Canadianism: Define it.

And my first response was that I thought he was warning me about something I'm already very conscious of.

If we define Canadian identity too narrowly, particularly around ancestry or ethnicity or religion or some romanticized historical idea of who a Canadian is supposed to be, then yes, we create an inside and an outside.

But that isn't what I meant by Canadianism.

Canadianism isn't about where your grandparents were born.

It's also not about whether your family arrived here in 1820, 1920 or 2020.

Nor is it about being white or brown, indigenous or Asian or Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Sikh or Hindu or having no religion at all.

Canadianism, as I've been trying to define it, is a civic identity.

And there's a line in the Canadianist manifesto that I keep going back to.

We have to make sure that the space between each community is one of discovery, not one of distance.

And that was basically my answer.

And he hated it.

He called it wishy-washy gobbledygook.

Fair enough.

Then he came back with a much stronger argument.

And this is where the conversation got interesting because I realized I'd actually misunderstood part of his original objection.

He said, essentially, no, if something has an identity, it has a definition.

And if it has a definition, some things necessarily fall outside of that definition.

He argued that there's obviously a difference between someone whose family has been here for generations and someone who arrived yesterday from what he called an alien culture.

He talked about cultural enclaves in Toronto where someone could supposedly live without speaking English.

He referred to it as a colony.

And then he got to the heart of his argument.

He said something must be given up by foreigners choosing to move here in order to preserve our identity.

Otherwise, in his words, an alien demographic could eventually replace what is already here.

Now I understood the disagreement.

Because we actually agreed on two things.

And my first response was that I thought he was warning me about something I'm already very conscious of.

If we define Canadian identity too narrowly, particularly around ancestry or ethnicity or religion or some romanticized historical idea of who a Canadian is supposed to be, then yes, we create an inside and an outside.

But that isn't what I meant by Canadianism.

Canadianism isn't about where your grandparents were born.

It's also not about whether your family arrived here in 1820, 1920 or 2020.

Nor is it about being white or brown, indigenous or Asian or Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Sikh or Hindu or having no religion at all.

Canadianism, as I've been trying to define it, is a civic identity.

And there's a line in the Canadianist manifesto that I keep going back to.

We have to make sure that the space between each community is one of discovery, not one of distance.

And that was basically my answer.

And he hated it.

He called it wishy-washy gobbledygook.

Fair enough.

Then he came back with a much stronger argument.

And this is where the conversation got interesting because I realized I'd actually misunderstood part of his original objection.

He said, essentially, no, if something has an identity, it has a definition.

And if it has a definition, some things necessarily fall outside of that definition.

He argued that there's obviously a difference between someone whose family has been here for generations and someone who arrived yesterday from what he called an alien culture.

He talked about cultural enclaves in Toronto where someone could supposedly live without speaking English.

He referred to it as a colony.

And then he got to the heart of his argument.

He said something must be given up by foreigners choosing to move here in order to preserve our identity.

Otherwise, in his words, an alien demographic could eventually replace what is already here.

Now I understood the disagreement.

Because we actually agreed on two things.