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Physician and global health-care activist James Orbinski has somewhere planted inside him a microchip labelled "Canadian." This is not some cloying platitude dressed up in silks and ribbons for the July 1 national day.
Dr. Orbinski, who has spent 20 years in war zones and the epicentres of disease epidemics and holds Canada's highest civilian honour — the governor-general's Meritorious Service Cross — for his work as chief of mission for Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, understands that people are shaped and defined by their culture.
"It's very hard to articulate," he says during a conversation about what Canadians bring to the world that can be called Canadian. "I can't stand outside it and articulate it, but it's something I deeply know."
His Canadian microchip is the principle of fairness. "I think it's a principle — what's good for me should be good for you — that is practised better here than most other places in the world," he says.
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So that's one national talisman. There are others. And Dr. Orbinski is right; they're hard to describe as tangible concrete chunks.
For the most part they fall under the heading of "soft power" — a term coined by Harvard scholar Joseph Nye to describe the deployment of a country's supposed national values as a tool for influencing others. Lloyd Axworthy, who was foreign minister between 1996 and 2000, was soft power's biggest proponent — which his academic critics labelled "preachy" and the replacement of "do good" with "feel good." Preachy or not, it has substance.
Canada's diplomats, to illustrate, know that the country's successful ethos of multiculturalism, especially its openness to others, still gives it cachet with other nations at a time when the rest of our cupboard of influence is virtually empty.
A parliamentary committee's proposal a few years back that Canada export its expertise in democracy elicited derisory comments from foreign-policy experts. In fact, we do have an expertise in complex democratic governance, and people like University of Toronto political scientist David Cameron and former Ontario premier Bob Rae have been welcomed in countries such as Iraq and Sri Lanka as consultants on constitution-building.
There's still a strand or two of Red Toryism remaining in our political DNA that gives Canadian non-governmental organizations a familiarity with the notion of global commons projects such as public access to clean water, clean air and protecting arable land for people in poor countries to feed themselves rather than allowing it to disappear into the maws of huge corporations for cash crops.
Canada's new and growing breed of transnational immigrants possess an extraordinary storehouse of knowledge and skills for doing commerce with their former homelands — notably China — that they are willing to share with larger Canadian businesses.
A 2007 study on Chinese-Canadian commerce done by University of Toronto sociologists Wenhong Chen and Barry Welman showed that more than 40 per cent of Chinese-Canadian firms are transnational, doing business both in Canada and China. Nearly three-quarters of them have helped Canadian firms by offering advice and shortcuts into international markets — finding niche-fits, among other things, for Canadian environmental and high-tech products — and the study credits them with playing a major role in the increase in Canada's trade with China from $8-billion in 1995 to $30-billion in 2005.
Those things are us. They have to do with the unique mix of Canada's history and the journeys of its peoples.
"You know, in a certain way, often you don't see yourself until somebody else tells you who you are," Dr. Orbinski says.
"And much of the world sees Canadians as people who are fair. "Our culture and our practices at home, municipally, provincially, federally, are in fact imbued with this principle. And we're good at it. We're good at listening and finding a solution, and sometimes that means endless committees and discussion. But you know what? That's what it takes. Better that than the imposition of an iron will or the imposition of might that makes right.
"To turn that around, right makes might. And we know that, because we have been doing that within our own borders for quite a long time. And we're pretty good at it."
Several current and retired senior diplomats talked in interviews about a similar image of Canada, but through a slightly different lens.
"When I would speak at the United Nations on anything that had to do with human rights or human security," said one former diplomat who asked to talk for background, "I got a very respectful hearing always, and I got it because of who we are rather than what we did or what we do.
"They don't give us a free pass on the aboriginal issue which is our great failing. But in terms of welcoming others and integrating them into society, nobody does it better than we do, and that includes the Americans, and we get a lot of credit for that in the international community. We still do."
Exporting democracy? It would be hard to think of anything more in Canada's self-interest: It's a de facto law of international relations that democracies don't go to war against each other.
The Paul Martin government's 2005 International Policy Statement declared:
"For those in countries where violence threatens to overtake political accommodation as the answer to competing interests, Canada's long history of accommodation of linguistic, ethnic and cultural differences … offers a glimmer of hope. Our system of governance represents a laboratory full of intriguing experiments that can assist others engaged in the complex task of institution building."
This is what Canadians do: peace, order and good government. It's our POGG brand.
