In his 1997 book National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian Historywhich explores the roots, foundations, and micro-truths that underlie Canadian identity, historian Daniel Francis writes that civic ideology in a country like Canada must be a deliberate product: something that needs to be “constantly recreated and reinforced.” Canadians depend on this social construct more than others, Mr. Francis said, “because we lack a common religion, language or ethnicity, because we are spread so sparsely across such a huge piece of real estate.” It is not, as Mr. Francis wrote, something “we come to naturally.”
This is certainly more true now than it was more than 25 years ago.
But if you asked the average Canadian approaching the year 2025 what it means to be Canadian – how it describes our civic ideology, or the values, behaviors and expectations that unite us as Canadians – I suspect many would stumble upon the answer. They may offer hackneyed metaphors, mythical aspirations, or characteristics that set us apart as Americans: we love hockey and Tim Hortons; We are the global peacekeepers; We are inclusive, diverse and tolerant; We have universal health care, free access to abortion, and relatively low rates of gun crime.
But this diverse landscape of Canadian identity, which decades ago might have been a real source of national pride, is a tired and largely inaccurate description of “Canadian identity” when tested against the reality of life in Canada in 2025. We are global peacekeepers, except that. Our commitment to uniformed personnel in UN peacekeeping missions is at an all-time low. We are inclusive and tolerant, but temples are routinely firebombed and fights break out between ethnic groups. We are a diverse population, but the short-sighted immigration policies under this government have turned the entire system upside down, destroyed our consensus on immigration and created major problems of integration. We have universal health care, but it comes with extraordinary waiting lists for non-urgent procedures, a dearth of family doctors, and regular emergency room closures due to staffing shortages. (Can we interest you in MAID instead?)
Crimes involving Firearms arrivehousing is laughably unaffordable, and Tim Hortons doesn’t bake fresh cookies in the store like they used to. In fact, the things that used to define us as Canadians are no longer true. It’s no wonder then, according to what Angus Reid recently said reconnaissanceCanadians’ pride in their country has fallen to its lowest level in 30 years.
But this is only part of the problem. Civic pride still exists in countries with major social and economic problems (the United States being the most obvious example), but as Mr. Francis writes in his book, it needs to be strengthened, refined and strengthened. However, this hasn’t happened in Canada in a very long time: In 2021, Canadian flags on federal buildings were flown at half-mast for nearly half the year, after reports of possible unmarked graves being discovered in former residential schools. Justin Trudeau has called Canada a genocide over its treatment of Indigenous women and girls. When he first became Prime Minister He said Canada could be the first “post-national state” in the world, adding that “there is no basic identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
In his book, Mr. Francis tried to explain how national unity is, to some extent, a function of forgetting. “We describe ourselves as a comprehensive cultural mosaic, while forgetting that racism has been at the heart of Canadian culture for generations,” he wrote. This may have been true in 1997, but 21st-century Canada has arguably done the opposite: we remember so much, so deliberately, that we kept our flags at half-mast for Canada Day in 2021. Younger generations in particular have internalized this fact. . The idea that civic pride and reconciliation with our country’s historical wrongs are fundamentally incompatible; To be proud to be Canadian is to somehow fail to properly acknowledge the harm this country has done, and continues to do, to marginalized groups. Indeed, data from the Angus Reid poll mentioned above showed the lowest rates of deep emotional attachment to Canada among those aged 18 to 34 years – lower, as a group, than those who had been in Canada for less than 10 years.
But this is a treatable problem: a problem that can be addressed by purposefully addressing the social and economic problems that arouse national pride, and by actively promoting a sense of civic identity. As Mr. Francis wrote more than 25 years ago, Canadians are so dispersed, so diverse, and so diverse in experience that we cannot, and should not, expect that unity and cohesion will happen simply by chance. We have lost our national identity and with it our pride in our country. But with some effort, and a deliberate change of course on the part of Canadian leadership, we can restore it.
