2020 Vision: Canada's success as the most diverse society on earth lies in its failure to forge a nation state with one identity, writes John Ibbitson
As nation states go, Canada is pretty much a failure. Repeated efforts by various federal governments to instil a pan-national sense of identity and purpose have achieved little. Poets and philosophers lament the weakness of the emotive bonds that tie Canadians together. The people of Quebec, residing restlessly within this ambiguous polity, are tempted to quit the thing altogether. In this failure lies the secret of Canada's success.
For Canada is emerging as the world's first truly cosmopolitan state. Last year, the country took in an estimated 250,000 immigrants. With a population of only 32 million, this represents a per-capita immigration rate twice that of the US, the other great settler nation in North America. And unlike the US, with its large Hispanic influx, about half of Canada's immigrants come from China, India and their environs. Most of the rest come from the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East or Africa.
Most of these new arrivals take up residence in the three large cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with the rest migrating to smaller cities, such as Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. Immigration has helped make Canada one of the world's most urban countries. Everyone else might see us as a land of mountains and forests, lakes and rivers, but what we really are is a handful of cities with a whole lot of bush in between.
Over the past 40 years, these cities have been transformed. Our European cultural base has been infused with Asian, Hispanic, Caribbean and African influences. Toronto and Vancouver are both expected to have majority Asian populations within a few years. Guatemalan-Canadian boys date Korean-Canadian girls, with fascinating results. The richness of this mix of cultural perspectives has produced a creative and entrepreneurial explosion that is reshaping both our economy and our culture.
Canada has become the most diverse society on earth.
So how did this scattered population - spread out across some of the planet's most inhospitable land and boasting some of its foulest weather - come to lead the world in successfully integrating disparate cultures? Mostly it was luck. When Britain completed the conquest of French North America in 1763, it found itself in the awkward situation of governing a small English population and a much larger and more established French one. In Europe, the English and French had been at war, on and off, for several hundred years. How were they now to live together in a single political space? The only solution was for each side to leave the other alone. Confederation in 1867 entrenched in a constitution the recognition that English Canada and French Canada were different; each wanted to develop on its own; both were willing to entrust a weak general government with matters of joint concern.
This culture of accommodation was a bad recipe for forging a great nation state, but a perfect recipe for assimilating a succession of differing ethnicities: Irish, Germans and Poles in the 19th century; eastern and southern Europeans in the first half of the 20th; and, starting in the 1960s, everybody else. While the US sought to assimilate its new arrivals into the vibrant American myth, we pretty much let everyone go their own way, provided they paid their taxes.
The truth is, it's not hard to be Canadian. We are intensely proud of the British and French legal and legislative traditions that underpin our society (although we are increasingly willing to borrow from the American system as well) and we expect everyone who comes here to embrace those traditions.
Beyond that, however, we ask only that you respect the other person's space, you pretend to like hockey, you learn most of the words to the first verse of the national anthem and you vote if you get a chance. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Real nation states have a strongly developed sense of self, based on centuries of historic, cultural and sometimes racial development. Canada, not so much.
But this loosey-goosey sense of national identity has its advantages. While a young woman arriving in Dublin from Manila may have trouble becoming well and truly Irish - in fact, her grandchildren might have the same trouble - that same young woman will fit into Vancouver just fine. She will find a large Filipino community already there, ready to support her. And her children will hang out in the shopping mall - that great social leveller - with kids of every background and hue. If you ask those kids what it means to be Canadian, they'll just shrug. But that's fine, as long as everyone gets along.
THIS IS NOT to say there aren't problems. Torontonians, especially, are worried about escalating gang-based gun violence that seems to be coming from young black men who have grown up poor and disenfranchised in ghettos on the edge of the city.
Other new arrivals, while perfectly law-abiding, sometimes have a hard time making it into the middle class. They may have trouble mastering English or French, or they might have difficulty getting their training and work experience recognised, which can lead to qualified doctors driving cabs. Some Canadians believe immigration levels should be cut back until these problems are dealt with.
But such voices are few. All of Canada's major political parties remain committed to maintaining or even increasing Canada's existing level of immigration, a policy that enjoys broad popular support.
Most Canadians know that, thanks to our low birth rate, new arrivals are increasingly the only source of workers for an economy already starting to feel the effects of labour shortages. They know that, in a world where competition among nations for skilled immigrants will increase in intensity as those labour shortages spread, our country would be foolish to surrender the competitive advantage we have spent decades cultivating.
Most important, most Canadians like the Canada that Canada is becoming. They like the energy of the place, the strange fusion cuisine, the creative tensions that you find in an office filled with workers from half a dozen different cultures, each bringing a unique perspective to the problem at hand.
The stereotypical politeness for which Canadians are famous was the result of that first, necessary, accommodation between English and French. Today, politeness has become our own national myth, the means by which we accommodate an agglomeration of different cultures, languages, and customs. Some of us believe that Canadians have used politeness to foment a social revolution, by bringing people from everywhere to here, and that a new, diverse, young-thinking, forward-looking Canada is emerging.
Some of us also believe that this becoming Canada could be fabulous.
John Ibbitson is the political affairs columnist for Canadian national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. His latest book is The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream, published last year