What Is a Canadian? Forty-Three Thought-Provoking Responses Hardback - 2006

Excerpt

A CANADIAN IS . . . in some cases, someone who wishes this eternal, narcissistic, self-­pleasuring celebration of our national identity would get to the money shot so we can feel safe, at last, from the necessity of keeping a shoe handy to throw at the radio when some CBC panellist chuckles and quips, “How very Canadian of you!”
- Jake MacDonald

A CANADIAN IS . . . almost always unsure of what it means to be Canadian. Maybe this is a strength. Maybe it is evidence of our tolerance and pluralism and of our enlightened postmodernness. Let a thousand identities bloom! Or maybe it just reveals our hollow core — a vacuity at the centre of our soul. Outside of Quebec, at least, we do not really know who we are or what we represent — other than that we have made ourselves remarkably comfortable in a cold land, and that we are good at hockey.
- Thomas Homer-Dixon

A CANADIAN IS . . . according to literary critic Northrop Frye, “an American who rejects the [American] Revolution.” Frye’s definition, dating back fifty years plus, is still, I wager, sage. In the twenty-­first century, one sees that, despite the continued (and increased) popularity of American entertainment in Canada and the commercial integration (collusion) of our two nations since 1988, Canadians still define themselves as un-­American: not (as) “God-­fearing,” not (as) homophobic, not (as) jingoistic, and not (as) anti-­government as their neighbours.
- George Elliott Clarke

A CANADIAN IS . . . 32,146,547 different things altogether — and counting. A far more telling question, perhaps, might be What is Canada?, for this is a place where the country defines the people as much as the people the country; perhaps far more so.
- Roy MacGregor

A CANADIAN IS . . . the most fortunate, demanding and indebted person in the world.

Fortunate for the resource wealth, land mass, space and opportunity Canada provides as a common birthright; demanding because of what we expect from ourselves, our society, our allies and neighbours; in debt to a history of sacrifice, determination and service that preserved and built the best for the inheritance we call Canada.
- Hugh Segal

A CANADIAN IS . . . a citizen of the world without ever having to leave home. In just over a dozen words, that encapsulates the positive reality of being Canadian. Here we live at the top of North America, citizens of a huge country with a small population of just over thirty-­two million people, including about four million “visible minorities,” most of us within three hundred kilometres of the most powerful nation in the world. Yet we maintain, despite the critics, a unique nation.
- Catherine Ford

A CANADIAN IS . . . an imaginary creature with various mythological traits, some of them charming, some irritating, many of them contradictory.

The Canadian is, famously, able to make love in a canoe; pass for American until asked to pronounce “out”; inflect sentences upward at the end. The Canadian is self-­deprecating, ironic, polite and deferential to authority. Also hockey loving, beer drinking, pemmican eating, igloo dwelling. Fond of universal health care, vestiges of monarchy, extra u’s, reversed r’s and e’s, and the sound of something called zed. Multicultural, tolerant, civil, clean, mildly socialistic. The Canadian says “Sorry” when you step on his foot.

The most accurate book ever written about the subject of Canadian identity is Anthony Wilden’s The Imaginary Canadian, a work by an English-­born, American-­trained, French-­influenced Lacanian psychoanalytical sociologist who lives in Vancouver. Wilden argued that the Canadian, like the typical Gen-­Xer or classic Piscean, is a categorical fiction, a chimera. The Canadian is a projection of our desires and fears, a straw man or whipping boy, as the case dictates, a notional sum of forces and vectors, just as illusory but a lot less useful than a centre of gravity or statistical mean, and legally of a significance somewhat less than the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus.

Because he is imaginary, the Canadian is someone we shall forever seek yet never find, for the Canadian is everywhere and nowhere at once.
- Mark Kingwell

A CANADIAN IS . . . adaptable. To illustrate, consider the depth and breadth of the Canadian woman’s wardrobe…it is the winter wardrobe that really defines the adaptable Canadian woman. There is the long wool dress-­coat for evenings out, the short car coat for trips to work or to the grocery store, and the heavy ski jacket for multiple purposes — including jaunts outside to plug in the car, shifts at the unheated hockey rink to watch sons and daughters play peewee hockey, downhill skiing at Mont Tremblant or Lake Louise, or walks around Regina’s Wascana Lake…In sum, the Canadian woman has clothing to adapt to every possible weather pattern. It is why Canadians build their houses with so much closet space.
- Dr. Jennifer Welsh

A CANADIAN IS . . . a wonderful thing to be.

I write these words at thirty thousand feet, on my way to a conference in India on ethnic conflict and nation-­building. This is one of my keen interests, exploring how countries and regions can explode with violence, and in turn find ways to put themselves back together.

We like to think of ourselves as a peaceable kingdom, whose history is as dull as ditchwater, and whose politicians are full of it. Yet conflict and its resolution have been an indelible part of our story.
- Bob Rae