in fairly precise terms what being Canadian meant: aside from not being American, it entailed the worship of VIA Rail, and Air Canada, and a clutch of other statist idols. As time wore on, many Canadians found this increasingly difficult, finally embracing free trade in the face of the most strident appeals of the cultural nationalists.

On the other hand, there were the national unitarians, for whom Canada avowedly meant nothing at all. Or if it meant anything, it meant an aversion to fixed principles, save only a dogmatic devotion to pragmatism. Canada, in this account, was wholly explicable in terms of compromise, a series of deals between mutually hostile groups -- racial, linguistic, regional, even the "two founding genders" of Judy Rebick's fantasia -- who shared no common interests or values, as other nations might. For its adherents in the political class, like the cultural nationalists, this vision of the nation had the inestimable advantage of making their own services indispensable, as brokers of the national deal. Yet this, too, has reached its terminus: in the Charlottetown referendum, Canadians rebuffed a document that would have turned Canada, quite literally, into a meaningless country.

If the two ideas of nationhood -- Canada means nothing, and Canada means these six things -- seem contradictory, they nevertheless played mutually reinforcing roles. It was easier to believe that Canadian nationhood meant nothing if you could convince yourself that, indeed, there was no such thing as a Canadian nation: if, that is, you accepted the fundamental premise of cultural nationalism, that nations are rooted in cultural and ethnic difference, the attempt to construct a pseudo-ethnic nation out of the Canadian identity soon paled beside the more obvious differences that existed between Canadians. Likewise, if avoidance of ideology was a fundamentally Canadian trait, it had the additional virtue of distinguishing us from the famously ideological Americans.

The result of all this tinkering about with the national consciousness is there for anyone to see: having learned to distrust these false visions of nationhood, Canadians have been left with nothing in their place. Possessed of such a weakened sense of self, they have been unable to offer any serious resistance, as the integrity of the nation has been subjected to a series of ever bolder challenges: from native leaders declaring that Canadian law will no longer apply on their lands, to provincial premiers ordering the national government to withdraw from any concern with the health and welfare of Canadians, to the revolutionary pretensions of the secessionists in Quebec.

It is all coming to a head. We are forced, finally, to decide: Are we a nation?

What does this nation stand for? And what, if anything, will it not stand for?

We have at last begun to realize that a new world nation, such as our own, cannot be rooted in identity, whether of the ethnic or pseudo-ethnic variety; that it must believe in something, other than what it is not; that there is more to life than being different. If we are ever to withstand the factional forces that would tear the country apart, we will have to put the nation on a more principled foundation. We will have to discover the moral case for Canada.

Five hundred thousand free flags are not enough: it's what the flag represents.