Times have changed, so should dated phrase

O Canada’s ‘all thy sons’ fails to reflect all Canadians, writes Harry Prest.

Reading Andrew Coyne’s May 10 column — “All thy sons under the gun once again” — I couldn’t help recalling a phrase attributed to Yogi Berra, because I too felt, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

In claiming that the Conservative MPs who oppose changing the phrase “all thy sons” in our national anthem O Canada to “to all of us” have no desire to “exclude half the population,” Coyne argues that they believe the current phrasing’s literal meaning somehow includes “all of us” and not merely males, citing “its meaning as it is intended and commonly understood.”

As an English professor I can recall back in the 1970s and 1980s hearing almost identical arguments put forward to defend the singular pronouns “he,” “him” and “his” as being understood to be gender neutral in structures such as “each soldier must look after his own equipment” or “a doctor must listen to his patient.” They were illogical then and they remain so in the present debate.

Can you think of any other context in which “sons” is synonymous with “sons and daughters?” Asked about the size of our family who would say, “We have five sons, three boys and two girls.”

The suggestion that “sons” can somehow be construed as being gender neutral in this case verges on the bizarre.

The strange thing is that the English version of O Canada has not been a static text over its history. A few decades ago we replaced a couple of redundant “We stand on guards” with “from far and wide” and “God keep our land” without the least bit of controversy. So why all the fuss about this proposed change?

When Robert Stanley Weir first composed the English version in 1908 women didn’t have the vote and the members of the Canadian Forces who were expected to “stand on guard” were exclusively male. Times have changed. In 1986, for example, the name of the Canadian Museum of Man was changed to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (and more recently in 2013 to the Canadian Museum of History), acknowledging that “man” is not a gender-neutral term. Neither is “sons.”

Surely the time has come ensure that the lyrics of our national anthem reflect who we actually are, not who we used to be.