Guilbeault drops the ball on Canadian identity

This year, on Canada’s day of pride, we were told by our identity minister that he can’t tell us what a Canadian is. That would be wrong to try to do, he said.

Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Steven Guilbeault said on Canada Day, “I won’t stand here and pretend that I can tell you what Canadian identity is or should be.” In the interview with The Canadian Press, he said he shouldn’t try to tell people so diverse as Canadians what we are.

The words come off reflective and considerate, but there’s something else going on here, something more weak and elusive. Guilbeault slipped the question of our identity. The reality is, there is no way he could have said anything specific about what it means to be Canadian today without triggering some pushback.

Imagine if he provided something concrete: “Canada is a country with nuclear families, two genders, Christians, we love capitalism and we are proud of our history.” Or: “We have many genders, we are on stolen land, we have no religion, we hate capitalism and we are ashamed of our history.”

That would be bad. Even though these identities are made up, you’d probably hear support for each from lots of Canadians. And therein lies a bit of the problem we are facing today. It is a war zone over Canada’s identity.

The minister acknowledged the problem in his interview. He said it’s complex to find things we can “rally around” today in Canada because we are so big and diverse. That is a nice way to say we don’t agree on anything.

In recent years, our country has ramped up its investment in diversity. Institutions encouraged us to find identity in all sorts of different things, expanded the Canadian identity by maximizing immigration to record levels, and opened our culture up to new beliefs about who we are and what is possible for identity. When asked on Canada Day what our country agrees about, our identity minister scratches his head.

Today we see the faults of multiculturalism. Canada is finding itself less and less united as a people. We are fragmenting.

Miriam Chiasson noted this threat in her 2012 report to McGill University titled, “The Management of Diversity.” Chiasson collected praises and criticisms about multiculturalism that other authors had put forward. A criticism listed by multiple authors was that if people live beside each other with different beliefs, the nation is encouraged to fragment.

Canada is getting there. Multiculturalism has grown unrestricted and introduced serious divides for the public. For example, the new competing ideas about what a female athlete is in Canada. We can’t all follow different beliefs about issues so basic to common life. Society needs one answer across its cultures in order to continue as one.

Many in positions like Guilbeault aren’t leading the country to resolve disagreements or set a vision, but are evading the duty. In the absence of leadership, the public goes on colliding in its beliefs over everything from crime, homelessness, gender, wars, peace, protests, justice systems. Almost nothing is safe from cultural disagreement today, it seems, and it’s tiring. How do we go forward as a country if we can’t agree on what direction forward is? We need to define who we are and what we stand for, if we are expected to be more than people who share a border and grocery stores.

Quebec provides a great example of this effort. When it passed Bill 84 last month, it asserted the need for a dominant culture in Quebec as a way to preserve its identity and to promote social cohesion.

Rather than multiculturalism, the province set forth one identity and emphasized that everyone, including immigrants, are expected to become part of the identity. I do not feel immigrants need to be the focus of Canada’s push for majority culture, and I believe Quebec’s identity was too loosely defined, but we need to take a page from Quebec’s book on this one.

The problem with diversity — or in other words, multiculturalism — is that it doesn’t provide a single goal that people can get behind. Diversity says that every goal is equal and nothing warrants priority over anything else. That is not a way to unite people in their lives and labours; it sets them in different directions. Diversity has not been our strength, it has very much divided our house against itself in Canada.

Conservatives are warming up to separatism sentiment in the Prairies, saying they don’t feel the country gives them a place to belong. We are seeing provinces promote deeply conflicting stances on cultural basics like the gender of kids, and the public poured into two camps in the recent election.

It is precisely this time when leadership is most important for the country, for an identity minister to willingly suffer slings and arrows from opposing groups while he pulls them together. What we do not need is an identity minister to slink out of questions about who we are. Avoiding the problem doesn’t make it go away. It just passes the problem onto the public and lets them suffer the stress. That is not what a leader does for their people.

Guilbeault would tell the country on Canada Day in a separate statement, “Canadian identity shines from coast to coast to coast and beyond our borders.” What identity? The one you can’t define? Forgive me for being facetious, but I have to: “Officer, I saw it from coast to coast.” You saw what? “I don’t know.”

Freedom for Canadians is priceless, and disagreements should exist about who we are. The conversation should never stop about what Canada is, and people should always exist who break the rules of our identity. But never should a country abandon the idea of having an identity altogether. People won’t have it. If Canadians don’t find a goal for their country, they’ll find tribes within the country that do have a goal.

» Connor McDowell is a Brandon Sun reporter.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com