Heritage Moments: Customs, Traditions, and Multicultural Citizenship in Canada

ABSTRACT

For many scholars who worry about the future of liberal democracy, a central challenge has been to conceive civic and national identities that are robust enough to sustain collective action without defining the criteria of shared membership in ways that are too narrow, exclusive, or inaccessible. This essay addresses the familiar questions that lie at the heart of this challenge – who belongs? and on what terms? - but with a double twist: First, I reflect on the normative questions posed by political theorists about ”belonging,“ but do so in dialogue with the empirical evidence generated by a cross-national opinion survey on national identity undertaken by the Pew Research Center. Second, I explore the Canadian case in greater detail, suggesting that sharing customs and traditions, anchored to and validated by the Charter of Rights, may be a surprising and under-utilized resource in establishing a more flexible account of belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• multiculturalism
• nationalism
• citizenship
• cultural heritage

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Department of Political Science at Western University and the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto for giving me the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper and to profit from the ensuing discussion. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, as well as the editors for their useful comments. David Cameron, Jack Lucas, Kanta Murali, David Rayside, and Phil Triadafilopoulos provided helpful comments. Michael Donnelly and Semuhi Sinanoglu helped me navigate the public opinion data, and Jack Lucas generously helped with the tables and figures. And a special shout out to Bernie Yack, with thanks for an ongoing conversation about politics that has continued on and off for forty-five years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Buttigieg (2019), “A Crisis of Belonging.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = GtESa_X_kVQ, November 16, 2019.

2. For reasons developed in the text, I use the terms civic and national identity largely interchangeably.

3. Japan is the only Asian country surveyed, but because Pew did not use the full battery of questions there I have dropped it from the analysis. The rest of the comparative analysis, therefore, is based on the remaining thirteen cases.

4. For discussion, see Vipond (2017), 190-194.

5. The Quebec law in question is known as Bill 21, “An Act respecting the laicity of the State.” It was passed by the National Assembly of Quebec on June 16, 2019.

6. It is interesting that Canada is both the country that appears least insistent with respect to language acquisition and the only country among the 13 surveyed that has two official (and officially portable) languages. It would be interesting in this regard to survey a country like Belgium, which is also multi-lingual but whose language regime is quite different.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert C. Vipond

Robert Vipond is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Most of his scholarly work has centered on Canadian political development, especially with respect to citizenship and the constitution. He is the author of Liberty and Community: Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (1991), co-editor of the two-volume anthology Roads to Confederation (published simultaneously in French as Vers la Confédération, 2018), and author of Making a Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity (2017), which won the Ontario Historical Society Brant Prize for the best book on multiculturalism. He was the Mackenzie King Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2002-03), and he has just finished a six-year term as Chair of the Manuscript Review Committee (or editorial board) of the University of Toronto Press. He is currently co-editor (with Jack Lucas) of a new book series with UTP on comparative studies in political development.