903...How I Understand Canada

From Michael Ignatieff's True Patriot Love.

We Canadians have trouble believing in ourselves because we live next door to a country that has mythic dimensions. It is also an invented country, but its act of self-invention has proven to be the most stupendously successful in history.

Canadians can only envy the scriptural sublime of America's Founding Fathers and the self-confidence that the American faith seems to engender in every citizen. In our neighbours' infuriating sense of self-importance, Canadians glimpse how love of country penetrates the souls of its citizens, how profoundly it shapes the character of a people. We wonder why such faith does not inhabit our own souls.

Next to the American experiment, Canada's very identity can appear to be nothing more than what Sigmund Freud once called the narcissism of minor difference. After all, we look like them. We buy the same cars. We dress and talk the same way. We holiday in the same places. We root for the same baseball and football teams.

Our differences appear minor and our emphasis upon their importance can seem self-absorbed and trivial. We care more than we should about the distinctive vowel sounds that mark out a Canadian speaking in an American crowd. We care more than we like to admit about beating the Americans at hockey. We know these are small things, but we invest them with defining significance.

We are right to do so. While some of our differences count as minor, others are major indeed. They rebelled against the British. We stayed loyal. They founded a republic. We sought responsible government within the empire. We speak French. They don't.

We owe the Americans much -- it's hard to imagine how we could have remained either free or independent had they not too been a free and independent people.

But our freedom is different, both in general and in detail: no right to bear arms north of the 49th, and no capital punishment either. They had the Wild West. We had the Mounties. Rights that are still being fought for south of the border -- public health care, for example -- have been ours for a generation. A woman's right to choose is secure here; there it remains contested ground. These differences are major, and the struggle to maintain them, while pursuing ever deeper integration with their richer economy, is the enduring challenge, not just of our identity but of our statecraft.

Establishing a uniting national myth beside a nation as powerful and as supremely gifted at myth-making as the United States is never going to be easy. The country that gave us Hollywood and Disneyland casts a glare that makes it hard to see the Canadian shape in the snow.

Besides, we cannot create a single myth, like the United States, because we have three competing ones, English Canadian, French Canadian and aboriginal. Three peoples share a state without sharing the same sense of the country at all. It is small wonder, then, that we have never been sure we can continue to imagine a common future.

Nearly 20% of our citizens are also foreign-born, from every country under the sun. Only Australia counts as many foreign-born nationals among her citizens. These Canadians frequently hold passports from other countries and import the attachments, passions and, occasionally, the ethnic and religious rivalries of their nations of birth.

The loyalties of new Canadians are complex, transitional, sometimes divided. When granting them citizenship, their new country does not ask them to choose Canada and renounce all others. Even so, new Canadians have turned out to be among the most devoted citizens in the country.

Why? Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destinies. Despite these challenges, or because of them, most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.

Imagining what we share is not easy. Imagining this land is never just to imagine it as it appears to you alone. It is to imagine it as an Inuit person might see it, a vast white place where the only sign of Canada is the Mountie detachment in the snow-girt command post at the edge of the settlement.

To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.

To imagine Canada, you have to walk a mile in the moccasins of others. In other countries, where language, ethnicity and myths of origin are shared, less empathy is required and more simple identification, one citizen to the other, may be possible. Not with us. To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into the mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.

You have to imagine the country as a Quebecois might see it, a Quebecois who never felt attachment to the flag, to Parliament, to the memories of sacrifice that move you, sometimes, to tears. This is a fellow citizen who voted oui in referendums in 1980 and 1995 to break up the country, or, as it was presented at the time, to negotiate a new relationship between a sovereign Quebec and the rest of Canada. These referendums were the defining crisis of our recent history. We came within an inch of dissolution. We are still absorbing the lessons of a near-death experience.

One of these lessons is that to survive as a country, we have to imagine what we have trouble understanding. We have no choice. A contract of mutual indifference between French and English will only defer the evil day. We must learn to live together now.

The Quebecois who lost the two referendums remain fellow citizens of Canada. They may not want to be here at all, and may still dream of independence one day. Yet we must all work together, if only until the next moment of rupture. Those Quebecois will have to understand the intensity of an attachment to Canada they do not feel themselves. We all have to understand, if not respect, the dream they live for. To be a citizen of Canada is to imagine the feelings of those who do not believe what we believe.

In Canada, empathy has to encompass 33 million people, with competing and conflicting myths of origin, spread across four time zones, in five distinct economic regions, speaking, at least at home, almost every language spoken in the world and, in public, two official languages. In spite of everything, we have managed to keep this project in being for one hundred and forty years. This is no mean feat and, in a world ravaged by difference, it is our example to the world.

WFDS