By Geoff Russ, August 11, 2025
Next year, the census will go out to all Canadians once again.
Millions of them will check off “Canadian” in the ethnicity column after the form arrives at their door, and they will be correct in doing so. You can hardly blame people for wanting to be truthful on something as important as the census.
In the Cambridge Dictionary, ethnicity is defined as a “large group of people with a shared culture, language, history, set of traditions … or the fact of belonging to one of these groups.”
Ethnicity should not be confused with race or blood. Instead, it should be recognized as a synonym for identity, and there is no question that Canadians possess their own. They are a people with a common culture, historical consciousness, and a shared future.
When “Canadian” was first offered as an ethnic option on the 1986 census, just half a per cent of the respondents selected it. In 2021, 15.6 per cent solely marked down “Canadian” on the census, the largest-ever share of the population to do so, and the single largest ethnic identification in Canada today.
To have a Canadian identity requires more than a piece of paper. It means being part of a distinct community bearing a unique heritage and sharing a way of life.
Canada cannot boast a direct lineage to well-documented, ancient civilizations like Greece or China. Nor can it claim a grandiose, revolutionary founding story akin to the United States.
Nonetheless, the legitimacy and significance of Canadianness is not diminished by its admittedly simpler origins. Nor is it as exclusionary as its critics would have people believe.
A leader who understood this well was John Diefenbaker, Canada’s 13th prime minister.
Bearing a German name and ancestry, Diefenbaker fell outside Canada’s founding English and French peoples. That did not stop him from passionately proclaiming himself to be a proud, unhyphenated Canadian.
By Diefenbaker’s time, blood alone did not define what a Canadian was, and it has not since. Canada still owes much to the legacies of the founding peoples, whose cultures continue to define our official languages, customs, holidays, political institutions, economy, and laws.
From Britain, Canada gained an ethos of Protestant liberty, its political institutions, the Common Law, and membership in the wider English-speaking world. Those who bemoan Canada’s lack of international cultural power should not forget the well-worn path for Canadian authors or artists finding success abroad in Britain or the United States.
Although largely localized in Quebec today, the French language and culture might not have survived without the efforts and record-keeping of the Roman Catholic Church, which helped to ward off threats of assimilation into the larger English-speaking majority.
The place of Quebecers as a distinct minority remains one of the central questions of Canada today. Canada’s Anglophone and Francophone citizens – even those outside Quebec – still remain distinct from one another, and likely always will.
The tensions and often uneasy co-existence between Anglo-Protestants and French Catholics helped to foster a Canadian habit of tolerance, and a deliberately non-revolutionary political culture. This is all part of what constitutes a unique Canadianness.
As exemplified by Diefenbaker, adopting these elements comes from nurture and conscious acceptance of fellow citizens.
Another factor that has produced a distinctive Canadian identity is the land.
Land is essential to what makes a people. It is not a coincidence that the iconic English patriotic hymn Jerusalem makes reference to “England’s green and pleasant land.”
Canada is an enormous country, bordered by three oceans and girded by desolate mountains, dark forests, ice fields, and windswept prairies. It is the harshest landmass of the three countries in North America.
The role of geography in forming Canadianness was essential and remains so today. The northern land of Canada has shaped generation after generation. For example, although they share our language and heritage, Australians were shaped by the parched hardpan of the Outback. Canadians are a people moulded by the winter and snow.
This affected where Canadian cities were built, what sorts of food can be grown and when they can be harvested, and what sports we excel in. Both English and French Canadians had to endure and survive in their rugged home. Those who did not adapt usually perished.
There is a strong tendency to dismiss Canadian identity as a myth, “imagined”, or at worst, exclusionary. On both the political left and right, there are those who do not believe that Canada – or Canadians for that matter – should exist.
Some assert that countries with colonial origins, such as Canada, can never be true countries. Others see the country as redundant, fit only for absorption into the United States. Both factions lie on the fringes and are treated far more seriously than they deserve. In fact, these are tiny segments compared to the majority of Canadians who possess more patriotism and sense of self than they are often credited with.
A genuine and authentic sense of national self is necessary to maintain a semblance of order and stability, and both are preconditions for a hopeful and prosperous country.
John Stuart Mill, the 19th century liberal thinker, understood the necessity of shared culture.
“Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities,” said Mill in 1861. “Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist… it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”
Mill was wrong about many things, but he was correct in this. We should not forget that wisdom in our era, when nationalism has rebounded and questions of identity are paramount. This is a potential source of strength for Canada, despite what some say.
Listing Canadian ethnicity on the census has been condemned as harmful to the ideal of “multicultural solidarity.” It is a silly notion unless one accepts the most racist and bigoted definition of ethnicity as a product of blood, rather than community.
Discussions about a more singular, rooted Canadian identity have been poisoned by partisan politics. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s use of the term “Old Stock Canadian” in 2015 during an election season led to over-wrought accusations of racial division.
Such controversies froze the discourse that might have led to a better understanding of whom and what a Canadian identity encompasses.
For instance, there were thousands of black British Canadians whose ancestors lived in Ontario and the Maritimes when Canada became a Dominion in 1867.
This is also true of Canadians of Chinese ancestry in British Columbia, whose forebears were present when the colony entered Confederation in 1871. Victoria’s own Chinatown is older than the British North America Act itself.
The First Nations and Inuit have inhabited the land since before the first European explorers crossed the Atlantic.
Those who choose only “Canadian” on the next census will do so because no honest alternative exists. At a certain point in a family’s history, the “old country” becomes a foreign country.
Many citizens of Canada have no other homeland, no second passport, and no desire to belong anywhere else.
This country is not a propositional project; it is the home of an inevitable national community. Dismissing Canadianness as merely imagined overlooks the pride that Canadians quietly feel in their inheritance, and the values and habits passed on from parent to child.
In the words of Sir John A. Macdonald, “I had the misfortune to be born a Scotsman, still I was caught very young and was brought to this country before I had been very much corrupted. Since I was five years old, I have been in Canada. All my hopes and my remembrances are Canadian.”
Geoff Russ is a writer and policy analyst, and a contributor for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
