Concert of the Canadas 4: Divergence is Progress
Original Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; April 3, 2025
Just over a year has gone by since I began this “Concert of the Canadas” series of musings. In the wake of recent developments the focus has shifted to making the most of the opportunity MAGA Republican insurgents in the U.S. have provided: By threatening our very existence as a sovereign nation state they have given us a compelling reason to come together as Canadians, and to think about what it means to live in the True North strong and free.
Parroting Trump-Vance-Musk “America First” chest thumping with a squawky “Canada First” will get us nowhere. To find our own voice, we need to go much deeper. My hope is that a thorough examination of the current situation from every perspective will help guide us towards aligning our assumptions about Canada and our place in the world with the challenges and possibilities of the 21st century. While our prodigal cousins in the republic to the south long for a return to an imagined past greatness, we can seize the moment and set our sights on the future. Canada’s time is now.
In my February 22 post I suggested that we start thinking and talking about fundamental questions such as “How did Canada come into existence? What does our history reveal about our purpose, our essential character, or, as people used to imagine, our ’destiny’ as manifested in how our story has unfolded?” I even started imagining a course of study for Canadian civics, history and geography that emphasizes open-ended exploration and imagination rather than instruction or correction.
At that point we were nearing the end of a provincial election here in Ontario, and now there’s a federal election underway. The time will go by quickly. We’ll have to make our minds up in a few weeks, using whatever bits of information may come our way: sound bites, slogans, pitches, paid political announcements, news of the day.
Bringing Canada into the present by drawing on a long view of our past is not something that can be done on the fly. My advice for Canada’s Liberals a few months back was to move forward, but cautiously, deliberately, one step at a time: “Don’t Rush,“ I said. As it happened, this was the very moment when things started to move at what now feels like breakneck speed. With a new prime minister, a dramatic realignment of party standings in the polls and an election underway, this is not a good time for reflecting on fundamentals, or for contemplating developments over hundreds and thousands of years. So I’m going to set aside the big questions for the moment, and concentrate on a few considerations for the vote on April 28.
For the provincial election last month, I suggested that a “Maple Leaf Forever” or “Canada Now” vote could have been Green, Orange or Red. “Just make sure,” I wrote, “that your vote is in alignment with a plurality of your neighbours and fellow citizens, riding by riding.” The same advice holds for the decisions we’re making now about who will represent us in Ottawa: A federal election in Canada is made up of 343 separate deliberation processes. How to vote is a decision best made in consultation with others immediately around us. The objective is to find agreement among the largest possible number of voters.
My sense is that having abandoned the standard binary, left vs right political party configuration going on a century ago has been good for our democracy. With some adjustments to the system, there can be a constructive role for most, if not all, of our various party cultures and legacies. I generally favour what I like to call an “omni-partisan” political culture in which differences serve as checks and balances, and where, instead of perennial enmity or a stultifying unity, a dynamic harmony prevails. I’ve even tried to argue that we should be able to belong to more than one party at a time.
I can’t imagine how a party that upholds the idea that government itself is the problem can be part of a harmonious, multi-party political culture. But wherever and whenever plain common sense is balanced with a sense of commons (or, at the very least, a modicum of respect for the common good), a harmonious coexistence is possible. The phrase “variation is a prerequisite for harmony, while unity can become monotony” has been a refrain in these musings.
It is telling, I think, that the commander-in-chief of U.S. military and diplomatic power chooses to ignore the fact that Canada is far more richly and harmoniously diverse than the 50 states he embodies as head of state. He likes to imagine our country as a single unit because that way he can round us up in one fell swoop, and lustily swallow us whole, with one great gulp within that massive gullet.
One of the key elements of my take on what distinguishes us is that Canada is plural, and in more ways than just as an array of oddly shaped and sized provinces bundled together as a confederation. Canada encompasses numerous nations and peoples, scores of cities, hundreds of towns, a complex range of watersheds and subwatersheds, and several continental divides.
There are various ways to understand Canada as a plurality. I like to think in maritime terms interwoven with various historical threads: Atlantic Canada, made up of Newfoundland and Labrador, goes back to the time before permanent settlement. As a federated nation state, it all began with the Laurentian Canadas: of the Gulf, of the River, of the Great Lakes. The Canadas of the Bay, including the cities and peoples of the Prairies and the Canadian Shield as it stretches across Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Nunavut, constitute another, very different combination of points of origin in a vast geography. The same goes for Arctic Canada. Pacific Canada is also a distinct world unto itself, and yet, simultaneously, will always remain an integral part of the whole.
Regional political cultures are becoming increasingly distinct: A federal Liberal in British Columbia can be as different from a southern Ontario Liberal as they may be from a member of party of Laurier, King and Pearson in Quebec or in one of the maritime provinces. What’s amazing is how relatively equitable things are across the spectrum of Canadian regions. There’s nothing like the damage done by a half century of neglect and decline in the U.S. American rust belt, or the hidebound insularity that’s still so prevalent in the Deep South. Almost without exception, Canadian settlements near the border are more dynamic, more prosperous, more peaceful and far better ordered than their near neighbours in the U.S..
When we are able to fully realize and embrace the fact that diversity is a strength, divergence becomes progress and unity regression. The Canadian way is peaceable, liberal, democratic, abundant, joyous, sustainable, progressive and conservative. Together, these characteristics are as full spectrum light is to the visible colours of a rainbow – an analogy that is especially apt in that, besides the way it illustrates how variety is compatible with wholeness, it also leaves room for what we cannot fully comprehend.
The political centre as I’m imagining it was nowhere to be found in the provincial election here in Ontario last month. Coming 18 months before the call was due, the call found everyone unprepared. All the mainstream party platforms were similarly lacklustre. In the end, a sizable plurality of Ontario Canadians who cared enough to go out and vote on February 26 chose, once again, to go Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario blue (which, to my mind, has been a tainted blue since the “Common Sense Revolution” broke out in the 1990s).
My home riding is exceptional in that it is the only constituency in all of Canada that is currently represented by the Green Party provincially as well as federally, and I think it would be wise, both strategically and as a point of pride, for the people of Kitchener Centre to choose to remain that way after April 28.
Beyond Kitchener, we appear to be approaching general agreement that at this juncture a Grit triumph across Ontario, with just enough Orange to keep that flame from extinguishing entirely, would be a happy result.
For New Democrats, I think the opportunity to shine this time around may be by returning to their roots in the prairies and setting out to become the new legitimate voice of the Canadian West, now that Danielle Smith and her resentment-mongering associates have thoroughly discredited their type of U.S. Republican-flavoured, illiberal conservatism.
My advice “for true-hearted, ‘Loyal She Remains’ Ontario Blue stalwarts” was and remains: It’s time to go back to the drawing board and find a way to relegate all those flagrantly Red (as U.S. Americans have come to see red) Republican strains that have gradually infiltrated Canadian conservatism over the last 30 - 50 years “to the dustbin of history.”
I, for one, would be happy to see a saving remnant of untainted blue remain after April 28, preferably centred in the Maritimes or backcountry Ontario, where progressive and even old-fashioned “King and Country” conservatism may not be totally extinct.
Given what the U.S. has become after almost 250 years of development, the more wholesome red white and blue republican influences that have shaped Canada over the years also warrant a thorough review. I think we’ll find that much that is of lasting value: public schools, representation by population, universal suffrage, separation of church and state, a bill of rights, a written constitution.
It is interesting how, up to 40-50 years ago, it was the Liberal Party that led us towards adopting U.S. American ways. But then, starting with Western Reform fascination with the trappings of the U.S. political order in the 1970s, the new fangled conservatism that culminated in the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 became the front line for the U.S. Americanization of the True North. The distinction is that the U.S.A. were a dynamic global force during the time when Canada’s Liberals were under their influence, while the republic began to stumble towards decline just when it started to inspire the various elements that eventually led us to the kind of U.S. Americanization that Pierre Poilievre favours.
In previous posts, I’ve tried to explain how my contempt for what passes for conservatism nowadays is justified. But hard line, right versus wrong partisanship is what I’m hoping we can rise above, and move beyond. The culture war that plagues this continent sets brother against brother, sister against sister, citizen against citizen in a pattern of mutually assured destruction. There can be no victory. Peace is the only possible solution, and Canada is far better equipped for waging domestic peace than a revolutionary republic that has never been able to lay down its arms.
I even thought about posting a revised version of Concert of the Canadas 3 with all the Doug Ford barbs removed. It’s not that I’ve changed my assessment of Ford’s leadership style, which is straight-forward populist “government is the problem” republican – arguably the very antithesis of what both a progressive and a “loyal she remains” Ontario conservative would stand for. But, be that as it may, my fellow citizens have given the PCPO - which, thankfully, has not yet been officially “re-formed“ - a whopping majority of seats (but not votes) three times in a row now. And I am able to stretch my optimism about future possibilities to not considering Doug Ford incorrigible. You never know, he may, someday, be on his way to somewhere on one of those crowded 20th-century expressways he loves so much, and suddenly see the light.
Meanwhile, Ford will remain the premier of Ontario, an office that, in accordance with the Canadian way, has a certain measure of honour built into it. The best approach is to let that be for the time being, and concentrate on making sure that the responsibility for defending Canada’s sovereignty, integrity and honour doesn’t get handed over to that abject negation, Pierre Poilievre. The distinction here is that filling an emptiness is something very different than battling an enemy or trying to overthrow an oppressor.
The new approach I propose, which I been referring to as the Canadian way, is not a protest against, an alternative to, or an opposition to any existing stance, view, system, or method. Instead, it embodies the strength that comes from being firmly grounded in the present moment. This perspective recognizes the complex paths that have brought us to our current position while looking forward to the future, with all its dangers and possibilities.
