While taking part in a geography student awards ceremony in 2016, Vladimir Putin corrected a schoolboy who said Russia’s border with the U.S. ended at the Bering Strait.
“Russia’s borders have no end,” Putin said, before clarifying. “This is a joke.”
It was the same kind of mirthless, menacing crack that permeates Donald Trump’s repeated reference to Canada as the 51st state of America.
No one would laugh at Putin now and we shouldn’t be shrugging aside Trump’s comment either. Does anyone doubt he would absorb Canada if he could?
But the most surprising thing wasn’t Trump talking about assimilating America’s closest ally.
What was truly shocking was the reaction in Canada: a supine indifference to the idea of an end to 157 years of proud independence.
A Leger poll this week asking Canadians whether Canada should be the 51st state suggested 13 per cent of the population would answer in the affirmative, rising to 19 percent in Alberta.
That is a sad indictment of the state of the nation.
Canada has long been obsessed with its identity, or lack of; plagued by a sense of inferiority to the U.S. and dogged by separation anxiety over Quebec.
But that angst has reached crisis levels over the last nine years. In an interview with the New York Times just after he was elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau said that countries with a strong national identity found it challenging to integrate people from different backgrounds. Trudeau argued that Canada has become a new kind of state, defined by the multiplicity of its identities, a pan-cultural heritage encapsulated in the boast that “diversity is our strength”.
“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” Trudeau said. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for one another, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities have made us the first post-national state.”
What that sense of post-nationalism has done in reality is corrode the idea of citizenship that held Canada together, with its sense of obligation, its willingness to sacrifice and its collective mission.
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We had the dismal sight last week of Liberal MP Chandra Arya accusing his fellow Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal of threatening him because he refused to grant unanimous approval in the chamber for a motion calling the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India a genocide.
In the wake of violent clashes in Brampton and Mississauga between Hindus and Sikhs, our elected representatives should be calming passions, not inciting them over events that took place half a world away, 40 years ago.
The country is in a sorry state. Opinion polls suggest a majority agree with the statement that it is “broken” and that it is heading in the wrong direction.
Pride in being a Canadian has fallen, particularly among millennials and westerners.
Alberta and Saskatchewan regularly bash Ottawa and push back against federal legislation and regulations.
In Quebec, a plurality supports the Parti Québécois, which has promised another referendum.
A Liberal government that has pursued policies designed to offer Canadians “stark choices” on gun control, vaccine mandates and energy policy is in danger of being reduced to fewer than 50 seats, according to the latest seat projections.
Every Canadian prime minister is faced with three dilemmas: the economy, unity and the U.S. None of those three central concerns are in great shape.
Canada needs a nation-builder and it is encouraging that Pierre Poilievre has taken to quoting his predecessor as Conservative leader, John Diefenbaker, on his founding principles of freedom of speech and action.
As a forthcoming biography by Bob Plamondon (Freedom Fighter: John Diefenbaker’s Battle for Canadian Liberties and Independence) makes clear, Dief opposed identity politics. He adopted a mantra of One Canada, which meant the end of hyphenated citizens.
Diefenbaker didn’t look at Canadian unity through the lens of ethnic background or the intersection of English and French, but rather emphasized the equality and social welfare of all citizens, regardless of language, race or religious beliefs.
“He was out of step with his party and the elites but was rarely disconnected from the Canadian people,” Plamondon writes, saying he was more of a nation-builder than the leader of a political party or head of cabinet.
We could do with more talk about One Canada.
Meantime, there is no benefit in Trudeau expressing his outrage at Trump’s late-night taunts.
Better to deflect with humour, as immigration minister Marc Miller did, when he suggested it sounds like we’re living in an episode of South Park.
For those whose memories don’t stretch back a quarter century to the 1999 animated movie, the mothers of the show’s protagonists “Blame Canada” for the degeneration of their progeny.
“They’re not even a real country anyway,” sings one character.
The majority of Canadians would take issue with that, but nations fade away when their sense of citizenship dies.
If it turns out that Trump wants the country more than we do, we might as well give it to him.
National Post
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