Canadian identity is too hard to define for too many.

I joined Counterpoint with Tanya Granic Allen to discuss Canadian identity, social solidarity, and what holds a society together.

Canada was not founded as a revolutionary liberal project like the United States, but as a nation of compromise and deep continuity with the past, rooted in peace, order, and good government. Our constitutional monarchy, rule of law, and Western civilizational inheritance shaped a people that are pragmatic, moderate, and deeply communitarian. It is this solid foundation that precedes and anchors our capacity for, and promotion of individual freedom and enterprise.

That communitarian instinct has long distinguished us from the United States. We reject the extremes of rhetoric, inequality, litigiousness, and cultural brashness in favour of continuity, restraint, and stronger civil society. But over time, that same instinct has drifted into a reluctance to defend standards, ideals, and shared norms for fear of exclusion. We suffer from tall poppy syndrome, which is an excess of the egalitarian instinct that stifles success and levels down, rather than lifting up.

Though our roots were more traditional in some ways than the revolutionary United States and France, sixty years into official multiculturalism, we’ve pursued a unity based on diversity all the way down. This is premised on a mistaken understanding of unity and the nature of social belonging. Human beings form attachments through family, place, language, faith, and shared history. A society that weakens those attachments as we have, risks ever greater fragmentation.

This matters for immigration, too. Integration must be a primary consideration. We must cease thinking of ourselves as an economic zone, or a hotel, or a postnational soup that has lost all taste because it is indiscriminate in its ingredients. Pace, scale, cultural distance, language, and institutions all matter for social cohesion. A confident society can welcome newcomers but only if it knows what it is welcoming them into.

We shouldn’t be ashamed of our history. Canada is an extraordinary success story, shaped by Greco-Roman philosophy, Judeo-Christian moral foundations, ordered liberty, and institutions that channel freedom toward the common good. The current obsession with cancelling the past reflects luxury beliefs. It’s anything but moral seriousness. It is a refusal to acknowledge that we inherited something worth conserving.

At a time of loneliness, declining birth rates, and social fragmentation, the answer isn’t more diversity, levelling down egalitarianism or emptiness-inducing autonomy. It’s thicker forms of belonging — families, faith, local communities, and traditions that give people meaning beyond the lonely, isolated self.

Interestingly, we’re already seeing stirrings of renewal: younger voters re-engaging with tradition, religion, and conservatism, and a growing hunger for rootedness in an unrooted age.