Canadian Traditions

It is often said that Canada is a nation of immigrants, and in opening our doors wider and wider to both refugees and immigrants, we are honouring the best Canadian tradition.

In the Osborne Collection at the Toronto Public Library, I came across a broadsheet from 1917, outlining a school ceremony to honour the Canadian flag.

The words the children were to say are instructive regarding the attitude towards immigration at that time, the time of Canada’s great immigration wave to populate the Prairies.

First student: From overcrowded European countries people will come thronging into this Dominion. Let it be our duty as coming citizens to see that only the worthy are allowed to enter. Let us like faithful sentinels, ever on the alert, guard our ports of entry.

So much for a simple open door policy. The door was guarded.

Second student: Pray tell us, who may enter in?

Third student: The honest, healthy, industrious immigrant will always find a welcome.

We now ask for specific skills supposed to be good for industry. Then, we asked for honesty and industry. Then, we saw immigrants as people, with intrinsic value, not just cogs in the economic machine.

This seems to me both more ethical and wiser. And it would be easy enough to determine. Simply make immigrants ineligible for any form of public assistance until they had been here for, say, five years, and deport them if they are convicted of a crime.

Fourth student: And when he has entered, we must see to it that he is taught to love our land, to keep her laws, to uphold her traditions and to salute her flag, as we do now.

Here we have really let the Canadian side down. We no longer teach immigrants to love Canada, to keep her laws, and to uphold her traditions. We actually now do the opposite. Our own Prime Minister has publicly denied there are such things as Canadian traditions. There are, of course, but our political elites aggressively reject and scorn them—including any appearance of the old flag these children were saluting. Meantime, our governments promote and fund whatever foreign traditions immigrants bring with them. That’s “multiculturalism.”

Most nations are based on race. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that: Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points asserted that nations ought to be. But Canada is not, and never was.

A nation, however, has to be based on something. Those that are not united by race must be united by shared traditions, or they are not united. They just happen to be living in proximity to one another. They will be incapable of any shared enterprise—of anything like peace, order, or good government.

Fifth student: 'Tis the Flag of Freedom we salute. The slave who many years ago crossed the border, the refugee from Poland, the downtrodden and religious outcast from mid-Europe, found Freedom beneath this Flag of ours and knew himself a man.

And this was the essence of Canadian tradition: freedom.

It is also, of course, the essence of the American tradition, and arguably of the British tradition. 

But, as the pledge still remembers, Canada has a special claim here, on the issues of slavery and of religious freedom. When the rest of the British Empire, and the USA, and the New World, and indeed most other countries, still practiced slavery, slavery was banned in Canada, and any slave who made it across the border was free. When the rest of the British Empire, and the USA, and most other countries, had no freedom of conscience, there was religious freedom in Canada. Only here could both Catholics and all varieties of Protestants vote, own land, and run for office, and even aspire to be Prime Minister.

This is what Canada was about at its founding. This is our legitimate heritage. It was this set of shared values.

This is what we have forgotten, and seem determined to lose.