Upstream

Moomba Parade, Melbourne

Multiculturalism is a bad idea.

As of the fifties and sixties, things were getting really interesting in Canadian literature, and in Canadian culture generally. A distinct Canadian voice was appearing. Mordecai Richler. Brian Moore. Timothy Findlay. Irving Layton. Al Purdy. W.O. Mitchell. Earl Birney. William Kurelek. Margaret Atwood. And on and on.

Yet even then, even in the Seventies, in taking a Bachelor’s degree in English at Queen’s, there was still zero opportunity to read anything written in Canada.

Then along came multiculturalism, and crushed that spring blossom before it fully bloomed. Now you still cannot read anything written in Canada—unless it is by an aboriginal author, or about some other country.

According to this new orthodoxy, recently expressed by Justin Trudeau, there is no Canadian culture, no Canadian mainstream. Canada is not supposed to have a culture. Culture is always and only something that comes from some other country. Recent immigrants have cultures, and can celebrate them. Aboriginal Canadians have cultures. But we native Canadians as Canadians? We whose ancestors have been here for a few generations? We were not allowed to have one. Nothing we had done in Canada counted.

There is a word for this attitude: colonialism. We are by it forced back into being a colony of other nations, just as we were about to emerge as maitres chez nous. Nothing could be worse for the survival of a nation as an independent and a united country, nothing could be worse for social cohesion, and nothing could be worse for the quality of life of Canadians, than what our political and cultural elite have deliberately done to us over the past half-century or so: deliberately suppressing Canadian culture.

We need a cultural revolution. It is time to stand up for being Canadian. That’s the movement.

I propose a web page on that basis, an ejournal, and a publishing house, and public readings. It would not cost much; if necessary, it could all be done on almost no capital investment. Poetry, short fiction, visual art, and essays that support the idea of a genuine Canadian national culture. With the wonders of the web, we could readily do multimedia too: video, audio. Performance art, drama, animation. Online poetry readings.

I think the time is ripe. There is a growing political and a popular mood. People are getting upset with multiculturalism across the developed world; although this is commonly falsified by the media as “anti-immigration.” Notably, those upset with multiculturalism should and do include immigrants and aboriginals, who do not appreciate being presented to the rest of us as cartoons, wearing wooden shoes, or quills and feathers, or leather shorts.

Here is how I would define Canadian culture for our purposes:

Canadian culture is democratic and popular in its instincts. No classism or snobbery. No line between popular and high culture. Hockey is culture.

True Canadian culture promotes Canadian unity. No ethnic chauvinism, no regional chauvinism, no class chauvinism.

Accordingly, true Canadian culture includes Quebec.

True Canadian culture is about what happens and happened in Canada, not in some other land. The exception being in Flanders Fields, so to speak--foreign exploits involving groups of Canadians as Canadians.

True Canadian culture cannot be anti-immigrant. Canada really is a nation of immigrants. In the US, some make a distinction between first settlers and later immigrants, but this distinction is far less meaningful in Canada. In most of Canada, waves of immigrants, in the sense of being neither English nor French, were in fact also first settlers. And not long ago. In Canada, immigration has tended to be largely rural, while in the US it has long been mainly urban.

But the focus of immigrants, immigration, and immigrant artists ought to be on developing and appreciating our common culture, not hiving off into isolated cultural factions. And not creating or artificially stressing differences. The immigrant story is a classic Canadian story, but the story must be of the attempt to integrate: The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. As Richler has his boy protagonist say in “The Room”: “Kiss my Royal Canadian.”

Multiculturalism is antihuman. Our job as Canadians, and as civilized human beings, is the same: to select the best from every culture available, and form from any and all sources the best possible shared culture. That is how culture advances. That is how humankind advances. This is our great opportunity as Canadians, because we are an immigrant culture. This has been the essence of Canada since its founding.

And, yes, this means a melting pot, not a mosaic. The obvious limit to this is that Quebec must remain linguistically distinct. We are, no doubt, back to bilingualism and biculturalism.

Cultural appropriation is civilization. Civilization is a matter of continuous cultural appropriation. Objecting to cultural appropriation is not just racist. It is barbaric. It is a frog march back to the Stone Age. Cultures do not own people.

While true Canadian culture must be identifiably different from American culture, Canadianism must be something more and other than mere anti-Americanism. A culture or nationality based on disparaging outsiders is worse than useless.

Canada must be more than geography—a mere location on a map. There is a tendency—see Group of Seven—to look at Canada as nothing more than this. True Canadian culture celebrates the people and what they have done. We have no right to pride over what God has done and our good luck. Nature is not culture.

The most important file here is perhaps education. For example, essays on why this or that work or artist expresses the values of Canadian culture. What is distinct about Canada.

I’d also like to see us certifying important elements of Canadian culture. This is a useful thing governments do in East Asia: declaring “national treasures,” including “living national treasures.” The Canadian government does a bit of this, but is guilty of a focus on nature and on divisive elements. We could host an annual list of inductees. Government isn’t going to do it right; we could.

Examples of real Canadian culture, worth citing, honouring, analyzing, writing about—and this list gives a good idea, I think, of the sort of thing I am speaking of as “Canadian culture”:

Stephen Leacock

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Alice Munro

Robert W. Service

“In Flanders’ Fields” – John McCrae

William Kurelek

Ian Tyson

Stan Rogers

Joni Mitchell

Gordon Lightfoot

The Tragically Hip

“The Hockey Sweater” - Roch Carrier

Gabrielle Roy

Mary Bolduc

The McGarrigles

Wade Helmsworth

Mac Beattie

Alex Colville

Emile Nelligan

Robert Charlebois

“Beautiful Losers” – Leonard Cohen. A lot of Cohen is Eastern European/Greek in flavor, international, not distinctly Canadian. But some is very Canadian. Beautiful Losers is.

Al Purdy

Irving Layton

Cirque du Soleil

“Cape St. Mary’s,” “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” and a vast folk song corpus from the Atlantic Provinces.

Neil Young – some of his stuff, at least, seems distinctly Canadian in tone and outlook. “Helpless,” for example.

Stompin’ Tom Connors – much of his stuff is regional, but I think not in a divisive way.

Margaret Atwood, “Survival.” Probably other Atwood, but I have not read her that much. Her feminist stuff like “The Handmaid’s Tale” would be disqualified as factional and divisive.

Northrop Frye. He had much to say on a distinctive Canadian literature.

George Grant

Pierre Burton – yes, he is a popular historian. Academic noses turn up at the name. Being popular is not a problem here. Classism, we note, is unCanadian.

Aislin. Political cartooning is a Canadian specialty. Aislin is probably the best. And Canadian cartoonists have miraculously avoided being politically pigeonholed, which would be divisive, and tend to disqualify them by our standards.

Duncan MacPherson. On the same grounds as Aislin.

A lot of food: poutine, tortiere, pate chinois, feves au lard, Kraft dinner, Montreal smoked meat, Montreal bagels, donairs, May West, Jos. Louis, butter tarts, pea soup, Jiggs’ dinner, ginger ale, spruce beer, rye, Salish candy, figgy duff, fries and gravy, roast beef sandwich. I guess ketchup chips also count, although I cannot personally understand the appeal.

Thomas Darcy McGee as our patron saint, worth quoting from often. He’s the original ideologue of a new and distinct Canadian culture. And he is the great martyr to Canadian unity. Why do we instead make such a fuss over Louis Riel, whose only contribution was disunity and strife?