Reflections On Canada Day 2024: Do We Live Up To Our Reputation?
I’m writing this story on the morning of Canada Day 2024, thinking about all the fascinating things I’ve read and the people I’ve met.
All countries have national stereotypes. One of Canada’s most prominent stereotypes is that Canadians are polite, kind and friendly, nicer and more tolerant than our American neighbours. We celebrate diversity, instead of trying to assimilate people the way the Americans do.
There’s truth to that, of course. Unfortunately, one of Canada’s biggest flaws is how we sometimes fail to live up to our rhetoric of tolerance and diversity. One of the key differences between Canadian and American racism is that American racism tends to be much more blatant and open, while Canadian racism is often much more subtle, justified by some other reasoning.
Canada’s and the U.S.’s treatments of Indigenous people are an excellent example. While Teddy Roosevelt said in 1866 that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’, Duncan Campbell Scott said in 1920 that
“I want to get rid of the ‘Indian problem’…Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department…” The rationale for Canada’s residential schools was that Indigenous people had a dying culture doomed to fade away, and that they needed to be ‘civilized’ if they were to survive. Even today, many non-Native Canadians think that Indigenous people should just assimilate and abandon their identities, even though Indigenous people have repeatedly shown over and over that is not an option.
…American racism tends to be much more blatant and open, while Canadian racism is often much more subtle, justified by some other action.
The different experiences of Black Canadians and Americans also show this point. Racist white Americans were up front about how Jim Crow laws were meant to ensure Black people ‘knew their place’, and openly threatened Black schoolchildren who tried to attend segregated white schools. In Canada, Black students were repeatedly segregated both formally and informally for more than a century, but like segregation in general it mostly flew under the radar. Almost everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks and her refusal to leave the ‘whites only’ section of a city bus, but the story of Nova Scotian Viola Desmond and her refusal to leave the ‘whites only’ section of a movie theater isn’t nearly as famous. The demolition of the Black community of Africville was justified as ‘urban renewal’, even though it ruined the lives of many of Africville’s residents.
Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier talked about how Canada could be a “harmonious whole, in which granite, marble, oak and other materials are blended. This cathedral is the image of the nation that I hope to see Canada become…I shall repel the idea of changing the nature of its different elements. I want the marble to remain the marble; I want the granite to remain the granite; I want the oak to remain the oak.” This is a common theme in Canadian history, but it’s a pity that Laurier seemed to only think it applied to white people. His government increased the Chinese head tax from $50 to $500 and rescinded the federal voting rights John A. Macdonald had started extending to First Nations people without their losing their ‘Indian’ status.
Even white people weren’t immune to this sort of thing in Canada. There’ve been lots of attempts to assimilate Francophone Canadians and repress French outside Quebec, which were justified by the claim that having ‘one flag, one religion and one language’ would strengthen Canadian unity. In practice, though, it led to Quebec separatism and the constitutional arguments we’ve spent decades fighting without solving the issues they’re about.
This isn’t all there is to Canada, of course. We wouldn’t have these stereotypes about us if there wasn’t some of truth to them.
During the World Wars, Canadians of Japanese, German, Ukrainian, Ottoman and Bulgarian descent were rounded up by the federal government and forced into internment camps for the ‘crime’ of having the same ethnicity as the countries Canada was fighting. They were stripped of their voting rights and other freedoms, had their property stolen, and were treated like glorified cattle simply because they hailed from ‘enemy nations’. Before the World Wars, the Canadian government rejected most Jews fleeing to Canada from Nazi Germany and Indian immigrants aboard the Komagata Maru.
These problems still exist in modern Canada. Muslim women like Zunera Ishaq were initially prohibited from being able to cover their faces for their citizenship ceremonies even when they proposed a workaround where they’d expose their faces to female officials in private beforehand. Indigenous women and girls continue to be assaulted and murdered at a rate far higher than the general Canadian population, while Indigenous people in general are constantly harassed and threatened online. Sikh people have been prohibited from wearing their turbans as RCMP officers and wearing ceremonial daggers in class. Support for Quebec’s Charter of Values extends way beyond la belle province. Skilled immigrants stil have trouble getting their abilities recognized by Canadian authorities, hampering the country’s economic growth.
One of the reasons that history is so important is that we can use it to learn what we did wrong in the past, see what needs to change in the present and do better in the future.
This isn’t all there is to Canada, of course. We wouldn’t have these stereotypes about us if there wasn’t some of truth to them. At our best, we’ve provided a refuge to people fleeing strife and suffering all over the world, from 18th-century British Loyalists to 21st-century Syrians. The concept of a ‘political nationality’ shows how different groups of people could live together as part of a country without abandoning other nationalisms that are important to them. At our best, we’ve extended that principle to racialized Canadians, ensuring that they get recognition too. We have a very rich scientific, cultural and military heritage we can be proud of. We’ve been one of the pioneers of multiculturalism and different cultural groups trying to figure out how to live together.
But that’s what true patriot love is supposed to be about-recognizing our failures as a country and using them as a reason to do better. Most Canadians don’t know enough about our history, either positive or negative. One of the reasons that history is so important is that we can use it to learn what we did wrong in the past, see what needs to change in the present and do better in the future.
And the more we live up to our rhetoric as Canadians, the more reason we have to be proud of our country.
Vive le Canada uni!
