Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto by Rudyard Griffiths
Douglas & McIntyre (2009), 232 pp.
On Tuesday, January 20, minutes after being sworn into office on the very Bible with which Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated to his first term in 1861, President Barack Obama turned to address expectant millions, the dome of the Capitol Building behind him, the austere spire of the Washington Monument and the brooding Lincoln Memorial ahead. The Mall in Washington, DC, is saturated with the symbolism of American history, as was President Obama’s solemn speech. “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath,” he intoned. “The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on, not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents.”
There is much in President Obama’s very American rhetoric that might well grate against Canadian sensibilities, in particular the sense of universal religious mission in passages like “This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.” But compare his sweeping evocation of what it means to be an American citizen with the manoeuvring that has characterized Canadian politics in the recent past, most of which has unfolded with virtually no reference to Canada as a nation, nor of Canadians as citizens of a single nation with a powerful history. That absence, according to Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute, is symptomatic of an impoverished notion of citizenship and history that endangers Canada’s capacity to address the looming global crises of the twenty-first century. “I would argue that the failure of our political leaders and opinion makers to rally the country to the defence of a common nationhood, in name and fact, fits into a larger pattern of collective acquiescence,” Griffiths writes. “Beyond politics, in the areas of culture, the economy and our social priorities, the country’s elites and institutions are failing to assert the symbols, shared objectives and values that defined our common identity for our forebears.”
In recent years, Canada has often been presented as the prototype of the “postnational” state, its people not so much of a single nation with its peculiar civic traditions, but rather “citizens of the world” connected by their common humanity. The idea of being a citizen of the world may well appeal to our sense of living in a globalized, multicultural society, and also to our anxiety about the darker side of nationalism, but, says Griffiths, it comes at a heavy price: studies suggest that Canadians’ knowledge of their own history has been steadily diminishing, as has their participation in important civic activities like voting and volunteering. Griffiths describes three potential twenty-first-century crises whose solution, in his view, will require strong federal institutions backed by an engaged citizenry: an aging population, which will further stress the health care system and deplete the workforce; mass immigration, which is needed to compensate for the aging population and the low birth rate, but which also demands support from the public sector; and climate change, which, if not slowed, could radically alter the way we live over the course of the next hundred years.
But then, what is Canada’s singular national identity, and what should it mean to be a Canadian citizen? Griffiths argues that Canada has undergone two defining periods of nation building, first beginning in the 1840s in the reform movement spearheaded by Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, and then again in the late 1940s, led by Louis St. Laurent, C. D. Howe, and Lester B. Pearson. “Those who would have us believe that Canada has always been a contingent association of different regions, linguistic groups and ethnic communities,” Griffiths concludes, “ignore or have forgotten our evolution as a civic nation. History shows that ours is a political community built on shared democratic values and institutions rather than on ethnicity, region or language.” But he also believes Canada needs a third period of nation building, this one focused on the nature of citizenship — and he offers practical suggestions. For instance, he proposes longer residency requirements prior to citizenship, and an enriched citizenship exam so new immigrants will lay down deeper roots and have a broader knowledge of Canada’s civic traditions; and mandatory voting and civic service, whether in the military, social service, or education, as a way of instilling responsibility and increasing participation in public life for all Canadians.
Who We Are is a bold and sometimes provocative book: while rejecting crude nationalism, Griffiths insists that multicultural Canada in a complicated, often volatile world is best served by a more robust idea of citizenship and a stronger allegiance to its traditions and institutions. While the book is not convincing throughout — the political machinations in Upper and Lower Canada are hardly a mythic parallel to the American Revolution, and the idea of “loyalty” that Griffiths sees as crucial to the Canadian version of democracy seems weak compared with the vision of liberty that fuelled the Declaration of Independence — it is nonetheless the starting point of a conversation that we can only ignore at our peril.
More book reviews: The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
