Dimpee Brar is the Director of Engagement of Allies for a Strong Canada.This guest column is a rebuttal to ‘What is a Canadian’ by Daniel Tyrie of the Dominion Society.You begin with a confession of decadence you do not understand: “What is a Canadian?” A serious Nation does not pose this question to itself like a neurotic teenager in front of a bathroom mirror. A people that still knows its purpose does not pause mid-stride to define itself. It lives out an answer so obvious that only the bored and the ruined need it explained. The very fact that you must ask, and think yourself profound for doing so, is a symptom of decline, not a cure.Worse, even the question is wrong. Your essay is not about what is Canadian but who is Canadian. It is a census disguised as philosophy. The genuine question “what is a Canadian?” presupposes a prior and more fundamental question: what is Canada? What is the regime? What principles justify its existence and command loyalty? You never touch this. You speak instead of “settlers, builders, explorers” as if Canada were a lifestyle brand with a rugged aesthetic. You completely omit the only political figure that matters: the founder.The founder does not swing an axe; he articulates principles. Mine is the radical position, unfashionable to left and right alike: our founders were right. Your position is merely the ethicized parody of the very leftism you claim to oppose, blood, soil, and stock in place of identity, equity, and gender. Same rejection of principle, different totem.To see this, you would have to look at our true founding, not its fulfillment in confederation. The Durham Report of 1839 is the key text. Durham did not discover a harmonious “Heritage Canada.” He found “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state,” French Catholic, English Protestant, “a struggle, not of principles but of races.” That condition, which he regarded as intolerable, is precisely what you propose to restore. He wanted to abolish race as a political principle; you want to enthrone it..Your derision of “values like tolerance and equality” simply shows that you have swallowed the left’s caricature of liberalism whole. You attack what they say liberalism is, not what it actually was at its founding. You sneer at “ideas” as if you were a hard-headed realist, but your “Heritage Canadians” is itself an idea, and a remarkably shallow one. The moment we move from counting to justifying, from who to what and why, we are in the realm of political philosophy. This is territory you ought to dread.The central founding insight was not that English and French, Protestants and Catholics, should agree to “celebrate diversity.” Durham understood that this “struggle of races” had to be replaced by something universal: the doctrine of natural rights, life, liberty, property, equality before the law, and a regime of toleration strictly bounded by these principles. These were not “soft values.” They were severe truths about man.This is what neither you nor your multicultural enemies grasp. You both imagine that liberalism means relativism, that “equality” means demographic levelling, and “tolerance” means non-judgmentalism. On that shared falsification, you mount your two hysterical crusades, theirs for the equity hierarchy, yours for the ethnic hierarchy. They lower the white heterosexual male to the bottom of a moral caste system; you insist he belongs at the top. Both sides deny the only ground on which a serious defence of the country is possible: that all men are by nature free and equal and that any group, religious, ethnic, or ideological, that refuses to subordinate its creed to that truth is, by definition, our enemy.If you took equality seriously, you would understand its radicalism. Canada, properly understood, is not a doormat. It does not smile indulgently at doctrines that deny natural rights. Multiculturalism is not an extension of our founding, it is its explicit repudiation. The Left, Islam, and your ethnonationalism are all, in principle, outside the regime because each claims a higher loyalty than natural rights and equality before the law. A serious Canada would not negotiate with these, it would demand their submission or their exit. Most importantly, it would identify them as enemies of our regime.You, however, retreat to birth and blood. But birth has never been sufficient for citizenship in any dignified regime. Citizenship is a moral and intellectual status. Take your own “Heritage Canadians.” You proudly quote 1971 polling showing a majority opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism. Then you avert your eyes from the obvious: Pierre Trudeau was reelected three times afterwards by that very stock. Your beloved blood voted to abolish the principles you claim it embodies. The “heritage” you worship is the same majority that surrendered the country to the very post-national order you condemn. Your romance with stock collapses the second you look at a ballot..Consider the ugliest example: the white woman who votes, reliably, for parties and policies that dissolve our borders, invert our moral hierarchies, and despise our history. Is she “more Canadian” by sheer accident of birth than the man who earnestly embraces natural rights and the supremacy of the Canadian regime? If you say yes, then you have openly abandoned the founding in favour of tribal loyalty. That is not conservatism, it is regression.Our founders did not believe in multiculturalism; they believed in a uniculture rooted in principle. “Culture” means the cultivation of the soul. The task of the regime is to form citizens in its principles. That is why the immigrant who drinks Tim Hortons, wears flannel, smokes marijuana, and watches hockey is still not Canadian in any serious sense, and neither is the native-born woman who votes to liquidate the country: both lack the Canadian soul: knowledge, belief, and love of the founding principles.Statecraft is soulcraft. That work was abandoned. Our schools and universities ceased teaching the regime and began catechizing identities. The result is what we see now: you, thumping the table for “Heritage Canadians,” and your enemies, shrieking “Nazi” in reply. Both sides prove the same point: neither understands, or even suspects, what this country was supposed to be.Multiculturalism was not an evolution; it was a revolution against the founding, a descent into nihilism in which no way of life may be judged by a higher standard, only by its power. You, the Islamists, the gender commissars, the race theorists, each asserts its own supremacy; none concedes a standard above itself. That condition is not peace; it is pre-political war, the very war of races and sects that Durham believed our liberal founding was meant to overcome..Whether my argument still resonates with Canadians is the true test of how far the decay has gone. If “equality” now means quota politics, if “toleration” now means indulgence of open enemies, if “Canada” now means nothing more than a padded administrative pen for warring tribes, then you may yet win the field by default. Not because you are right, but because a people that has forgotten its principles can only cling to its blood.And now to your accusers. They will not answer with Durham, our founding principles, or political philosophy. They know nothing of it. They will shout “racist,” “bigot,” “white supremacist,” and call it done. This is not moral seriousness but intellectual collapse. To scream “racist” at you is convenient precisely because it avoids the terror of principle. It spares them from having to say what Canada is beyond a haze of official sympathies. It confesses that they, too, have abandoned the founding and lost faith in reason.This is cowardice. Argument risks defeat; denunciation does not. To engage you seriously would require them to state and defend standards they half suspect they no longer possess. It would reveal that the entire post-national, equity industrial complex cannot withstand the scrutiny of the very reason it invokes.This catastrophe should have been strangled in its cradle: the replacement of education with propaganda, of citizenship with identity, of argument with excommunication. Generations of Canadians lived on the moral capital of a serious liberal order without ever understanding, much less transmitting, its meaning. Now you and your accusers quarrel in the ruins, each armed only with the fragments of a nation you do not understand.Dimpee Brar is the Director of Engagement of Allies for a Strong Canada.This guest column is a rebuttal to ‘What is a Canadian’ by Daniel Tyrie of the Dominion Society.
