Canada did not rise from the romantic fire of revolution. We didn’t storm a Bastille. We didn’t write a founding manifesto and dare the world to stop us. Canada began in something quieter — restrained and effective: negotiation stretched across geography, language, and weather — a long effort to keep a fragile federation intact.
For a time, that effort was admirable. We knew we were different, and we made “different” function. Well. We didn’t need to be dramatic to be real.
But somewhere along the way, we stopped being a country in any meaningful sense and became a management plan.
This isn’t a complaint about compromise. Compromise held Canada together. The problem is what happened afterward: pragmatism stopped being a means and became the destination. We stopped using expedience to serve a purpose; we began using it as a substitute for one.
If I had to pick the moment that shift became unmistakable, I’d point to 1958 — the year Canada cancelled the Avro Arrow.
The Arrow was more than an aircraft. It was a statement: Canada could be more than a branch plant with a flag. It was proof — unarticulated but palpable — that we could choose ambition over caution, creation over procurement, competence over dependence. And then it was gone, killed in the name of practicality. The details can be debated forever: doctrine changed, costs rose, alliances mattered — so did deference.
But the deeper meaning was simple. Canada stepped away from vision and convinced itself the loss was maturity.
From there, it became a national habit. We replaced inherited meaning with designed meaning. We traded culture for administration. We swapped identity for policy.
The new flag is an example. Many Canadians justifiably love it. I don’t. To me it marked a turn toward a kind of nation-making that does not grow organically but is calculated — closer to branding than belonging. The older symbols carried continuity, awkwardness, and history. The newer one is sleek. It is safe. It is modern. It is inoffensive. It was intended to smooth us out.
That smoothing-out impulse became a national reflex. Any rough edge in Canada’s story was sanded down. Any pride was treated as dangerous. Any assertion of heritage became suspect.
Then multiculturalism arrived — not multiculturalism as demographic reality, which Canada has always had, but as an official ideology. The sales pitch was that Canada would be “many cultures” without imposing one. But you cannot have many cultures without a host culture. Without a shared cultural spine, multiculturalism becomes something else: not culture, but procedure — a bureaucratic neutrality masquerading as virtue.
It also creates an asymmetry that Canadians are no longer allowed to notice. We are told we must respect and admire every imported tradition, every festival, every sacred symbol. Fine. But in the same schools, we are told we should not say “Merry Christmas,” as though our own inherited traditions are pollutants. We can affirm everyone else’s rituals — provided we deny our own.
This is not inclusion. It is self-erasure.
And once a society internalizes the idea that its founding culture must apologize for existing, it doesn’t become enlightened. It becomes empty. Its children do not learn confidence; they learn embarrassment. Its newcomers do not meet a proud host; they meet a nervous landlord.
Our constitutional structure reflects the same impulse. A constitution is supposed to be the civil contract of a nation — stable, binding, serious. But Canada’s contains a clause that, in effect, says rights are rights unless government decides otherwise. The notwithstanding clause is often defended as a democratic safety valve: a way for legislatures to override judges. Perhaps. But a constitution is not supposed to be a suggestion. A right that can be suspended on schedule is not a right. It is a privilege. That is not the logic of rights. It is the logic of power.
A country can survive for a long time on privilege and procedure. It can remain materially prosperous and institutionally stable. It can avoid catastrophe. But it cannot inspire. It cannot demand anything of its citizens beyond compliance and taxes.
This is where we now find ourselves: managing instead of building; administering instead of imagining; negotiating instead of leading. We still hold elections. We still debate budgets. But much of our politics is about avoiding pain rather than pursuing purpose. We speak endlessly of “stakeholders,” “communities,” and “consultations,” as though clarity itself were a form of violence. We balance every interest group so carefully that we forget to name a destination.
There is an old line: without vision, the people perish. A nation without vision decays into managerialism. It becomes timid. It becomes passive. It becomes a map of competing demands rather than a community of shared commitments.
Canada’s great talent has always been compromise. But compromise is not an identity. It is a means by which a country pursues something greater than the sum of its regions and factions. When compromise becomes the highest value, the country stops standing for anything except the act of not falling apart.
We used to be a country.
Now we are a process.