Let me take you back to the year 509 BC. The nobility and people of Rome, chafing under the despotic rule of King Tarquin the Proud and outraged by the wickedness of his son Sextus who “wrought the deed of shame,” have cast off their monarchy and proclaimed a republic. The common citizenry, armed with a newly-powerful vote, rejoice that they are now subject, not to the whims of tyrants, but to laws that apply equally to all. White-togaed patricians, their blue blood thrumming at the prospect of competing to fill the king-shaped void in the Roman constitutional order, offer themselves up to the popular favour and venture themselves as candidates for the two annual consulships that have replaced the monarchical office. The age of kings has passed, and a new era of republican virtue is dawning.
So, at least, runs the traditional account, recorded with almost breathless enthusiasm by the historian Livy, of the expulsion of the Roman kings and the foundation of the Roman Republic. Livy does, however, reserve one word of praise for monarchical rule. Arbitrary power, he tells us, was necessary during the infancy of the Roman state while a common sense of national identity was still developing among the founding peoples of Rome:
“What would have happened if this band of herdsmen and immigrants, fugitives from their own peoples, having taken hold of liberty–or, at any rate, impunity–under the protection of an inviolable sanctuary and being free from awe of royal power, should have been tossed about by the winds of popular fervour and taken up quarrels with the leading men of a city not their own, before the ties of wives and children and the love of the very soil … had made them to be of one spirit?” (Livy, AUC, 2.1; my trans.)
Livy’s account of the foundation of the Roman Republic, scholars now agree, is more myth than history, and, though he could not have known it, Livy himself was living in that “golden age” during which the Augustan revolution, wrapping itself in the toga of republican virtue, was progressively eroding, to the point of dissolution, the very representative institutions and democratic impulses that the historian praised.
Even so, I think Livy’s fundamental point in this short passage is sound, in that he accurately identifies the two indispensable ingredients for creating a healthy polity: first, love of family–which, because man is a social animal, includes love of neighbour and, because he is a political animal, love of national institutions–and second, love of place. A shared identity, bound together by the love of hearth, home and country, are, in Livy’s day as in ours, the necessary preconditions for free institutions and a democratic institution to endure and thrive. It was only once such an identity had matured that despotic government could safely be discarded.
Now let’s cast our minds forward across the centuries and oceans to British northwest America. The year is 1858, and gold has been discovered along the Fraser River. Would-be prospectors and a confident and expansionist American government look with hungry eyes across the 49th Parallel towards the vast hinterland over which Britain makes good her claim with little more than a string of Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts. Fearing the loss of its Pacific possessions, the British government establishes the colony of British Columbia and appoints James Douglas, already governor of the neighbouring colony of Vancouver Island, to bring British order to the territory and transform the motley band of foreign fortune-seekers who crowd the banks of the Fraser into loyal subjects of Queen Victoria.
The colonial secretary, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, gives Douglas his marching orders: he is to preside over the erection of a system of English courts to dispense the Queen’s justice impartially, and he is to work towards setting up representative institutions–but not too hastily. As Lytton warned Parliament in words that might very well have been lifted from Livy, it would be dangerous to “risk at once the experiment of self-government among settlers so wild, so miscellaneous, perhaps so transitory, and in a form of society so crude.” (Quoted in Ormsby, British Columbia: A History, p. 156.) In New Westminster as in Rome, a tight rein must be kept on the settlers until a common identity and permanent ties to the land could develop. In the meantime, Governor Douglas would be to them as lawgiver, and a handful of judges, gold commissioners, and Royal Engineers, few but fearless, would see that his–and the Queen’s–law was obeyed.
By the tireless efforts of these men, a common identity and shared purpose did develop among the denizens of the goldfields and the rainforest, and British Columbia was favoured with representative institutions that still survive, with all the scuffs and dents of a century and a half of electoral contest, to this day. But what of her shared identity? How has it fared over the past 150 years?
This question does not apply to the Pacific province alone. For decades, Canada’s dominant ideologies, official and popular, have encouraged the adoption of attitudes and policies that, if they do not actively undermine a common national identity, have done precious little to preserve and strengthen it. Our political class seldom ventures a more substantial account of Canadian identity than a woolly invocation of “values” and appears, at least if immigration policy and school civics curricula are anything to go by, to regard social cohesion as an optional extra to be cultivated, perhaps, once the GDP has been attended to. Shared identity and love of home play second–sometimes third or fourth–fiddle to economic considerations. Yet, if Livy and Lytton are right, a shared identity is not an optional extra, but the necessary precondition of a healthy democratic polity.
The result of our disregard for this truth is a society ever more fractured and factious, its centre straining valiantly to hold in the midst of so many and great centrifugal forces. Our representative institutions survive, to be sure, but the common identity that built them does not. We take our institutions for granted, believing them to be self-justifying and self-sustaining. This is true in part, but if we neglect the nurture of the tradition and culture that produced them, we risk losing our grasp of the reasons they came to be and the internal logic by which they function. We risk being left as barbarians looking upon the ruins of Roman villas and vainly pondering how they were built and what for.
Part of the problem is immigration policy. Admitting too many people too fast on nakedly economic motives–both theirs and the Canadian government’s–without adequate regard for how these newcomers would be integrated into the society they aspired to join, granting the franchise indirectly to non-citizens via internal party nomination and leadership races, and extending citizenship by descent to the third generation with only nugatory residency requirements, all conspire to cast doubt on the integrity of our political process, to make Parliament and our provincial legislatures little more than ventriloquist’s dummies for foreign squabbles, and to cheapen Canadian citizenship
The problem lies not in immigrants themselves, nor even in the number of immigrants admitted per se. Canada, like the United States, has historically welcomed proportionally far more immigrants than it does today and has shown itself up to the task of incorporating them organically and integrally into our national life. But the Canada that was able to do this was a Canada that had faith in itself and its institutions.
We find ourselves now in the midst of a crisis of confidence, an inability–or rather, more culpably, an unwillingness–to tell our national story in a way that we ourselves, let alone those outside of or newly arrived in our country, find attractive and compelling. The provinces have been happy to neglect civics instruction in schools, leaving the formation of the next generation of engaged citizens in the hands of the proverbial uninterested and uninformed PE teacher. The result is a national broadcaster that cannot even correctly identify Canada’s head of state as our head of state. Provincial and federal politicians alike have been content to hew down the tree of national identity and heap its limbs on the pyre of regional grievance if it serves their electoral fortunes. This is a crisis, not of others’, but of our own making.
There are, of course, broader forces that undermine our shared national identity. The anonymity and atomisation of our urban lives and the irresistible gravitational pull of our placeless and faceless digital cosmos are barren soil in which to grow a love of place and ties of common affection. We enwrap ourselves in enfeebling, isolating, and stultifying digital cocoons, and in so doing alienate ourselves from our neighbours and from the very sod of the country itself. These are not so much failures of policy but vices of the soul–of habit and of will–and they will not be healed but by the cultivation of the collective and individual virtues that oppose them. I seem to hear two ethical maxims, one ancient, one modern, combining to offer a remedy to these ills. The first is “Love your neighbour”–not just any neighbour, not humanity in the abstract, but your neighbour, the often not easily lovable people you find next to you. The second, equally pithy and pointed: “Touch grass.”
In Red Tory circles, to make claims like these is to lay the lash to a horse that is well and truly dead. We know what the problems are, but the solutions are by no means clear. What is sufficiently clear is that these problems will not be solved by abrogation of representative institutions. That particular feline will not, I suspect, be willingly coaxed back into its bag, nor indeed could it be without dealing a serious blow to the ideals of fairness and equality before the law that we have been fortunate to inherit from our forefathers. Our courts and parliaments, our cabinets and King are our priceless heritage as English- and French-speaking British North Americans. It is as absurd to put them in pawn for the sake of a half-baked, social media-driven vision of unity as it is to chip away at them in the cause of political expediency or a slight uptick in our GDP.
Nor indeed is the solution, pace online ethnonationalists, to “return” to a fictive racially homogenous Canada of yore. Ethnic and racial diversity has been a feature of all New World polities since the beginning of European settlement. Our forefathers were equal to the challenge of building a common identity among an ethnically and culturally heterogenous population; the example of James Douglas is evidence enough of that. That white ethnonationalists believe this to be an impossible undertaking betrays a dearth of imagination and a want of faith in their own ability to convince others of the value and strength of Canadian identity and Canadian institutions. It seems they are as much cowed by a lack of confidence as the “globalists” they despise.
Traditional Canadian Tories, from Douglas to John Farthing, have always affirmed that they have more in common with, say, West Indian Anglicans born and bred in the political and cultural heritage of the Commonwealth than with American republicans who happen by an accident of nature to share their skin tone. Our goal cannot be to build the ideal ethnostate–which is as impossible as it is undesirable to achieve–but rather to make our own band of “herdsmen and immigrants” into a nation that knows and wills itself to be united in purpose and to be bound by ties of patriotic love.
We cannot achieve this without a revival of national confidence and a realignment of priorities. What might an immigration policy, or an education policy, or an economic policy that prioritised national unity and shared identity look like? How do we tell our national story to new Canadians, both those born here and those who have come from afar?
Is it a story that emphasises our differences, that dwells with an almost narcissistic fixation on what makes us–as individuals or as cultural subunits–special? Difference is not, cannot, be denied, but it must be thought and talked of, insofar as it need be talked and thought of at all, only through in the context of diversity-in-unity. To extend the metaphor of the Canadian “mosaic,” now trite on the lips and in the press releases of our political class, a collection of tiles can only become a thing of beauty when arranged by expert craftsmanship under a unified creative vision; the parts, while not unimportant in themselves, must nevertheless be ordered towards and subsumed into the whole.
What should that confident, strident, united vision be for today’s Canada? What practical steps must we take to see it realised? The problem of national disunity is vast and its causes various, and I hope in a series of articles to explore how a sense of common identity and national unity might be rebuilt. The shards of our national mosaic–some the dower of centuries, some fresh from the kiln–lie heaped and scattered about us. All that remains for us is to set them in order.