Haroon Siddiqui: No, Mark Carney, Canada is not the most European non-European country

We have spent the decades since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 separating ourselves from Europeans and carving out a distinct new identity. Here, Queen Elizabeth II signs Canada’s constitutional proclamation with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Haroon Siddiqui, editorial page editor emeritus of The Star, is a senior fellow at Massey College. Siddiqui.canada@gmail.com

Given Donald Trump’s madcap ideas on trade and his mafia tactics, Mark Carney’s outreach to Europe is obviously a good idea, even if we don’t know how it will pan out.

But the prime minister is wrong to be droning on about “our shared values” with Europe. We do have a lot of history together, as he says, but we don’t share the same present.

He claims that Canada is “the most European of non-European countries.” Not really. While we are decidedly not American, we are no longer European, either. We have spent the decades since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 separating ourselves from Europeans and carving out a distinct new identity.

The Charter ushered in an unprecedented era of Indigenous and multicultural rights. Historic assumptions have been mostly dismantled, principally that Canada was a white Christian nation, where peoples of other colours and faiths were expected to, and often did, assume second-class status. No longer.

Canadians of long-established ancestry have had to make, indeed made, the difficult journey towards accepting all Canadians as truly equal and as worthy of dignity as others.

Carney has demonstrated no real feel for this new Canada and seems unaware that when he talks of Canada’s great affinity to Europe, he grates on many, especially Indigenous people and Canadians of non-European stock. His enthusiasm is particularly offensive to those of us who’ve come from lands once occupied by European colonialists — racist, cruel and rapacious.

Contrary to Carney’s assertion, Canada is the least Western of Western nations. As philosopher John Ralston Saul has argued, we are a “Métis nation,” shaped by Indigenous Peoples and their values of moderation and compromise — reflected in the 1867 British North America Act, a compact between the Indigenous, the English and the French. We can draw a line from that to this contemporary blessing: Canadians rate pluralism and multiculturalism as our top virtues when Trump and several European populists have turned skin colour into a major fault line of the West.

Anti-immigrant parties are doing well in Britain and across Europe — Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Finland, etc. They are cheered on by Trump who fans the fears of Europe facing “civilizational erasure” and becoming “majority non-European,” i.e. non-white. Far too many mainstream Republicans are proclaiming the United States to be a “Christian nation” and echoing far-right Europeans in asserting that “Christ is king.”

In Canada, however, no overtly anti-immigrant, let alone racist or religion-based party can hope to win a national election or even muster a few seats.

The last time a nativist party made headway was the Reform Party led by Preston Manning. That was in the 1990s, at the peak of the backlash against multiculturalism and our changing demographics. He called for immigration from Europe so as not to “radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada.” He wanted multiculturalism repealed. In the 1993 election, Reform made a breakthrough with 52 seats.

But by 2000, he was appearing at a Chinese New Year rally in Toronto and wishing the audience Happy New Year in broken Cantonese. I was there that night and thought: Only in Canada, eh?

Stephen Harper, during his years as prime minister, made hay with his Islamophobic rhetoric and policies. But when he proposed the Barbarous Cultural Practices Act in 2015, Canadians had had enough of him. Chris Alexander, his minister in charge of that odious file, is now running to be mayor of Toronto and is unlikely to succeed partly because of it.

Last week, when Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre criticized Carney’s tilt to Europe and harrumphed against “no EU taxes, no EU laws and no EU open border rules on immigration in Canada,” he did not follow Trump any further, for fear of eroding any chance he may still have of ever becoming prime minister.

In 1971, when Pierre Trudeau ushered in his multiculturalism policy, he declared that “Canada has no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other.” Some 40 years later, Justin Trudeau said that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada, making us the first post-national state.” Both were pilloried, even though they were stating what Marshall McLuhan had in 1963: “Canada is the only country that knows how to live without an identity.”

It turns out that all three are dated now. Canada does have a distinct identity.

If Canadians conclude that Carney et al are trying to make us more European, his honeymoon would be over. Just as surely as it would if his efforts to increase our estimated $350 billion a year trade with the rest of the world fails to sufficiently mitigate the erosion of our nearly $1 trillion trade with the U.S. — Trump or no Trump.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Haroon Siddiqui is Editorial Page Editor Emeritus and former columnist of The Star. He is the author of the book “My Name Is Not Harry.”