To the distant past, actually. He himself had never been to Ireland, nor had his parents. His grandparents had been from there - and if the sounds of Ireland moved him to tears it was, he felt, because the place was rooted within him with an almost genetic intensity. Canada was his home, but nothing about it could move him to this degree.

The man's feeling was undoubtedly genuine. Yet, to me, his logic was flawed: "Danny Boy" sends shivers up and down my spine, too, and the closest thing I have to Irish heritage is an aunt by marriage - and even she is now divorced from my uncle.

We in Canada have done an abysmal job of appreciating our own history. We know that our first prime minister was fond of drink; that the man who guided us through World War Two had a peculiar relationship with his dog and his dead mother. The railroad, once a symbol of national achievement, has lost its romance. We know that history has not been kind to our native peoples - we feel either guilt over the evils visited on them or resentment over the demands made by their descendants. If we are at all aware of history, it is to wish that it had been different, better, more humane.

Our historical memory, then, is at best meagre, almost a psychological oubliette that robs us of heroes and leaves us only flawed forefathers. We find hardly any reason for pride in our accomplishments. In our own eyes, we barely exist.

Our social landscape has changed. It is more varied, interesting and divided than ever before. Our ignorance of ourselves - this discounting of what we once were and what we once achieved - has led us to make a fetish of the foreign heritages and identities that have come to us. The only pasts that count are those of elsewhere - mythologized, exoticised, distant enough to accommodate romantic notions of dream and loss. "Danny Boy", "Island in the Sun", "Dark Eyes" and any number of songs will move you, not because they appeal to human emotion, but because they touch the only part of you that you believe to be real. Your Canadianness is only skin deep.

Identity is shaped in essentially two spheres, the private and the public. The private identity is a crystal mosaic of constantly shifting pieces. It can be grasped only for a moment before it slips away, reshaping itself into something subtly altered: by circumstance, by experience, by information gained and belief proven or disproven. To know oneself is a constantly evolving process: there is no one answer. This is the essential, living identity, shaped by tales of the family odyssey that help individuals locate themselves in time and place, the personal mythology that tells you who you are.

The public identity is a more willful construct shaped through collective social attitudes and structures, and, on a shallower level, through flags, anthems, speeches meant to stir rather than inform. We feel it when the anthem is played for a winning athlete; when, abroad, we meet a stranger whose strangeness evaporates when we discover a shared nationality and frames of reference. Public identity is, in the end, largely a matter of shared reference - the common ground of the "We".

Increasingly in Canada, we have dragged private identity into the public domain by using government policy to engineer it into various shapes. Curious: that a nation that has long believed the state to have no place in the bedrooms of the nation would tolerate such interference in the identities of the nation. All "national costumes" are officially recognised in an effort to create a mosaic. But parading around in such costumes - and I mean this figuratively as well - is theatre; it is a child's fantasy of glamour. Flower-arrangements in the living-room may be appealing, but they have nothing to do with the solidity of the foundations below.

Between the private and public identities there is constant interaction, sometimes soothing, sometimes scathing. While the private can be damaged by the public - history is full of decent people who subordinate the self to the demands of public duty; the tank sometimes crushes the man who stands defiantly before it - the public remains still more vulnerable. In the sixties and early seventies, American public identity was battered by the radical assertion of the private. By the eighties, the hollow concept of New Soviet Man had been demolished by rugged private identities unwilling to live the lie. The primacy of the private identity became evident.

Canada's public identity continues to be built on opposition ("We aren't like them"), on institutions (medical and employment insurance, welfare, old-age pensions), and on theatrical display (mainly ethnic celebrations). But they don't care how much or how little we resemble them; our public institutions are crumbling; and the costumes, dancing and singing have no meaning beyond entertainment and folklore. This is fragile ground on which to build a cohesive country.

Meeting basic needs goes only so far in fostering a sense of belonging. Distributing free flags is a politician's answer; painting a Canada-Day maple leaf on your face is a clown's. If our neighbours to the south (and some of our co-citizens in Quebec) engage in such antics, it isn't to manufacture pride; the pride is already there, the flag-waving merely a way of displaying it.

Instead, we have to allow ourselves to be dazzled by our country, by the wonders that can never be diminished by the political and linguistic squabbling that haunts us like a cancer. We have to learn to see beyond our comfortable limits, be they religious, racial, ethnic or linguistic. Public policy has a role in showing us not just the evils of the past and the quandaries of the present, but their glories too. A country without a past or with one demeaned, such as we have allowed ourselves to become, is condemned to a fractious present and an uncertain future, with a citizenry dreaming - ironically - always of elsewhere.

Despite our foreign aid programs and our record in peacekeeping, Canada is a country greatly diminished since the Second World War. The truth is, we carry little weight in the world. Were the Canadian state to disappear tomorrow, many beyond our borders would notice but few would mourn. We have, to some extent, become, as a character in V.S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River says harshly of us, a hoax: "They thought they were part of the West, but really they had become like the rest of us who had run to them for safety. They were like people far away, living on other people's land and off other people's brains, and that was all they thought they should do."