I have been thinking about the hyphens in my identity and how important they are to situate me in Canadian society. We are all hyphenated Canadians, because we all have a history and a particular place. To ignore these, to act as if we are all the same, has the effect of marginalizing some and normalizing white, middle-class culture and practice. I think the hyphens in my identity help to demonstrate this.

I am a settler-Canadian. My ancestors immigrated to Canada in the late 1800s. On my mother's side, my ancestors took up farming among the rocks of Nova Scotia. They were among the people who cleared away forest and worked the land. My family has always been privileged to own land.

I am mostly British-Canadian. My mother's parents were Scottish and Irish. My father's father was English. His mother's family came to Canada from England, but they were originally French protestants. Most of my ancestry places me within the culture and society of those who established this part of Ontario. The culture and legal structure fit my background.

I am a middle-class-Canadian. Growing up, my father had a good job, well paying and stable. By the time I got to university, he was upper management in a multi-national corporation, so we were upper middle class. Both my parents had stories of their families struggling to make ends meet, but my experience did not include financial stress.

As an adult, there were a few years where money was tight, but I could always count on my parents supplying the new winter coat. As a minister, I have a pretty good income, but I married a university professor who had a very good income. I am firmly middle-class-Canadian. I have enough money to do things I want to do.

I grew up a suburban-Canadian. I lived in neighbourhoods were families lived in single family dwellings. We had a yard and gardens, space we owned.

I am a heterosexual woman-Canadian. I'm married with children. I never have to justify or explain my family. While I have run into a few barriers and some harassment as a woman, I entered a line of work that others had opened up before me, where there are now at least as many women as men.

I am a university educated-Canadian. Although my mother only finished grade eight, my father had a university degree which he got through night school. I've had years of study, expect my kids and grandkids to keep going to school after high school. I have credentials that are transferable.

As an adult I made some choices that moved me away from my background. I moved out of suburbia to downtown Montreal and then to rural Grey County. I chose to farm as well as work off-farm. 

And this is where the hyphens in my identity matter: I've had choice. My background gave me space to slide easily between locations, to move into whatever schooling I wanted, to choose the kind of work I wanted to do.

I have come to recognize that I am a privileged person. My racial background means that I don't get profiled by police or by prospective employers. My cultural background fits with the culture that set up the laws in the province where I live. I fit in. My class background means that I have not experienced poverty myself. I assume that I am going to manage to cover expenses easily.

Because I fit in so easily, because I've been able to choose to slide between jobs and living spaces, I didn't have the lived experience of clashing with social norms. To expand my understanding, I choose to put myself in situations where I didn't fit easily. That helped me begin to understand the experience of people with different hyphenated identities.

The hyphens in my identity matter because they've given me privilege. The hyphens in a new immigrant's identity matter because they help to surface the challenges they face. Hyphens of race, gender and sexual identity, social class help us to see the challenges people live with. Wiping out the hyphens, making everyone "Canadian" does not get rid of the challenges. It only hides them.

Cathy Hird lives on the shore of Georgian Bay.