What Canadian nationalism?

We long ago sold off Canadian cultural production, leaving nationalism nothing from which to draw on.

1.

It was early in the morning, maybe 2 or 3 o’clock, when I found myself at a board room table with several cops on the other side. I was explaining comments that I had made that elicited several credible death threats. The threats had been left on my university phone just before 7:00 that night. Alone in my office, I heard one in particular was so chilling, I didn’t know what to do. I called campus security to come and listen to it, and they did, and without saying a word to me, they put the phone down and called Toronto Police.

I was 20 or 21 at the time.

Anyway, I remember vividly the question: what did you say to get a message like that? the cop asked me. And so, for several hours, I had to explain to them what I meant when I said this: white people have no real culture. But, Tim Hortons one insisted. Tim Hortons, that bastion of white culture. Ah, you think that coffee and doughnuts are white culture, I asked? Do Black people not like Timbits too?

Oh, you’re mixing up Canadian culture with white culture. That’s what you’re doing. How easy it is to make this mistake!

What is Canada? Is it the white Christian nation of our origins and most of our past? Is it the struggle between that racism and justice? Is it … nothing? Surely, Canadian identity and nationalism isn’t nothing as we can feel it when we leave. But what is it, when our society has agreed to let its culture wither and die on the vine?

To define culture in today’s circumstances, we take short cuts. We reach to things that aren’t Canadian (maple syrup), aren’t Anglo (poutine), aren’t cultural (a coffee chain that serves shit coffee and that exploits its employees). For white Canadians, we feel ownership over cultural aspects that we have no business owning, like so much else, and we short hand it: I would fight for this country if the US invaded, I feel tremendous pride when I think about … the Rockies, I am not a patriot but I will stand up if we are challenged by a bully, and so on.

At the moment that I was talking to these cops, the Canadian cultural touchpoints of the past 100 years were fading away or being actively dismantled. Neoliberalism was here but, that evening in 2006, these cops wouldn’t know what that word even meant. And so when I said that there was no such thing as white culture, and cop buddy retorts, “but hockey,” and it took me another hour to get him to concede that many different races can play hockey, I was confronted with the stark reality: we have no contemporary idea about who we are any more.

2.

Not knowing who we are is not the same as knowing who we are not. We are not Americans, as every single piece about Canadian nationalism reminds us. Unlike in Canada, there is a yellow haze that follows American around; a cloud of soft yellow that gathers in a place that never experiences the cold; the day-glo buzz of overhead neon lights that cast midday shadows on Walmart goods as far as the eye can see. Canada has these stores too, but somehow, they look different. Less yellow. Sharper focus. The look of gallons on a gas station sign. Miles Per Hour. You can blindfold any Canadian and drop them into a Denny’s at 4 AM anywhere in the United States and they will know that they aren’t in Canada any longer.

Or so we tell ourselves.

But let’s remove Americans from the picture and what are we left with? Are we anything without them?

English Canadians desperately lack culture. In the past four decades, Canada declared itself open for business, obliterating its own cultural production and creating living conditions that are very hard to create in. The financialization of housing meant an end to low rents, cheap rental space, cheap venues and galleries and therefore abundant and cheap nights out. The financialization of pensions gobbled up the Rehearsal Factories, Republiks, the Call the Offices. And free time all but vanished.

To have culture, culture must be created. And it isn’t for lack of want or talent or energy from among consumers or creators that Canada has effectively destroyed its cultural production. Cultural production, or the creation of art, is no different than a glove factory or more broadly, the textiles industry. Sure, a few factories have survived the Free Trade era but the ones who have vanished were weak and probably should have closed anyway. They weren’t efficient, goes the prevailing logic. Let the market decide who makes gloves. Let the market decide who writes books.

We find ourselves in a Canada where we lack culture, and so culture is created in that space where lack finds itself. In other words: we are not, therefore we are.

This kind of negative-space cultural identity creates a very strange kind of nationalism: one that doesn’t really exist, until all of a sudden it’s driven to the surface by an external force. Like Donald Trump saying that Canada should be the 51st state. Surprise! Canadians, what say you?

Hell no!

But why not?

Because we aren’t them!

Then who are we, if not them?

*cracks open a beer* … i am canadian

(Do they still sell Canadian? I’ve been in Quebec too long)

3.

Normally, it suits the business class very well for Canadian identity and nationalism to exist in negative space. Because what fills negative space better than stuff? With no real mass cultural production to speak of, corporations can rush to fill the desire that Canadians have to act out being Canadian.

That snow shovel? You bought that because you’re a Canadian and it snows in Canada.

That BBQ? You bought that because you’re going to grill the second that the snow recedes off your patio and soak up every ray of sun before the snow comes back.

Those wool socks? The cold!

Bagged milk? You have no choice! And it’s only half-Canadian.

Made-in-Canada? There’s a maple leaf on the package and you’ve been primed to zero in on that.

Consumerism has rushed to fill most of what used to be cultural identity, though this isn’t limited to Canadian identity. Indeed, try performing femininity without also having to pay for it. But when Trump acts the bully, the most significant cultural reaction we have is: well, I’m going to buy Canadian! As if Free Trade even allows us to make that decision. The Farmers’ Market is too expensive. I’ll just buy whatever Save on Foods has on sale. Cultural pride, deflated.

It isn’t in and of itself a problem that consumerism is one expression of national identity. All cultures have some kind of economic production that helps form a collective basis on which to build an identity. But in Canada, a country that isn’t actually held together by anything, it’s extremely fragile and really, culture as sold by the elites is in the service of only one thing: the bottom line.

Cultural commercialism alone cannot stand in for cultural production. No store is going to tell us who we are, who we were and who we should be. No store is going to show an image of ourselves in all of our pockmarked cheeks or broken backs or quiet pleasures that cannot be bought and sold. No store is going to show us a sunlit closed-up corner store, with a pepsi sign hanging from one in-tact hook over the front door, with a name stamped on it that we recognize from our childhood. No store is going to ask the fundamental question: why? Not in the way that culture does.

4.

Canada probably shouldn’t exist.

If you travel as much as I do, you realize that there is very little that actually unites us that wouldn’t also unite someone that you’d randomly meet in Philadelphia or Des Moines or some small town you’ve never heard of in Ohio. One of the unifying things about this country is that Canadians always think that they are the quintessential Canadian but also, that they are more preciously different than Canadians anywhere else.

Try to tell someone from British Columbia that they’re the same as someone from Ontario and they will spit on the ground (but then, try again, to tell someone from Prince George that they are the same as someone from Sudbury and the gulf eases).

If culture grows from climate, there is little that unites people across climates.

If culture grows from industry, there is little that unites people across industry.

If culture grows from the sum total of diverse experiences of the people within the culture, there is little that unites people across the millions of pockets of diverse experiences.

And so, we have to create that which unites.

The white colony of Canada has always had this problem. Canadian nationalism at its beginnings was a project of white supremacy: white supremacy over the people who lived here already, white supremacy over white-enough immigrants who we could dominate into being white, and white supremacy over the non-white masses who wanted to come here and who we mostly refused. To create a common identity within this White Christian Canada took a lot of effort on the part of the elites. Nothing could be left to chance. When John A. MacDonald created his National Policy, underpinned by a new east-west railway, it was to create the nation of Canada along with all of the requisite culture. It was to unite Canadians, push out (subjugate, murder, poison) non-Canadians and to make someone in Saint John identify with the Red Ensign as much as someone in Grimsby did.

This was tremendously difficult and to do it, MacDonald knew that he needed to marshall the forces of cultural production (church, music, literature) in the same direction as the economy (small enterprise and massive projects alike). That would be the only way to make people want to join Confederation and to make people defend Confederation. For years, subsequent governments of varying flavours understood that if you don’t have a cultural project, you cannot keep this nation together.

One of my favourite examples of this is the CNR’s railway school program. Fearing the rise of Communism, the CNR (Canada’s most significant crown corporation) operated a school car that would drive through northeastern Ontario to teach children school who lived too far away from one. The children were mostly immigrants, and mostly from Communist countries. Some were Ojibway. Through teaching English and Math, the CNR school ensured that the children were taught Canadian values (i.e. anti-Communism and English), and the adults could come and see a movie or play Bingo.

The program operated into the 1960s and was only possible thanks to the public ownership of an important industry and political vision. Nothing was left up to chance. Nothing was left up to the markets.

5.

We are ideologically far away from a time where the federal government saw its role as creating some kind of nationalistic identity. We’re so far away from that time, that government cant even create its own immigration plan: the Liberals outsourced immigration policy planning to a private American firm. There is no planning. There is no attempt to create a common culture. There is … nothing.

Nothing, at a time where people understand instantly why we perhaps may need it.

At the heart of neoliberalism is the belief that community is the enemy — Thatcher’s famous attempt to obliterate community as an object of resistance. In Canada, rather than simply obliterating community, cultural production has been defunded and the two federal parties have coopted nationalism to suit their terms. The Conservatives, with their hokey and folksy Canadian spirit versus the more aggressive and cheesy Red! Red! Red! of the Liberals. Combined with the end of intentional cultural production, there are now only two ways to be a proud Canadian: a Conservative one and a Liberal one. The third way is that there’s no pride in being Canadian at all. While I live in that camp, I can’t deny that a majority of Canadians do not and do not want to either.

This is, I think, why the so-called Freedom Convoy bothered Liberals so deeply. The Convoy people managed to wrestle the Red! Red! Red! of the Liberal nationalist brand away from the Liberals and turn it into their own. Hey, that’s our flag! In doing so, they stole from the Liberals their most powerful tool. The Liberals were exposed for having done barely anything for working people, while enriching their friends, and they couldn’t even wrap themselves in the Canadian flag as a cloak of invisibility. The flag was no longer theirs and the emperor was naked.

This past week, when the ice finally melted, liberals snatched nationalism back, with the help of the breathiest Prime Minister Canada has ever had (no way did that shit fly before we had TV). Nationalism is back, baby, and by goll, it might just be enough to defeat Pierre Poilievre.

Because at the end of the day, the only nationalism that matters is the one that elects the good guys or that boosts profits.

6.

But think about how much deeper our connection to this country would be if we were all engaged in building a common future, together?

It’s wild that in an era where Canadians have never been more diverse, our cultural production has been crushed. The giants in Canadian literature who built Canada through their stories, the giants of Canadian painting who showed us what Canada is, the giants of music who put a tune to our collective memories, the giants in broadcasting on whom we could rely and whose creativity created culture and subculture — so much of that, destroyed, replaced with nothing in an era where we’ve never had more talent and more stories that need to be told.

And the artists have been reduced to fighting one another over the tiniest scraps.

A recent feature on memoir in Le Devoir, suggested that memoir is such a popular mode of writing for marginalized people because they’re often the ones who have the least time to spend writing. And so, they write what they know. There is tremendous richness in that but, god, imagine people could write full time? And be paid? Create music full time? And be paid?

Co-creation and co-production is a means to make co-habitation not only possible, but desirable. You wonder why Canadian society is so polarized? Look to see if you can find any art that brings us together that isn’t cheesy or corporate. In a way that you want to consume it. See if you can find anything.

Where cultural production was key to creating a White Christian Canada, today, we can see how crushing cultural production is also key to keeping us that White Christian Canada that we have never quite managed to shed.

Because it is not allowed to be too critical. It is not allowed to challenge cultural icons. We cannot take risks and make dangerous art. These things are forbidden in Canada. They will get you banned by the CBC and ignored by the Globe and Mail — at the exact moment that Canadians need, and want it, the most.

7.

We cannot allow the scraps of Canadian identity, nationalism and culture to be owned by political parties. These things cannot be entirely tied to the chaotic rhythm of politics.

If we can learn anything from the men who built white supremacy through Canadian identity (and their wives cheering them on), it’s that these things need to be intentional. We need a project. It’s the only hope in hell that we have to upend the modern slave-wage program of temporary foreign workers, it’s the only hope in hell we have of building something more just. And yet, it’s never been more elusive.

This territory is fraught because we’ve ceded so much of it to the far right. They understand cultural production — through astroturfing campaigns, organizing real campaigns, placing people to run for various positions across society, mutating their message to connect with Canadians regardless of where they are, through media and social media, through self help and live events — they have a clear vision for cultural production and hegemonic shift.

The left does not have this vision. At all. In fact, it isn’t even clear that we want a national identity at all. Where radicals in the 1970s were fighting for a leftwing nationalism that kicked out US companies from Canada, social democratic reforms and an inclusive immigration and integration society, the left is caught between the vacant, bullshit Red! Red! Red! nationalism of the Liberals and the racist and fascist nationalism of the right.

It’s despairing to think about this because we clearly don’t have the capacity to do these things on our own and our reality is part and parcel of the neoliberal project. No one is coming to save us.

But we cannot fall into the same fakeass logic about nationalism that the far right uses: we don’t create identity out of thin air, it’s the sum total of a million different cultural inputs, and when these million different cultural inputs are decimated, we are left with nothing at all. And while you can still appeal to someone’s latent sense of not being American, it’s a straw house, ready to blow over the second the American military crosses the border.

Those inputs need to be funded, supported and circulated, and the state is the body that needs to do this. That’s the way to build a new nationalism for a multipolar world.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I think that Canadians are probably mostly scoundrels who have long ago given up cultural clubs or religious involvement or community involvement and who therefore no longer feel tethered to the place in which they live. And in such a moment, the scoundrel will, of course, reach to a vacant patriotism that doesn’t mean or do anything. It isn’t an insult against him; it’s a statement on where we find ourselves in this moment, in this country that only kind of shed its white supremacist identity because it also just happened to shed everything else at the same time.

The refuge is barely in tact, and it must be rebuilt if we don’t want it to look like it used to.

In the past few days of this nationalist surge, way too many people concluded: see? Canada isn’t broken. We are here, we’re the truth north strong and free (or is it proud and free?) The naysayers were wrong.

Sadly, us naysayers are right. Cultural critics usually are (criticism, another casualty of our times). Things are broken and that vacant nationalism is exactly what the Liberals are counting on for you to support them, regardless of how the chances that you’ll die in an ER are higher than they’ve been since we’ve had public healthcare.

Personally, I don’t care if Canada survives this moment. Canadians are the people who I talk to every day and they will always be here. But we need to be a little bit smarter in understanding what is actually happening: we have been sold out long ago in the service of global capitalism. We are not going to get it back by doing capitalism even harder.