Below the swell of goose-vs-eagle elbows-up patriotism that continues to gush through the nation lies an undercurrent of worry: half of Canadians feel that we’re losing a collective sense of what it means to be Canadian.

The finding was made by a

new Postmedia-Leger poll released in advance of Canada Day

, which asked respondents whether they feel, in the last four to five years, that “Canada has been losing a shared, collective identity of what it means to be Canadian.” Fifty-two per cent of replies were “yes,” while only 30 per cent were “no.”

The poll also measured a tremendous amount of national pride: 83 per cent of respondents claimed to be either “very proud” or “somewhat proud” of their country, with only 15 per cent stating they were not.

Thirty-four per cent of respondents felt their pride had grown in recent months, a sentiment felt prominently among the 55+ crowd, and among Liberal voters — a confirmation of the boomeristic character of the anti-Trump “Canada is Not for Sale” crowd. Among all recent-pride feelers, 83 per cent credited U.S. President Donald Trump for their deepening emotions. (Another 21 per cent of Canadians claimed to feel less proud in recent months, which most attributed to the recent federal election).

So, despite being incredibly proud to be Canadian, a good number of us are starting to wonder what common ground we share with our countrymen that makes us distinctly Canadian.

It’s a crisis of identity that, based on pure numbers, makes sense. Canada has changed, fast.

Some numbers for comparison: in 2001,

18 per cent

of the Canadian population was comprised of immigrants; in 2022, the immigrant share

reached

23 per cent, the emphasis shifting to Asia and the Mideast. Trudeau-era immigration policies boosted intakes far beyond what was seen in the Harper years, and jetted off to extremes post-COVID. In 2022, the population

grew

by three per cent (1.1 million people) since the year before.

Canada for many years managed to keep public sentiment on the side of immigration by maintaining high bars to entry, selecting only the immigrants we needed, and favouring those who have a greater potential for assimilation.

Foreign students developed a reputation for being rich, or eager to become Canadian, or both. Immigrant adults were known for being self-supporting, often with some prestige from professional or business backgrounds. Refugees were known for being grateful and hungry to contribute back to their new home. They came from all over the world, and it was fine — they joined Canadian-born nationals in their love for the country.

The quality simply couldn’t be maintained with volume. A liberal approach to student visas  — which quadrupled the number of permitholders from 2011 to 2024,

placed

them at 2.5 per cent of the population last year.

Fraud ensued

. Last fall,

Statistics Canada found

that one-fifth of international students weren’t actually studying. Students too poor to afford a life here were

scammed

, strip-mall diploma mills grew, and the credentialed newcomers they churned out — noticed by their Canadian counterparts to be

increasingly incapable
of
reading
and
writing

in English — continued on their quest to receive citizenship.

Indeed, language barriers (the non-English and non-French kind) are increasingly presenting themselves to

doctors

,

health-care staff

and

police

. Some provincial governments get around this obstacle by

releasing
information

in numerous foreign languages. Even the private sector is jumping on board; stand in line at a TD Bank and you’ll be treated with a slew of ads clearly targeted at new arrivals.

Canadian jobseekers, meanwhile, have

noticed
a rise

in

ads

seeking Punjabi speakers (and in Vancouver,

Mandarin

). These preferences come at a time when the employment prospects of Canadian youth, who once easily filled many entry-level jobs, have

steeply fallen

to a jobless rate of 13.4 per cent. It’s a source of frustration for both Canadian-born English-only speakers and their

immigrant non-Punjabi counterparts

.

Many newcomers are still happy to assimilate, but not all — and as the total number of new arrivals grows, so too does the number of those who barricade themselves in enclaves and hold on to old, sometimes un-Canadian values. Edmonton and Calgary police both had to defuse

Eritrean riots

in 2023; a Montreal elementary school had to

suspend

11 Muslim teachers amid allegations of creating a toxic, sometimes violent environment; anti-Israel protests have become a regular feature of Toronto and Montreal,

correlating

with high immigration in the last decade from Muslim countries.

Making matters worse is a national attitude that sends the message to newcomers that Canada is racist, hateful of its Indigenous people and has a history in strong need of being painted over.

All of this, Canadian officials will probably say, is a good thing. “Diversity is our strength” is a phrase that has been

uttered

in Parliament 135 times; government documents often tout the Canadian

mosaic model

of multiculturalism. But regular Canadians, for the most part, never wanted this: in 1993, Angus Reid

found

that 57 per cent of the nation wanted minorities to “be more like most Canadians”; in 2016, 68 per cent were found to believe that “minorities should do more to fit in better.” There’s a common-sense understanding, which could be

acknowledged

more openly in the early 2000s, that diversity can also offer challenges to overcome.

This is still the dominant view: in its June study, Leger found that 64 per cent of Canadians believe immigrants should be encouraged to embrace Canadian values and leave behind incompatible elements of their home cultures, melting-pot-like. Only 22 per cent favoured the mosaic model. There’s some wisdom in that.

National Post

Back during the second season of the first iteration of the

Sex and the City

series, prim and proper Charlotte — then York, now York Goldenblatt — unexpectedly finds herself caught up in a circle of wealthy, stylish “Power Lesbians.” Fed up with Manhattan’s heartless heterosexual dating pool, she’s drawn to the Lesbians’ autonomy and elan — their #wedontneedaman bravado paired with a strong dose of sisterhood and fun.

The trouble is that Charlotte is straight — the Lesbians are not and they’re not too keen on posey interlopers. By episode’s end, Charlotte is sent packing by the group’s queen bee who makes clear that only actual homosexual women can be Lesbians, let alone the television-worthy “power” variety.

What a difference 25 years makes. Today, Charlotte would not be dismissed as hetero, but welcome as #queer — much like her two children on the SATC rebook “And Just Like That” currently streaming its third season. Her daughter, Lily, is dating a hunky male ballet dancer —— but he also has a boyfriend. #queer! Meanwhile, her second child — Rose — is now Rock, who came out as non-binary in the series’ earliest episodes. Also #queer! As a straight mom-friend of mine who had a son with a gay man would say, the Goldenblatts are living a #queer lifestyle.

Indeed, nothing epitomizes the shift in LGBT liberation and politics like the rise of the word “queer.” I first encountered queer during my coming-out days in the ‘90s and then — like now — I loathed it. Queer was a tool for liberation, I was told, to be reclaimed from the centuries of homophobia that had sent actual queers to prison, exile and often death.

But I never bought it. Along with being Gay — plain, old gay — I am also Jewish and African-American. No Jew is “reclaiming” the slurs used again us — same with Black folk (the popular “n—a” that so often appears in rap songs is very much not the same thing as the N-word).

Because even in my 20s, I instinctively understood that rather than a tool of liberation, queer is a tool of timidity, confusion — capitulation. Straight people like Charlotte and Lily can be queer — the married (to a man) female curator at the LGBT art museum whose board I once served on was also “queer.” Hipster hetero dudes who once drunk-kissed a fellow fraternity brother call themselves queer. But ultimately, it’s a word that means nothing — a verbal vehicle for those seeking the benefits of minority status with none of the backlash. It’s transitory and ephemeral — a sensibility rather than actual identity or orientation.

Black people can’t opt out of being black when it suits them. But queer can be discarded quickly and conveniently. There’s little risk to calling yourself queer — scant cost nor consequence. With little concern for commitment, let alone discrimination, queer isn’t brave, queer isn’t noble. Queer is a tool of privilege.

Queer is also the logical outcome of two decades of shifting the focus of the LGBT movement from actual sexual behaviour and orientation — to gender identity and ideology. Rooted in feelings rather than discernible facts, queer means nothing and stands for nothing. It’s simply part of an identity-politics intersectional soup that degrades the real achievements of actual gays and Lesbians who spent decades fighting for the equality queers now so casually don as mere accessories and ornamentation.

Worst of all, as gay scholar Andrew Sullivan describes in a recent New York Times opinion piece, the murkiness around identity-based nomenclature like “queer”

is doing real damage.

After rising steadily for decades, LGBT acceptance peaked at 62 per cent in 2022 — dropping to 51 per cent this year. Worse still, whereas a majority of Republicans approved of same-sex marriage in 2022, just 45 per cent do today. I don’t need Republicans to like me and my “queer” family — but I absolutely want them to leave us alone!

This decline corresponds to the peak of “gender’s” infiltration into the LGBT rights movement — and comes of little surprise. After all, what was once a cause rooted in lifestyle and behaviour — men dating, mating, marrying other men — has morphed into an amorphous “vibe” with few truly concrete signifiers. It’s hard to support rights for a minority group, when it’s nearly impossible to figure out what that minority actually is or stands for.

One thing #queer certainly has become is #intersectional. Which makes sense. The mix-and-match principles of intersectionality — affiliation with one minority group means affiliation with all minority groups — is ready-made for the farcicality of queerdom. No wonder queers have so easily — yet bafflingly — aligned with the most farcical movement of all right now, #queersforpalestine.

Think about it: Gays for Palestine, Lesbians for Palestine — never heard of them because such hashtag activism doesn’t really exist. But #queers for Palestine — they’re all over the place. A pairing of movements — queer liberation and Palestinian liberation — with scant consideration for fact or history or the truth. And the truth is, public-facing queerfolk — however they might present or manifest — wouldn’t survive a day in the Palestinian territories.

This weekend as cities like Toronto and New York mount their annual LGBT Pride parades, the only thing I want is an end to queer. In its place I want Gays and Lesbians and Bisexuals and the Transgendered — identities and orientations with none of queer’s fear nor folly. I want out and proud LGBTs who respect their community’s history and the sacrifices endured to achieve it. I want men who are proud to say they love and lust after other men and women who speak as heroically about other women.

More than 50 years after the riots at Stonewall, being homosexual in a world that still so often violently despises us remains a truly revolutionary act. Despite all those claims of #reclaiming, there is nothing revolutionary about the word queer.

David Christopher Kaufman is a columnist and editor at the New York Post.

President Donald Trump was positively exultant over the “12 Day War” in Iran. After being badly outwitted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and maneuvered into a war that the United States had sought to avoid for more than twenty years, Trump decided that it was his achievement all along.

An important achievement it was, and Netanyahu — often criticized in this space — deserves the credit that he is magnanimously sharing with Trump. After 46 years of spreading misery and mayhem, no tears are being shed for the mullahs in Tehran and their arc of mercenary proxies in the region.

The Americans were in Iran for less than twelve hours of the twelve days. They could have taken a more leisurely approach if they wished, the Israelis having cleared Iranian airspace of any potential incoming fire. After the stealth bombers did their business, the air force could have put on an aerobatic show. If it were a NATO exercise, the Snowbirds could have made an appearance. With defense spending set to rise to 5 per cent of GDP, the Snowbirds may well become ubiquitous.

The reason for the “12 Day War” branding exercise — Trump’s commemorative crypto coin may soon be issued — is to answer the part of his MAGA coalition that in the name of opposing “endless wars” seems to oppose all military action.

The folly of the folks who oppose “endless wars” — does anyone support them? — is that they have misdiagnosed the problem, which is not that the wars are “endless.” It is that the aftermath has no proper end in mind. War is usually the easier part; it is the post-war part that can be much more difficult.

Consider that last month, amidst celebrations of the 80th anniversary of VE day, no one lamented that American forces are still in Europe. Had in 1946 — the year Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were born — someone predicted that the president would command dozens of military installations in Germany even four score years later, it might have been considered that an “endless war” was afoot.

The Korean War began 75 years ago this week. American forces are still there. Are Germany and South Korea not better off than Vietnam, which American forces departed from fifty years ago?

The reason that Trump is more exultant than Netanyahu is because the latter has a longer attention span, and also a better sense of history. Israel has won swift victories before. It won one in Gaza in 1967. But if there is no effective plan after the victory, a short war can give rise to endless turmoil. See also Lebanon 1982.

The spectre of Afghanistan and Iraq is the perfervid cry of the “endless war” folks. Yet, in both cases the intensive war phase was relatively short. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to declare “major combat operations” in Iraq concluded. The fiasco that followed was not because the war was too long, but that the commitment to the aftermath was too short.

After World War II, America and its allies signed up for decades of, not endless war, but peace-building secured by military presence.

Given that Trump apparently decided to go into Iran at the last minute, it is likely that he has no plan for what is next. And if what is next goes awry, it will be that American attention was not too long, but too short.

Regarding Afghanistan, Trump frequently bragged that no American troops died for 18 months under his watch. Of course he was

wrong

, but his boast undermined the claim that it was an “endless war.” In fact, the last American troops under Trump who died were in February 2020; later that month he negotiated an exit agreement directly with the Taliban, throwing the Afghan government under the bus. With the Taliban guaranteed to get Afghanistan back from the Americans in 2021 — conveniently after Trump left office — there were no further attacks.

The catastrophic and chaotic withdrawal from Kabul was the responsibility of the Biden administration, but the seeds were sown precisely in Trump’s deal with the Taliban to bring the “endless war” to an end. Afghanistan — and the United States — would have been better off had it not ended when and how it did. “Endless war” was better for Korea than premature withdrawal in Kabul.

Strategic thinking does not hew to a fixed timeline. Had the Iran war taken 24 days rather than 12, that would not make it worse per se. It may even have been better had other strategic goals been achieved.

A war can always come to a quick end if one side surrenders. That was an option for Britain in the summer of 1940. It is the preferred option Trump has failed to impose on Ukraine. It is, more or less, the Afghanistan option the Americans chose under Trump and Biden in 2020 and 2021. War is not a purely chronological exercise.

How this conflict will really end is still to be seen. But it would be welcome if it ended the “endless war” talk.

National Post

• Vivian Bercovici: Iranian regime’s survival now depends on milquetoast leaders
• Carson Jerema: Globe writers’ hatred of Trump blinds them to Iran threat

As a lifelong student and educator, I’ve been in academia and the arts for the last quarter-century. I was a witness to the first Israeli Apartheid Weeks at York University in the early 2000s. I’ve followed, and fought, the anti-Israel obsession of CUPE 3903 (York University’s contract faculty union), including introducing a motion to stop them from manipulating their platform to promote non-labour issues on campus. It didn’t take.

Days after the October 7 massacre in Israel by Hamas and other Gazan groups, the York Federation of Students (YFS), York University Graduate Students’ Association (YUGSA) and the Glendon College Student Union (GCSU) celebrated the atrocities as “‘land-back’ actualized” and Palestinian “resistance against their oppressors” in an

abhorrent

pro-Palestinian public statement, which is

still online

.

CUPE 3903 is particularly notorious for its anti-Israel stance. In late January 2024, its

Palestine Solidarity Working Group

and the union’s education committee published

“A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine,”

which included a martyr’s poem and asked teaching assistants and university instructors to “divert this week’s tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation.”

More recently, CUPE 3903 promoted off-campus anti-Israel radicalization sessions, including an

event

organized by the problematic Palestine Youth Movement to “unpack Canada’s entanglement with global imperialism and subsequently the occupation of Palestine.”

It also advertised to members an April 24

fundraising party

that raised money for the Toronto Community Justice Fund, which helps cover the legal costs of over 100 pro-Palestinian arrestees in the area. Among the beneficiaries are the 11 vandals who, in 2023,

plastered

an Indigo bookstore with posters of CEO Heather Reisman and splashed them with red paint, a response to Reisman’s scholarship program for discharged members of the Israel Defense Forces who have no family supports in the country.

The issue goes far beyond student groups and labour unions on campus, however. As first- and second-generation anti-Israel activists grew and graduated from students to faculty and beyond, they took their terrible ideas with them. Jump forward 25 years and the consequences can be felt at Canada’s

Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences

, organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. It’s the country’s largest gathering of academics, hosting numerous annual conferences of scholarly organizations under one roof, and during one week.

This year, the congress, held in Toronto from late May to early June, hosted no less than five anti-Israel propaganda sessions camouflaged as legitimate academic discourse under the guise of free speech. When I asked the chair of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ board about this in an email at the start of the conference, her response was not to mitigate harm, but to deflect responsibility.

“Each scholarly association develops its own conference programming, in keeping with the principles of academic freedom and association autonomy,” she wrote. “While some sessions are open and publicly listed, others occur within the closed programming of individual associations — a distinction that reflects their independence in shaping their own agendas.”

This is a problem since some hosts of sessions at the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, including the Canadian Association for Food Studies, the Canadian Sociological Association and others, seem consumed with an anti-Israel obsession.

The session I attended, “From Palestine to Turtle Island: Food as a Weapon of Colonialism and a Tool of Liberation,” hosted three Palestinian panellists: one legitimized the “Victory Gardens of the First Intifada,” another called Israelis “evil,” and the last referred to Hamas terrorists as “Hamas fighters.” These particularly outrageous instances were framed by a generally accepted false premise that Israel is a settler-colonial, segregated state which is committing genocide against the indigenous people of the region, namely, Palestinians in Gaza.

Other anti-Israel talks at the congress included a keynote hosted by the Canadian Political Science Association’s reconciliation committee on the “Palestinian Experiences of Genocide and Scholasticide in Gaza,” as well as a session by the Canadian Sociological Association called “Speaking of Palestine: Issues of Academic Freedom and Reprisal.” The sociology association also hosted a talk about genocide and “disjunctions” whose description included the statement, “The death and devastation witnessed in Palestine … continues to reduce Brown and Black bodies to material for the machinery of empire”; this was classified as “Black and racialized programming.”

The notion that Israelis are racist is now accepted across academia. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, as slogans making these claims are notorious on college campuses. But this idea, or ideology, has been a long time coming. Last July, at a conference organized by the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) at the University of Southern California, I sat in a theatre filled with genocide experts and was told by the keynote speaker — herself an Indigenous non-academic educator from the Los Angeles area — that the persecution of the Palestinian people has to do with “white supremacy.” Notably, the president of INoGS was sure to mention the “genocide” in Gaza in her opening remarks.

These sessions are typical of the increasingly aggressive anti-Israel propaganda across academia. This time last year, I and others were fighting with the Dance Studies Association, the foremost U.S.-based, global-reach academic society for serious dance research, regarding a panel that was scheduled to take place at its annual conference. The session was titled: “Undoing Colonial Ambiguity: Keywords in Dance and Dancewashing in Palestine-Israel.” Even a petition signed by 200 dance academics and artists from around the world didn’t get DSA to alter their plans and include a pro-Israel voice on their curated panel. Only in retrospect did we discover that the session featured a “martyr’s dance” and procession, complete with a fake casket draped by a Palestinian flag centre stage.

Weeks prior to the conference, when a small group of us disgruntled former and current DSA members warned DSA leadership that the invited dance troupe’s artistic director celebrated October 7 on Instagram, they told us over Zoom that they didn’t believe in “gatekeeping.” In 2023, they also thought it was a good idea to condemn Israel — not Hamas — in a statement emailed to members a week after October 7: “We stand firmly in our commitment to dance practice and scholarship that condems the violences of settler colonialism, and call on the United Nations to demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to war crimes in this region.” They didn’t condemn Hamas by name then, and knowingly chose to platform, and even honour, a terror sympathizer nine months later.

I didn’t sit silent. I spoke up in real-time during the genocide conference, disrupting the keynote speaker. I made a real stink in emails and online about the DSA’s martyr’s dance and, at the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, I disrupted the last few minutes of a panellist spewing propaganda by holding her to account for her own words while on Zoom.

Why? Because silence is complicity at this point. The quieter we are, the louder their lies. So start speaking up!

National Post

Gdalit Neuman is a PhD candidate at York University and is affiliated with the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies. Her writings have been published in the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, Performance Matters open-source online journal, as well as several dance magazines.