This article originally appeared in the Hub.
By Daniel Dorman, July 31, 2024
In the fall of 2022 I had the privilege to travel to Chișinău, Moldova to help document the work of a group of churches supporting Ukrainian refugees that flooded their country after Russia’s invasion. Moldova was already one of the poorest countries in Europe and at one point early in the war nearly one in six people in the country was a refugee.
It was beautiful to see charity in action, even as Moldovans feared they were next on Putin’s hit list. But I also got a picture of the longer-term economic malaise facing much of the country.
Throughout the trip, I often saw nice new cars—Mercedes, Jaguars, BMWs, and the like—sitting outside of homes or apartments that were on the edge of collapse.
When I asked my host why this was the case, he said: “No one invests in anything they can’t take with them.” The threat of political instability is woven deep into the national consciousness.
That same Moldovan host told me that his elderly relative has been assigned five nationalities despite living in the same house his entire life—the political situation of Eastern Europe is so fraught that the name on the front of his passport had to change every couple of decades since he was born.
Moldova’s economic malaise is based in part on a spiritual malaise, a deep-seated hopelessness and a lack of trust in government and political processes. There are deep wounds from a traumatic history that need to be overcome before Moldova will be more productive, less corrupt, and healthier as a whole.
I believe Canada, admittedly to a lesser degree, is beginning to suffer from a similarly crippling crisis of confidence.
At the base of the many challenges we face is a growing disbelief that Canada, as a nation, is a valuable project. If nearly seven in 10 young Canadians believe Canada is broken, why would they even attempt to build lives here? It seems obvious that Canada will not build enough homes to get out of the housing crisis if few people feel that Canada is a particularly worthwhile or stable place to live.
In the past few years Canadians have endured:
- Our federal government unjustifiably using emergency measures to suppress political dissent, marking a decline in the rule of law.
- Credible reports of treasonous behaviour by members of Parliament as our democracy is undermined by foreign actors.
- Seeming endless ethical scandals from senior members of government (like Minister Sajjan’s recently revealed failures in Afghanistan).
- Disgrace and chastisement on the world stage for our pretension to lecture other countries on progressive social issues without substantially contributing to global security.
- Once venerated Canadians like Sir John A. Macdonald and Henry Dundas are in the historical doghouse with thin justification and a total forgetfulness of their contributions to this country.
- And an economy severely damaged by contradictory and counterproductive environmental measures that stifle natural resource development—our most productive sector.
Canadians are feeling betrayed—and for good reason. But justified cynicism is still unhelpful. If we are going to reinvigorate Canada, we’ve got to find a way past defeatism. I think we need to start with two things: (1) We need to stop lying about our history, and (2) we need to restore civic education.
Stop lying about our history
Given the negative narratives surrounding Sir John A. Macdonald, I bet many Canadians would be shocked by the inclusiveness and tolerance characteristic of his speeches. “I never asked the question, and never will ask, what a man’s religion, race, or ancestry may be,” Macdonald famously said. Or as Peter MacKay wrote, “Macdonald was a man ahead of his time on subjects of diversity, equality and justice for all.”
Contrary to his tarnished reputation, Macdonald’s desire to look past national origin and differences of religion in public life was built into the DNA of Canada and has been a part of what made this a great nation. Macdonald had very real faults, but a balanced assessment of Macdonald’s political vision leaves much to be admired and emulated.
Today, Canada’s first prime minister is known almost exclusively for his faults and his failures with Indigenous Peoples. Postcolonial activists have successfully reframed and revised our history in the national imagination. For example, 60 percent of Canadians still believe the media’s precipitated narrative that there was a “mass grave” found on the residential school grounds in Kamloops, B.C.—despite the fact that even the chief who initially announced finding human remains with radar technology backed away from the claim.
If we believe the revisionist version of our history, that Canada is a racist and genocidal state, we won’t invest in our country. If we become familiar with a truer, fuller Canadian history we might find something worth preserving and a national identity worth living into.
Restore civic education
As Aaron Wudrick, David Livingstone, and David Tabachnick recently laid out in an article for The Hub, liberal education has long been in decline in Canada with the inevitable result that Canadian democracy finds itself in ill-health. The author’s cite a study from Abacus data which outlines that “about four in 10 Canadian adults don’t recall learning anything in school about current events, how governments work, or their roles as citizens, and only one in 10 were taught how to discuss controversial issues.”
But more than just better outcomes in teaching students the difference between the House of Commons and the Senate or the different branches of government (as important as that is), public education in Canada needs a spiritual awakening and a redefining of its purposes away from merely pragmatic career training towards a broader vision of shaping responsible citizens.
Wudrick et al. explain that “the humanities and social sciences, which are the traditional homes for this education, have drifted from their core mandates, jeopardizing liberal democracy rather than exploring its deep philosophical roots, celebrating its strengths, and shoring up its deficiencies.” Public education desperately needs to rediscover the humanities and social sciences without the distortions of critical theory.
Then, through great historical and literary works like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, or Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless students could be given glimpses of genuine authoritarianism and injustice. They could be introduced to the solemn reality that justice and democracy are desperately fragile and in need of many defenders. And they could even become grateful for what they have in Canada against the backdrop of a broken world with a mostly sad history.
In 1979, in the midst of an energy crisis that was dividing the United States, President Jimmy Carter gave his famous “malaise” speech. He said this of what truly faced the U.S.:
“It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”
So the U.S. stood in the late ’70s in the midst of a confidence crisis. So stands Moldova after a century (or more) of political instability. And so stands Canada.
To move forward we must first commit to rediscovering and retelling a truer version of our national history, and then we must recognize that the responsibility to uphold what is good about Canada is distributed to all of us that call this great country home.
Daniel Dorman is a contributor to Young Voices and the director of communications at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
