Andrew Potter: Don't give up on Canada, get to work

Enjoy Canada Day everyone. Get a good rest. You're going to need it.

By: Andrew Potter

We took the kids up to the Claude Robillard sports complex in Montreal on Sunday to watch the last day of the Canadian national track and field championships, which doubled as the qualifying trials for our Olympic and Paralympic teams heading to Paris at the end of the month. It was a gorgeous summer morning, and the stands were packed with fans cheering on the athletes hailing from every corner of the Dominion. 

There was a pleasantly casual patriotism to the proceedings. After the big races, the athletes who had won or qualified for Paris would wrap a Canadian flag around their shoulders and do the de rigeur little jog-past in front of the stands, then pose for the cameras holding a novelty cheque-sized mockup of an Air Canada flight ticket. Some would do an interview on the infield, in French or English or a mix of both: Quebec runner Audrey Leduc talked about how she was excited to go to Paris to represent Canada and collect a lot of pins, while after his 200 metre victory, veteran sprinter Aaron Brown of Toronto said that he always felt an extra boost when he was running in front of a crowd full of people waving the maple leaf. My favourite, though, was the B.C. shot putter Greg Stewart, who celebrated his qualification by wrapping a flag around his seven-foot-two frame and lying down on the grass to soak it all in (the photo I snapped of him is at the top of this column.)

It’s hard to think of a more enjoyable weekend preamble to Canada Day, and it was a nice counterpoint to what is, to put it mildly, an uncertain time for Canada. Over the past few months, the notion that “Canada is broken” has gone from a CPC campaign meme to a widely acknowledged truism. An Ipsos poll published this past week reported that 70 per cent of those surveyed (and 78 per cent of those 18-34) agree that Canada is broken, while Canadians across the board feel generally less proud to be Canadian than they did five years ago.  In recent weeks, both of your Line editors have written columns (Matt here, Jen here) in which they have at least partially endorsed the prospect of giving up on Canada, psychologically anyway, if not (yet) physically.

But what does it mean for a country to be broken? I suppose it depends on what people think goes into making it work properly in the first place. 

A decade or so ago, in the lead-up to what was expected to be a coast-to-coast-to-coast celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary, Statistics Canada conducted a survey asking respondents what they considered to be our important national symbols. The top answer was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, followed by the Canadian flag, the national anthem, the RCMP, and hockey.

A similar poll conducted around the same time by Leger Marketing asked “what keeps Canada united?” and gave respondents 11 options from which to choose. The highest-rated answer, chosen by a quarter of respondents, was again the Charter, followed by health care (22 per cent) and hockey (12 per cent). Down at the bottom of the rankings were official bilingualism and the equalization system, both at four per cent, and the monarchy at two per cent. 

Curiously absent from these lists are the sorts of things that you might expect to be seen as holding a country together — a common language, or ethnicity, or culture, or a shared history. Instead, it’s a mishmash of political institutions, government programs, and national symbols.  

That shouldn’t be all that surprising though, given Canada’s origins. As Alan Cairns liked to remind us, there were no Canadians, in the contemporary sense, prior to 1867. That is, Canadians weren’t a natural kind; there did not exist a pre-existing group of people who saw themselves as a people, for whom the creation of the federal state of Canada was necessary for their autonomy, their self-government and their self-determination. 

What this meant is that along with the Canadian nation-building exercise, there had to be a parallel project of creating Canadians themselves — a people who saw themselves as a part of a shared community of destiny, working on a common national project. In the absence of a shared history or language or ethnicity, it is hardly surprising that Canadians ended up seeing the national identity embodied in Canada’s political institutions and their symbolic representations. 

There is a problem with this, though, which is that it introduces an essential fragility to the exercise of citizen-building, where the perceived strength of the nation is closely tied to the actual popularity and the performance of the government of the day. Canadian nationalism is therefore deeply political in precisely this sense: the more people dislike, or feel alienated from, the government and its related institutions in Ottawa, the more they tend to believe that Canada as a whole isn’t working. 

It’s instructive, then, to revisit those polls from a decade ago listing the things that Canadians saw as holding the country together. The Charter, which came so close to catalyzing a genuinely pan-Canadian rights-based patriotism, has now become pretty much a dead letter thanks to the fantastically reckless use of the notwithstanding clause by various provinces. The RCMP is a wreck of an institution that seems incapable of reforming itself. In pretty much every province, the health-care system is in a steadily deepening crisis. Our symbols aren’t doing much better: the prime minister let the flag sag at half mast for half a year in a poorly thought-out attempt at reconciliation. There’s been no best-on-best international men’s hockey for a decade, since the NHL pulled its players out, while the Stanley Cup has been parked south of the border for 30 years and counting.

And so on. Given all this, it would be weird if Canadians weren’t feeling less than enthusiastic about the place. We are definitely in a funk.

But here’s the thing: Broken doesn’t mean finished, and broken doesn’t mean hopeless. Broken just means we have work to do, if we think it is worth doing. And that has to mean more than just kicking out the bums in Ottawa at the next opportunity. It means fixing our institutions, giving fresh life and meaning to old symbols, and, more generally, finding reasons to cheer for one another. The Oilers might have broken our hearts down in Florida last weekend, but Canada is through to the quarter finals of the Copa next Friday. Our swimmers are getting ready to storm the pool in Paris. And best-on-best hockey is coming at the Four Nations Face Off in February.

More than anything, we just need to recommit to doing what we’ve been trying to do for the past 157 years — making Canadians, out of those who are already here along with the hundreds of thousands of newcomers who are arriving every year. It’s easier said than done , of course; if it was easy then we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.

Happy Canada Day everyone. Enjoy it, because tomorrow you have a choice to make. You can join the give-up-on-Canada crowd, or you can roll up your sleeves. 

Andrew Potter lives in Montreal. Follow him at his newsletter Nevermind: The Forgotten History of Generation X.

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