What Does It Mean to Be a Canadian?
A national identity, in a multicultural, multilingual, and highly mobile population, is a challenging concept for a modern post-nation state democracy. Nations are themselves a socially constructed community, imbued with rights, responsibilities and laws.
This Canada Day, reflecting on what Canadian citizenship means, and what legal democratic rights this citizenship provides, may provide some insight into our federal election this fall, and the future of our democracy.
In his 1983 book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes some of the features of these social constructs:
. . . [more]The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a