The Anti-Nation: Multiculturalism as the Third Solitudes

 

“today, Canada is really three nations: Quebec, the West, and the multicultural cities.” …..

Jan. 8, 2006. 08:54 AM

DAN DUNSKY

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Every country has its problematic national story: race in the United States, class in Britain, empire in Russia. Canada's problem is its perpetual identity crisis, a collective neurosis bred of being a confederation of English and French peoples -- what the novelist Hugh MacLennan once called the country's "two solitudes" -- and the small neighbour to one of history's few great nations. Canadians alternately worry about too much American attention – of being overwhelmed by the United States – and, as suggested by the title of a book published in 1999, Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American Policies Toward Canada (UBC Press), of being ignored by the United States. (It didn't help that the New Republic once judged the most boring headline ever to be "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.")

These twin pressures have always existed as an immutable fact for Canadians and likely always will. But American policymakers need to be far more interested in how we deal with these questions, since their answers will largely determine whether Canada is likely to remain a trusted ally in the unpredictable post-9/11 world or become a dangerously exposed northern flank.

The United States cannot "wall itself off" from Canada. Traffic across the 5,061-kilometre border, which Ronald Reagan once hailed as "a meeting place between great and true friends," cements the most comprehensive bilateral trading relationship in history. A truck crosses the U.S.-Canadian border every 2.5 seconds. Approximately $1.3 billion in two-way trade crosses the border every day Ρ $500 billion a year. More than 200 million two-way border crossings occur yearly, making the shared border the busiest international boundary in the world.

Nearly 25 per cent of American exports go north to Canada. More significantly, Canada is now America's largest source of crude oil and petroleum products. This may become more important, both because of continuing instability in the Persian Gulf and because, according to the Oil and Gas Journal, Canada contains, at 180 billion barrels, the world's second-largest proven reserves.

"Anyone watching what is happening up north will recognize that, before long, Canada will inevitably overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's oil giant," said Utah Senator Orrin Hatch recently. While chastising Canada for "irresponsible" talk of favouring China with increased oil exports as payback for the ongoing U.S.-Canadian softwood lumber dispute, Hatch nevertheless said that "we in this country don't want to be on Canada's shit list, ever."

Despite the senator's fears, however, Canada has much more to worry about than the U.S. Quite simply, the border is Canada's economic lifeline. Owing to the absence of a large domestic market and an abundance of natural resources, Canada must export to survive. And today the United States consumes fully 85 per cent of Canada's exports, accounting for an astounding 40 per cent of the country's GDP. In addition, many high-value Canadian products and services – for example, Canada's contribution to the U.S. space program – are designed to piggyback on existing American initiatives.

The signing of the U.S.-Canadian Free Trade Agreement in 1988 (and NAFTA in 1993) accelerated the vertical integration of Canada's economy with that of the United States. Some 50 per cent of Canadian foreign direct investment (FDI) is now aimed at the U.S., while more than 60 per cent of inbound FDI is American. According to Export Development Canada, a federal Crown corporation, "the import content used to make Canadian exports has been growing steadily and now averages around 35 per cent, and in many manufacturing industries [exceeds] 50 per cent." This integration has, in turn, increased Canadian productivity. In short, it is no exaggeration to say that Canada's primary national interest is located south of the border.

The shock on Canadian economic activity of the effective closure of the border after 9/11 demonstrated the country's vulnerabilities and highlighted Canada's interest in safeguarding its southern frontier. The nightmare scenario for Canadian politicians today is a successful attack on the U.S. homeland by a terrorist who enters through Canada.

Faced with this reality, Canada has strengthened its anti-terrorism posture. Over the past four years, in addition to specific action on the border, Parliament has passed Canada's first-ever Anti-Terrorism Act, a Public Safety Act, and a new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Further, the government has created the Office of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Canada's answer to the Department of Homeland Security, and has undertaken a foreign affairs and defence review. Canadian law now defines terrorism and designates terrorist groups operating in Canada. It is an offence to support terrorist groups or any activities related to such groups. And security, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been given enhanced powers of surveillance, arrest and detention, including preventive arrests or arrests without warrants.

Canada has established common procedures with the United States for the screening of high-risk goods in third countries prior to their arrival at North American airports and seaports, and the Department of Transportation has plans to increase the use of biometric systems and radiological scanners at Canadian points of entry.

Similarly, after 9/11, public pressure to rebuild the Canadian armed forces has grown dramatically. In its 2005 budget, the federal government pledged an additional $11 billion to the armed forces over five years, a move supported even by the dovish NDP. This marked the first substantial increase to the defence budget since cuts in the overall federal budget during the 1990s reduced military spending by some $25 billion.

And though Canada chose to sit out the Iraq War, Canadian Special Forces joined American units in Afghanistan in 2001 and later assumed the leadership of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2005, the Canadian military enhanced its Afghan force and set up base in Kandahar. Using language that Canadians had all but forgotten, Major-General Andrew Leslie, former commander of Task Force Kabul and deputy commander of ISAF, predicted that Canada may be in Afghanistan for a generation: "There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth dying for. There are things worth killing for."

In sum, Canada has acted to improve its overall security posture since 9/11. In keeping with the Canadian realist approach to bilateral continental relations, Canada has endeavoured to safeguard its economic interests by satisfying American security concerns, which, according to former Canadian ambassador Allan Gotlieb, "opens doors [in Washington] like no other key."

But if self-interest was clearly at work in Canada's post-9/11 security decisions, it is less clear whether the Canadian and American governments share the same global outlook. Whether Canada is a trusted ally of the United States Ρ insofar as the latter has defined its global roles and responsibilities Ρ is a more difficult question to answer. For, in many disturbing ways, Canada seeks to unify its chronically fractured sense of nationhood in opposition to the United States.

By and large, Canadians like Americans. A recent comprehensive study of the country's attitudes reveals that 70 per cent of Canadians "value and respect the United States and its citizens," while only 15 per cent admit to not liking or respecting "anything that the United States and its people stand for." The problem is that, today, Canada's political reality reinforces the minority anti-American sentiment.

Traditionally, Canadians distinguished themselves from Americans on the basis of having a different political system. Canadians, said the great literary critic Northrop Frye, are Americans who rejected the revolution. However, over the last half-century, as centrifugal forces threatened to tear the country apart, opinion-makers began to distinguish Canadians from Americans on the basis of having a different value system.

Alarmed at the rise of nationalism in French Canada, and fearful that as the British Empire receded from memory the United States would replace Great Britain in the affections of English Canadians, a new breed of federal politicians and bureaucrats attempted to erase Canada's very real divisions (and centuries of history) by appealing to a largely rhetorical set of "Canadian values" shared by all from sea to sea. Only by appealing to these values, Canadian nationalists believed, would Canada overcome its cultural neurosis and emerge as a single, unified state capable of resisting the inevitable lure of America.

So, where Americans were religious, Canadians were now secular. Where Americans were a martial people, Canadians were now pacifists. Where Americans were conservative, Canadians were now liberal. Where Americans were greedy capitalists, Canadians were now empathetic social democrats. And these beliefs – reinforced by a large contingent of nationalist and anti-American media – rubbed off on the population at large. Today, Canadians consistently tell pollsters that they are more tolerant, more respected by others, better educated and friendlier than Americans. Oh, yes: and more modest, too.

This pattern shows up in international matters, as well. Canadians are confirmed multilateralists (except when they seize Spanish and Portuguese fishing trawlers on the high seas, bomb Kosovo without UN authorization, and unilaterally claim a 320-kilometre marine exclusive economic zone). Canadians are a "moral superpower" (except when it comes to official development assistance, where Canada's contribution ranks among the lowest of wealthy nations, despite the prime minister's pledge that "our foreign policy must always express the concerns of Canadians about the poor and underprivileged of the world"). Canadians are environmentally conscious (except that they consume more energy per capita than all OECD countries except tiny Iceland and Luxembourg and have no feasible plan for implementing their Kyoto promises). Canadians believe in international law and normative foreign policy (except when government agencies look the other way as their own citizens suspected of being terrorists are "rendered" to Syria or Egypt). And on and on it goes. "A country that seeks great changes and lacks the willingness to run great risks dooms itself to futility," the 17th-century English statesman Lord Clarendon is said to have remarked. He could well have been describing Canada today.

This need to present a unique set of Canadian values is not without consequence. Consider just three recent episodes involving the governing Liberal Party. First, the communications director of former prime minister Jean ChrŽtien called George W. Bush a "moron," and the prime minister at first declined her resignation. Then, an MP was caught on camera saying "Damn Americans! I hate those bastards." And, in an "open letter" to Condoleezza Rice, former minister of foreign affairs Lloyd Axworthy called the United States a "virtual one-party state," devoid of the checks and balances the country "once espoused before the days of empire." This from someone whose own party has governed Canada for 70 of the past 100 years!

More seriously, despite the promising reaction to the terrorism threat, the prevailing Canadian-values and anti-American paradigm has influenced government policy on security issues. The most recent example is Canada's confused decision on ballistic missile defence (BMD). The government of Paul Martin had given every indication that Canada would sign on to the development and deployment of BMD, even ensuring that NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian air defence system, would be used as a key component in the program. However, the opposition – and, again, elite opinion – relentlessly attacked BMD as America's "missile defence madness," as "the weaponization of space," and as something that would "harm Canada's international reputation." Canadians, who had not been asked to contribute financially to the development of the system, and who could one day be protected by it, had been favourably predisposed to join. After the onslaught of negative attacks, however, they changed their minds. The government, fearing that as many as 20 members of its own caucus would vote with the opposition, decided to opt out of the program.

To understand how this anti-American bias is being strengthened by Canada's current political reality, one must begin with Lord Durham's observation in 1839 that Canada was "two nations warring in the bosom of a single state." Some 165 years later, Canada remains a country where, in the words of historian H. V. Nelles, "unambiguous unity and a singular identity" still largely elude its inhabitants. Except that today, Canada is really three nations: Quebec, the West, and the multicultural cities.

Quebec is already separate within Canada. To the average Quebecer, the Canadian federal government is essentially irrelevant. Quebecers make almost all their own political and social choices, and international markets are as influential an economic force in the province as is the rest of Canada, perhaps more so. Quebecers are more left-wing and statist than their English-Canadian counterparts and more culturally confident, too. The province has a thriving French-language magazine, book, film, Web and TV industry that utterly dominates public tastes, as opposed to the American products that resonate widely in the rest of Canada. No serious people today think that Quebecers want to return to past political arrangements or that Quebec nationalism is a waning fad. The province has never signed the 1982 Canadian constitution (though it is bound by its provisions) and support for independence hovers around the 50 per cent mark. A few weeks from now, Quebecers may well send more secessionists to represent them in the federal House of Commons than ever before.

Meanwhile, more than one-third of Western Canadians believe it is time to consider separating from Canada, according to 2005 survey data. Western Canadian alienation is nothing new, but it has lately taken a different form with the rise of the Conservative Party, which dominates the region and is the official opposition. The Conservative Party's intellectual roots owe more to the American conservative movement than to traditional Canadian Toryism: It is the party of smaller government, social conservatism and rural populism. Alberta, the engine of this new West, is Canada's wealthiest province, home to the country's galloping oil and gas industry, and enjoys a faster population growth than any other region. Nearly 60 per cent of Albertans supported the Iraq War, while fewer than a quarter of Quebecers did.

This leaves Canada's increasingly multicultural cities. Five cities are home to 43 per cent of Canadians; Toronto alone accounts for 17 per cent of the total population. Canada's cities are also the primary destination for immigrants and refugees to the country. About 20 per cent of Canada's residents Ρ and half of Toronto's Ρ are foreign-born, compared with 11 per cent in the United States, 5.6 per cent in France and 4 per cent in the U.K. Cities are therefore the testing ground for Canada's multicultural experiment.

However, multiculturalism rejects the idea that a single set of organized cultural beliefs and political principles are foundational to the nation's public life. So multicultural Canada cannot demand, as other countries can and do, that new arrivals adapt to the country's traditional cultural and political forms because, as the minister of citizenship and immigration has said, "we've developed, as a Canadian value, an appreciation of diversity – if not a complete nurturing of that diversity."

Furthermore, multiculturalism has today become an anti-Western impulse, specifically one that sees the United States as the locus of all manner of evil in the world. Therefore, large segments of Canada's urban areas should be seen to be, in effect if not in intention, hostile to the Western political tradition in general and to American ideals in particular.

In truth, Canada is now a country of three solitudes – four, if Canada's ever more assertive native population is included – where each has increasingly little in common with the others. Quebec's secessionist political parties obviously do not believe in trying to bridge these gaps. Significant portions of Canada's Conservative Party probably do not believe in doing so either, though the party will not acknowledge this publicly. This leaves the federal Liberals as the only major party attempting to be pan-Canadian in its appeal. And their only way of appealing to these disparate groups is by reference to the mythical Canadian values described earlier. "As the only truly national party," Prime Minister Martin said this month, "we will defend Canadian values."

However, Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system and demographic reality (highly urban Ontario and Quebec represent 60 per cent of the country's population) reduces Liberal pan-Canadianism to vote-getting among multicultural city dwellers and non-secessionist Quebecers. So a typical Liberal election campaign preys on fears of the country's disintegration at the hands of Quebec's secessionists and the loss of its unique social character and diversity at the hands of the Conservatives and their "hidden agenda" of "U.S.-style" policies.

The current campaign is a case in point: Here's the prime minister addressing Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe on Dec. 16: "Let me say also that I am a Quebecer, and you are not going to take my country away from me." And here's the prime minister on Jan. 3: "That is the clear difference of values that is illustrated by Stephen Harper's goal of a fend-for-yourself Canada and my vision of a country in which we strive together as a society toward a common good."

Ergo, the Liberals believe they are the only thing holding the country together and preventing its inevitable drift into the American orbit. Thus does the Liberal Party confuse its interests with those of Canada's citizens and use electoral politics to heighten anti-Americanism and Canadian regionalism.

However, as long as this Liberal electoral playbook results in election victories, don't expect Canada to ally itself too closely with the United States on any matter that doesn't directly affect the country's key economic interests.

Paul Martin is fond of saying that Canada "will set the standard by which other nations judge themselves." Politicians are often called upon to say silly things, but it is generally a good idea not to let rhetoric stray too far from reality. But contemporary Canada – with the exception of its competent economic management – leaps precisely that gulf between rhetoric and reality, perhaps overcompensating for deep feelings of inferiority. It is a leap that too many Canadians have grown accustomed to hearing and by now enjoy believing. And it will persist until the status quo of Canadian federalism changes: either by devolving much more power to the regions and allowing each to make its own political, economic and social choices, or by breaking apart. Either way, the narcissistic and corrosive platitudes of "Canadian values" and "national unity" should cease.

There is no shame in fundamentally altering Canada's political arrangements. Unlike the United States, the country was not founded on an ecstatic commitment to a great cause but on the more pedestrian grounds of being a good idea. Such pragmatism should welcome change, if change is best. Canadians should be mature enough to question whether the country created in 1867 is still acting in the best interests of all its citizens in 2006.

Just as few predicted the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of Canada also seems far-fetched. Nevertheless, American policymakers should consider the possibility. In 1999, President Clinton said the United States "valued our relationship with a strong and united Canada. We look to you; we learn from you. The partnership you have built between people of diverse backgrounds and governments at all levels is... what democracy must be about, as people all over the world move around more, mix with each other more, live in close proximity more."

But what if the "partnership" Canada has built no longer supports America's global roles and responsibilities? What if the essential condition for Canadian unity is an anti-American value system built into the national political process? In that case, it is unclear that Canada is a long-term ally of the United States out of anything more than economic necessity. In that case, is it still in America's interest to support Canadian unity?

 

ddunsky@tvo.org