I can see it emerging from the hard, snow-bitten ground just outside my window. Also on my computer screen and TV set. It's the perennial question asked not just in spring, but in the icy heart of winter: what does it mean to be Canadian?

It is a question we at the CBC used to pose often when I worked on Peter Gzowski's Morningside way back when. And I see we are asking it again now as the federal government reviews and revamps the Canadian citizenship program.

The subject has more twists and turns than a street pretzel.

For example, many Canadians were puzzled, and perhaps more than a little miffed, when they discovered that after this country spent $90 million evacuating Lebanese-Canadians during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict of 2006, a substantial number of these summer patriots returned to their lives in Lebanon.

Is Canada simply a country of convenience, you ask? A well-appointed "hotel," in the phrase of the (Spanish-born) Canadian novelist Yann Martel? If war breaks out in your "other" country, do you simply wave the Canadian passport and expect to be airlifted from harm's way?

Seven-year-old Victor Manuel Munoz, from P.E.I., hugs Governor General Michaelle Jean as he and family members were presented with their Canadian citizenship certificates in February 2007. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

This kind of flexible citizenship is very, well, Canadian and can be viewed on many levels.

During soccer finals, the crowds in my Toronto neighborhood ethnic bar could be heard rooting against the home team Canadians. Their team was the one representing the country they came from, though it's a good guess that many of these young fans were actually born here.

Blood and belonging

Back when he was a full-time teacher and writer, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff distinguished between ethnic and civic nationalisms in his book, Blood and Belonging. When you gave allegiance to a civic polity, like Canada, he wrote, you were embracing not only a country, but a political idea that is supposed to transcend the trap of group-based, birth identity.

In the current clime, this civic nationalism is a cause that other writers, like the boyishly enthusiastic Rudyard Griffiths, the former executive director of the Dominion Institute, is stumping the nation with — while promoting his book Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto.

But for many Canadians, the notion of who we are requires a certain abstract discernment to fully appreciate.

Most Americans are no doubt used to thinking of their country as a set of ideals, as President Barack Obama recently reminded the world when he told a Turkish audience that America is not a Christian nation, but something larger, more encompassing.

So, what is Canada? A network of social-welfare nets? Medicare? This is the sort of quip I've heard commentators on CBC programs feel they can coyly make.

In fact, as many note, Canada is an idea wrapped in geography, not a clan-linked blood pool. That is what civic nationalism means: you are bound to people who are truly other. That's the short answer. The long answer is more complicated.

The complicated version

Good questions, of course, are like onions. Peel away one layer and you have another taking its place. In that way, the question of Canadian identity must also speak to the larger question of what it means to be a modern Western nation.

This is what the conservative British philosopher and writer Roger Scruton asked when he gave the McNish Lecture for the Advancement of Western Civilization at the University of Calgary recently.

The question he asked was "What makes the West strong?" You can switch the name and ask the same about Canada.

In Scruton's tally, the Western vision offers, among other gifts, personal freedom and freedom of expression. It came alive during the Enlightenment and is largely based on that beautiful and useful theory: the consent of the governed, an idea that, in our diminishing civics classrooms, is too little taught or understood.

The consent of the governed is, for Scruton, the "starting point of Western political philosophy" and the basis of the social contract in Western societies.

"The right and duty of participation," says Scruton, "is what we mean, or ought to by citizenship."

If we want a simple definition of citizenship, that's it. It is also, says Scruton, "what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of — an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent."

Nevertheless, says Scruton, that ideal, that Western ideal, may not be enough.

What's missing

What people want in the way of citizenship, says Scruton, does not necessarily make them happy. "Something is missing from a life purely based on consent and accommodations with your neighbours."

For him (and he is not alone), our Western ideal, so precious in so many respects, nonetheless turns us into a community of strangers. We live in a state of "collective apartness in which fulfillment and meaning are confined to the private sphere."

The Western state is a great achievement, argues Scruton. But there is something missing at its centre and many immigrants who come to countries like Canada see that emptiness on full display.

That is why they import their blood and belongings, to borrow Ignatieff's phrase, along with them. And these belongings become cemented through a vast array of government policy.

That may all be fine. We all live multiple identities. But our main collective identity is more fragile than we imagine, according to Scruton. And, as a consequence, we Westerners face many perils.

Scruton worries that too many of those arriving here have a certain contempt for the culture they see before them. It's a culture of licence, not liberty, to use the philosophical distinction. To his credit, Scruton is both worried and sympathetic to the criticism at the same time.

Citizenship is a great ideal. But it's not enough, which leaves the question: what is?

Scruton's answer is "forgiveness and irony." That's a mouthful. And it is not the sort of thing you'll find on a citizenship test.

I will try to explain further, next week.