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Or we could equally say the land is our strength. Its beauty, resources, scope and range of Canadian nature, combined with our sense of communion with the land, counts as something inexpressibly but undeniably special. Even the Liberal party has saluted the land as a patriotic bond. Not to score political points on our anniversary day, but did not the Liberals run a whole election campaign—that of 1972—on the very motto, “The Land is Strong.”

There is no doubt that diversity is a good thing, but it doesn’t operate as a definitional virtue of our country. Furthermore, the current highlighting of diversity also carries with it rather too easily a self-congratulatory ambiance, being in fact the very kind of “patriotic” boasting that we proudly boast we do not boast of. “No flag-wavers we, like those Americans … but are we ever tolerant!”

Nor is diversity singularly a Canadian social virtue. Other countries are diverse too, their citizens just as virtuously open to others as we are. Neither being Canadian born, nor by virtue of acquired Canadian citizenship, does some peculiar alchemy invest us with an inherently superior tolerance to that of, say, Chinese, American or African heritage or citizenship.

It may be a pleasurable paradox that all we have in common is our differences, but it cannot survive any translation into reality. No country, no nation, is founded on the differences it contains. And so it is with Canada 150, years after its birth in Confederation. Celebrating our differences doesn’t really mean very much, aside, again, from the facile moral uplift the slogan offers, unless it proceeds from a common, shared and unified understanding of ourselves as a nation.