Howard Anglin: Cry, the beloved Dominion
Can any country buck the global trends of cultural disintegration and deracination?
I grew up in another country. I still visit it a couple of times a year, and I miss it more each time. For the last four years I’ve taken a house there for six weeks in the summer, just a few minutes’ walk from my childhood home. The house is on the water overlooking McNeil Bay, where in 1843 the S.S. Beaver anchored before the party on board, including Sir James Douglas, went ashore a couple of miles down the coast to select the site for Fort Victoria.
This morning, as I looked out of the window with my coffee, the bay was clear. That’s not something I would have noticed as a child, but it’s forest fire season in Canada now. Those weeks of claustrophobic haze and apocalyptic sunsets are now as recognisable a ‘season’ as leaf peeping in Laurentia and the opening of the ski hills in the Rockies. There have always been forest fires in Canada, but the annual return of the smoke is new in this new country.
Lots of things have changed since my childhood, a few of them no doubt for the better, though none come to mind. Others haven’t. Looking up from my seat at the Oak Bay Marina, which I jokingly but accurately call ‘my office’ in the summer, I see three boys fishing off the rocks of the breakwater. The excited chitter when one of them pulls up a crab clinging to the bait on the end of the line hasn’t changed since my friends and I fished for the same plug-ugly rockfish, often under the covetous eye of a pair of harbour seals.
The sea is still there, of course, though there are fewer salmon and whales in the straits, and more cargo ships and tankers. So are the mountains, when the smoke hasn’t obscured them. The great rampart of the Olympic Range and, to the east on a clear day, standing proudly apart, the storybook peak of Mount Baker. There are deer now in the neighbourhood, and so there are taller fences and netting above them.
The most visible change is more expensive and less friendly. There are more houses, mostly boxy infill and cold geometric houses replacing bungalows half their size. The old homes had shaggy wildflower gardens that were quite obviously tended by the owners rather than the professional services that trim new landscaped frontages, but still the place feels more or less the same, and that is not something you can say about much of Canada.
In Vancouver, English Bay is just about recognisable, but Coal Harbour, the North Shore, and most of the rest of the city aren’t. Toronto cowers under bristles of thoughtless buildings and, beyond the high-rises, its suburbs have been stretched across field and farmland in all directions from the lake. Of Canada’s great cities, only Montreal still feels close to the way it did forty or fifty years ago, and then only if you squint. Canada, you see, is now another country.
The new country is not the country I knew as a boy, but it would have been more familiar (mutatis mutandis) to our early settlers: the high levels of immigration; the proliferation of strange languages, clothing, and customs; the opportunism of émigrés free of their native customs and as yet unconstrained by ours, sometimes bleeding into ignorant or contemptuous lawlessness; the clash of old enemies in new lands. None of this is new, but the old Canada had managed to smooth the rough edges (mostly) and maintain the peace.
Alex MacDonald: This Victoria Day, remember who we are
Queen Victoria, Canada’s first queen and second-longest-reigning monarch, was known affectionately as the Mother of Confederation, the namesake of two provincial capitals, and the monarch whose name is used to bestow the highest military honour in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Immigration, education, integration
To see what went wrong, start with education and immigration. The choices of who joins us and what we teach them as well as those who are already here, together, decide what the future electorate will look like, so the best way to know what a country will look like in 20 years is to extrapolate from government policies in these two areas.
Our education system started to go off the rails in the 1980s and has been steadily dumbed down ever since. Over the same time, our immigration levels were high compared with those of our peer countries, but the process was mostly orderly and legal and focussed on permanent settlement. That changed when Trudeau removed restraints on both quantity and quality. These two changes are obvious reasons why Canada has declined over the same time.
The bad news is it is going to get worse before it gets better – if it does. Until our provincial governments reverse the rot in higher education, starting with the education faculties, return our K-12 system to what it was before the education faddists got their hands on it – or better yet, conform it to a traditional classical and liberal education, following the example of some charter schools – and reinstate rigorous standardised exams to restore accountability, we can’t expect to produce a well-formed citizenry.
Those changes to education would mitigate the effects of the corruption the Trudeau ministries introduced into our immigration system, but hope for a better future requires significant reform there too. The first step is to stop treating immigration as only, or even primarily, economic policy. Our national immigration policy must be social and cultural policy first, and economic policy second and mostly derivative of the first.
Without a high-trust society and the social capital that comes from a common respect for our historic order, the rule of law, and a politics that is not based on ethnic allegiance, economic freedom is of little benefit, if not impossible. This means, as MP Michelle Rempel Garner recently wrote, that ‘the first principle of Canada’s immigration system’ must be ‘integration’. This starts with better selection of fewer people, and must extend beyond arrival.
Those who are selected should be those more likely to integrate. This means much tighter control over family sponsorships, where standards are much lower than for primary applicants. Much higher language skills and credentials that are recognised before you arrive would also help. So would reinstating in-person interviews for permanent residents and extending the probationary period before citizenship, with zero tolerance for criminality and proof of net financial contribution to the country.
Quebec has demonstrated the possibilities of linguistic assimilation, but also the limits of shared language to form a common culture. More work must be done here, starting in schools. Publicly funded education should not be provided in any language except English or French, and there should be no public curriculum based around foreign culture and identity. Multiculturalism programming should be directed away from highlighting differences towards bridging gaps between immigrant communities, where most of our social friction is today.
The unfinished work
If we managed to get the provinces, which have hitherto shown no interest in taking responsibility for education, and the federal government, which has only reluctantly and ineffectually begun to address the worst excesses of the immigration system it broke, to take these jobs seriously, it would be a start, but not enough. There would still be the legal system, the tax system, and the regulatory systems to deal with, though fixing the education and immigration systems would have downstream effects on these too.
Then there is the bigger question: can any country buck the global trends of cultural disintegration and physical and social deracination? How do you integrate newcomers into a fragmented culture, when the causes of fragmentation are largely beyond your control? People who sold everything to cross an ocean a century ago had no choice but to put down roots here. Now even Canadians born here have shallow roots, while those who arrive can come and go easily while living in a diaspora bubble of social media and popular culture.
How do we break down atavistic commitments and build a Canadian people in a world of fluid transnationality? Without broadly shared cultural references, moral teachings, and sources of information, and with few fixed relationships beyond our nuclear families (which we are now also free to move away from or abandon altogether), is it even possible to build what almost everyone who ever lived before us would recognise as a society? These questions bear on national unity while eluding national solutions.
Each of us used to belong naturally to the community that raised us, unless we consciously chose another one and it accepted us, which, except for members of the eternal tribe of misfits and transients, could only be done once; now we define and redefine ourselves by constant individual choices. When we each curate our own hermetic community, partly virtual and partly real, it is hard to see how 40 million individuals scale up to a national community of shared interests in which there is a cognisable common good. Without that, what do we expect newcomers, no matter how carefully chosen and vetted, to integrate into?
It doesn’t bear thinking too hard about these things. They are global forces that are easier to avoid individually than to control collectively as Canadians. Even as individuals, the difficulty of building community when implacable technological, moral, and legal pressure conspires always to pull it apart betrays the fatal flaw in unconstrained liberalism. Until we can re-tame the feral form that modern liberalism has taken since it slipped the leash of the natural law, change for the better can only be local and limited.
I don’t intend any of this as counsel for despair. Despair is always irrational. It makes nothing better and discourages the good. We made Canada once, then we unmade it. We can remake it again. It will take time, as it did before, and external forces we can only imperfectly control will make it harder this time. If we do it right, starting with fixing the immigration and education systems, what will emerge will not be recognisable as the country I grew up in, but neither will it resemble the confused anticulture of the current country.
Howard Anglin is a founding partner of Haultain Group. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, D.C.
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“Without a high-trust society and the social capital that comes from a common respect for our historic order, the rule of law, and a politics that is not based on ethnic allegiance, economic freedom is of little benefit, if not impossible.”
If I understand this essay properly, it is a profound and introspective manifesto of both where we went wrong, and the long, hard slog required to repair the damage.
When I was in university, there was a law professor, historian, religious commentator, philosopher and occasional NDP federal candidate by the name of Ian A. Hunter.
He wrote a provocative essay criticizing the then nascent Charter of Rights and Freedoms, describing it as the death blow to the national quest of forming a lasting pan-Canadian identity. He described most presciently how Canadians would form in competing tribes, offering political support as collectives, rather than individual citizens. The incentives were too strong to ignore, and the political leverage too important to forgo.
My point of sharing this is to address Mr. Anglin’s point about immigration being a moral, cultural, and civic imperative, rather than simply an economic policy tool.
Constitutional freedoms require a virtuous and informed citizenry to accept the responsibilities that come along with those cherished freedoms. As George Grant wrote many years ago, freedom without responsibility, discipline,
& restraint simply leads to nihilism. (He was quoting Nietzsche)
What are those values, morals, traditions, and conventions that we must embrace and cherish? Exactly those that the Liberal Party of Canada and the intellectual educational terrorists in our midst are trying to erase.
This is a wonderful, melancholic lament, Howard, and I salute you for getting it right.
Well-done, friends.