Canada: Proudly Nothing at All

How a post-national state became the Switzerland of self-loathing

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Canada has always been a country struggling to define itself, which is the polite way of saying we’ve been in a prolonged identity crisis since 1867. The Americans fought a revolution; the French had a bloody revolution; the Australians sprang from a penal colony. We… had a series of conferences. Our great founding drama is essentially a group of men in frock coats politely agreeing to be a country.

For decades, our national identity was supposedly built on three pillars:

1. We are not American.

2. We are nice.

3. We once sent peacekeepers somewhere.

These pillars are as load-bearing as the Ikea desk I made that swayed when you turned the fan toward it. The “not American” thing is like defining your marriage by saying, “Well, at least I didn’t marry Gary from accounting.” The “nice” thing mostly means “passive-aggressive in a flannel shirt.” And as for peacekeeping — well, our blue helmets now see less action than Greta Thunberg at a Fort McMurray job fair.

Ask a Canadian where they’re from, and you’ll rarely hear “Canadian.” Instead, we get the hyphenation pageant: Italian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Indigenous-Canadian, Lebanese-Canadian, Ukrainian-Canadian. I occasionally call myself Irish-Canadian. At least I like Guinness.

My family arrived in 1904, and I’ve been to Ireland once — a trip which consisted of being poisoned with industrial-strength laxatives by an Irish cousin. I am as Irish as a bowl of “Lucky Charms”, — which, in case you didn’t know, are an American invention with a leprechaun mascot conceived by a marketing guy in Minnesota.

Multiculturalism, in theory, is our grand achievement: a place where every culture can thrive without fear of oppression or assimilation. In practice, it’s a polite balkanisation.

Sociologist Jeffrey G. Reitz has noted that multiculturalism can leave communities functioning as self-contained islands. And islands rarely decide to become continents. We are a patchwork quilt of little worlds stitched together under one flag, and everyone insists the quilt is lovely — but no one ever wraps themselves in it.

Into this void wandered Justin Trudeau, declaring in 2015 that Canada is a “post-national state.” Translation: “We’re so enlightened, we don’t need an identity.” Another translation: “We have no idea who we are, and that’s a feature, not a bug.”

The absence of any unifying story has left us defining ourselves almost entirely by negative space. Ask a Canadian what makes them proud, and they’ll say: “We’re not American.” Which is just a low-rent version of the old English boast, “At least we’re not French.” This might pass for nationalism in the staff room of the CBC, but it’s hardly the stuff of great nations.

Worse, our replacement for identity has become an elaborate ritual of self-loathing. Yes, Canada has done terrible things in its past — turning away Jewish refugees after WWII being one of the most shameful examples. A mature nation confronts its sins and corrects them.

We, on the other hand, have decided to brand ourselves with them. Trudeau, never one to miss a chance for theatrical contrition, has declared Canada a “genocidal nation.” Under his leadership, national virtue is measured in public self-abasement. The more ashamed you are, the more “moral” you are.

It’s the political equivalent of posting a gym selfie without actually lifting anything.

This is not humility; it’s narcissism in a hairshirt. We use our guilt as a social credential. We’re not a country building a better future; we’re a country rehearsing for a permanent apology tour.

Meanwhile, our so-called cultural identifiers are a bad tourist brochure. Hockey. Tim Hortons. Saying “sorry” when someone else bumps into you. These are national quirks, not national values. Can we seriously build a 21st-century identity on double-doubles and over-apologising? The New York Times once joked that Canadians are “apologetically apologetic,” which is both funny and depressingly accurate.

Other countries manage diversity without losing their core story. Australia celebrates its Greek bakers, Vietnamese fishmongers, and Lebanese butchers — but expects everyone to belt out “Advance Australia Fair” without irony. The United States, for all its chaos, still sells the American Dream like it’s a lifetime warranty.

Canada? We’re like the world’s polite roommate: we’ll let you store your stuff in our fridge, but don’t ask us to cook dinner together.

Our multiculturalism has been so strenuously non-assimilationist that ethnic identity now routinely outranks national identity. And while diversity can be a strength, it is not an identity. It is simply the state of being different.

And here’s the problem: we’ve confused multiculturalism with moral relativism. Our unspoken national motto seems to be: all cultures are equal. That’s not a value; that’s institutionalised idiocy. If all things are equal, why do we choose where we live, vacation, marry, work, study, and worship? Why do we make any decisions at all?

Why not randomise everything — spin a globe for your honeymoon, marry the first stranger you see at the bus stop, wear a sarong in January and a parka in July? If it’s all the same, why discriminate between sushi and poutine, Beethoven and Bieber? The truth, of course, is that no one lives like that — because deep down, everyone knows all things are not equal.

But in public, we keep up the polite pretence. And so we become a nation of morons — congratulating ourselves for elevating “difference” above discernment, while quietly making every life choice in favour of what we think is better.

Meanwhile, our national ego is measured in Olympic medal counts. For two weeks every couple of years, we stop apologising long enough to crow about our curling silver or our speed-skating bronze — as if the true measure of a nation is whether a curler from Moose Jaw can beat someone from Oslo on ice.

Our foreign policy is no less comical. We had “Trudeau the Elder” winning a Nobel Peace Prize for peacekeeping. We now have “Trudeau the Younger” winning international attention for turning state visits into a Bollywood costume party. Foreign leaders talk trade; we talk about our socks. It’s the Mr. Dressup School of International Affairs.

And as for peacekeeping, our last serious deployment was so long ago it’s now the stuff of high-school history class. We cling to Lester Pearson’s 1956 Suez Crisis glory like a high school quarterback still telling you about his game-winning touchdown from forty years ago — except Pearson actually won, and we just keep showing up to the reunion with old game footage.

It’s as if I went around bragging about winning the gold medal at the science fair in grade 5 — a feat involving vinegar, baking soda, and a papier-mâché volcano — and expected it to still count for something in geopolitics.

So what’s left? More years of Trudeau’s post-national smugness? More competitive guilt pageants where politicians and activists vie to see who can apologise hardest for history? Or do we decide that we want to be something?

If not, Canada risks becoming not a country but an address — a polite waystation between more interesting places. A nation of hyphenated solitudes, occasionally united in cheering for a hockey team, usually just in time for them to lose in the first round.

And if being “not American” is our main selling point, then we’re not a nation — we’re a negative space in someone else’s story. And if our official creed remains that all cultures are equally valid. At the same time, our Prime Minister brands us “genocidal.” We’ve achieved the ultimate Canadian paradox: a people too polite to assert values, too self-loathing to believe in them, and too stupid to see the contradiction.

Still, perhaps we’ll get lucky and a Canadian team will win the Stanley Cup this century. But don’t hold your breath — we’ll need it for all the apologies.

And presiding over this whole charade is the CBC — the taxpayer-funded cathedral of post-national smugness, where every broadcast is a liturgy in the religion of “we’re not American” and every sermon ends with a moral lecture you already heard at your kid’s school assembly. For $1.2 billion a year, it’s the most expensive mirror Canada ever bought to admire its mediocrity.

In the end, Trudeau, Carney, and the rest provide the costume changes. At the same time, the CBC supplies the choir, and together they keep belting out the same tuneless dirge: Canada is nothing in particular, and we should be insufferably proud of that.

It is the national lullaby of a country that mistakes sedation for unity, moral relativism for virtue, and an absence of definition for the pinnacle of civilisation.

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