Being "Canadian" in a post-modern world

Giving today's Star a quick read earlier in the day, I happened to glance at Richard Gwyn's column about the latest in Quebec-Ottawa politics. I don't want to get into that subject matter here, but there was something in what Gwyn wrote that is worth a closer look. He says:

I've long been of the view that Canada is now a post-modern state, the first of its kind in the world, in which few of the old rules about identity and belonging apply.

Michael Ignatieff had brought up a similar point in his talk last weekend, about how Canada will have to accept that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity, even though there have to be certain core values that every Canadian must share and which override loyalties to other values if a conflict arises. It is not just the provinces that each have their own interests and identity considerations that often clash with a federal "Canadian" vision; the ever increasing multicultural fabric of Canadian society where cultural, religious and other interests co-exist in an uneasy relationship with what are expected to be "Canadian" values and loyalties is proving to be a growing challenge to exactly what it means to be Canadian. A recent example of this phenomenon is the Shariah debate in Ontario and the way it was resolved by the provincial government.

The bigger picture here is that the modern notion of nation-state - a geopolitical entity defined by a group of people who share a common identity and are entitled by the virtue of this national identity to a right of self-determination - is no longer the norm. So, to conclude, what does the future look like for Canada? I will end simply by how Gwyn ends:

In a sense, we are also becoming pre-modern. We're going back to medieval Italy, as a collection of city-states. Out of it came the Renaissance and some great cooking, but also a lot of violence and bloodshed. The quality of our cooking is pretty good.