Canada’s many blessings I don’t take for granted

We are beginning to look like a last bastion of intelligent and good-hearted government

Never before has there been a Canada Day killjoy like COVID19. It has snuffed out all our traditional fairs, festivals, concerts, parades and lavish fireworks, and left us with nothing more to celebrate our history than something called “a national virtual Canada Day.”

O Canada, please, that does not give me a glowing heart that sees thee rise, glorious and free.

I will nevertheless buy a goodsized Canadian flag, which I have never done before, and mount it on our condo balcony so it faces Halifax Harbour. That’s because on July 8, exactly one week after Canada’s 153rd birthday, I will revel in having reached my own 86th. I am thus much more than half as old as Canada, still here and, for that, luckier than I once thought possible.

I have lived more than 30,000 days in our home and native land, and on not one of those days did I ever hear a bomb burst, a machine-gun stutter or a wounded soldier moan. On not one did I languish in jail for having ridiculed a politician; or endure even the briefest torture by any practitioner of what the U.S. government has called “enhanced coercive interrogation techniques.”

Around the world, the UN reports, the number of people who have fled their homes to escape warfare or deadly political and religious persecution has now surpassed 70 million, or 32 million more than the entire population of Canada. Heaven only knows how many of these have witnessed massacres and the bloody slaughter of friends and relatives; and lost everything except the clothes on their backs and farewell trinkets from loved ones who, even if still alive, they will never see again.

I can list such horrors and hardships, but Canada has so insulated me in safety and comfort that I am simply incapable of describing how it feels to endure them. My wife and I have been together for 65 years and have never heard a shot fired in anger. Neither have our three children, three grandchildren or five great-grandchildren.

UN agencies report that 815 million people are dangerously malnourished and go to bed hungry every night. But rarely, in my more than eight decades, has my gluttonous stomach been denied its three square meals a day. Ah, yes, bacon and eggs with Ethiopian coffee; Montreal smoked meat on rye with a slice of dill pickle; local lamb chops, grilled medium rare, if you please, with a baked potato, sugar peas, robust red wine from Portugal and a wedge of gorgonzola. Splendid!

Tens of thousands of the 1.17 million people who live in East Timor must walk for hours every day of their lives just to fetch the water no one can survive without, and at least 300,000 have no access at all to any water that’s clean. Water. org tells the story of an Indonesian woman named Sarmanah. To sustain her young children and dying husband, she grew vegetables, ran a small shop and, starting at dawn, walked several times a day to a river or to the lineup at a village well to get 10 litres of water to carry home.

Nearly 700 million people the world over somehow survive without safe water, but I’m certainly not one of them. We have in our condo one huge bathtub, two showers, two bathroom sinks, a double kitchen sink and, all in all, five taps. From each flows all the hot and cold water we could possibly want, mixed to the exact temperature we want. (Sarmanah would not applaud my wallowing in 100-litre baths.) Then there’s the washing machine, and two flush toilets.

Some 673 million people have been defecating out in the open all their lives. More people have cellphones than flush toilets, which is one reason why water-borne diseases every year kill nearly two million children under the age of five. Our own offspring never faced either that risk or not having a good doctor.

We’ve made our homes in small towns in Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and in Halifax, Moncton, Saint John, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. As I remember the folks in all these places, most were generous, cheerful, unbigoted, and helpful to both neighbours and strangers.

Canada has long been a true (if imperfect) democracy. And now, by comparison with the deranged, racist, brutish, isolationist, dictatorial and Trumpish influences that infect more and more nations, we are beginning to look like a last bastion of intelligent and good-hearted government.

Our population, just over 37 million, amounts to a miniscule .05 per cent of the world’s 7.4 billion people. Enough of ours are impoverished, deprived and underprivileged to qualify as a national disgrace and yet, for most of us, no other country comes closer to being paradise on Earth. As for me, I live in a marvellous little city by the sea, in a marvellous region of a marvellous country, but I still haven’t the faintest idea why I deserve to.