More Unbearable Lightness

Thirty-five years ago, in the inaugural issue of this magazine, I reviewed the newly published diary of André Laurendeau, written from 1964 to 1967 during the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The timing was apt: politicians, scholars, and journalists were speculating heavily on how to fix the “Canadian crisis” following the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord the year before.

It was an ideal opportunity to write about Laurendeau, one of Quebec’s most lucid journalists. Born in 1912, Laurendeau had promoted separatism in his youth, helped launch the Ligue pour la défense du Canada movement during the Second World War, and led the Bloc populaire canadien. He served in Quebec’s legislative assembly from 1944 to 1948. Even before the end of his term, he joined Le Devoir in 1947, and he became its editor-in-chief a decade later. He witnessed first-hand how Canada was losing legitimacy among the Québécois and deeply understood the Quiet Revolution. A passionate Quebec nationalist, he remained Canadian enough to give the country the benefit of the doubt. In 1963, Lester Pearson asked him and Davidson Dunton to head the royal commission. In 1965, its preliminary report declared Canada on the verge of its worst crisis since 1867. Laurendeau died in 1968, before the commission’s conclusion, but his travel diaries revealed a man saddened by how little sense of country Canadians possessed. That prompted me to title my review “The Unbearable Lightness of Canada.”

Four years later, as the second Quebec referendum unfolded, the journalist Richard Gwyn collected his own thoughts on a nation grappling with its identity and embroidered on Milan Kundera’s concept in Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian. In his richly documented chronicle of a country rocked by severe recessions in 1981–82 and 1991–92, by NAFTA, by the end of the Cold War, and by the nascent digital revolution, Gwyn found no “true patriot love.” In the wake of the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, he argued that Canadians needed to “reinvent” their identity. He wrote that “Canadians don’t take Canada seriously,” observing that English Canada, in particular, had regressed and lost its links to what made it distinct. He saw Canada threatened by Quebec’s fury over botched reforms, the rise of “identity politics,” and the easy acceptance of “official multiculturalism” as enshrined in the 1982 Constitution. This fragility was proven during the 1995 Quebec referendum, when a slim federalist victory was secured only by anglophones and new immigrants.

While Gwyn was doubtful thirty years ago, Carol Off confidently declares that Canadians finally know what they are: “northern dwellers, sturdy by necessity, humbled by geography and schooled by climate.” She characterizes them as nice, fair, risk-averse, and dedicated to pluralism, health care, and the rule of law. She notes that the country has two official languages and multiple cultures and owes its survival to First Nations — which the state once attempted to erase.

To my mind, every assertion in her book’s opening pages begs for more originality, context, and evidence. For instance, Off claims Canadians have become hostile to the United States. There is nothing new here, as Canadians have a long history of anti-Americanism that goes back to the days of the Revolution some 250 years ago. Beyond Donald Trump’s big mouth, what’s different this time? She writes that we have nothing to worry about, given that Canadians enjoy a higher standard of living. That’s actually untrue, according to the World Bank: our GDP per capita of $55,698 (U.S.) is about 62 percent of America’s $90,027. Surveys show we may be happier, but we’re not richer and we are way less productive. There is no contentment in those realities.

Off insists her book is about “patriotism” rather than “nationalism,” a concept she fears for how it “can disintegrate into hatred and even violence.” Yet nationalism — the instrumentalization of love of country into state policy — is what she is looking for. It’s also a term Gwyn and countless thinkers have used without hesitation.

For Off, nationalism is inevitably repressive and violent. Her experience as an occasional war correspondent informs this view, and the last thing she wants from Canada is expressions of that policy impulse. I, for one, can’t see how the Canada she hopes to preserve will be protected unless some form of nationalism is put into force: it should affect everything from what cultural policy we adopt to what weaponry we purchase. That certainly seems to be Mark Carney’s view, and it’s not a new one. It’s the very same vision that inspired Sir John A. Macdonald to spearhead the movement to create a Canada from coast to coast, as well as all of his successors.

True Patriot Love is billed as the product of a series of road trips “talking to Canadians about their country and listening to their questions about its future,” but the method does not fit the contents. Much of it presents a personal view of Canadian history in Off’s lifetime: the flag debates, Expo 67, the 1970s of Pierre Trudeau, the “Meech Lake Fiasco” (as she calls it), Canada’s last peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, the war in Afghanistan. It captures some of the best insights of her decades at CBC Radio (including a long and popular stint hosting As It Happens), but no Canadian is captured discussing their views on Canada’s “patriotism” in these pages.

It is disappointing that Off did not spend more time talking to Canadians or actually doing research. All her topics have been the subject of deep studies that have yielded rich insights. She does not seem to need those works; this is a personal book inspired in part by Joyce Wieland’s True Patriot Love exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 1971. Off quotes Wieland, who believed Canada “was just finding its place in the world order” that year. I could offer many other dates that much more clearly defined the place. They were either written in blood and suffering or shaped through brilliant diplomacy. Over fifty years later, Off considers that Wieland’s work still commands respect. I wish I could agree.

There is certainly a case to be made that Canadians are increasingly different from Americans, on a broad scale. Over twenty years ago, Michael Adams’s groundbreaking Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values drew on extensive survey data and argued that despite a shared popular culture and deep trade ties, the core world views of citizens in the two countries were diverging. He described these differences using “socio-cultural maps” to illustrate how each nation’s collective consciousness was shifting over time, debunking the idea that Canada was inevitably destined to become a carbon copy of its neighbour.

Adams may have uncovered elements of “true patriot love”— values shared by Canadians based on a common understanding — but they certainly were not evident in our cultural consumption. More recently, Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing has shown that cultural products purchased in English Canada are overwhelmingly American, leaving precious little room for the expression of a distinct identity. English Canadians do not read about their own country, and its best novelists don’t even locate their books in Canada.

Off’s search for true patriot love is divided into four parts. The first presents her rosy interpretation of 1960s nationalism in English Canada. She returns to her birthplace of Winnipeg and considers that “we’re at a crossroads” at the moment. She wants us to “turn toward a Canada that reflects the times in which we live — one that doesn’t cling to old tropes but has a broad understanding of who gets to belong.” She concedes, “I’m not yet entirely sure what the future Canada is, though it’s slowly coming into focus. There are so many wrong turns possible for a country as young as Canada.”

She tries to square John Diefenbaker’s robust opposition to Pearson’s economic and cultural plans with his desire for Canadians to be “masters in our own house.” Diefenbaker and his cabinet are applauded for debating John F. Kennedy’s urgent “request for a high alert status” for two days during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 —“reluctant to appear overly eager to do Washington’s bidding.” Elsewhere, Off describes how Diefenbaker killed Canada’s homegrown aerospace industry when he famously cancelled the Avro Arrow fighter jet, “a symbol of can-do Canadian know-how.”

I really don’t want to be the “heavy” historian taking a journalist to task for asserting interpretations that are unfounded, but there is a lot here that makes me question Off’s ability to guide readers toward a better understanding of what true patriot love might entail.

The treatment of Pearson is equally confusing. Off has Mackenzie King in power during the “upheaval” of the ’50s and Pearson coming home to become the minister of External Affairs. King’s premiership actually ended in 1948, and Pearson was Louis St‑Laurent’s external affairs minister from then until 1957. Off details her teenage impression of Expo 67 but does not seize its true importance in history. Pierre Berton’s 1967: The Last Good Year could have been put to better use. (She seems to resent Berton, accusing him of leaving out of his books the “ugly details” of what “nation-building required.”) Pierre Dupuy’s Expo 67 ou la découverte de la fierté would also have been helpful, but then she does not appear interested in others’ views about Quebec.

The second part of the book celebrates Off’s experience of the ’60s and ’70s, when Canadian culture seemed to thrive. She discovered Margaret Atwood in those years and never got over it. A few songsters emerge, as do a few films, but the glory days seem to dim without comment. Pierre Elliott Trudeau looms almost as large as Atwood. It may indeed have been a decade (say 1967 to 1980) of remarkable cultural and policy flourishing. It was also a decade of massive policy failures.

The book turns darker in its third part to cover the Meech Lake Accord. Although Off often insists that she was on the Quebec beat at times in her career, she demonstrates practically no sensitivity to the province’s politics and its own search for true patriot love. Her treatment of the proposed constitutional reforms is characterized by her personal disdain for Brian Mulroney and some of his lieutenants, but she also reflects the general bias of the CBC against the Progressive Conservative government and its policies — a bias that was denounced at the time by John Meisel, the former chair of the CRTC and an eminent political scientist, and demonstrated by scholars since.

Off strikes me as dismissive of Mulroney’s search for a solution to Quebec’s expressed need for recognition in Canada, and she dislikes his rapprochement with the U.S. The Meech Lake promise of allowing Quebec to “preserve and promote” its distinctiveness comes off as devilish. The fact that it wanted to be recognized in the Constitution alongside Indigenous rights and multiculturalism looks odd to her. Allowing provinces an opportunity to recommend candidates (not appoint them) for Supreme Court of Canada appointments seems a horror, and the promise of continued talks on Senate reform is anathema. She doesn’t comment on the constitutional commitment to at least “preserve” official-language minorities. It’s not clear how the Meech Lake saga either constituted true patriot love or weakened it, but Off has no doubts that it was toxic and deserved its death.

Then Off’s book examines Canada and the Balkan Wars, with sidelights on Somalia and Afghanistan. Again, the relationship is not clear. Canadians continue to consider that peacekeeping is a cornerstone of the country’s identity, but such heroism practically dried up at the turn of the century. Canada has now left that theatre entirely, and Canadians can no longer genuinely claim this global role as part of who we are.

Off closes by reflecting on her summer place on Cape Breton as a haven that defines “belonging.” Her husband’s family sank roots there hundreds of years ago; there’s renewed economic vigour in the Mi’kmaq communities nearby. Even immigrants are moving in. Life’s good.

Such a storybook ending left me strangely uneasy about the future of the country. It masks what I think is a harder reality: that English Canadians have lost the ability to narrate their own (remarkable) story. They are intimidated by their own history, are often ashamed by their ignorance (it’s not their fault, given that history has been erased from school for almost two generations), and have practically taught themselves to seek the dullest answers to the pointed questions of the day. They can cite only what’s obvious: they are not Americans but are distinctly uncomfortable with people who dare rock the boat. In their newspapers and broadcasts, they resist deeper national conversations for fear of being embarrassed.

Carol Off’s True Patriot Love may have chronicled how English Canada’s lightness of being became more bearable, but it remains largely unexplained. Perhaps it is the best version English Canadians can express of a true patriot love — under the circumstances.