The commodification of citizenship and the downfall of civilization
Canada must remember what it is, or risk ceasing to be anything at all
The West has committed a grave philosophical error: we have come to view countries not as civilizations but as corporations, and citizenship not as a sacred bond but as a kind of customer loyalty program.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Canada, where national identity has been hollowed out and replaced with an abstract collection of economic indicators and talking points: growth is good, immigration is GDP, diversity is strength. The country, we are told, is “open for business,” but rarely do we hear what that business is for.
This technocratic view of nationhood reduces people to inputs and culture to marketing. It is the ideology of the spreadsheet and the conference panel. It regards the state as a logistics network, the citizen as a consumer and the nation’s story as a relic. From this perspective, a “successful” country is one with a rising stock price, even if its citizens feel poorer, lonelier and more alienated from one another than ever before.
This phenomenon has distinctly Canadian roots. Canada was the first country in the world to adopt official multiculturalism as state policy. The idea was not merely to tolerate diversity, as any civilized society should, but to institutionalize it.
Multiculturalism became not just a demographic reality but a governing philosophy. The old Anglo-French identity of the country — rooted in language, law, religion and tradition — was steadily replaced by a kind of curated pluralism, where national belonging was defined not by common culture but by shared access to bureaucracy.
In theory, this was meant to make everyone feel included. In practice, it left us with a country in which all cultures are celebrated, except the one that built it.
Newcomers are encouraged to preserve their ancestral languages, faiths and customs. This is not necessarily wrong. What is wrong is that the majority is told that it has no culture worth preserving — or worse, that its culture is a legacy of oppression that should be abandoned.
The past is recast as shame. The present is a diversity marketing campaign. The future is a quarterly growth target. The only unifying myth is “progress,” and the only sin is nostalgia.
This is not a sustainable vision of nationhood. A country cannot survive on imported customs and managed relativism. It cannot inspire sacrifice or loyalty if it refuses to define itself. It cannot hold together as a community of citizens if citizenship is treated merely as a right to access services, rather than a commitment to a shared moral order.
Consider what we have normalized. We grant citizenship with barely a civic test, no language requirement worth enforcing and little expectation of loyalty beyond tax compliance. We proudly announce immigration targets in the hundreds of thousands while our housing stock lags, our social cohesion frays and public trust crumbles.
None of this is an accident. It is the logical conclusion of viewing the country as a company, and its population as a customer base to be expanded endlessly, without regard for the cultural, spiritual or institutional foundations that make collective life possible in the first place.
And yet, we are told this is “inclusive,” even “just.” But inclusion without integration isn’t unity — it’s fragmentation. Justice without memory isn’t fairness — it’s erasure.
You can see this everywhere in the Anglosphere. In Britain, national identity has been reduced to bland civic values and royal pageantry, while the actual fabric of Englishness has eroded.
In Australia, the conversation has shifted from the Dreaming to “productivity.” In America, patriotism is either performative or derided, depending on which campus or zip code you inhabit.
And here in Canada, we have taken the worst lessons of each. We have built a society in which the only shared value is economic growth, and even that is slipping away.
We speak of reconciliation but have abandoned rootedness. We talk about “communities” but fear the idea of a common culture. We boast about our diversity while shunning any real attempt at unity.
When people feel alienated in their own country, we tell them to check their privilege. When they long for identity, we call them intolerant. When they worry about the future of their children, we show them a carefully curated graph with some cold economic figures.
This is not just a policy failure, it’s a moral failure. A country is not an economic zone. It’s not a human resources department. It’s not a project in demographic engineering. A country is a home, a story, a people. It is a chain of memory binding the living to the dead and to those yet to be born.
If citizenship is just a contract, it will be broken. If culture is just cuisine, it will be consumed. And if nationhood is just numbers, it will eventually be replaced by something colder and far more dangerous.
Canada must remember what it is, or risk ceasing to be anything at all.