Ken Dryden wants to make a point, and Naheed Nenshi just proved it.
The former hockey player and current Liberal MP has a new book, Becoming Canada, in which Mr. Dryden argues, with some passion, in defence of what could be called a new nationalism, a new way of seeing this country that leaves behind the tired animosities of the past and embraces the young, modern, incredibly diverse country that Canada has become.
“If we have the wrong story, we get the wrong future,” Mr. Dryden maintained Wednesday at an appearance hosted by the Ottawa International Writers Festival. The old story of Canada is too much rooted in the English-French divide, in a parochial anti-Americanism, in a whining uncertainty about what this country is and what it should be.
All that is being blown away by what Mr. Dryden calls Canada’s new “multiculture.” While in Europe, leaders lament the failure of immigrants to integrate, Canada’s immigrants are reshaping this land in their own image, and they like what they see.
Some commentators have seized on the candidacy of Rob Ford in Toronto to warn of an emerging Tea Party movement in Canada: a rebellion against high taxes and open immigration.
They forget that Mr. Ford may lose on Monday, in which case Canada’s largest city will have a gay mayor, George Smitherman.
And they cannot, for the life of them, account for Naheed Nenshi’s astonishing win in Calgary, formerly known as Canada’s most conservative city.
Mr. Nenshi, who will be the first Muslim to be mayor of a major city, did it the way U.S. President Barack Obama did it, by going outside the mainstream political elites – who in Calgary’s thought they had the job locked up for veteran alderman Rick McIver or broadcaster Barb Higgins – and appealing directly through social media to young and immigrant Calgarians who previously hadn’t bothered to vote.
The result was a huge turnout – the highest in more than 30 years – and a left-them-in-the-dust victory for Mr. Nenshi.
“When I met the guy today who said, 'I'm 25. I've had so many chances to vote in elections since I turned 18, and I've never done it before tonight,' that's when I realized that we've touched something,” Mr. Nenshi told the Calgary Herald.
Angela Merkel in Germany has declared her country’s efforts to assimilate its ethnically non-German population a failure. A group of respected thinkers in Canada has formed a new organization called the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform, which seeks to craft a more robust definition of Canadian citizenship to which new arrivals must adhere.
But new arrivals are robust citizens already, as long as you speak to their values, as Mr. Nenshi proved this week.
If citizenship means compelling new Canadians whose parents hail from China or India or wherever to act and think like old white people, if it means compelling them to rage against Louis Riel’s execution, trumpet the sanctity of the CBC, and assume a false moral superiority over the United States, then who wants to be a citizen? Why do we keep propping up that old, worn notion of Canada?
Mr. Dryden ends his book with questions: “This country that is the most global country in a global world, and knows it, what would it do about – climate change, poverty, starvation, human rights? How will our political parties ... reflect this Canada? How will the political media reflect this Canada? How will our politics be confronted, challenged, and changed?”
These are questions to which most of our political leaders appear bereft of answers. Most politicians – and yes, many of those who comment on them – appeal instead to an ever-aging, ever-dwindling, ever-more-fearful electorate.
But there’s another electorate out there, just waiting. Nobody is offering anything that they care about right now, but if someone does, they’ll come out in droves.
Just as they did in Calgary.
