Margareta Dovgal: Without a strong national culture, Canadian pluralism is doomed

A doom loop of institutional self-hatred, thoughtless multiculturalism, and bad policies will rip Canada apart, writes Guest Contributor Margareta Dovgal.

(Photo credit to Chrisna Senatus.)

Margareta Dovgal is a public policy commentator specializing in energy, climate, and economic development.

We can have a political class that is unconcerned with or actively derisive of Canada’s legitimacy as a legal entity, or we can have pluralistic multiculturalism. The two cannot coexist without the very state disintegrating, and that’s the path that Canada is rattling down.

The unified and legitimate system of power that underpins our very sovereignty is being pummelled by the very actors charged with representing the people’s will as the Crown: our federal and provincial governments. Both are advancing deeply misguided approaches to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

As that’s taking place, Canada is absorbing nearly a decade of substantive population change through what have been the highest immigration rates in the world.

Either factor alone would be incredibly risky to stability, and that’s typically why countries invested in survival don’t engage in either. But in Canada, it’s just another Monday on Parliament Hill. Both together are threatening a systems collapse in short order— and that’s even before we get into emerging Prairie secessionism or Quebec’s lingering threat of just leaving if their distinct society isn’t respected.

I should clarify that I am a strong advocate for reconciliation. I think fairness of opportunity and substantial economic development is an imperative, in a country where so much of the wealth and prosperity generated over the last century has largely bypassed the descendants of this country’s last pre-European inhabitants.

Section 35 of the Constitution is the just and fair recompense in law for land title transfer. Under the very legal model through which this land was populated, title was established (mostly, except for B.C.), the country was founded, and the institutions we know and cherish were built.

Going back on our word is as much an ethics question as it is a sovereignty issue. The very legitimacy of Canada in its current form relies on a body of agreements made with Indigenous peoples.

In my view, any decision to circumvent or eliminate Section 35 obligations would necessitate an overwhelming mandate from Canadians for constitutional overhaul. Anything else just starts an endless game of whack-a-mole. Play stupid games, win even more stupid prizes.

My support for Section 35 is therefore rooted in a conservative belief in finality, because decades of perpetual negotiation and litigation have become a crucible for extremism. This endless process erodes faith in the system itself, validating the claims of those on the fringes who argue the entire project is broken.

To understand the precarity of our situation, we first have to understand that our model of society is a radical and fragile exception, not the historical norm.

Multiculturalism is not a new concept, though it is a defining characteristic of modernity. For millennia, humans have found ways to live and trade together within and between empires, juggling vast differences in ethnicity, religion, and values.

Take the Tang Dynasty’s capital, Chang’an. In the latter half of the first millennium CE, Nestorian Christians from Persia, Sogdian merchants from Central Asia, and Buddhist monks from India all congregated at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road.

This diversity was a symbol of the empire’s power and cosmic centrality. Putting the idea into practice that people from different backgrounds could coexist was actually far rarer in pre-modernity.

The alternative was a brutally enforced homogeneity and territorial dominance like Tokugawa Japan. After a century of bloody civil war between culturally identical warlords, the shogunate achieved stability through insularity. Achieving that required expelling foreigners, banning Christianity, and locking the country down for 250 years.

It was a brutal, radical pursuit of homogeneity that brought two and a half centuries of absolute peace that ended right before the modern era.

Diversity as a governance position throughout history typically worked with a strong state and unrelenting cultural hegemony. When permitted, diversity was even occasionally celebrated so long as it never challenged the core cultural and political legitimacy of the state itself. The Tang Dynasty, for all its celebrated openness, provides the cautionary tale.

The An Lushan Rebellion, from 755 to 763 CE, shattered the empire. It was led by a Sogdian-Turkic general who was a product of the empire’s multicultural meritocracy. The moment he turned on the throne, the cosmopolitan dream shattered, and the empire began its long, brutal decline.

Wherever this was not enforced, state power splintered, multicultural factionalism bred political tension, and states split apart.

Sometimes, it happened passively through attrition and fragmentation, usually coinciding with sustained economic decline, and sometimes violently, through overthrows and genocide. Look no further than the slow, agonizing collapse of the Ottoman Empire that ended in 1922, and resulted in the slaughter or deportation of the huge Greek and Armenian minorities.

For centuries, the Ottoman millet system granted religious communities vast autonomy under the supreme authority of the Sultan. But this devolved into competing, violent nationalisms the moment that central authority grew weak. It carved up the modern Middle East and Balkans in a century of bloody ethnic cleansing.

Brutally putting down dissent in such systems allowed states to survive for centuries, often with little in the way of significant political change for sustained periods. In cosmopolitan, pre-modern states, ethnic and religious difference were the most carefully watched potential sources of dissent or fomenting sedition.

That’s the secret to the Chinese model and it’s also why democracy isn’t just inconvenient to the powers that be (as some simplified Western models of non-democracies assume), but it is actually antithetical to the very way governance has always been done in China and why China has survived and evolved for millennia. To just roll one’s eyes and call China or even Russia autocracies and to leave it at that would be to miss the point.

They certainly have autocratic characteristics, but the power of each country’s ruler is far from absolute. The strength of the state, however, is undeniable. In contrast to much of the West, they are essentially homogenous, culturally if not ethnically.

These characteristics make both regime change (to the chagrin of the Western security establishment) and openness to mass immigration highly unlikely.

The historical cases I cite aren’t endorsements of autocracy but illustrations of a perennial challenge. They highlight the peril of maintaining civic cohesion amid a multi-ethnic society. To dismiss these empires’ collapses as simple failures of autocracy is to mistake the form of governance for its essential function.

We are far richer for today’s interconnected world that enables migration and pluralism, but the past reminds us what happens when cohesion fails. A multicultural state, regardless of its political system, requires a powerful unifying centre to cohere.

Where autocracies used coercion, a liberal democracy must achieve the same gravitational pull through consent and a compelling shared culture. Without that foundation, democratic pluralism becomes little more than a set of procedural rules for managing our own polite disintegration.

Nowhere is this disintegration managed with less resistance than in Canada. Other Western nations, while facing similar pressures, retain a political metabolism, akin to a chaotic but functional immune system that generates antibodies to radicalism.

The American system, for all its flaws, possesses a brutal, Newtonian logic of action and equal reaction. Canada’s political monoculture offers no such check. Our institutions amplify corrosive ideologies instead of resisting them, leaving us uniquely vulnerable to the very collapse desired by our most fringe elements.

So why did the West, and particularly its Anglo-American offshoots like Canada, choose a path so different from the historical norm? The answer isn’t a single event, but rather it lies in a confluence of ideological shifts and demographic necessity that created a situation unique in human history.

The first factor was a profound crisis of civilizational confidence. The old colonial project, which for centuries had been powered by an unquestioned belief in European cultural and moral superiority, shattered in the aftermath of two world wars.

Stripped of its moral certainty, the West turned its formidable capacity for critical inquiry inward, developing a deep-seated skepticism toward its own history, traditions, and cultural narratives.

The very idea of imposing a dominant culture (the feature that made pre-modern multicultural empires stable) became morally suspect, if not outright repugnant. This narrative began in universities and in the last decade it truly broke containment. It is difficult to imagine a more effective internal mechanism for destabilizing a civilization than an ideology that fosters a crippling sense of self-hatred.

Into this ideological vacuum stepped the cold, hard economic reality of demographic collapse. By the latter half of the 20th century, birth rates across the developed world had plummeted below the 2.1 children per woman required to maintain a stable population.

This is a time bomb, ticking and threatening the foundations of the modern welfare state. You can’t fund pensions, healthcare, and social services for an aging population without a continually growing base of young workers and taxpayers.

Mass immigration has shifted from a choice to a non-negotiable. The choice was no longer whether to welcome newcomers, but from where—and lately the answer to that question has been “from wherever people most want to come,” rather than it being a utility-driven policy.

Modern migration brings people, as well as their baggage.

The shocking and persistent strength of anti-Israel demonstrations across Canada, that has often crossed the line into outright violence, showcases the dangerous turns of pluralism without guardrails. This is not Canada’s war, but it has become one of the most animating issues of recent history, surpassing Occupy and the anti-lockdown campaigns in scope and impact.

There should be no question that the current scale of diaspora conflicts in Canada is a failure of Canada’s multicultural ethos.

And here is the crucial variable that makes our modern multiculturalism so porous by comparison. Unlike the Tang, who expected foreigners to admire and adopt the culture of the Middle Kingdom, or the Romans, who demanded allegiance to the emperor and the state, the modern post-colonial West was no longer sure what it ought to ask of its newcomers.

In fact, it increasingly asked itself to deconstruct its own narratives, to question its history, and to cede cultural space as a form of reparative justice.

This created a completely new model of multiculturalism, defined not by the gravitational pull of a confident host culture, but by the centrifugal force of a state that increasingly defines its virtue by the weakness of its own cultural demands.

That simply doesn’t make sense, not if your objective is to maintain Canada as a nation. To be candid, opponents of Canada are not shy, nor are they fringe actors removed from the mainstream political discourse. They actively speak of what they want, which is the dissolution of Canada, but unsurprisingly they seem rather quiet when asked what should come next. Can they be seriously trusted to seed the utopia of the future we all deserve? They are not unlike rebellious high schoolers who berate their parents and then ask to borrow the car.

The very political class most passionately advancing challenges to Canada as an entity derives all its power and security from the very state whose legitimacy it is undermining. What would be forgivable mood swings in a teenage human who inevitably grows up can’t be tolerated in a state if we want it to successfully survive to adulthood.

Ultimately, nowhere has this radical experiment of mass immigration and multiculturalism been pushed further or faster than in Canada.

The numbers are staggering, and they aren’t an accident. They are the deliberate outcome of government policy. In 2023 alone, Canada’s population grew by 1.27 million people, a stunning 3.2 per cent annual increase that is among the highest in the world. Of that growth, a full 97.6 per cent came from international migration.

To put that in perspective, our federal government is adding the equivalent of a new city the size of Calgary, every single year, into a country already buckling under a severe housing crisis, overburdened hospitals, and decaying infrastructure. These issues with administrative absorption compound on top of more fundamental challenges with societal cohesion and national identity.

A state that questions its own right to exist will inevitably fail at the mundane but essential tasks of governance. Policy paralysis, born from ideological confusion, is why our infrastructure crumbles and our services fail.

And the crisis of civilizational confidence we’re approaching is the direct product of what happens when multiculturalism collides with the messy politics of a particular narrative of reconciliation—one that frames Canada not as an imperfect but legitimate nation founded on treaties, but as an irredeemably illegitimate colonial project.

This is a vision of reconciliation that treats the Canadian state not as a treaty partner to be held accountable, but as a colonial fiction to be dismantled. It turns the language of justice into a tool for abolition, making foundational concepts like the Crown’s “duty to consult” incoherent when the legitimacy of the Crown itself is the primary target.

An ideology of self-hatred produces a porous multiculturalism. A state that believes it has no legitimate culture of its own loses the moral standing to make any demands of newcomers.

Procedural unity alone, based on the rule of law, rights, and administrative equality, cannot fully substitute for a shared culture that makes those procedures meaningful. The very point of the Canadian project is inclusivity: anyone can become Canadian. But belonging demands understanding what Canada is, where its culture comes from, and why it’s worth inheriting.

A confident state should take pride in articulating that heritage, giving newcomers something coherent and aspirational to join beyond the thin instruction of obeying the law.

I’m a child of Russian immigrants and a big fan of the radical experiment that invited my Eastern European parents to come and build a life here, that enabled my family to seek a better economic trajectory. It empowered me with the dominant language and culture while allowing me to retain a healthy dose of Slavic identity and values.

Multicultural societies can be found all over the world today, but the most permissive, in terms of least demanding total assimilation, happen to be the ones in states essentially built by the British. And Canada is an outlier even among Western nations grappling with similar pressures.

Compare Canada’s emphasis on celebrating difference with Germany’s more explicit demands for integration (Leitkultur or “leading culture”), including language proficiency and adherence to democratic values as a precondition for full participation in society.

Even as the ethnic composition of Germany undergoes substantial change, which hasn’t gone entirely unopposed by the public, the German approach maintains a shared ethos conducive to a stable civic, post-nationalist society.

Even in the United States, a country born from revolution and perpetually at war with itself, the cultural mythos of the American dream was so profound that until recently it kept everything knitted together.

America’s original sin was, of course, the transatlantic slave trade, a far more brutal and foundational crime than Canada’s, which was to sign treaties as an alternative to the outright extermination or enslavement favoured by the Spanish and Portuguese.

The reckoning, when it came in the form of movements like Black Lives Matter and the rapid institutional adoption of critical race theory, was a direct hit to that unifying mythos. And with it came not a quiet acquiescence by the right, or balanced undoing, but a furious election campaign which was won on the promise of an institutional counter-attack.

So when I warn of a systems collapse, what does that actually mean? It isn’t a cinematic explosion, nor Mad Max on the Trans-Canada Highway. It is a slow, corrosive disintegration—death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts. The symptoms are already all around us.

A systems collapse is what happens when the core functions of the state cease to be reliable. It’s when provinces like Saskatchewan and Alberta openly defy federal law because they no longer see Ottawa as a legitimate partner, turning our federation into a bitter and dysfunctional tenants’ association. It’s when the justice system becomes so bogged down and selective in its enforcement that public safety becomes a lottery.

It’s the collapse of social trust, where a public square once grounded in a shared Canadian identity fragments into a collection of ethnic and ideological enclaves who share a postal code but little else. It is the breakdown of public services, a future that is already here for anyone who has waited 12 hours in an emergency room or watched their children’s schools fill to bursting while the quality of education plummets.

The decolonial-abolitionist strain of reconciliation dissolves our civic culture and erodes the very legitimacy of the Crown’s authority to govern, while the sheer scale of mass immigration overwhelms the state’s capacity to provide for its citizens. One policy hollows out the soul of the nation; the other breaks its physical body.

This is the doom loop Canada is currently in.

Without a political class willing to defend the legitimacy of the country and manage its growth with prudence instead of reckless abandon, we are choosing to become a failed state, one well-intentioned, historically illiterate policy at a time.

Margareta Dovgal is a public policy commentator specializing in energy, climate, and economic development. She holds a Master’s of Public Administration in Energy, Technology and Climate Policy from University College London, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Area Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she also studied Sanskrit, archaeology, and philosophy.