Signs of progress are all around us

A few law-breaking yahoos misuse the Maple Leaf for their mislabelled “Freedom Convoys.” That should not deter the rest of us from holding up the Maple Leaf with pride, especially around Canada Day. Without crossing the line into obnoxious American patriotism.

Canada is not quite Nirvana on Earth, but it’s closer than most. The undeniable tensions — how best to come to terms with our genocidal treatment of the Indigenous peoples; racism toward BIPOC communities, especially two-tier policing; post-Sept. 11 Islamophobia, especially in Quebec; etc. — are, at last, being addressed. Not always well. Not fast enough.

But such issues now weigh heavily on the national conscience, signalling that we may be ready to try to tackle them without tearing each other apart.

It is not Pollyannaish to point out that Canada is the only western nation to have a national consensus on immigration and multiculturalism. That’s a miracle at a time when skin colour has become a major fault line of the West — white nationalists discomfited by the increasing browning of their nations.

The white world — North America, Europe and Australia — needs immigrants, but immigrants come primarily from non-white nations. They are generally well-educated, highly skilled, culturally confident and not all that obeisant to majoritarian dictates.

Many, fearful of change, getting the short end of automation and economic globalization, have become xenophobic, turning their fear and anger against the other. Their fear and anger are catered to, fanned and reaped by populists and demagogues. Thus, Donald Trump and his acolytes and their dog whistles to racism. Thus, Brexit. Thus, the plethora of bigoted right-wing parties and politicians across Europe.

The $3 trillion and 20 years spent on the war on terror not only hollowed out the treasuries and distorted public policy priorities but also weakened the common bond of decency. COVID did the rest. Now too many people find comfort in conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and denialism of science and common sense. That’s their right. But we have our rights, and duty, to guard against this madness.

The democratic liberal order is in disarray. But not in Canada. Our unique history and contemporary multiculturalism, constitutional as well as a lived reality, have provided the ballast. We have managed to make Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village a reality at home. Ours is the most successful heterogenous experiment in human history.

An overwhelming majority of Canadians proclaim pluralism and its progenitor, the Charter of Rights, as the defining values of the nation. Ahead of such traditional unifying symbols as hockey. Can you think of any people, anywhere, who vouch such fidelity to the fundamental principles embedded in a constitution?

In 2010, Phil Ryan, professor of public policy at Carleton University, wrote a book, “Multicultiphobia,” enumerating all the whining that had gone on over — let’s not mince words here — the loss of the assumed superiority of white Christians, both French and English. But such exclusivist claims have since disappeared, more or less. I called him the other day to ask what he thought of all the progress we’ve made.

He said: “The conservative critics that I examined had regularly predicted that multiculturalism would lead to the splintering of Canada. It seems instead to have led many Canadians to a more relaxed, less brittle, sense of Canadian identity.

“This process is certainly incomplete and uneven. But we should acknowledge and cherish the change, especially as we watch in horror as the nation to our south shatters, in part because of rigid nativist conceptions of America.”

Immigrants, especially visible minorities, who until not too long ago were stigmatized and denigrated as deviant from the Canadian norm and incompatible with Canadian values, are now among its most innovative, productive and loyal citizens — and our lawmakers, healers, health officials and caregivers.

No overtly anti-immigrant, let alone racist, party or politician can find much success in Canada, unlike in the U.S. and Europe. Those who have tried have failed. Maxime Bernier. And the Conservative party that got toppled in 2015 in part due to its poisonous campaign of hate against Muslims. Canadians had had enough of Stephen Harper’s divisiveness.

Where governments acted badly, the courts often came to the rescue, upholding the rights of citizens, especially Indigenous peoples, women and minorities. In the post-Sept. 11 era, Canada was the only western nation to have the confidence and the decency to hold two judicial inquiries into wrongs done to Muslims Maher Arar and Omar Khadr, with the complicity of Canadian security services. It was the courts that delivered justice to three Arabs who had been tortured in Syria and Egypt. It was the courts that ruled against people being held on secret evidence under what were called “security certificates.” Canada has its red lines.

In our home and native and adopted land, everything is always up for discussion. Nothing is frozen in time. Testimony to a nation in constant dialogue with itself — forever evolving, so far for the better.