The answer to ‘Who is a Canadian?’ lies between the extremes of ‘A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian’ on one hand, and ‘Just because someone has a Canadian passport doesn’t make them Canadian’ on the other hand.
INITIAL SPARK
Recently, British Columbia MLA Dallas Brodie, in a (since deleted) post on X, referred to the perpetrators of the Air India bombing as ‘foreign terrorists’. Journalist Rupa Subramanya took exception to this characterization (see her X post at this link), saying, essentially, that inasmuch as these perpetrators were Canadians, it would be wrong to call them ‘foreign’ terrorists. Her post generated a fair bit of back and forth between her and some other participants. In fairness, I must mention that Ms. Brodie deleted her post and made a new one with amended wording. See the two images below (for the record, I believe that her second post still leaves it open to interpretation that the Air India bombing culprits were foreigners):
OLD BATTLES
On the face of it, this exchange between a handful of individuals may seem to be unworthy of being the subject of an article, but I have been seeing debates around the definition of ‘Canadian’ for the better part of a decade, so I thought that it was worth my time (and hopefully, yours as well) to dwell on the various aspects and nuances involved.
I believe it is undisputable that not anyone and everyone who wants to be considered a Canadian should be called one; there must be qualifying criteria to belong to the group. This is the core reason why so many Canadians reacted negatively (and continue to do so) to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement that ‘A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian’; in addition to being both ambiguous and mind-numbingly vacuous, it also amounts to declaring that there are no qualifying criteria to be a Canadian.
On the other side, we have a tiny – but growing, or at least increasingly vocal – segment of Canadians who insist that only those who can trace their family tree back to the pioneering days of what would later become Canada can be called Canadians; everyone else – and especially non-whites – are interlopers at best, and invaders at worst. The various terms that they use are ‘founding stock Canadians’, ‘legacy Canadians’, ‘real Canadians’ etc. On the milder side of this school of thought, there are those who concede that after a certain (arbitrarily defined) number of generations, immigrants become Canadians; in the interim, they are not Canadians in the real sense.
The already hazy picture of the Canadian identity has been made a lot hazier by two factors that I have spoken about extensively over the past few years, viz., mass immigration and our warped definition of multiculturalism. In the interest of brevity, let me sum up my thoughts on these as follows:
- The earlier approach to / policy of immigration was structured so as to select individuals who were more likely to blend into Canadian culture, owing to their education as well as exposure to western culture before immigrating to Canada. Mass immigration (over roughly the past 10 years) threw these selection criteria out the window, with the result that vast numbers of people arriving in Canada had neither the ability nor the inclination to change their habits and behaviour in accordance with Canadian norms. The resulting friction, exacerbated by inaction on the part of the authorities, has destroyed the broader society’s willingness to accept newcomers as Canadians. (As a side note, when former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that Canada has a lot of ‘social capacity’ to accept newcomers, she had it exactly backewards; firstly, there is no such thing as ‘social capacity’, and secondly, Canadians are increasingly disapproving of high immigration.)
- The aforesaid inaction is enabled by what is falsely believed to be ‘multiculturalism’ in Canada – by which I mean that the Canadian idea of multiculturalism is of multiple cultures existing in proximity to each other, BUT without any cultural exchange taking place – at least not to a meaningful extent. One thing that cultural exchange does – if the participants are so willing – is to iron out differences between cultures. But since we insist that the cultures arriving in Canada should be encased in glass and preserved in unaltered form for eternity, the differences cannot be ironed out. The net result is that Canadian culture ends up bending every time someone’s culture does things that are not present in Canada. In the end, Canadian culture has become bent out of shape. Many Canadians are uncomfortable about that.
- The easiest way for politicians to claim their multicultural credentials, apart from participating in cultural events and eating food, is by making statements about political issues in the newly arrived Canadians’ country of origin. This encourages the said newcomers to continue to live in the political space of that foreign country while living physically in Canada, for which I have coined the term ‘multi-politicalism’. Instead of inhabiting two cultural spaces, i.e., the culture of their country of origin and the Canadian one, they exist in two political spaces. As a politician seeks to climb the ladder of popularity by taking sides on a foreign issue, he or she has less time for Canadian issues. This invites disapproval from those who prioritize Canadian issues, and their ire can fall on all immigrants (read: non-white Canadians).
- Under the same multiculturalism, non-Christian minorities (who are almost exclusively non-white) get preferential treatment in law. One example of this is the exemption to Sikhs from wearing a helmet while riding on a motorcycle. Sometimes, the ‘exemption’ is unofficial, such as demonstrators for an in-vogue cause blocking roads or bridges, or harassing a targeted community (such a Canadian Jews), who do not have to face the legal consequences for their actions or words. These phenomena add to the resentment against all immigrants, whose ‘Canadian-ness’ starts getting challenged more and more.
VALUES
The question of who is a Canadian cannot be answered without first agreeing on what makes a person Canadian. After the 2015 federal election, Conservative Party leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch brought the issue of ‘Canadian values’ to the fore. The fact that we are still arguing about this is because the idea of Canadian values is as easy to articulate as it is difficult to pin down. And it is difficult to pin down because, unlike many other places on earth, Canada is a relatively recent entity, such that ‘Canadian’ is not an ethnicity or race in the way that ‘Serbian’ or ‘Indian’ is. We have to necessarily define ‘Canadian’ in terms of personal attributes, rather than ancestry. And this is where things become tricky.
We can all nod along in agreement as attributes such as ‘helpful to others’, ‘tolerant’, ‘easy-going’ and so on are listed. Our agreement is in no small part due to the fact that it pleases us to have ourselves described in such glowing terms. But it is when the unpleasant parts of reality pop up that our agreement dissolves into disputes. Is a convicted criminal – such as a murderer, a serial rapist or human-trafficker – a ‘Canadian’, regardless of how many generations of his family have been in Canada? Surely, these acts do not define the term ‘Canadian’ in the broader sense, but that does not take away from the fact that the individual in question IS a Canadian. In short, how we define ‘Canadian’ generally is very different from whether a particular individual is a Canadian or not.
In this context, it is pertinent to note the tendency among many politicians (and other politically active persons) to denounce certain actions or people as ‘un-Canadian’. This tends to create a furor generally, but I believe that all the brouhaha is neither here nor there. A person can be a Canadian AND engage in actions or speech that makes us uncomfortable because we have a lofty idea of what a Canadian is (or should be). Engaging in such actions or uttering such words does not turn a Canadian into a not-Canadian.
CONFLUENCE
This brings us back to the question of whether the perpetrators of the Air India bombing were Canadians or ‘foreign’ terrorists. The inner desire to absolve ourselves of the collective guilt of the biggest terrorist attack in Canada – and the biggest aviation-related terrorist attack before 9/11 – is understandable. Nobody wants to be associated with such a heinous act. It is a stain on our collective soul as a nation, and we want to wash it away. On the other hand, the terrorist act was planned and executed from Canadian soil. Canadian authorities were in a position to stop the attack but, for whatever reason, didn’t do so. The subsequent investigation was botched. Families of the victims have been denied closure for 4 decades. There HAS TO BE shared guilt associated with that.
Many Canadians cope with this by (a) denying that the perpetrators were Canadians, and (b) holding the government + its agencies as being solely responsible for the failures. In this manner, the individual isolates himself / herself from both these parties, and thereby achieves exculpation.
In the X debate on Ms. Subramanya’s post, I offered that we cannot be selective in disowning immigrants who did (or do) things that we don’t like; just as we regale in the positive things that immigrants do (such as the exultation over the success of Carol Huynh, who was born to ethnic Chinese refugees from northern Vietnam). If we own the achievements of some immigrants, then, in order to be logically consistent, we MUST also own the crimes of other immigrants. Saying that immigrants who commit crimes are not Canadians, while claiming that immigrants to contribute positively are Canadians, is logically inconsistent.
TERMINUS
Even in the case of the Canadian-born (whether the so-called ‘old stock’ or otherwise), the qualities that we desire to see in a Canadian are developed over time. The same happens with the newly arrived Canadians. We are all human. We all stumble from time to time. Over a longer period, we (hopefully) get closer to the idealized notion of what a Canadian is supposed to be. Just as a child is no less of a Canadian, because he / she has not yet developed all those qualities, similarly, an immigrant who is in the process of assimilating into the Canadian culture is also fully Canadian. I must reiterate here that our multiculturalism, by incentivizing ghettoization, thwarts this process of assimilation. This is doubly the case for the Canadian-born children in ethnic ghettos.
In sum, while it is perfectly okay if we define a Canadian in idealized terms, when a person’s behaviour does not live up to that lofty standard, they do not cease to be a Canadian. Believing that they do is a form of denial. It shows that we don’t want to deal with an uncomfortable reality.
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Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons; the image is at this link. Used without modification under Creative Commons License.
