What is the meaning of citizenship in today’s world? What are its rights and responsibilities? What are the benefits it confers and the obligations it demands? How does it differ – on the lyrical scale of pride, purpose and patriotism – to be a citizen of one country as opposed to another? Is citizenship for some peoples of the world still an ember of empire and emblem of cultural superiority, as it was for the Greeks and Romans in the ancient world, the British and French centuries later, the Japanese and the Russians in the 20th century? Or, is citizenship today a celebration of a post-imperial ideal – democracy, freedom, human rights, the rule of law, diversity, the free market – as it is, at its best, for a citizen of the United States or the European Union in the 21st century?

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Citizenship is a sense of blood and belonging, an attachment to people and to place. It is geography, history and demography, too. It begins with a reverence for the land. This may be steppes in Russia, jungles in Brazil, deserts in China, marshes in Iraq. In This Land is Your Land, an ode to America written in 1940, folk singer Woody Guthrie rhapsodizes over a continental country stretching from “California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters.” Guthrie sings: “This land was made for you and me.” Yet as much as citizenship is about the land, it is also a respect for its people – their traditions, customs and institutions. These make them a nation. They are proud to belong. In any country, people and place remain the pillars of citizenship.

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For Canada, the meaning of citizenship is more subtle and complex than in other countries. Canada has never had an empire; indeed, it began life in 1867 as a British dominion. For their first 80 years our forbears were taught to be British, not Canadian. Canada had no territorial conquests, no colonies, no civilizing mission in the world. It had no glorious national narrative. Canadians? Who were Canadians?

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Until Parliament passed the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947 – after sending soldiers into two world wars and establishing a diplomatic service – Canadians were not clearly Canadian. They bristled when they were registered as “British” at birth, marriage and death; they resented having “British subject” stamped in their passports. Their constitution, the British North America Act, resided in Britain and could be amended only with the approval of Westminster (until 1982); Canada’s court of last resort was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London (until 1949). Without a war of independence, a civil war or a foreign invasion – those historical crucibles of national spirit – it was hard for Canadians to see themselves as Canadians. “The (Canadian Citizenship) Act tried to incorporate into law a definition of what constituted a Canadian,” wrote Paul Martin Sr., the Secretary of State who was its architect. The debate then wasn’t about residence, naturalization or revocation. Nor was it just about voting, holding property or moving and speaking freely under the protection of the state. Rather, explained Martin more idealistically, “citizenship is the right to full partnership in the fortunes and in the future of the nation.” Citizenship was about aspiration. It was about nation-building. In Canada, it still is.

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But casting citizenship in law isn’t necessarily creating it in practice. In the absence of a national mythology, the concept of citizenship in Canada early on was largely an attachment to “our home and native land”, words from O Canada, the country’s national anthem. The bond was largely regional. Canadians were not Canadians; they were Albertans, Ontarians, Quebeckers, Prince Edward Islanders. They were rooted in a province or territory, tagged with monikers, some disparaging: Bluenoses (Nova Scotia), Sourdoughs (Yukon), Peasoupers (Quebec), Newfies (Newfoundland). Westerners identified with the Rocky Mountains, Ontarians the Laurentian Shield, Quebeckers the St. Lawrence River, Maritimers the Bay of Fundy. Canada is the second-largest country in the world, and few Canadians have been able get their arms around it. Canada is heavily urban (about 80 per cent live in cities) and distinctly regional: British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada and the North (three territories).

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If geography is Canada’s strength, it is also its weakness. Distance and economics are obstacles to Canadians discovering their country, as those of smaller countries do. One of the early triumphs of 19th century Canada was building the Canadian Pacific Railway – its construction was a condition of British Columbia joining Canada in 1871 – and forging a link with the rest of the country lying east of the mountains. Besides its trans-continental railway, Canada also tried later on to bind itself together with the Trans-Canada Highway, which extends 7,821 kilometers between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It opened in 1962. A quarter-century earlier, with the same imperative of nation-building, Canada established a national air carrier (Trans-Canada Airlines, later Air Canada). But there were (and are) few roads north to the high Arctic. Getting around Canada on public transportation is hard, and in some ways, getting harder. Links to the near north, such as the passenger train between Winnipeg and Churchill, the country’s only deep-water Arctic port, have been cut. Train service in Canada is sparse, erratic and expensive. There is no daily passenger service between Montreal and Vancouver, and inter-city service in the densely populated eastern corridor (Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa) is thin. In the west, no trains run between Calgary and Edmonton and between Regina and Saskatoon. Ironically, there were more trains in the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor a generation ago than there are today. High-speed rail, common in Europe and Asia, is a fantasy in Canada. Worse, bus service to northern and rural communities is declining. While domestic airlines serve Canada’s cities, foreign carriers do not. The absence of competition makes airfares to smaller urban centres prohibitively expensive; it is cheaper to fly within Europe, Australia and the United States than within Canada. All this makes exploring Canada challenging. Canadians may love the land, celebrated in verse and song (Canada has its own version of This Land is Your Land) but few Canadians have actually seen much of it, especially the North. Canadians are as likely to vacation in the United States, Europe or the Caribbean.

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The search for national identity is existential. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for his part, sees not at all: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he allows. Establishing identity is frustrated by Canada’s fragmented demography. Canada is not a melting pot. It has three founding peoples – French, English and aboriginal peoples (whose stature and contribution was unrecognized until recently). There was English Canada (the West, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces), French Canada (Quebec), and the North (Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and since 1999, Nunavut.) Canada’s 37 million people (38th in population in the world) are concentrated in a few metropolitan areas, mostly within 160 kilometers of the U.S. border. Beyond that the country is empty. Canada is sparsely populated (four persons per square kilometer). For its first century or so, Quebec was French and the rest was English. That was Canada’s identity, which was surprisingly more cohesive than today. With immigration, particularly in the last half-century, Canada has become less British and French. After Australia, Canada is now the world’s second most heterogeneous country. About a fifth of Canadians are born elsewhere; in greater Toronto, the country’s largest city, more than half of residents are foreign born. Managing relations between French and English was once the great challenge of Canada, shaping our national consciousness. Accommodating each other’s reality has taught Canadians the art of compromise and a respect for minority rights, but there has been friction. In 1945, tension over Canada’s duality was captured in an acclaimed novel aptly called Two Solitudes.

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Today, Quebec is thriving and self-confident. It is a distinctive entity within Canada, its language and law (the Napoleonic code) constitutionally protected. The threat of secession that arose in the 1960s and extended to the 1990s, igniting Canada’s Constitutional Wars and threatening to break up one the world’s oldest federations, has now faded. The independence movement, which brought the secessionist Parti Québécois to power in Quebec City and held divisive provincial referenda on independence in 1980 and 1995, is now passé. Today the challenge of forming a national identity and defining citizenship flows less from the complaint of a discontented French Canada than the complacency of an amorphous Canada – a product of swelling immigration. Some 300,000 immigrants will arrive in 2018, rising to 340,000 a year by 2020. They no longer come only from Europe but from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. They are no longer only white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian or Jewish, as they were once, but brown and black, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and a host of other faiths and races. Canada’s Two Solitudes has become Several Solitudes.

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In the 21st century, Canada tries earnestly to foster a sense of community among its disparate people. It remains a society without a clear raison d'être, though to Trudeau and others diversity is our identity, emphasizing what we are to the world rather than what we do. This search for self-definition is driven by the reality of “new Canadians”, as they are politely called – who were not born in Canada, who were not educated in Canada, who do not speak English or French (Canada’s official languages), who are, predictably, unfamiliar with the land and its story. The challenge of helping tens of thousands foreigners adjust to life in the cold, empty upper half of North America is staggering. Countries everywhere struggle to integrate newcomers who come to their borders; the difference is that Canada wants them -- assuming they follow the rules of entry (Canada chooses immigrants on a point system) and don’t jump the queue (entering illegally across the U.S. border). When they arrive Canada asks them to abandon old prejudices, presumptions and hatreds – particularly those leaving authoritarian states – and embrace a regime of diversity and tolerance. We ask them to abandon ethnic nationalism, to discard an identity rooted in religion and race and to regard women and minorities with equality and the government with legitimacy. Fundamentally, we ask them to embrace civic nationalism, honouring Canada’s laws, customs and Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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Such is the great nationalist hope of Canada – to create in this heterogeneous country filled with peoples of different origins, colours and faiths a common purpose. It is to instill in them a commitment to community, an appreciation of Canadian values, a loyalty to an ideal. In the United States, which makes loud, muscular patriotism its signature, the national motto is “out of many, one”. In Canada, the reality suggests “out of many, many”. After a century and a half of nationhood, Canada does not share the passion of the Americans, the French or others who wave their flag and sing their national anthem lustily. Unlike them, Canada does not have a unifying projet de société; we feel no moral duty to spread our culture around the world. (Until 1965, Canada did not even have its own flag.)

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Canadians make a virtue of their ambiguity. To them the lack of overt patriotism as a good thing; it keeps us out of foreign adventures that gung-ho chauvinism or militarism fosters in other societies. It may be why Canada has never fought a war abroad alone; in the world wars, Korea, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, Canada always joined other nations. The weak attachment to a national identity and the instinct for accommodation and consensus may be the reason, as well, that Canada has had little domestic strife – rebellion, riots or violent strikes -- since 1867. Canadians have a tolerance of diversity and, at the same time, an ambivalence toward the country itself.

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Canadians are not terribly demonstrative about Canada; we don’t toss rhetorical bouquets or utter saccharine declarations of affection. Indeed, when Conservative Stephen Harper was running for office in 2006, a journalist asked him whether he “loved” Canada. He avoided the question. Americans make a show of their love of country; Canadians do not. Harper wanted to lead the country but could not say he loved it. How perfectly Canadian! Canadians, it is true, cheer their skiers, skaters and hockey players at the Olympic Games and wave the flag on Canada Day. On some occasions, overcome by patriotism, they even paint the red-and-white Maple Leaf on their faces and wear scarlet mittens and tuques. But that’s about all. Richard Gwyn, one of the great journalists of his generation, called this ethos “the incredible lightness of being Canadian.” It’s a feeling that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. This is the Casual Canadian.

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How, then, does this cavalier view of country – something between indifference and insouciance – manifest itself in Canada’s citizenship? Defining citizenship, teaching citizenship, extending citizenship, revoking citizenship, allowing dual citizenship – all are a reflection of Canada itself. For every country, citizenship is either the timber – or the tissue – of nationhood. Some peoples care greatly who joins their club. They judge newcomers rigorously and demand an expression of loyalty – like years of residency – before offering them membership and its privileges. Other peoples are less exacting. Citizenship, in a sense, is like religious conversion. Judaism, at its most exacting, demands years of study and practice, after which prospective converts might still be rejected and invited to try again. Christianity, at its least demanding, seeks little beyond a belief in Christ and the sacraments.

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If citizenship is not quite seen as an entitlement by newcomers to Canada, it is certainly an expectation. “The lightness of being Canadian starts with the fact that it’s the easiest citizenship in the world to obtain,” Gwyn wrote in 1995. “What’s striking is that we ask, and expect, so little in exchange for that blue passport.” Curiously, becoming Canadian has become even easier in recent years. In 2017, the governing Liberals changed the rules. You now must be physically present in Canada for three of the last five years, with no minimum number of days per year, before applying for citizenship. Under the old law, you had to be physically present in Canada for four of the previous six years, with a minimum of 183 days in each of those four years, before applying. As Gwyn argued, three years isn’t much time for residency, particularly if you don’t have to spend more than 183 days of each year in Canada. Now there is no minimum. Other nations require five years for citizenship; Switzerland requires twelve years. Canada also allows a temporary resident or protected person to count time spent in Canada (up to a year) against the time required to be in Canada to become a citizen. Before, time spent in Canada before becoming a permanent resident did not count toward the physical requirement for citizenship.

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What else does Canada ask of a new citizen? Not much. You must have filed Canadian income taxes for three of five years, matching the physical residency requirement; before it was four of six years. If you are between 18 and 54 years old, you must meet a language requirement and pass a knowledge test. Here, too, the Liberals have relaxed things. Under the Conservatives, you had to take the test and meet the language requirement if you were between 14 and 64 years old. The new rules do not require an immigrant who is under 18 and over 55 to speak English or French or know much about the country – the reason for the citizenship tests – though they may well live for the next 20 or 30 years in Canada. And those under 18 could conceivably become citizens without those abilities – although if they remain in Canada, they would presumably learn English or French. There is no assurance, however. Some immigrants never pick up the language or understand the culture, preferring to live and work in their native tongue in ethnic urban ghettos in Chinatown, Little Italy or Greektown, where the world scarcely intrudes.

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To teach newcomers about Canada, the government publishes a guide to our politics, government, values, and culture. The guide itself has been contentious in recent years; when the Conservatives took power in 2006, they complained that the Liberals did not want to introduce immigrants to Canada’s military history, preferring to focus on its affinity for international peacekeeping. They noted, with ridicule, that one obligation of citizenship was recycling paper, as if this were a great civic virtue. They re-wrote the guide, called Discover Canada, with a sharper edge; the revised version warned newcomers that Canada would not tolerate “barbaric practices” (like genital mutilation of women) imported from less enlightened societies. When the Liberals returned to power in 2015, they set about revising the guide again. By the summer of 2018, it remained unfinished. An early draft of the guide reiterated that citizens should obey the law and pay taxes, but added that they should respect treaties with indigenous tribes. The draft eliminated the previous references to “barbaric practices” while highlighting the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which examined Canada’s sad history of sending indigenous people to residential schools. It also dropped references to Canada’s role in the War of 1812, a fixation of the Conservatives, while emphasizing Canada’s discrimination in the past toward Jews, Chinese, Ukrainians, the disabled, homosexuals and others. Critics say this promotes a culture of victimization.

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At the end of the day, you might ask, what does all this mean? What is the essence of Canadian citizenship? We know it is easy to get and hard to lose; the government has recently made revoking citizenship more complicated, arguing that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” We also know that dual citizenship, banned in other countries, is permitted in Canada; many Canadians have two or more national passports and some three million Canadians live abroad. We know that for new Canadians, the obligations are limited and the benefits are great. We know citizenship comes with little sacrifice. “My parents were immigrants, and my aunts and uncles as well,” a witness told a parliamentary committee in 1994. “They were not told what it means to be a Canadian citizen. They were just told, essentially, ‘pass the test, pay the taxes, and that’s it.’” In 2018, a new Canadian joins an affluent, open, liberal society with low crime, little governmental corruption, high life expectancy and a suite of generous social benefits – old age pensions, universal health care, unemployment insurance, welfare, parental leave, free primary and secondary schooling and subsidized higher education. As a citizen, you gain admission to one of the world’s largest economies, now enjoying the lowest unemployment in 40 years. While Canada does not promise you “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, as the Americans do, it does offer, more modestly, “peace, order and good government”. Canadian citizenship? At a time borders in Europe are closing and walls are rising to keep out an army of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, Canada, perhaps uniquely in the world, exalts immigration and multiculturalism. Immigrants are considered an asset. We have admitted some 45,000 Syrian refugees since 2015, several times the United States, and Canadians have embraced them with generosity and warmth. Canada is taking in refugees from third countries coming across its border from the U.S., a growing problem. Alone among western democracies, none of the political parties in Ottawa oppose immigration. None are restrictive or nativist. This is the face of a moderate, secular, progressive Canada.

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For millions fleeing war, repression, economic hardship and environmental degradation, coming to Canada means winning the lottery. The UN ranks Canada the world’s seventh “happiest” country. When you become a Canadian, you don’t have to do much. In fact, you can order your passport and live permanently in Hong Kong, for example, or seasonally in balmy California, Hawaii and Florida. If life abroad sours for them, they know Canada will always take them in. That’s what Canada did in 2006 – an escape hatch, even a country of convenience -- for thousands of Canadians holding its passport who caught in Lebanon’s civil war. Canada contracted a fleet of ships and aircraft and dispatched them to the region. It evacuated14,982 people, not all of them Canadians. That some of them had never lived in Canada, that some had lived abroad most of their lives, that some of them intended to return to Lebanon just as soon as they could, that it cost C$96 million – all that did not matter. For Canada, protecting citizens was an obligation, even if its citizenship was, for many, little more than a promissory note.

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The unbearable lightness of being Canadian, as Richard Gwyn put it, has created a country struggling to give shape to a shapeless self. George Jonas, the writer, compared Canada to a train station in which travelers share “a destination” but not “a destiny”. Yann Martel, the acclaimed Canadian novelist, calls Canada “the greatest hotel on earth. It welcomes people from everywhere.” Everyone is a visitor, occupying a room, a floor, even a wing. No one stays long because no one wants to make an extended commitment. A hotel is impermanence, by its very nature, the loosest of loyalties. People come and go. This is partly true of Canada; about a third of its immigrants leave within 20 years. Most do become citizens, though fewer than before; the level of naturalization fell from 85.6 percent in 2011 to 82.5 percent in 2016. Of course, most do stay, and have stayed, for generations. Their energy, talent, and imagination have made Canada a success. But skeptics still wonder just what Canadians share if they remain attached more to where they came from, as some do. Haitian-Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Ukrainian-Canadians, Indo-Canadians: can they and all those other expatriates ever become un-hyphenated Canadians?

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Would they fight for Canada, for example, as new Americans are asked to promise in their oath of citizenship? Would they volunteer for a year of community or military service? Do they contribute to charity or volunteer their time? Do they take part in the political process? In many respects, the answer is no. Canadian don’t vote overwhelmingly (turnout in the 2015 federal election was 66 per cent.) They don’t give to charity overwhelmingly (average donations are 0.8 percent of income, much less than American donations) and the percentage of Canadians claiming an income tax deduction for political or charitable contributions on their yearly tax returns is dropping. Many do volunteer but they are disproportionately older people.

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The Casual Canadian appears in unlikely places. The former leader of the Liberal Party, Stéphane Dion, said he would only renounce his French citizenship if it proved a political liability to his becoming prime minister. His successor, Michael Ignatieff, returned to Canada after 30 years away, entered politics and ran for prime minister, rejecting criticism that he was unqualified he was gone so long; to him it did not matter because “I don’t feel I was away at all.” A former governor-general, Michaëlle Jean, also refused shortly after her appointment to renounce her French citizenship until she was persuaded to reconsider a few weeks later. She also refused, when asked by a journalist, to say how she voted – yes or no -- in the sovereignty referendum of 1995 (before she was governor general). In other countries, this kind of vagueness or defiance (a de facto head of state and commander-in-chief who might have supported Quebec’s secession and is reluctant to renounce her dual citizenship) would have been seen as unpatriotic, disloyal, even disqualifying; in Canada, no one seemed to care.

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And maybe they don’t. The other story of Canada is that its fragmented population, soft citizenship and tepid nationalism is forging the world’s post-national society. Some Canadians see themselves as global citizens, viewing their multiculturalism as a model, even an inspiration, in a world pulling up its drawbridges. They see diversity as an economic and social advantage, connecting Canada to the rest of the world with people of many languages and cultures. A polyglot Canada is certainly Justin Trudeau’s beau idéal. He finds no real national consciousness in Canada, believing multiculturalism a strength, not a weakness. Our differences make us strong, he says. Critics like columnist Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail and Maxime Bernier, an outspoken Conservative parliamentarian, say this is nonsense -- that it is unity, not division, that counts most.

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No one knows what multiculturalism will mean for Canada’s ultimately citizenship and self-image. In a prosperous, peaceful, contented Canada of 2018, it is easy to ignore the dangers of tribalism and self-segregation. It is easy, as well, to dismiss the value of a shared sense of nationhood and to deny how quickly tolerance can evaporate when things go bad. War, recession, crime, and terrorism will be the real test of Canada, though certainly no one wishes them upon us. Only then, perhaps, will Canadians learn the real strength of our unfinished, unorthodox nationhood – and understand the people we are.