The Railway Protests Showed that Canadians Are Not Nice and Should Not Try to Be

“The world,” claims the famous slogan, “needs more Canada.” It is generally understood today that the basis of Canadian identity is the belief in Canadian moral superiority (1). “Canada is the more best (plus meilleur, sic) country in the world,” once mumbled, it is said, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The condescending remark that Americans say about Canadians, “Canadians are nice,” one that could be said about a disabled neighbour (“at least he is nice”), is somehow proudly received in Canada. 

As if being “nice” was the goal of great nations and a sufficient characteristic to differentiate a nation from others. The old joke that Italians are just French people in a good mood is indeed just a joke, and much more than that differentiates the Italians and the French. But it has been decided that being nice was all Canada needed to differentiate itself from the United States, along with absurd props like milk bags and the mounted police. 

This definition of Canadian identity was put in place by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father, in the 1970s. The elder Trudeau was the first Canadian prime minister to not see his job as being a mere administrative agent of a small colony but rather as a leader of a major country that needed a sense of nationhood. 

But the claim of Canadian moral superiority was always tedious—as it would be about any other nation—, especially considering Canadians’ relationship to Indigenous peoples. The recent railway blockades by Indigenous and other activists clearly shown that a lot of problems remain to be solved regarding the First Peoples. Problems not only socio-economic, but also complicated legal issues of Indigenous governance and unceded territory. These disputes clearly should, but, unfortunately, are not about to be solved. 

This summer, following the conclusion of a special inquiry commission regarding the death or disappearance of thousands of Indigenous women, Trudeau went out of his way to say that Canada had committed a “genocide” against the Indigenous, just like Nazi Germany against the Jews.  A senator who served as commander of the UN peacekeeping mission during the Rwanda genocide even rebuked the prime minister for removing meaning to the word genocide. “Mr. Trudeau seems to ignore it,” La Presse’s Lysiane Gagnon then wrote, “but there has never been a state that has accepted to be called genocidaire, even when it was true.”

If Canadians are indeed genocidaires, the claim of moral superiority disappears, and the national identity dissolves. With his ill-informed admission, the prime minister granted that there cannot be such thing as Canadian moral superiority, and thus took away the crutches that made stand the moribund paraplegic that was Canadian identity. That would imply, perhaps unfortunately, that Justin Trudeau was right when we said that Canada was the first “post-national” country.

It therefore appears obvious that the eternal goal of the federal government is the establishment of a sense of nationhood and the development of a robust national culture. This process should be informed by internal realities—Canada’s history, official languages, and so on—and external realities—the threat of assimilation by the United States and the replacing of British monarchial romanticism by republican vigor. 

A new Canadian identity should appeal to both English Canadians and Quebeckers, as the latter are stuck in Canada, whether they like it or not, and their culture and history deserve a prominent place in the Canadian nationhood. “The greatest names in Canadian history—indeed, in the early history of the North American continent—are all French,” wroteMcGill literature professor and noted novelist Hugh MacLennan in 1949. “What men can historians of the English colonies set up against Cartier, Champlain, Cavalier de la Salle, Père Marquette, Brébeuf, Joliet, d'Iberville, Radisson, Frontenac, Laval and Montcalm?” And this trend has only continued, as Canada has been led for a Quebecker for 48 of the 71 years since these lines were written.

In Quebec the issue is peculiar and mainly involves the protection of the French language. Evidence of that is the disturbingly large number of upper-class Francophone Quebeckers who are taking the bizarre avenue of self-assimilation by, among other means, studying in English Cégeps. Due to social pressure, they then stop speaking French, even among themselves, or start speaking a creole which they call “franglais” but has been called “the sublanguage of disabled individuals about to be assimilated.” Never, by the way, has an elite in any country of the world abandoned its language to speak creole. 

It should be noted that the Canadian Conservative ideology is a major obstacle in creating a national identity. For one thing, Conservatives’ love of the Crown makes it very difficult for Canada to fancy itself as a country not a colony. When he was minister of defense, Peter MacKay, who is currently the front-runner in the Conservative Party leadership race, took the “long overdue” step of restoring the “royal” designation of the Canadian military, which it had lost in 1968.  

The Conservative-controlled legislative assembly of Ontario recently introduced a novel procedure in which “God Save the Queen” is to be sang once a month. Long before that, Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had arranged for two flags to be placed on his casket: the 14-year old Maple Leaf, which he considered an aberration, and the British Red Ensign, the former colonial flag of Canada. Apart from a few tiny jurisdictions and despite the centuries-long existence of republican movements in Quebec, Canada is the only country on the American continent to not be a republic.

Canadians should welcome this hollowing out of their identity as an opportunity to re-build their country, in the same way that Trudeau père did it in the 1970s, and create a new culture and nationhood based on stronger pillars. Despite being notoriously anti-nationalist, Canadians should strive to build a national imaginary worthy of the only G7 country to have never lost a war.