A nation’s highest purpose is not improving takeout menus, but you might be fooled by listening to the talk in the English-speaking world.   

British television host Piers Morgan boasts there are “a lot of white English people I would happily trade for chicken tikka masala.” South Australia’s state premier has warned that “the food would be all the same” without multiculturalism, and that he “couldn’t think of anything worse.” When did exotic food become the social contract?  

Canada in 2025 superficially resembles Canada in 2015, but it feels brittle and disjointed. Surveys now suggest most Canadians want lower immigration levels and want newcomers to adopt our customs instead of living apart in cultural enclaves. In other words, they want them to assimilate, and with good reason.  

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that when people gather around shared religious rituals and symbols, they generate “ collective effervescence ,” a kind of social “electricity” that produces solidarity, confidence, and a sense of right and wrong.   

As such rituals slacken, he warned, beliefs can lose their emotional force and be hollowed out. Randall Collins, a disciple of Durkheim, calls these moments “interaction ritual chains ” and argues that when they succeed they create mutual solidarity, personal “emotional energy,” and shared moral standards. Restaurant culture and food delivery apps are no substitutes for these hard-earned pillars.  

In Canada, that includes Christmas. The familiar and joyous traditions of bright lights on the windows, Christmas concerts, and a tree in the town square are beautiful and fulfilling, including for secular and non-Christian families. Such festivities are also both a religious and civic reminder that we share more than a tax code.  

For years, Christmas has been chipped away to make room for ideologies like “inclusion.” In 2018, Victoria city councillor Ben Isitt argued that Victoria shouldn’t be decking public property with holly, Christmas trees or poinsettias and won council support for a review of city-funded seasonal decorations aimed at secularizing and “diversifying” them. His broader project of being a Grinch ultimately crashed, like his political career .   

In 2011, a school in the Ontario town of Embrun cancelled its Christmas concert and replaced it with a non-denominational “February fest.” It was not the last. These are small choices individually, but they snowball.  

An evening walk makes this clear. Neighbourhoods where most, if not all, the houses once glowed bright in December now have long, dark stretches with new owners who simply do not care to participate. Annual Christmas lights are a low-stakes annual ritual that is being sadly and silently replaced with nothing.   

Do we really prefer that once-festive suburbs now resemble hallways of rented rooms? Like it or not, Christmas is one of the oldest traditions in Canada, with special significance given that snow and winter have disproportionately shaped our history and identity.  

The breakdown of that identity in recent decades has also revealed a darker side. This month at an apartment complex in Toronto, over a dozen mezuzahs were ripped from the doors of the homes of Jewish seniors. The police are investigating it as just one more hate crime that has been perpetrated against Canadian Jews since 2023. Anti-Jewish offences are the most frequently reported hate crime in Toronto, a city that now prides itself on its diversity and multiculturalism.  

Immigration policy and weak integration have likely helped shape this climate. The rapid admittance of so many people from war zones and other volatile parts of the world without real integration can import their hatreds into our own public square. None of this has been helped by cheap air travel, global messaging apps, and foreign interference . Of particular concern is the introduction of diasporic feuds from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, which have surfaced in our streets and even Parliament.  

The head of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a Crown corporation, has conceded that it is “difficult to guarantee the safety of Jews in Canada,” something nearly unthinkable 20 years ago. Last year, Liberal MPs Chandra Arya and Sukh Dhaliwal had a heated exchange which Arya later told the House he experienced as a threat, over a disagreement about labelling India’s 1984 anti-Sikh riots as a “genocide.” The Commons serves many purposes, but foreign score-settling is not among them.  

Canadians have noticed. A 2024 Leger survey found that 52 per cent of respondents say immigrants should adopt Canadian customs, more than double the share of Americans who say the same. Roughly 60 per cent also disagreed that Canada actually needed more immigrants entirely. Far from fringe views, they reflect a Canadian public who are angry that their shared sense of identity is fraying and shocked at the violations of their high-trust society. Canada feels less like home for those who are born here, and that is egregiously wrong.  

Food is not a defence or a useful deflection from a well-overdue review of our attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism without nuance or guardrails. It is deeply unserious to pretend that more exotic restaurants compensate for neighbours who care not for Canadian holidays, look the other way when Jewish seniors are terrorized, or for a Parliament becoming a forum for foreign quarrels.  

Fusion food did not make Canada into a good country, or produce good citizens. The good, orderly Canada of recent memory did that. It had beloved rituals from Christmas to Remembrance Day, which people were taught to attend and honour by their parents, not the state.   

Durkheim’s words are a warning that such occasions carry the collective meanings that bind us, and once they fade, the moral sentiments of a society will wither. When interaction rituals fail, as described by Collins, the solidarity and “emotional energy” that they produce are run down, resulting in people losing confidence and attachment to each other, leading to unforced divisions between them.  

The price for better food options must not be a country where religious minorities fear to walk their own hallways. Christmas should not dissolve into awkward and diluted “winter celebrations.” Our own Parliament is not a place for boutique, non-Canadian conflicts and whether taxpayer money should be sent to foreign motherlands. It is a place for Canada, and Canadians.  

The foundations of our common life are hard-won and essential, and food is no more than a bit of seasoning on top of it.