Does Canada Exist?
Righteous idealism about immigration has wrecked the liberal project across the world.
, our Canada correspondent (and more), on Justin Trudeau’s political failure, and what we can learn from it.
— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor
One of the original proposed names for Monty Python’s Flying Circus was supposedly “Whither Canada?” This once comical question is now being asked sincerely and with increasing urgency — and not just by Canadians. For the declining fortunes of the United States’ northern neighbor have reached the point that they have generated unprecedented attention. After a long post-Cold War period of steady growth, Canada’s economy has flatlined, with median earnings falling below the poorest U.S. states. Things have gotten so bad that even The Economist has noticed.
In the wake of the announcement of his resignation earlier this week, much of this attention has understandably been directed at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What is easy to forget in light of all the focus on Trudeau himself is how over the past decade Canada embraced policies that were once viewed as the vanguard of modern global bien pensant politics. From the time that his Liberal Party government took power in 2015, Canada has run a kind of controlled experiment in post-national governance.
At the beginning of his tenure as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau announced that “There is no core identity in Canada,” going on to declare it the “first postnational state.” And his government practiced what he preached, opening its borders to unprecedented immigration, resulting in one of the highest annual rates of any country in the world. The overall population is now well over 41 million — an astonishing gain of 15% during the present government’s tenure that is primarily attributed to new arrivals. Indeed, for several years now, as much as 99 percent of the country’s population growth is due to newcomers from abroad.
A country can have immigration of course, but it cannot make being the recipient of immigration its raison d’être. It is one thing to say that a liberal society must be able to accommodate pluralism, which indeed it ought to. It is another, however, to insist on pluralism as the highest political value to the exclusion of any national identity.
Now it is true that Canadians have been historically reticent about defining themselves too strongly, particularly in comparison to Americans. Being a Canadian meant having general access to the same material advantages of as any other developed country — minus much of the sturm und drang of U.S. politics, plus universal healthcare.
But the present government has gone beyond this tendency in its rejection of a Canadian nation — even a multiethnic one — whose interests it might be obliged to represent. This denigration of anything like a binding Canadian identity has spilled over from the economic to the political realm, with allegations of treason hanging over Parliament. It seems that the country’s leaders denied that Canadian citizenship had any meaning, and people believed them. Indeed, record numbers of Canadians are now leaving altogether.
Alongside a rhetoric of moral universalism was a vague understanding that population growth would drive economic growth — conveniently then, doing good and doing well might be synonymous.
But this has not been borne out in practice; instead, unrestricted immigration managed to produce a housing crisis in the world’s second-largest country. Meanwhile, diaspora politics increasingly dominates the domestic political scene at all levels of government, with an irruption of formerly unheard-of anti-Semitic episodes a notable side-effect. One thing the activities of the Trudeau government have clearly revealed was that in the absence of a unifying national spirit, what prevailed was not some more enlightened form of politics, but an ethos of cowardly expediency at the top and vicious interest group politics below.
As a result, we are witnessing a case study in how to induce national decline in the absence of war or other external shock. Over the better part of a decade, Canada has become a far poorer country to the point that its G7 membership is now in question. But while lagging economic indicators are proving most relevant for ordinary citizens, the problems here are ultimately political.
True, none of these problems are irreversible. Canada remains a fundamentally wealthy and fortunate country in its geographic situation and distribution of natural resources, and many of its problems are fixable at the policy level.
But policy can only achieve so much. A shared national understanding of some kind is necessary, both when it comes to prioritizing among competing policy objectives and in maintaining democratic legitimacy when there are costs to be borne by the electorate.
This last point is important, because Trudeau’s vision — which was also the vision of political elites in Canada and elsewhere — presupposed an opposition between democracy and nationalism. His postnational shift was thus thought to be a shift toward a more democratic future. The events of the past decade have done much to falsify this belief.
After all, the radical changes to Canada’s immigration regime were a reflection of elite rather than popular preferences. But more fundamentally, a political franchise that is open to all comers necessarily dilutes the democratic prerogatives of actual citizens. And more profoundly still, a government that is beholden to everyone is beholden to no one. It is the boundaries of a given country that make democratic legitimacy possible at all: a representative government has to represent a particular community of people. And in our world, such communities are ineluctably national.
Last month, president-elect Donald Trump sparked much discussion when it was reported that he had semi-comically suggested, in a private meeting with Trudeau, that Canada become America’s 51st state. He has since reiterated this proposal following the announcement of Trudeau’s resignation. This has prompted an uncommonly unified response among Canadians, from Trudeau himself to his chief political rival Pierre Poilievre (Shark Tank investor and public irritant Kevin O’Leary appears to be an exception).
This is not itself remarkable; external threats have long been a key factor in the processes of state formation, as well as being useful for maintaining political cohesion. This is sometimes referred to as “Sallust’s theorem,” after the Roman historian who posited that the fear of external enemies had long contributed to unity and public virtue within Rome prior to its final defeat of Carthage.
But what is at issue here is not so much a question of banding together for security, because this proposal does not really threaten the lives of Canadian citizens (and indeed some have noted that it might even have material benefits). The real question is whether there is anything distinctively Canadian that citizens might adhere to, even at cost to themselves, because it is theirs.
Certainly, Trump’s bluster offers an opportunity to take up this question. For, nationalism goes hand-in-hand with state formation, and there has been no shortage of nationalisms that have formed in the crucible of conflict or occupation or foreign threat. Yet an opportunity is really all this is; the belated apprehension that a country might require a “core identity” is not the same thing as actually providing one.
I sometimes think of this as the “flux capacitor” problem of nationhood. Recall that Back to the Future brilliantly avoids getting bogged down in exposition by having Doc Brown explain that it is thanks to the flux capacitor that the DeLorean can travel back in time. And what is the flux capacitor? Why, it’s the thing that makes time travel possible. This is a great screenwriter’s trick, but it is not so readily available in the real world. One can say that a national identity is what makes social and political cohesion possible, but ordinary people are unlikely to be satisfied by that explanation alone. They will of course care about the content of that identity, and here neither recourse to abstract ideals nor references to clichéd cultural signifiers (Mounties! Maple syrup!) will cut it.
Nonetheless, Trump’s shot across Canada’s bow requires a response. Like many things involving the once and future U.S.president, it has both farcical and serious implications. Logistical issues aside, why shouldn’t a country that abjures all national identity and interests seek advantage in a kind of geopolitical merger? This is far from the only question the next government of Canada will find itself obliged to answer, as it seeks to reverse the losses of the past decade.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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Terrific piece after the lionization of Trudeau and, dare we say, Angela Merkel
The woke promotion of micro identies at the price of the larger sense of Western Culture has leached the vitality from most Western countries. The weakness and moral confusion is unmissable. Fortunately the rot has recently accelerated to the point that it feels life-threatening, and natural pride and survival instincts have clicked in.