The smart bet is that the ballot box question in the next federal election will be about national survival. Most of the debate will focus on economic choices, productivity, tariffs, trade and foreign policy. But what about culture?
To be a nation, we have to feel that we belong together, that we are more than a string of city lights in the night sky lined up along American border. It’s suddenly popular to be proudly Canadian — to vehemently publicly diss the Americans, and want to buy Canadian. But aside from being justifiably angry at Trump, what is this based on?
Our national government is meant to foster a sense of Canadian identity. What are those running for office putting on offer? What is their vision of Canada?
Mark Carney’s Liberals have the toughest challenge. For more than a decade, the Liberals ran a government that sought to reconfigure our national identity — eliminating Canadian symbols that the intelligentsia told us were shameful. Canadians had much to apologize for. We needed to decolonize, to become more diverse. Above all, the story was of the harm caused by Canadian history.
It ought to be clear now that this decade of guilt-ridden national shame left Canada vulnerable — faced with a genuine national threat but with an open-question. If Canada is such a terrible place why would anyone defend it?
Obviously, this isn’t how most Canadians feel. It has just taken the threat of American annexation to awaken the latent stirrings of national sentiment.
Now that everyone seems to be rooting for “Team Canada” again, Canadians ought to ask those who want to govern this nation, how deep is their commitment? What are they really offering? And will their nationalism slip away the minute it’s convenient?
I have a few suggestions for what Carney and Poilievre, and even Singh (who probably won’t), ought to be offering.
Above all else, the parties should promise that they will prioritize Canadian pride and dignity.
Heritage isn’t about history. It’s not about debate and criticism. And our national heritage institutions should operate with this in mind. This doesn’t mean we’re embracing simplistic jingoism. But it does mean recognizing that our support for heritage is to build the idea of Canadianness. Funding for national heritage is meant to show that we have a proud history — that there is something here worth belonging to.
The second key element of any national cultural policy ought to be a more realistic approach to pluralism. Canadians live in a country of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. We aren’t unified. But the fundamental error of the last decade was to do diversity wrong — to engage in a downward spiral of national subtraction. Out of a well-intentioned, but horribly mistaken desire to protect certain historically marginalized groups, we kept demoting our national heroes out of a belief that they “harmed” people in the present.
A pragmatic pluralism would recognize that one people’s hero will be another’s villain. This absolutely should not mean dishonouring anyone because one group says they are hurt.
Heritage harm is a choice. No one has to be offended when they walk into a school named after someone whom they don’t respect. Conservatives aren’t psychologically damaged when they fly out of Pearson airport. Nor do Liberals suffer when they tour the Diefenbunker. Francophones don’t need to avert their gaze as they drive through Durham region just because Lord Durham once advocated for their assimilation. And a Wendat/Huron Canadian doesn’t need to feel threatened when driving past Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory just because the Mohawk people once wiped out Huronia.
Any Canadian party that wants to be seriously considered as a defender of the nation should promise a pragmatic pluralism which builds up and doesn’t tear down our country. Each group of Canadians should be allowed to keep their historical heroes. Instead of tearing down John A. Macdonald statues, a new federal government should promise to raise statues of figures like Tecumseh or Big Bear. Canada is a diverse country. We can have a diverse set of historical heroes. No one gets a veto. Individual Canadians can choose to be harmed by a name if they want — but our national government needs to be bigger than this — stronger and more resilient.
What’s more, a third key promise ought to be the adoption of a culturally mature notion of diversity. Canada hasn’t always looked the way it does today. People in the past didn’t think the same or act the same. A responsible national government would take pride and celebrate this diversity.
Canada’s prehistory was dominated by Indigenous peoples who have fascinating histories that long-predate the origins of Canada itself. We ought to celebrate these histories. And this shouldn’t mean just pretending that pre-contact Indigenous peoples were benign environmental-loving hippies. We should tell the more accurate and much more fascinating stories of conflict and war and struggle.
From the time of New France up to the 1960s, most Canadians could trace their ancestors back to two places — France and the British Isles. This is just a fact of history and demography. We don’t need to apologize for it. We were an overwhelming white western European colony. We shouldn’t expect our historical figures for much of our history to represent the diversity of multicultural Canada in 2025. They didn’t, and they don’t.
We could instead celebrate the amazing fact of Canadian governments in the 1960s — first under Diefenbaker and then under Lester Pearson — to remove racism from our immigration system. This was an astounding decision. Most groups, for almost all of human history, have wanted homogeneity — to insist on sameness. It’s not odd that Canada was similar before the 1960s, but it is quite amazing that Canada changed its tune. A build-it-up national cultural policy would celebrate this fact, and the Canadians who came before. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Our heritage should be about building up and adding on, not deleting.
Finally, a more mature approach to diversity would acknowledge that Canadians are sophisticated and not bigoted. They don’t have to share the same identity characteristics of our heroes to appreciate Canadian history. That kind of racial in-group thinking is a barrier to true national belonging. You don’t have to be Black to admire Viola Desmond. You certainly don’t need to be white or German-Canadian to be proud of Diefenbaker’s “One Canada vision” and his championing of a Bill of Rights.
Who will offer this proud Canadian vision? Which party will turn its back on the subtraction-heritage distraction of the last decade?
The way ahead ought to be clear: a vision of the country where pride and dignity comes first; a proud pluralism that allows every Canadian group to have its heroes and its stories; and a mature approach to diversity that assumes a resilient Canadian population, one that sees and celebrates our differences over time, and assumes that any Canadian, regardless of their background or when their ancestors arrived here, can share in the story.
National Post