A myth in the making
Published Tuesday June 30th, 2009
Tomorrow's Canada Day, and from coast to coast to coast we'll be celebrating 142 years of Canada with peace, order, and good barbequing. We do have a great deal to celebrate. Comedian Rick Mercer has compared being Canadian with winning the lottery. We have built a pretty good place to live in the Great White North.
If July 1st is a day to celebrate who we are, I want to take a minute on June 30th to reflect on who we are. So who are we? Every generation or so we get a new version our ourselves.
Canada's a country that keeps reinventing itself. In 1867, the Fathers of Confederation found it useful to assert our British heritage in the new nation. Four tiny provinces banding together as a full-fledged kingdom would have raised tensions with Washington, where most of what is now Canada was seen as being up for grabs. The two countries were not particularly close at this time, with the Aroostook War having been "fought" a generation earlier and President Johnson winking at the occasional Fenian incursions into Upper Canada. A republic was out of the question, and so a compromise power structure was struck, non-threateningly termed a "dominion," complete with a national police force instead of an army.
It's easy to trace a lot of our modern Canadian character to this story. And, like all stories, this is one that mixes fact with myth. The British mythos at the heart of it played into the Victorian ideal of an empire upon which the sun never sets, and which probably reached its height in Canada in the late 19th century, though there's still plenty of Canadian monarchists who pretend we still cherish the vestiges of that heyday than we really do.
Somewhere between the days of Wilfred Laurier, our first francophone prime minister, and official bilingualism of the 1960s, the myth of Canada being an offshoot of Britain gave way to the story of two founding cultures, English and French, coming together for the mutual good of us all. There certainly is some truth to this, reflected every day in our languages and our laws, but this too is another incarnation of what it is to be Canadian.
By the 1970s, we hadn't shed this incarnation, but the descendents of Ukranian immigrants in Saskatchewan and Chinese immigrants in British Columbia and Irish immigrants in New Brunswick and a whole pile of First Nations across the country insisted that though they spoke English, they weren't English, and their current and historic contributions were building this country. Multiculturalism entered every schoolchild's vocabulary; we were a quilt of a nation, not a melting pot.
Today, I think we still embrace that multicultural identity, at least in the sense that we know our own little corners of Canada don't represent the whole country and the nation itself is more than a sum of those parts. We all want to make our country a better place, but for most of us we can really only make our communities better places. Canada as a nation is a result of those local efforts. I think our sense of being Canadian comes as much from a shared set of values as it does from contact with our cultural institutions. I think we're also in the process of developing a new incarnation of our national myth.
John Ralston Saul made a compelling argument late last year in A Fair Country that we're not English or French or modeled on any European tradition at all, but rather we're essentially an aboriginal culture. Aboriginal culture, Saul contends, is marked by peaceful but unresolved tensions between groups and an ever-expanding circle than embraces everyone. "We are a Metis civilization," he asserts, because that was what we were for most of our history, before we embarked on a century and a half of constitutional debates and trying to settle issues that should remain dynamic.
How will the next generation or two of Canadians see themselves? Hopefully we'll always have a better image of ourselves than the Joe Canadian beer commercials in the '90s, which were not so much "I Am Canadian" as they were "I Am Not American" monologues. Just as I'd hope that our patriotism will always run deeper than flag waving, anthem singing, and a firm but vague conviction that we're not Americans, I'd put forth the hope that our future national myths incorporate the best of our values.
I hope everyone enjoys Canada Day tomorrow, and enjoys Canada for a long time to come.
Peter T. Smith is a teacher and writer. He can be reached by e-mail at ptsmith_tj@hotmail.com. His column appears on Tuesday.
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
Comments (1)
All comments are subject to the site Terms of Use. For a full commenting tutorial click here.
Our editorial team relies on filtering technology and our visitor community to identify inappropriate comments. In the event that a site user has submitted offensive content that has evaded our filter, please select the option to Flag As Inappropriate presented within the comment. Thank you for helping to keep this site clean.