What is to be Canadian, anyway?

By Jim Gerwing

The celebration of Canada Day is again only a memory. We Canadians have much to be proud of. Take our world dominance in hockey. Well, we used to be the best, and we still do produce some magnificent players. We are also pretty good as curlers, and, lo and behold, we are making a name for our country in baseball. And talk about the most recent phenoms in tennis, not to mention figure skating, basketball, volleyball, and skiing.

We do take delight in sports successes. Yet, as a nation, do we really want to be best known in that field of endeavour? What about other, more "cultural" pursuits? For a small country (small in population) we do pretty well in many fields, whether scientific, artistic, economic, ship building, you name it. 

We are a young people, a mixture of many races, many cultures, many religions. We brag about having been the "last great frontier." Our natural resources in oil, natural gas, lumber, water, fish, metals, potash, uranium, to name just a few that come easily to mind, are enough to make even the most bashful Canadian justifiably proud.

We have never made war on anyone, and we have faced no serious threat to our independence, not even from the newly independent American colonies in l812 or the Fenian raids following the American Civil War. It is no secret that we could never build an army or navy powerful enough to defend our national boundaries. Until recently we have had an enviable record at international peacekeeping.

We love to poke fun at ourselves, possibly to make sure we don't get too proud.

And then we come face to face with some of the ugly realities in our past. We have a most dreadful record of how we treated the indigenous people of this country. We have shown them little or no respect, neither as individuals nor as peoples. We are only now beginning to acknowledge the appalling legacy of the residential schools of Canada. We mistreated the Chinese who came to work here, without whom we would never have built our railroads and our mines. We have much to be ashamed of for the way we handled Japanese Canadians in the Second World War. Lately we have been struggling with ways to deal fairly with Muslim immigrants. Out here in the West we are still often uncomfortable when talking about the possibility of Quebec separation. So often two solitudes.

There is an interesting cartoon in the 1978 Canadian Automobile Association's Heritage of Canada. It is a beautiful book as far as it goes. Still, it is interesting to look at what is missing. For instance, a cartoon on page 322 depicts Johnny Canuck conducting "The Maple Leaf Forever" by settlers who came to farm the prairies. They are Germans, Icelanders, Scotsmen, Belgians, Englishmen, Russians, Americans, Austrians, Irishmen, Frenchmen, and Scandinavians. No First Nations, no Blacks, no Asians, no Hispanics, no Semites of any description, and no women. I seriously doubt whether any non-white people were ever treated as equals in this country. Equally significant is that we hear far too little about the contributions of women. The essential part First Nations women played in the fur trade for several generations comes to mind.

The real question is how we deal with realities such as these in our school programs and in our general perceptions of who we are.  Certainly we want to teach our children to be proud of our country. On the other hand, we cannot afford to give the impression that Canada has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. We need to open the whole story (in an age-appropriate way), not just with a sentence or two in a social studies text that no one reads or remembers. Can we strike a healthy balance? Can we tell the true stories without either fawning or cringing? How long will it take for us as a people to put our differences aside and live and work and think together as a single nation drawn from countless diverse backgrounds? 

That is the precious dream I have long harboured for our land. From a public point of view, our museums and our restaurants seem to be showing the way. Unfortunately, our senior governments seem to be going the other way. And I see far too much indifference in the general population. How long will it take for this vision to trickle down and trickle up until it becomes a way of life for all Canadians? Or have I become one of those silly old men who still thinks that cooperation, compromise, and coalitions are desirable commodities in a multicultural democracy?