imagining Canadian nationalism
By Harsha Walia
The various articles in the New Socialist special issue on “Canada and Empire” offer a powerful critique of Canadian left-nationalism and the ways in which it serves as a shield against examining Canada’s own policies of oppression both within and beyond its borders.
Canada is thought to be a peaceful and compassionate society. Internationally, Canada is seen as the peacekeeper. Most Canadians perceive the US as the greatest threat to and oppressor of the dependent and helpless Canadian nation. For example, the Council of Canadians over the past few years has used the slogan of “Canada: Country or Colony?” to point to military, border and trade integration agreements, suggesting that Canada is in a colonial relationship with the US. The myth of Canadian benevolence and the veneer of Canadian multiculturalism has further perpetuated the illusion of being the Northern underdog and served to cast Canada as a liberal counterpoint to US imperialism.
However, as the various articles in the last issue of New Socialist reveal, the very foundation of Canada is built on the blood and holocaust of indigenous peoples. Cree lawyer Sharon Venne has written, “Canada, the great peacekeeping nation, must maintain its international image because its treatment of Indigenous Peoples makes its human rights record as black as the record of white South Africa. After all, the legislation to keep blacks down in South Africa was modeled upon legislation drafted and used in Canada against Indigenous Peoples.”
Slavery has historically been practiced in Canada and its present-day manifestation continues with an apartheid system of labour in which migrants are legislated into vulnerability and invisibility in order to provide a hyper-exploitable pool of labour without rights of settlement or social/political enfranchisement. On the global stage, while the US is perceived as having been the sole imperialist hegemonic power over the past six decades, Canada has lent its support to imperialism – through complicity and overt support – in Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan, Haiti, Palestine and Iraq.
Finally, contrary to popular Left sentiment, Canada is no less favorable to corporate rule than the US. The better social benefits such as public healthcare enjoyed in Canada as compared with those in the US are not due to the goodwill of any progressive Canadian government; in reality, they are a product of past working-class struggles.
This reality of Canadian capitalism, colonialism and imperialism is well articulated throughout the articles in the last issue of New Socialist. As David McNally writes, “This is the ugly face of a middle level imperialist power that pretends that, because it lacks the aggressive capacity of US imperialism, it has no imperialist interests of its own.” Sebastian Lamb further writes on this blind spot of the Canadian Left: “when we break out of the narrow perspective that looks at Canada mainly in relation to the US instead of placing Canada in relation to the entire global system, we can appreciate how Canadian capitalists and governments are globally dominant, not dominated.”
Nationalism of the Oppressor, Nationalism of the Oppressed
These articles offer a nuanced understanding of Canadian nationalism by implicitly distinguishing the “oppressor nationalism” of Canada from the “nationalisms of the oppressed.” The nationalism of the oppressed has often been characterized as “anti-statist nationalism” as it embodies the shared identity and collective feelings, thought and behaviour of a community often without geographic, economic or political boundaries. As Alfredo M. Bonanno writes, “Nationality is not a principle; it is a legitimate fact, just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small, has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principal of freedom.”
Such nationalist movements express a popular anti-colonial sentiment and provide a platform for oppressed peoples to organize against imperialism, as witnessed by historical national liberation struggles across the Third World. Although nationalist movements have historically imitated and led to statist forms of organization – for example, the partition of India and Pakistan has manufactured a patriotic and fundamentalist defense of these arbitrarily defined states – other nationalist trajectories of self-determination are possible as witnessed through the Zapatista structures of governance in Chiapas.
This nationalism of the oppressed is quite unlike Canadian statist nationalism, which is itself predicated on the arbitrary existence of the Canadian state – a legal and political community and socially-constructed identity established by deliberate action. State formation has historically served to displace the free confederations of tribes and communities, and the Canadian state has attempted to create a cultural nation of its own by denying the nationhood of indigenous peoples that constitutes it.
Canadian Nationalism and Border Controls
“All borders are acts of state violence inscribed in landscape. Every wall and fence, checkpoint and pillbox, is a sundering of the integrity of nature and the rights of man. The very existence of exclusionary borders, as all great radical thinkers have understood, constitutes a permanent crisis of human liberty.” -Mike Davis & Alessandra Moctezuma
Canadian nationalism emphasizes the nation as a contained entity threatened by outside forces wishing to destroy it and its members. Borders have been presented as a site through which criminality is able to seep into the state. As Margaret Beare put it, “the imagery is often of floodgates giving way in front of a sea of criminals, as waves of immigrants enter the country.” This state-building exercise requires ways to legitimize the global apartheid system of regulating citizenship. One way this is done is to create a public consciousness about the “undesirable migrant”: a welfare bum, a criminal, a terrorist.
Yet the reality of migration is one that reveals the asymmetrical relations between “rich” and “poor,” between North and South, where the effects of colonialism and corporate globalization have created political economies that compel people to move. Still, within the Canadian nationalist discourse, the Canadian state is perceived as a bulwark of necessary protection, and the illusion of the state as a place of safety is maintained through bureaucratic organizations – such as the military, federal intelligence and immigration apparatus – which produce the sense that “The Enemy” is outside the realm of “us.” Catherine Dauvergne has written, “one reason why the concept of ‘national interest’ is so vital to immigration law is because of the role this law plays in constituting the nation.” Immigration law determines who becomes part of the Canadian community. The impetus towards cracking down on migration therefore demonstrates Canada asserting its sovereignty and control.
The ongoing use of the dichotomous rhetoric of “us and them” – particularly after the events of 9/11 – is rooted in the colonial legacy that makes racially-oppressed communities “The Enemy” that can then only exist outside of the nation. For example, during World War Two, Japanese Canadians were designated as “enemy aliens” and over 22,000 were relocated or interned. Similarly, despite the fact that Canada is home to many of Arab origin, because the racialized image of “The Enemy” after 9/11 includes all Arabs, the notion of the Canadian nation must necessarily exclude Arab-Canadians. This then justifies their treatment as hyphenated citizens – a group excluded from, and in opposition to, the Canadian nation. By comparison, after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by far right white supremacists there was no profiling or registration system of white men aged 18-45.
This normalization of whiteness within the Canadian state allows for the unfettered and unchallenged consequences of the “War on Terrorism”. This includes massive arrests and the interrogation of immigrants and refugees, the passing of legislation granting intelligence and law enforcement agencies much broader powers of intrusion into people’s private lives, pervasive government and media censorship of information, the silencing of dissent and the widespread racial profiling and criminalization of Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities. Security certificates have been used to arbitrarily detain five Muslim men on secret evidence in complete defiance of their basic civil rights. Legislation such as the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Anti-Terrorism Act has strengthened the association between terrorism and immigration.
Therefore Canadian nationalism cannot simply mean sovereignty from the United States. As Samir Hussain has written, “simply ‘being better’ than the United States of America (or ‘American citizens’) is hardly a cause for celebration – indeed, this is not a difficult achievement.” It must also mean autonomy, popular sovereignty and full self-determination for all those who occupy the territories of Canada, particularly indigenous peoples and racialized migrants.
Sakej Henderson argues that “the more people become aware of the conditionality of a context, the more likely they are able to effect meaningful change to that context.” Rather than awkwardly embracing a Canadian nationalism that emphasizes the state’s absolute and hierarchical authority, we must articulate and defend the importance of maintaining free, equal and reciprocal relations between all human beings and the land. Such relationships, along with a more global and comprehensive analysis of colonialism, capitalism and racism create the battleground for building a broad and powerful revolutionary grassroots movement.
