Canada we live in falls so short of myths I was raised on

I was in California when the socalled Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa began, and the main thing I felt about it was a profound sense of second-hand embarrassment. Driving around Los Angeles listening to NPR’s reporting on the protests, I found myself desperately hoping that I wouldn’t get pulled into a conversation with an American who would ask me to account for what was going on at home.

The uncomfortable conversation I feared never did come to pass, but the question remains: why did the prospect of having to talk to an American about my country’s domestic politics make me so uneasy?

Perhaps some part of me still naively expected to be able to interact with the rest of the world with a touch of superiority about Canada’s moral goodness relative to other nation-states. I have distinct memories of being taught in junior-high social studies that Canada’s distinct identity in relation to other western nations was derived from our commitment to the ideal of the multicultural mosaic as opposed to the assimilative melting pot, or from our provision of universal health care to all Canadians.

In this framing, Canadian identity was rooted in a shared set of values that was supposed to engender a particular way of life which would form the basis for our “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term. Our imagined community, and its associated national mythology, was built on a framework of centre-left policy ideas.

The problem with any national mythology, though, is the very fact that it’s mythic. At any moment, the façade can begin to crumble, or can be broken down deliberately by people determined to expose a reality beneath.

Canada only exists as a nationstate as a result of the historic and ongoing genocide and subjugation of Indigenous peoples, and so far almost all attempts at articulating a distinct national identity have tried to paper over that reality. It’s not hard to understand why — people are only willing to rally around a flag that stands for atrocities if they can be convinced that those atrocities were necessary evils, or else distracted from remembering that those atrocities happened at all.

This alone is a foundational problem for Canadian identity. However, even for people who have historically been able to subsume themselves in the good vibes of an identity built around centre-left policies, Canadian identity is becoming shaky.

If your national identity is built around policy ideas but the promises of those ideas remain unfulfilled for large swaths of the population, how stable will that identity be in the long run? For how long will citizens willingly buy into the myth?

It feels ludicrous to build our identity around universal health care when millions of Canadians are unable to access a regular primary care provider, or around multiculturalism when Muslim Canadians are routinely subject to Islamophobic hate crimes, to name just two fractures in the mythology. These tensions are becoming increasingly difficult for many Canadians to swallow, which has led to a sense of ambivalence on the question of national identity.

In the absence of a compelling identity narrative, it’s no surprise that some Canadians, feeling disaffected and insecure about their futures, have turned toward reactionary movements that present new concepts of national identity rooted in white nationalism or American-style liberty, concepts which are often found operating in tandem. We need look no further than the “Freedom Convoy,” where white supremacists, defacing public property with swastika graffiti, found common cause with protesters who accused the federal government of fascism for imposing vaccine mandates.

This movement needs to be condemned forcefully by right- and left-wing politicians alike, lest the narratives it presents about what sort of country Canada should be take even deeper root. More than that, though, we need a compelling alternate framework for what Canadian identity in the 21st century should be about, and what we should be striving for as a society.

Income and wealth inequality; inequitable access to health care; lack of affordable housing; the continuing violent seizure of land from Indigenous peoples; escalating hatred towards racial, religious, and gender minorities; these all strike me as urgent problems in need of our attention. Activists have spent years building coalitions to address these issues, but in many cases lip service from political leaders has taken the place of any serious action to tackle them.

Given all of this, I don’t feel particularly proud to be Canadian, but I don’t feel ashamed of my nationality either. The fact that I’m Canadian is a product of the lottery of birth rather than an active choice I made, and so to feel strongly one way or another about this state of affairs feels foolish.

What being Canadian means to me, in this moment, is that I have an obligation to try and assist in the sort of coalition-building mentioned above. I hope that one day as a result of collective efforts both large and small, we will all live in a country where renters no longer routinely have to spend half their monthly incomes on housing, where “universal health care” is truly universal, and where Indigenous communities are no longer subject to violent police incursions on their sovereign territory.

Until then, I’ll fly the flag, but not proudly.