With the arrival of Canada Day, it’s a good time to reflect on what it means to be Canadian. With that thought, the old stock answer always crops up: Canada has no national identity.

Canada. Oh wimpy, diminutive, reclusive Canada. If anything, our countries identity seems to be based on not having an identity at all or, at best, the kind of identity usually associated with wallflowers.

It has been argued that part of the reason for this is because of the last 50 years of multiculturalism in Canada. How can you have an identity when your whole national project is predicated on the notion that people can come here and be just the same as before they arrived? The argument goes that the patch work quilt that makes up the Canadian project has smothered any sort of grand-national identity that we can all share. People go to America and become Americans. People go to Canada and remain Filipinos, Indians, Somalis and Ukrainians. In short, Canada is nothing but a series of little, nationalistic fiefdoms.

I reject this argument.

There’s no doubt that the American identity is a much stronger construct than the Canadian psyche, but that doesn’t mean there’s no Canadian identity. It’s just more subtle. 

Fifty years of welcoming immigrants has created Canadians minds that are willing to tolerate more cultures than in any other part of the world. Canada is relaxed, accepting, inclusive and willing to talk about faults rather than strangle onto some notion that we are perfect. 

That’s the Canadian identity: a certain kind of enthusiastic tolerance.

It means little things; you can find sushi in pretty much every major grocery store in Canada; it means that butter chicken curry can be the favourite food of a white man who has never even been to India; it means that in Toronto, on Sunday morning, many of the Canadian television networks get taken over by weird South Asian song and dance movies and Italian soap operas; it means that the children of parents who grew up in tropical climate can grow to love a game that is played on ice.

It also means larger things beyond just television, food and sport.

Canada doesn’t have the far-right racist political uprisings that we’ve seen in the Netherlands and France. Racial demagogues in Canada do arise, but not at the levels seen in parts of the western world. The right represented by the Conservative Party of Canada, has bent over backwards to welcome new immigrants to the party. Racism in Canada doesn’t seem to exist in levels seen in the US and in Europe, at least not in political discourse.

None of this means that we’re not without faults. Honour killings and sharia law that holds women as inferior to men is not accepted in our tolerance. Neither are ‘codes of conduct’ enacted in the town halls of small Quebec towns that are clearly meant to exclude foreigners.

These things don’t expose the collapse of multiculturalism. They simply mean that we’re still trundling along, progressing, talking, trying to figure out our national project.

We’ve got parts correct though: we’ve created a national psyche that is easy going, relaxed, is willing to try new things and that, by and large, judges people by the content of their characters, not by the colour of their skin. For that, Canada deserves applause.

DISCLAIMER: The Last Word is an opinion column, it is meant to provoke thought and debate. As such, any opinions written here are the writers own and do not reflect the viewpoint of any other Fitzhugh staff member or the directors of the Jasper Media Group Inc.