Nine years ago, an unknown Manitoba MLA named Elijah Harper held up an eagle feather and spoke that single word. With it, he did more than bring down the Meech Lake Accord. He also gave us the perfect personification of the role in which Natives, immigrants and even, at times, women are cast in Canadian political theatre: as refuseniks.

For many minorities, Canadian political life is less an experience of day-to-day inclusion than of long stretches of neglect punctuated by dramatic moments of refusal. Diversity in Canada is the right to dig in your heels and say "No".

Think of how the Mohawks resisted that golf course in Oka or how the National Action Committee on the Status of Women campaigned against the Charlottetown Accord. Think also of the Innu and Cree opposition to Quebec hydroelectric projects, the Lubicon Cree's boycott campaign against Daishowa's logging and the showdown at Gustafsen Lake.

All of these rare instances when minority issues took centre stage manifested themselves as jarring interruptions, often inspiring suppression. All were blockades, in one form or another. All seemed to come as a surprise - as if another, parallel Canada had materialized out of thin air.

It is sometimes argued that Canadians suffer because we don't know our history. But perhaps we know our history all too well - or rather one big, blinding chapter of it. That chapter, of course, is the one tracing back the essential struggle between the English and the French.

It may seem strange to bring up the unity question in a discussion of identity politics, but they are two sides of the same coin. Identity politics have been all but crushed under the colossal weight of the two largest and most vocal identities on the national landscape: the English and the French.

Many on the right are fond of claiming that ours is a "victim culture." It's true that Canadians are expert whiners, but it's misleading to transplant the political correctness rhetoric of the United States. In the US, those vying for political and cultural representation are indeed ethnic minorities, women and gays and lesbians. In Canada, however, we have an indigenous victim hierarchy. Ours is based entirely on grievances with the logistics of the nation itself: Torontocentrism, Quebec sovereignty, Western and Eastern alienation - problems that can't be solved unless someone moves the Rockies or sinks Montreal.

So the question is not whether Canada's identity has changed since the first Dominion census documented the existence of 125 Jews and 11 "Hindoos". Of course it has. As recently as 1947, 80 per cent of Toronto's inhabitants were of British descent. Today, 42 per cent of Toronto's population is non-white.

The real question is why this radical transformation of the population has failed to translate into an equally radical transformation of Canada's sense of self. Why, given the level of public subsidy it receives to portray contemporary Canadian culture, does the CBC do a worse job of reflecting ethnic diversity than the Fox network? More fundamentally, why can't debates about immigration policy, native land claims, and pay equity seem to compete with the national preoccupation with unity?

The reason is simple. Canadians may be enthusiastic about political correctness, but once the newspapers have dealt with their Toronto bias, once the television producers have balanced their panels with someone from each coast, once the conference organisers have fussed over simultaneous French-English translation, there is little "correctness" left over for anyone else.

Plainly put, the most vocal oppression junkies in Canada dwell at the very centre of the power elite. Two of our national political parties - including the Official Opposition - are the offspring of this culture of geographic and linguistic complaint. If Lucien Bouchard, the Alberta oil barons and everyone living in Atlantic Canada are the dispossessed (and have the political and media clout to blare their grievances across the country), how can unemployed African-Canadians in Nova Scotia, underpaid Chinese garment workers in Toronto or suicidal teens on Native reserves ever hope to capture our attention?

At least in the US, the disenfranchised have the cold comfort of facing off against their oppressors. Canada's disenfranchised minorities must first convince their oppressors to stop crying victim themselves.

This warped identity turf war may explain why while the female vote has become an American political obsession, it remains on the back-burner in Canada. Despite feminist breakthroughs in the professions, women can't seem to shatter the glass ceiling over Parliament Hill: although women make up 42 per cent of administrators and managers in Canadian workplaces, they are only 19 per cent of our politicians, well behind the US's 30 per cent.

The fierce competition for victim status may also explain the shameful indifference to military and police violence against minorities. I'm thinking, for instance, of the tanks rolling into Gustafsen lake, the police killing of native protester Dudley George at Ipperwash Provincial Park, the RCMP's fatal shooting of Connie Jacobs and her son Ty at the Tsuu T'ina Reserve in Alberta and the police shootings of black youth in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The outrage sparked by these events pales in comparison with the mass indignation provoked by the use of pepper spray on mostly white university students outside the Vancouver APEC summit.

It should come as no surprise that this jockeying for victim position is at its most bullish in Quebec, ground zero of the unity debate. Though I consider Quebec nationalism to be legitimate, one side effect of this slow-mo revolt has been a propensity among Quebec nationalists to regard multiculturalism with deep and ungenerous suspicion. From the start, the policy was viewed, to use René Levesque's words, as a dark plot "to obscure 'the Quebec business'."

The sentiment is alive and well. When Jacques Parizeau blamed "money and the ethnic vote" for his referendum loss, he was stating unequivocally that French Quebeckers are Canada's only legitimately aggrieved minority: the "White Niggers of North America", as Pierre Valliers famously wrote. And when Parizeau added: "We know who we are," you can bet that Quebec's ethnic minorities and Jews knew perfectly well who, in his eyes, they were not: real Quebeckers.

So there has been no "identity revolution" in Canada - if anything, there has been a devolution, with the old battles of confederation occupying even more space in the national discourse. Until we stop fighting that war between France and Britain circa 1759, we will never see an "identity revolution" befitting the country's demographic evolution. Put more bluntly, until the core questions of nationality have been resolved, everything else will be secondary.

Is it possible to break this stalemate? Of course. In the optimistic afterglow of Expo 67, Canada enjoyed a level of national self-confidence it has yet to recapture. The spectre of Quebec separation did not go away (indeed, separatism reached a militant peak in this period), but even that was unable to take away our broader confidence that Canada had a legitimate and indisputable place in the world. It seems not coincidental then, that the early seventies brought several breakthroughs in the enfranchisement of women and minorities: Pierre Trudeau's famous 1967 statement that the state had "no place in the bedrooms of the nation", the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, the 1971 Multiculturalism Act. Those were heady days when Canada was building something, instead of just protecting, defending or dismantling.