Adam Zivo has written a powerful op-ed in the National Post:

Growing up in suburban Toronto, I occasionally had classmates who, being the children of immigrants, like myself, seemed spiritually homeless. They spent their summers in their parents’ countries, which were like gauzy pocket universes, while Canada remained a land of mud and chores, tolerated but not loved, pallid against the glow of a romanticized elsewhere.

As a teenager, I did not want to be like these people. My Serbian parents taught me to be Canadian first, and, though this identity seemed nebulous (peacekeeping and hockey?), I assumed, perhaps naively, that it would later solidify and provide an enveloping sense of belonging. Against this promise, maintaining ties to the home country seemed parochial and claustrophobic.

As I got older, though, Canadian nationalism was not reinforced, but demolished under the auspices of “inclusivity.” The architects of this transformation were, broadly speaking, cultural and economic elites for whom nationalism was superfluous, because they already belonged to a global community defined by class — an urban world of minimalist AirBnbs and fusion tapas that looked identical whether in Toronto, Paris, Tokyo or Mumbai.

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