CHARTER SCHOOL

Face the nation: Canada remade (Globe and Mail, Jun. 6, 2003)

Take a look at how Americans and Canadians responded to this statement in an Environic survey: "The father of the family must be the master of his own house." In 1992, 42 per cent of Americans said the statement was true, compared with 26 per cent of Canadians. In 2000, 49 per cent of Americans agreed with it, compared with 18 per cent of Canadians. Mr. Adams calls it the most astonishing polling result he has ever encountered.

Neil Nevitte, the University of Toronto political scientist who for 20 years has tracked values in Western Europe, the United States and Canada, credits Canada's egalitarian family structures with helping to create young Canadians' ideology of tolerance, social justice and ecological concern.

Today's 20s are indeed the children of those who voted for successive 1960s' and 1970s' governments that enacted multiculturalism, decided the state had no place in the nation's bedrooms, crafted the Charter to elevate individual rights into Canada's supreme law and balance them against the rights of the collective, created the social programs that have allowed the great majority to grow up secure, healthy and well-educated, and wove tolerance and respect for diversity into the schools, courts and law books.

If a ride on the Toronto subway is a trip through 100 languages and the world's entire set of skin colours, it is because Canadians of older generations opened more widely the doors to the country.

If francophone Quebec has been transformed into a vibrant, multi-ethnic society that looks confidently out on the world rather than protectively in on itself, it is because pure laine Quebeckers--the parents and grandparents of today's young adults--helped that change take place.

If Canadians in their 20s overwhelmingly say yes to homosexuals being allowed to marry in law, it is because they were raised in Canadian families and educated in Canadian schools that assigned premium value to tolerance and social inclusiveness and independent thinking.

So 20s are really just a stronger version of the people who raised them, in a trend that promises even more tolerant generations to come. The real split in values and attitudes, the CRIC-Globe survey found, was with their grandparents who were, in almost every area, the least open to change.

"The Charter was not created to reflect Canada; but the Charter did create a new Canadian generation that reflects the Charter," says Queen's University political scientist Matthew Mendelsohn, who helped design the CRIC-Globe and Mail poll.

"It's tough to build a country to match a dream," Pierre Trudeau is once reported to have said.

In fact, that appears to be what Canadians are succeeding in doing.

"It may turn out to be an anachronism," says Mr. Adams of Environics. In a world of six billion people, he says, a society defined by idealism, egalitarianism, personal fulfilment, tolerance and diversity "may be a dream that fails."

The idea of a culture dedicated to multiculturalism is an interesting one, but it's hard to see how it's sustainable for any significant period of time. Canada has the ideal environment in which to test out the idea--its national security and economic health nearly guaranteed by its proximity to the United States, it may never have to find out whether a society with no shared beliefs can unify to face a national crisis. In fact, in any crisis significant enough to threaten the existence of the nation it would likely just be absorbed into the United States. In the meantime though, an ethos that forbids anyone from judging the behavior and beliefs of anyone else seems almost certain to lead to ever greater individualism and less and less community, because people are simply unlikely to have much in common.

This increasing isolation from one's fellows will then lead to increasing dependence on the centralized state. Folks will have realized the dream of being left alone, but in being left alone to believe in whatever they choose to believe in, they'll find themselves truly alone, with no one to share life with.

It seems unlikely that men will prove to be such solitary animals rather than social beings, and unlikely that they'll be very happy, but perhaps they can serve as our canary in the coal mine. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2003 09:56 PM