Conservative outrage over Canada’s modernized passports is just more culture war chaos

Remember when the Canadian passport was just a boring government document? Yeah, me neither. Barely a year after processing backlogs and lineups at government offices turned them into a political hot potato, passports are back in the headlines thanks to a long-running redesign process that has culture war conservatives outraged over the changes. In other news, water remains wet.

The updated design, which has been underway for a decade now, is ostensibly about improving the security features of the passport. They will, for example, now have a polycarbonate data page that uses laser engraving instead of ink, and something called a “Kinegram” over your deliberately unflattering photo. They can also be renewed online, which will save people the hassle of having to fill out those printed forms and wait in line at a Service Canada office to submit them. That alone is a massive improvement over the status quo, one most Canadians will surely welcome.

But if you were looking for a reason to get upset about the new passports, you’re in luck. Because using the same images on the back pages for a long period of time apparently makes passports more prone to counterfeiting; the new ones switch out the pictures of Vimy Ridge, Terry Fox and the Stanley Cup in favour of animals and natural scenes like children jumping into a lake.

This shouldn’t be a big deal, except for the fact that everything has to be a big deal these days. And so, the Conservative Party of Canada gathered every pearl it could find and got to the clutching. “The current prime minister’s woke and out-of-touch ideology is so egotistical that he cannot imagine there are any Canadian stories bigger than him,” CPC Leader Pierre Poilievre said during question period. “That is why he deletes Terry Fox, the soldiers who died at Vimy, the city of Quebec, and the RCMP from our passport to replace it with a colouring book that includes an image of him swimming at Harrington Lake when he was a boy.”

(It doesn’t, of course.)

Sarah Fischer, his director of communications, decided to take a more literary bent with her critique by quoting Czech writer Milan Kundera. “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory,” she tweeted. “Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long, that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”

The notion that the Trudeau government is trying to do to Canada what the Soviet regime did to Czechoslovakia is suitably hyperbolic for someone in her role. If anything, the government is simply trying to update our national symbols to reflect the reality of modern Canada, one that’s more diverse and forward-looking than many conservatives would like to admit.

If there’s a legitimate bone to pick here, it’s probably the one the Royal Canadian Legion raised around the removal of an image of the Vimy Ridge memorial from the pages of the old passport and its impact on our collective awareness of it. But let’s be real: nobody is learning about Canadian history through the images in their passports, and if they are, then the process of either educating or naturalizing them as citizens has been an abject failure. There are better (and more effective) ways to teach Canadians about this crucial aspect of their history, and all of this energy would be better spent focusing on that.

That’s only if you think the complaints coming from the conservative side of the aisle are actually about honouring Canada’s history, though. If they’re just about triggering another pointless skirmish in the ongoing culture war, then all the energy being invested in the new passport’s design makes more sense. The CPC’s attempt to defend the honour of veterans and Terry Fox is a wee bit inconsistent, given its leader’s personal doughnut delivery to a lawless band of occupiers that defaced a statue of Fox and urinated on the War Memorial. But intellectual consistency has never exactly been a cardinal virtue of conservative politicians.

Poilievre has promised that if elected, he’ll bring back the images of Vimy Ridge and Terry Fox, along with “pride in our country” and “a passport that all of us can be proud of.” I’d suggest that national pride doesn’t depend on what’s on the pages of a passport and that the CPC’s overreaction here speaks more to their innate fear of change and progress than any esthetic concerns they might have. But if they do get the opportunity to steer the next passport redesign, they might want to include an image of someone farming partisan outrage. After all, that also seems to be a key part of our culture now.