It’s time we reminded ourselves why Canada is worth fighting for, apart from single payer health care, which seems to be the only thing that comes to mind for politicians and talking heads seeking to differentiate us from our neighbour to the south.
Apart from that, is it just an arbitrary demarcation line on a map, as President Trump has said? And are we paying a high price in standard of living for our independence?
As a country we exist largely because the British Empire did not want to cede the riches of the whole North American content to the United States after the American Revolution. And we did over time move from under the British Empire umbrella to the protection of the Americans.
But we’ve governed ourselves for a very long time now, and created a culture, a nation, that is very different from either Great Britain or the United States. Much better, in fact, than either.
Here are the things that make me proud to be a Canadian. These are things I believe we should not give up - the things worth fighting for.
- As level a playing field, as much or more equality of opportunity regardless of the circumstances of your birth, as any country on earth. Well ahead of the United States and the United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
- The biggest factor in our remarkable ability to move people from the lowest socio-economic quintile into the top two quintiles in a single generation is education. Canada has incredibly strong free public education. In both the US and the UK good education often costs a lot of money: you either pay for it in private school fees or you pay for it by moving to an expensive postal code. There are varying results between Canadian schools, but the teacher is paid the same and the tax money is distributed without regard to the prosperity of the neighbourhood. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40708421, How Canada became an Education Superpower:
- Not believing the world owes anyone fairness, we nevertheless work hard to create it “In the most recent Pisa results for science, the variation in scores in Canada caused by socio-economic differences was 9%, compared with 20% in France and 17% in Singapore.”
- A free market, where you can use your willingness to take risks, your initiative, your innate abilities, your hard work and determination to make a better life for you and your loved ones, creating opportunities for other in the process, and building national prosperity.
- Income redistribution that doesn’t overburden the builders and productive sectors of the economy, but does help level the playing field so that more people feel fairly treated and that they have both security and opportunity, without a culture of dependency. Because we share our prosperity, even with overall wealth (GDP per person) at 70% of the US (we need to fix that!), average Canadians are as well off as average Americans.
- This, along with single payer health care, also delivers the kind of security and stability that creates a good environment for business and for risk-taking—though to make the most of that our appetite for it will need to change!
- And we share enough so that we don’t need gates and private security to be safe
- A genuine democracy, with one person one vote, not one dollar one vote. Our campaign funding rules mean that politicians answer to voters, not to donors. Businesses influence policy by dint of their contributions, in terms of taxes paid and jobs created, but in the end they cannot override the desires of the citizens. In the United States campaign finance rules mean politicians answer to donors. Their country doubled down on this when the Supreme Court made the Citizens United decision, arguably the beginning of the end of democracy in the US, bearing fruit today in front of our eyes. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained. And in Canada nobody goes into politics to get rich.
- A culture of tolerance, where differences are appreciated and people of many faiths, ethnic origins, and mother tongues co-exist in peace. A Charter of Rights and Freedoms that protects against discrimination for any of these and for gender or sexual orientation. A mosaic, not a melting pot, a place where your individuality is celebrated.
- Regulation of markets, ensuring that the pursuit of self-interest doesn’t simply concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few, but is harnessed to serve everyone.
- Community, a sense of belonging, of common values and a shared project, a shared future, shared by people of vastly different backgrounds. Peace, Order and Good Government, our Constitution says, not Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of (individual) Happiness, but the understanding that happiness is a team sport, and that liberty comes with responsibility to the society that enables it.
- Courage, willingness to face head on the systemic failures of past decisions whose intended and unintended consequences have been traumatic and unfair, and to work hard to correct the wrongs we see, to face the truth and deliver reconciliation.
- Innovation: Canada starts with Can. From the geological challenges of mining and indeed of extracting oil from tar sands, from dealing with the bitter cold of our winters, building railways through mountains, solving communications problems over distance to helping form the United Nations, Canadians prove that necessity is the mother of invention and that they are not easily deterred from their goals.
- Egalitarian principles, the same ones that won the battle of Vimy Ridge when the British and French had failed, when the Canadian commander thought it only natural to trust the troops to make their own decisions, giving each one a map and an understanding of the plan, instead of relying on an officer class to tell the soldiers what to do. Embodied too in a national sport where everyone makes their own decisions, and sometimes even the goalie scores, and an assist earns the same point as a goal for the player, because it means a goal for the team. (Does any other sport count that way? Ours does.)
- Pride, in the moments of our history, where we began coming of age, Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the repatriation of the Constitution, the ’72 Summit Series and hockey championships and gold medals in other sports, great companies past and present, Inco, Nortel, Blackberry, Shopify. In the grit that has always meant we win when we have to, more often than not, embodied by Hayley Wickenheiser, Christine Sinclair, Donovan Bailey, and countless others.
We are a work in progress, and lots of these reasons for being Canadian are imperfect still, the balance between community and the individual is the ongoing work of society, but we have done that work as well as anyone, and, I think most of us agree, far better than the country below us that now seems to want us to join them.
John Rawls, an American philosopher, in his remarkable A Theory of Justice asks us to build society as you would if you did not know in advance if you would be born strong, weak, able or infirm, rich, poor, in the majority or a minority, male, female, gay, straight, cis-or trans-gender, intelligent or intellectually challenged.
From that "veil of ignorance" about the circumstances of your beginnings, if you had to choose a country to be born into, which would it be?
I think Canada would be very high on that list. The United States would be much lower and on its current trajectory lower still. (If you know in advance that you are very able, smart, strong, healthy, straight and white and male you might well still choose, as many ambitious people do, to go to the USA.)
Canada became the country I describe here because our forebears had vision. They built farms, cities, railways and businesses, and they drew on the more than 800 years of progressively more democratic approaches to govern that began with Magna Carta in 1215.
Some fought against tyranny in war, some fought for votes for men without property and then for women, some fought in unions for better working conditions and some fought political battles for changes like free public education and medical care. But they fought: our country was not a happy accident.
We cannot take it for granted. We cannot let our forebears down. What we have is worth fighting for. It is worth economic sacrifice, it is worth even greater sacrifice than that.
We have built something worth standing up for, and we have the natural resources and the human resources to be prosperous on our own. This is not selfish. We can be a model for the world and the source of food, know-how and minerals for other countries. We can continue to share our wealth by welcoming immigrants and trading.
But we must not surrender it to a country that is fast surrendering its own hard-won democracy to a selfish autocracy. There might be countries we could join, but the United States in its current form is not one.
