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By Salma Siddiqui

September 23, 2026

Canada has become exceptionally good at accommodating difference, yet it has been less successful at answering the harder question of what increasingly different people believe they have in common.

That question is becoming politically consequential. On October 19th, Albertans will vote on whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada or whether its government should begin the constitutional process required for a future binding referendum on separation.

The vote is not itself a vote on independence, but the debate raises a broader question about the federation: how can a political community accommodate strong particular identities without those identities eventually becoming alternatives to membership in the whole?

That, among other elements, is where Alberta is relevant to the broader Canadian debate.

Alberta is not a multiculturalism case, and provincial political claims should not be equated with the experience of immigrants or cultural minorities. The connection is structural. Alberta illustrates a problem of nested belonging: people can have a powerful attachment to a particular community while also belonging to a larger one, but the larger identity must remain sufficiently meaningful and legitimate for the two attachments to coexist.

Federalism is built around this principle. Canadians can be Albertans, Quebecers or members of other provincial and territorial communities while simultaneously being Canadian.

Multiculturalism confronts a related problem at the cultural rather than territorial level. Canadians can retain languages, religions, traditions and connections to ancestral communities while also identifying fully with Canada.

The histories and political claims are different, but both raise the question of whether a larger identity can remain strong enough to contain meaningful differences.

The Alberta debate is useful because current opinion does not map neatly onto a simple desire for independence. An Angus Reid Institute survey conducted in August found that 61 percent of Albertans preferred remaining a province of Canada, while 33 percent supported beginning the legal process toward a future binding separation referendum. On a simplified question about actually leaving Canada, 65 percent said they would stay and 30 percent would leave.

Among those who would vote to leave, 41 percent said the motivation was more about sending a message to Ottawa than actually wanting Alberta to separate. The point is not that Alberta separatism is a proxy for multicultural tensions. Rather, the polling illustrates a distinction between attachment to a particular political community and dissatisfaction with the larger political system. A citizen can be deeply attached to Alberta and still want to remain Canadian.

But that layered attachment is not automatic. It depends partly on whether people believe the larger political community recognizes their interests, gives them meaningful political standing and provides legitimate institutions through which disagreement can be managed.

That same problem becomes increasingly important as Canada’s population becomes more culturally diverse. Canada’s multicultural model has largely answered the question of how different people can live in the same country. It now has to answer the harder question of why they should continue to see themselves as members of the same political community.

Canada is already a country of immigrants. According to the 2021 census, 8.36 million Canadians — 23 percent of the population —were immigrants, the highest proportion recorded since Confederation. Another 6.4 million Canadian-born people, or 17.6 percent of the population, had at least one foreign-born parent.

These numbers change the national question. Canada cannot construct its future identity around ancestry, a single inherited culture, or the assumption that there is a settled majority culture into which everyone else will eventually assimilate. Nor should it.

The relevant question is what kind of identity can function in a country whose population contains increasingly diverse histories, cultures and attachments.

The answer cannot be ethnic. It has to be civic.

A civic identity is not simply a collection of abstract values. It is the sense that, whatever their ancestry, religion, language or region, citizens belong to the same political community. It rests on four practical foundations: equal membership, common democratic institutions, participation in public life, and reciprocal obligations to other citizens.

This does not require cultural uniformity. A person does not have to abandon a language, religion or ancestral connection to become fully Canadian. What matters is that Canadian citizenship is experienced as a meaningful form of belonging, and that other Canadians recognize the citizen as a member of the same political community.

That distinction is important because multiculturalism can otherwise be reduced to recognition of difference. Recognition matters, but it cannot by itself create political solidarity. A country can contain many cultures without possessing a sufficiently strong sense of common purpose.

The goal should therefore be neither assimilation nor permanent cultural separation. Integration means retaining meaningful aspects of one’s heritage while participating fully in Canada’s economic, political and civic life. An immigrant can remain deeply connected to Indian culture while becoming fully Canadian; a Quebecer can be strongly Quebecois while remaining Canadian; an Albertan can identify intensely with Alberta without regarding Canada as someone else’s political community.

These identities are not historically equivalent, but they demonstrate that belonging can be layered rather than singular.

Civic belonging cannot simply be proclaimed. It has to be experienced, and it imposes obligations on both sides. For immigrants, citizenship should mean more than legal status: it involves participation in the economic, social and political life of Canada and the development of an attachment to the country as home.

These principles do not belong to one ethnicity or religion. They can be shared by someone whose family has been in Canada for eight generations and by someone who arrived eight months ago.

For the established population, it means treating newcomers as Canadians rather than permanent outsiders. Canada changes through immigration, and immigrants change through participation in Canada. That exchange is not a failure of multiculturalism; it is how national cultures evolve.

The same principle applies to the federation. Ottawa cannot expect national loyalty while treating persistent regional grievances as illegitimate, and provinces cannot expect federalism to work if every disagreement with the centre becomes evidence that the federation itself has failed.

A federation exists precisely because citizens and governments disagree. Its legitimacy depends on whether those disagreements can be contained within institutions that people regard as legitimate.

The Alberta debate illustrates this broader point: where political discontent reflects a desire to be heard by the centre, the question is not simply territorial loyalty but whether citizens continue to regard the political system as one in which they have meaningful standing.

There is a corresponding danger in multicultural politics: allowing grievance to become the dominant grammar of citizenship. Discrimination, historical injustice and regional inequality are real, and Indigenous claims rooted in treaties and constitutional rights cannot be dismissed in the name of cohesion. But a political system organized principally around competing claims for recognition can struggle to articulate a common interest.

If every group approaches the state primarily as a group seeking recognition or redress, politics can become a competition among identities. The question of what citizens owe one another becomes harder to answer.

A civic conception of multiculturalism does not require ignoring historical differences or pretending that all experiences are equivalent. It requires a framework in which different groups can pursue their interests while continuing to recognize one another as members of the same political community.

Canada’s demographic trajectory makes this increasingly important. Statistics Canada projects that immigrants could constitute between 29.1 and 34.0 percent of the population by 2041, making the country’s population more ethnoculturally diverse.

The Canadian identity of the future therefore cannot depend primarily on something people inherit. It has to be something people can enter. That points toward a civic conception of nationhood grounded in equality before the law, democratic institutions, individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, political participation and reciprocal obligations.

These principles do not belong to one ethnicity or religion. They can be shared by someone whose family has been in Canada for eight generations and by someone who arrived eight months ago.

This is what gives civic identity its particular importance. It provides a basis for solidarity without requiring sameness. It allows people to maintain substantial cultural and regional identities while giving them a reason to see the political community as their own.

The alternative to this approach is not necessarily an openly divided Canada. Fragmentation is more likely to be gradual: citizens increasingly understanding politics through narrower identities, regions treating Ottawa as an external authority, communities turning inward and national institutions becoming arenas in which competing groups bargain primarily for recognition.

The danger is not diversity itself but the erosion of the political imagination that allows different people to see their interests as connected.

Canada therefore does not need to abandon multiculturalism. It needs to deepen it. The principle that Canadians can retain their heritage should be supplemented by a clearer conception of what they are joining.

Multiculturalism should not ask people to choose between heritage and country. Its deeper promise should be that people can bring their histories with them while participating in the construction of a political community larger than any one history.

That requires a conception of citizenship that is neither assimilationist nor fragmented. It requires a shared civic home.

Canada’s future will contain more languages, cultures, religions, regional identities and complicated personal histories than its past. That need not weaken the country.

But national cohesion will increasingly depend on institutions that give citizens a meaningful stake in the whole and on an identity capacious enough to accommodate difference without dissolving into it.

The central question is therefore not how to make Canadians the same. It is how to make people who are profoundly different believe that they are participating in the same political community.

Multiculturalism answered the question of how different people could live in Canada. The next task is to answer the harder question of why they should continue to see themselves as part of the same political community.

The answer lies in a civic identity strong enough to contain difference: equal membership, common institutions, participation and reciprocity, without requiring cultural uniformity.

Salma Siddiqui is Vice Chair of the Forum of Federations.