Heroic Canada has lots to celebrate

IFireworks light up behind the Peace Tower in Ottawa during ceremonies of Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation last July 1. t is a duty to take issue with Charlotte Gray’s dismal farewell to Canada’s sesquicentennial year in the Globe and Mail of Dec. 30. She explained that the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Canada, (the adoption of the British North America Act), was “a bust.” She started with an invidious comparison with the centennial celebrations of 1967. Then, she wrote, (from hearsay as she had not come here yet), Canada was celebrating “an ingenuous relief that the country had survived … Canadians went elsewhere for post-graduate studies, and Canadian university faculties were populated by Americans who had fled the Vietnam War.” Not really; I went from Ontario to a French Quebec university, a more radical change than going to the U.S. or U.K., and many of my fellow graduates from Carleton, where Ms. Gray is now accredited, did graduate studies elsewhere in Canada. There were only a few Americans on Canadian university faculties and they were not all draft dodgers, and CanLit had long since made its already frequently tiresome and parochial voice heard.

I am apparently one of those “old Canadians” who recall 1967 with “misty-eyed nostalgia,” (though I believe I am about the same vintage as Ms. Gray). In fact, I recall the summer of 1967 with delight, as a rural Quebec newspaper editor and probably the most junior person in the extensive entourage of the premier of Quebec, the distinguished and elegant Daniel Johnson (père), and I spent much of the summer making respectful advances on the delightful World’s Fair (Expo 67) pavilion hostesses of many countries and fetching drinks for my employer (and myself ) at the bar of the Quebec pavilion. It wasn’t a celebration of the fact that the country had survived, so much as that world history’s only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation, a completely original Canadian concept, had brought the country to some comparative prominence in the world. It wasn’t all “boosterism” as Ms. Gray cites an Ottawa museum director as asserting. There is that element in all national celebrations, including the audience singing Rule Britannia at the last night of the proms in Royal Albert Hall, or Kenneth Branagh touting Britain’s unsatisfactory National Health Service (while dressed up as Isambard Kingdom Brunel) at the opening of the London Olympics in 2012, or the Bastille Day parade on the Champs Élysées, or almost anything conducted anywhere by Americans on the 4 th of July.

The photographs that accompanied Ms. Gray’s story highlighted what was the most significant event in that year for Canada: the invitation by the French president, General Charles de Gaulle, reckoned by the French their greatest countryman since Napoleon, and at the time rivalled only by Chairman Mao Tse-tung as the most eminent statesman in the world, to Quebec to secede, although the general was in Canada as a state visitor to celebrate the centenary of Canada. It was an outrage, and I was standing only a few metres from de Gaulle when he said it. More irritating than the ending touch, “Vive le Québec Libre,” (the slogan of the separatists), was his comment earlier in his address from the balcony of Montreal City Hall that the ambience he had encountered that day as was quite aware of that challenge, as I spent most of my time in French Quebec. This time, for the first time in a political crisis, the British and Americans, who had had their own problems with de Gaulle though he had never invited the separation of a third of their populations from their countries, would not be there to help us. Canada would not be part of a coalition, we would deal with France and its local espousers alone, as we had faced the daunting geography and the severity of the climate, as Canadians built was unsuccessful compared to 1967 because the country has discovered that it has “patterns of racism, discrimination, and episodes of appalling cruelty.” This is the now oppressively customary genuflection to the complaints of the native people, as if our ancestors had seized and occupied their country as Hitler and Stalin occupied Poland in 1939. Canada was almost unpopulated when the Europeans arrived here more than 400 years ago (approximately 200,000 natives in today’s Canada). There has been some mistreatment of the natives, and we must make amends, but the most conspicuous “appalling cruelty” on Canadian territory was habitually conducted by the natives on themselves. Ms. Gray’s comparison of Canada’s 150th anniversary to the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the upcoming sesquicentenary of the founding of the German Empire, is completely spurious. Canada did not give the world or even ourselves Soviet Communism or Nazism, no matter how rattled Ms. Gray is by native agitation.

Canadians are not sobered, as she claims, by our “racism, residential schools, discrimination, and homophobia.” Throughout the 150 years, Canada has been generally more humane than almost any other country, and welcomes immigration at least as cordially as any, (as Ms. Gray can attest). We have allowed the native issue to achieve absurd proportions of official guilt, to which the population does not generally subscribe. There is not the slightest question of the legitimacy of the Europeans and other subsequent immigrants in Canada, and the whole concept of nation-tonation relations between the Government of Canada and the many native groups is nonsense. Ms. Gray is correct that Canada has not constructed such a solid national mythos as have those countries that are the national arks for an entire civilization, like the great nation states of Europe, or the bearer of light to the world as a uniquely democratic concept, a self-image the United States believes in and has put over, though it is in some respects a tenuous proposition historically.

The reason Canada was not so excited in 2017 as 1967 is because half-centuries aren’t as noteworthy milestones, and precisely because the country is much more accomplished and important in the world than it was 50 years ago. The wailing about natives and “homophobia” is bunk. The only countries in the world as populous as Canada that have had the same political institutions for longer than 150 years are the United Kingdom and the United States. When examined carefully, Canadian history is quite heroic, partly because it seems unheroic despite the immense accomplishment of building this country on the border of such a magnetic neighbour, to which it would be easy to assimilate. It is a G7 country, no longer a young country, and in general, its population prefers serenity to the drama of violence that makes most older countries more historically gripping. That is not a trade that most Canadians would wish to reverse.