What Happened to Canada, Eh?
Several years ago, two of us, Canadians, a diplomat and a journalist, began to experience a similar pattern during our separate travels abroad. Globally-minded people we met sometimes made comments, or asked questions, about Canada’s much-reduced political and diplomatic role on the world stage.
“What happened to Canada?” some of them would ask.
To them an older version of our country they were familiar with was fast ebbing away: Canada the middle power, which, though a close US and western ally, once forged its own way on global issues using the tools of multilateralism, peacekeeping, and the United Nations.
That roughly half-century-long approach engendered a reputation for fair-dealing and a posture approaching neutrality, which placed Canada in good standing internationally. This was abetted by Canada’s record as an inclusive and tolerant nation at home. It was such that young travellers from other countries wandering the world, especially Americans, sometimes patched Canadian flags on their backpacks to elicit favourable treatment from the citizens of host countries.
But in more recent years that tradition has been quickly eroded by ideological creep, upending that “higher” vision of Canadian foreign policy and subordinating it to more navel-gazing and parochial concerns. This was first from the neoconservative government of Stephen Harper which scuttled Canada’s longstanding internationalism because of its insular and short-sighted far-right fixations; and then by his current antithesis, Justin Trudeau, who embraces idealist panaceas around the construction of perfect egalitarian utopias.
Canada, no longer the pragmatic and respected world actor it once was, appears more abstracted and withdrawn with each passing year.
But is politics the fundamental cause of this shift? Or is something else afoot at a deeper level that has made Canada irrelevant, if not ineffective, on the world stage.
We suggest the latter, and that the answer lies in Canada’s culture.
Canada is an affluent country, enormously rich in resources, blessed by a massive landmass with a proportionally small population. It is the northern neighbour to the wealthiest country in the world. Critically, its raison d'être (and self-image) is in many ways to be a safe haven for its citizens—and the countless aspiring-Canadians from troubled areas of the world who want to make the country their home. Obsession with ever more safety and welfare is the prime consequence over time of that ‘safe haven effect.’ Due to this role as well as its bounty, most Canadians are comfortable and have built a society that is buffered—geographically and culturally—from challenge. Its nature as a safe haven, though perhaps playing a necessary role in the world, does also demand some degree of withdrawal in order not to spoil that basic concept.
To put it another way, because Canadians are conditioned to both comfort and safety, they are avoidant of risk and exceptionalism. This may also derive as a passive response to the risk addictions of Americans and their intense sense of exceptionalism. Canadian risk aversion may also be built into its cultural DNA. The United Empire Loyalists, British subjects who chose not to take part in the American Revolution, went on to partly found and build Canada. The descendants of these same people were engineers of the English-French compromise that kept Canada intact for centuries. Unlike the aggressive vectors of the American Revolution, these were more conservative tendencies.
These longstanding Canadian cultural proclivities may simply have become too dominant, leading to a kind of aberrant behaviour. In some ways, and especially in media and academic circles, Canada has become the high church of a new kind of radical progressivism defined as ‘woke.’ The country is happy to lead this parade of abstract and sometimes coercive commitments to inclusivity, diversity and endless apology. It goes with the Canadian grain—it also has a missionary appeal that provides meaning. Our feminist foreign policy is the main international indicator of this ideology.
But there is a high price to pay where all of this is concerned: softness should a significant challenge arise; a kind of sleep in which the rest of the world is an affordable distraction; and finally, a denial of the need to do anything—or worse, the pretence of doing through words. Canada’s recent political difficulties with an overly-assertive China is merely one case in point.
The question responsible decision-makers in Ottawa should be asking is: is this sustainable? Will this approach make Canada any readier for the geopolitical and socio-economic storms and great power rivalries that will impact us over the coming decades?
The problem is not just China, a large enough challenge, but also future competition from the Russians, potentially in the Arctic. Relatedly, deteriorating politics in the United States may have unforeseen consequences for its reluctant northern neighbour. A querulous, distracted and fragmented USA might have implications in terms of American refugee flows, changing defence commitments and capacities, and even overall cultural direction: whither the West?
Perhaps just as important a question: is the virulence of new ideology, a hypertrophy of old tendencies, not also a risk domestically, creating polarization where none existed before? Are we not becoming a caricature—a left brained representation—of what was once a fairly functional inclusive system?
Can Canada remain the safe haven it needs to be while dealing strongly and flexibly with these coming pressures? Or will a continued ‘safe haven effect,’ amplified by a growing obsession with utopian ideals, paradoxically subvert it, leading, ironically, to an unintentional fragmentation of a once healthy country?
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