canadian identity

Over the last 20 years, only two of the past seven federal elections have produced majority governments. Governing and opposition parties alike have struggled to grow their popularity with Canadians.

This past year offered Canadians plenty of reasons to question their national identity. The angry occupation of Ottawa last winter, on the edge of Parliament Hill, clashed with our stereotype of Canadians as polite compromisers.

The Canadian identity is in constant evolution, in response to changing political forces and cultural influences. One of the more important potential sources of change in recent years is the growing ethno-cultural diversity of the population, driven by immigration and, in particular, by the growing number of immigrants arriving from Asian and Africa.

Political leaders in Canada benefit from our inevitable tendency to compare ourselves to the United States. No matter how bad things are here, there is a good chance they are worse there.

In 2015, through an unprecedented national mobilization of government, the settlement sector and Canadian citizens, the country opened its doors to accept refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in Syria, resettling close to 40,000 refugees within the space of a year. How have these refugees fared in their new country and lives, and what can be learned from their experience that might benefit future refugees?

We are living in an era of populism and polarization. Our politics is divided and angry. And if anything is changing, it is changing for the worse. Or so we are often told.

The survey finds that younger Canadians have grown more dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country, and more pessimistic about prospects for the next generation.

The diminishing concern about the impact of free trade on Canada’s cultural identity coincides with some sharp differences of opinion between Canadians and Americans on prominent social issues.

After the optimism of the country’s centenary in 1967, one set of scholars published a group of essays entitled Must Canada Fail? In a similar fashion, the adoption of a new, made-in-Canada Constitution in 1982 was met with another classic academic volume: And No One Cheered.

Plus de 25 ans après le référendum de 1995 sur la souveraineté et à la veille du 40e anniversaire du rapatriement de la Constitution, il peut être facile d’oublier que, du début des années 1960 à la fin des années 1990, débattre des lois fondamentales au Canada était presque devenu un sport national.