The Next Canada (book review)

In The Next Canada: In Search of Our Future Nation, Myrna Kostash traveled aross Canada and talked to young people in all walks of life to find out how they view this country and their own life, and how all this reflects the future of our nation.

Myrna's book reflects a strong social democratic tradition in Canada. The young people she interviewed included frontline community activist, technoligical wunderkind, ecologist, sexual dissident, social philosopher, experimental artist, entrepreneur, McJobber, and fisher. While not done through any kind of scientifically orchestrated random sampling process, they do represent a very diversified cross-section of the new generation.

The book is divided into the following chapters.

• The New World Order - about work, unions, money and the dignity of labour


• Culture - about cyberspace, arts, rebuilding cultural community


• Beyond Identity Politics - about the decline of conventional politics, social resistance, and the disadvantaged


• Homeplace - about shrinking of public ownership, creating new values, Quebec, and reclaiming the public good

In the final chapter, Myrna concludes with one big question and its answer:

How is it possible, I wanted to know, that my interviewees, who live in so many radically new circumstances that could not have been foreseen when the various elements of Canada's social safety net were being woven together, who seem to have assumed the burden of the "new" consciousness of contingency and multiplicity, and the normalization of the transnational globe, who have no illusions about the long-term survivability of a specific Canadian identity, who have been handed the apparatus of theory that warns them social cohesion is a romance of the Old Narrative - how is it possible that, when I asked them not ujust whether they were Canadians but how they knew thet were, they almost to a person answered some version of "I know I am a Caandian because I believe in social compassion."

Myrna believed that she has found, through the "myriad of conversations" she had with these young people, a narrative of pure desire - a desire to dig deep enough to strick their own roots. "The next Canadians are right here, they are at home, and they call it Canada."