Robert J. Joustra: Canada’s pluralism crisis

Canada seems like an ideal case study of pluralism. Founded, as Canada was, on the alliance of at least two great, diverse nations (“deux solitudes”), and subsequently folding into its story many other Indigenous nations, the origin story of the Dominion of Canada is conspicuously covenantal. While Canada has experienced its own share of political violence, cultural rivalry, and state-sanctioned oppression, its origin as a separate and discrete dominion is not usually considered a special consequence of any of those things. Rather, it may seem, at least at first, a somewhat idealistic series of political negotiations which produced a serviceably covenantal, even if bland and lawyerly, settlement: the British North America Act. The only major casualties were casks of whisky. This is not an unusual way to talk about Canada’s origin story, not least because it provides a nicely sharp contrast with our neighbours to the south, who factor inevitably into any kind of Canadian identity. Partly for this reason a kind of national myth has grown up around Canada as a mosaic—independent identities woven into a whole cloth—compared to the United States as a melting pot—independent identities dissolved into a larger identity. Our prime ministers are heard saying things like “diversity is our strength,” and one of Canada’s main comparative advantages, at least once upon a time, has been a broad, bipartisan consensus that diversity is generally a net good, and newcomers and immigrants in particular add to the nation’s vitality and productivity. This story pairs well with the aspirations of Yuval Levin’s book, American Covenant. In it, Levin paints a picture of something like what Chris Stewart, Chris Seiple, and Dennis Hoover call covenantal pluralism. Levin argues that “unity does not quite mean agreement” and that “we have forgotten the practical meaning of unity: in the political life of a free society, unity does not mean thinking alike; unity means acting together.” Levin’s admiration for the Constitution of the United States of America, as both manifestation and tutor of a structure for this kind of unity, is his central argument. Like Levin, Stewart, Seiple, and Hoover argue that pluralism is more process than end point, more organic than mechanical. It depends, they say, on at least three fundamental things: freedom of religion or belief; cross-cultural worldview literacy; and the virtues and structures within which mutual difference can be constructively conciliated. On this latter point, Levin places heavy emphasis. At least within the context of the U.S., he argues, the Constitution and its arrangements anticipate and make possible the kind of pluralism that Seiple, Stewart, and Hoover have in mind. In other places, it may look otherwise. Perhaps, very close to home, is not a bad place to search. “Canadian” identity So, is this true of Canada? What is the status of this story, of this broad set of conditions for a sustainable form of robust pluralism to exist today? There is a prior question to the practice of pluralism that much politics may take for granted. In order to do pluralism, in order to establish a relationship, we must know not only how to do it, or what is to be decided, but who is in the relationship. This question of identity, when it comes to Canada, is remarkably vexatious. It is the problem at the heart of our constitutional chaos. It has been 60 years since George Grant put his finger on the pulse of this particular crisis in his savagely pessimistic Lament for a Nation. In this classic work, Grant argues that while the foundation of Canada (1867) may indeed have been something like a covenant between an Anglo-British Protestantism and a French-Catholicism, that covenant was now effectively moot as at least one of those identities—the English—had largely disappeared. Grant’s lament can read as a bit of light anti-Americanism, in part because his sorrow is for the passing of a distinct Anglo-identity in Canada, a tradition of English politics and culture, that, while linguistically consonant with America, was more culturally and morally European. This Canadian identity, for Grant, was more traditional, more organic, more conservative, and it served as a kind of moral ballast against the technocratic capitalism of the revolutionaries to the south. Jean-Christophe Jasmin makes a related argument when he says that “the culture shared between Quebec and Canada is not Canadian. It is American.” A version of this argument appears in the philosophical reflections of many different cultures concerned about the corrosive power of capitalism and technology. The Japanese had their “Western science, Eastern ethics,” and the Chinese, Ottomans, and even Russians had their own mottos for this anxiety. A Liberal leader in Quebec, M. Bourassa, put it: “American technology, French culture.” Canada’s anxiety is perhaps more acute for its proximity: how to maintain an independent Anglo-identity on a continent dominated by what would become the greatest superpower in the history of the world, whose culture, cuisine, even its politics, would be so easily transported beyond its borders in an era of rapid globalization? Grant called the game in 1965. Enjoy your petty narcissism about hockey and health care, I paraphrase him here, because the moral and cultural core of English Canada is now simply an affectation of America. The only hopeful line of argument Grant offers in Lament is that Quebec’s French-Catholicism may prove sufficiently robust to hold back the homogenizing behemoth of American culture. It is an ironic argument for most Canadians to hear that Quebec’s separatist fantasies are in fact a solution rather than a crisis for the vitality of the Dominion. This was a dramatic line for Canada’s premier public intellectual of the 20th century. And his concerns were taken very seriously. The Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau used the power of the state in the decade after Grant’s lament to fund Canadian identity projects, from news media to broadcasting to music and art. The jury of public opinion is still very much out on whether these efforts have created and sustained something like independent Canadian culture (and whether anyone in Canada actually wants it). Canada’s constitutional conundrum This somewhat philosophical and historical background is necessary to make sense of Trudeau’s signature effort to construct and sustain a Canadian identity: the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. It is sometimes baffling to outside observers that prior to 1982, the “Canadian Constitution,” such as it was, was not entirely a document of the Canadian government or its people. It was known, rather, as the British North America Act, and it was an act of the British Parliament, dated to 1867. Since then, a variety of conventions and alterations had indeed greatly enlarged Canada’s independence, not least the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which established Canada’s right to make its own foreign policy, but it remained the case that ownership of the Constitution itself was not, basically, Canadian. Trudeau’s efforts to repatriate the Canadian Constitution, as the effort became known, can perhaps be best understood as a long-run political response to anxieties about Canada’s national identity. It seemed to fulfill the wish that Canada would not be American, but it would also not be British. Canada would instead be its own independent state, with its own constitution, and exclusive jurisdiction over its basic governing documents. It should be said that there was some concern that a written constitutional document that laid out specific constitutional provisions was itself a kind of American exercise. Canada had long had a political culture dominated by a quasi-constitution in the British North America Act, and a series of laws that operated in a quasi-constitutional nature, with a battery of conventions, themselves of a kind of constitutional status. It was complex, to be sure, and led to occasional “constitutional” crises, as in the King-Byng Affair, but nobody could argue it was American. It also precluded the judicialization of Canadian politics, with courts and the Supreme Court, in particular, playing a less significant role. That would indeed change after 1982. Whether the idea of a written constitution repatriated to Canada was a good idea or not is not the focus of this article, though some of the unintended consequences of repatriation may prove important to the crisis of pluralism. This is because in its negotiations with the provinces, Trudeau’s government failed to ultimately secure Quebec’s support. The details are interesting, involving the “Kitchen Accord” (from which Canada’s “notwithstanding clause” originated), and the “Night of Long Knives” (from which Quebec’s premiere René Lévesque withdrew in betrayal), but the overall point is that when Queen Elizabeth II signed the Constitution Act 1982 on April 17, 1982, she did so without Quebec’s consent or signature. This did not mean Quebec was exempt from the Constitution, as some separatists would claim, but as an exercise in pluralism, one must admit, it leaves something to be desired. As it turns out, Quebec was not the only nation to have been passed over in the process of repatriation. First Nations, too, were conspicuously absent from most of the negotiations over the new framework governing Canada’s Constitution. Two further attempts, by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, were made. The Meech Lake Accord of 1987 tried to goad Quebec into signing through a distinct society clause and establish more formal powers for provinces related to the Senate and the Supreme Court. It failed at the provinces. The Charlottetown Accord of 1990 tried again, with clearer divisions of powers, a clarified federalism, a particular emphasis on Indigenous self-government, a distinct society as well as a “Canada Clause” setting out the values of Canadian character, and broader Parliamentary reform, including “Triple-E” Senate—equal, elected, effective. It failed in a national referendum. The defeat of Quebec separatism in its own sovereignty referendum in 1995—partly fueled by the perceived betrayals of these abortive constitutional settlements—effectively produced a muddle that has been the basis for Canadian politics ever since. The prospects of pluralism All of which is to say that there is a common, general consensus that while Canadian federalism, its Senate, Indigenous governance, and indeed its sense of national identity are something of a hot mess, any path to fixing it through reopening the Constitution is political suicide. Not only is Canada’s diversity infrastructure sadly neglected, not unlike 24 Sussex Drive itself, we are also–perhaps justifiably–terrified to reopen or renovate it, lest perhaps the very act catalyzes some kind of catastrophic collapse. Alas, this state of affairs cannot hold for long. And just when Canada’s diversity infrastructure is reaching its breaking point, trend lines around social polarization, demographic and economic demands around new immigration, and cultural and religious illiteracy are also peaking. Given Canada’s demographic trends, the question is not whether to increase diversity, but how good the diversity infrastructure is to welcome the newcomers Canada desperately needs. This is not simply abstraction. It means newcomers have not only homes and meaningful work, social and cultural support, but also that there is a welcoming process that folds newcomers into the goods of the Canadian covenant. Absent these things, we are indeed fire-loading the Canadian political ecosystem for a substantial populist backlash, one fueled not only by material shortcomings (housing, inflation, productivity growth) but also identity politics (diversity infrastructure). Such a collision of forces threatens to undermine the very vitality of Canada’s longstanding bipartisan consensus that newcomers, new ideas, new diversity, is a net “good” for Canada. That consensus, worryingly, appears to be breaking. Nor has Canada seen much improvement in its capacity to do hard diversity work in its existing political infrastructure. After failing three times to meaningfully fold French and First Nations minorities into the formal Canadian constitutional system, the midnight addition of the notwithstanding clause—a clause whereby provincial governments may enact and uphold laws notwithstanding the Canadian Constitution, including, somewhat concerningly, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—has enjoyed considerable enthusiasm in the last several years. It is hard not to notice that many provincial complaints are related to religion, language, and culture. They are related, in other words, to opting out of the diversity infrastructure of the Canadian Constitution. Taken together these updates are not especially encouraging for the prospects of pluralism in Canada. The picture we take away is one of a country that is increasingly divided on basic questions of not only freedom of religion, but even whether religion is good or bad, and a related collapse of religious literacy. We see a country that has depended on its prudent, orderly management of diversity for its economic and cultural vitality, but which has badly underfunded the infrastructure needed to maintain it. And now, just when economically and demographically, it is most badly needed, it is at the point of—or is perhaps already—breaking. Canada is a great country. It enjoys an almost unbelievable set of geopolitical, economic, environmental, cultural, and political advantages. It ranks, regularly and uncontroversially, as among the wealthiest, happiest, and freest societies. It is hard to imagine one of the world’s wealthiest, most educated, most successful states falling into difficulty. But this argument has sounded exactly that warning bell: it is Canada’s largesse, and its success, which now stands as a barrier toward doing the hard work of pluralism. It is not enough to open doors, or declare ourselves “post-national” or celebrate “diversity”: these must be met with robust virtues, institutions, and literacy in pluralism, all of which, as I see them, have atrophied significantly since 1982. It is not always for lack of trying—I do not want to be too critical, or too pessimistic. But, of late, Canada has become victim of a kind of dangerous and smug complacency that what has happened in France, or Hungary, or the Netherlands, or even in the U.S., cannot happen here. It can. And I expect, in fact, it will. Canada has deficit-spent its bank of robust pluralism. Now the country must begin repaying with the hard work of deep dialogue, of foundational protections (and limits), and, finally, of revisiting its political poltergeists of institutional and constitutional reform. A longer version of this article will be published in a forthcoming special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs.