It isn’t hard to be moved and inspired by Canadians
Last year, at this time I was asked to be the guest editor for the Canada Day edition of the Star. I was excited about it, and also anxious.
I knew I didn’t want the edition to be a lot of words from people who most of their lives have worked to define Canada: Canadians are tolerant, patient, able to work with others, polite, clean, etc. We may be those things, more or less, and they may be important, but we’ve heard them so often that we don’t much hear them anymore.
I also knew that I wanted this edition to be about the future. To celebrate the past may seem appropriate and kind, but for those truly worthy of being celebrated, who have done something big or small to make us better, true celebration comes in seeing others who have carried on, who allow the past to live and make it matter, who make the present still better and a better future more possible.
So I and the Star’s editors and journalists adopted a phrase to guide us: Canada Day is not just a commemoration of what we are, but an expression of what we can be.
We interviewed people we admired, who are doing important, future-defining work, to hear them talk about what they are doing, what excites them. To give us hints at where Canada is going, at what is possible.
Afterward, people who had read the newspaper and approached me spoke about certain things the contributors had said — Sarah Polley or James Orbinski or Ritika Goel or Naheed Nenshi. But more than that, how inspiring they all were.
It was not my intention to inspire. But it is impossible to see people doing interesting things and not be moved.
I don’t just mean famous people. I would bet that every Star reader knows somebody — a neighbour, a person at work, an organization they’ve worked with — who is doing something amazing. Helping people with a disability or an illness, making a home for abandoned animals, being a foster parent (less foster, more parent) to abused kids. A person you’re just happy exists and shares the same community and country and world that you do.
More than we are what we say we are, we are what we do.
Seeing all that we are doesn’t need to blind us to what we are not. We’ve done a lot of things wrong. That’s Canada too. We put Canadians of Japanese origin in internment camps during the Second World War. We turned away Jews. For generations we have given aboriginal peoples little chance to live a traditional life, a new life, their own life. To some we’ve given a great chance at a great future, and not to others.
But if we are only as horrible as we sometimes think, what hope is there? Rather, if we are capable of doing remarkable things, if we are already doing them, this Canada can become our guide. What would this Canada have done about the big questions we got wrong in our past? What would this Canada, of Sarah Polley, James Orbinski and thousands of our remarkable neighbours, do about climate change, human rights, inequality and the big questions of our future? (This might be a useful prompt for investigative journalists, too, who can reveal not only wrongdoers, but right-doers as well.)
In October, there will be a federal election. For political junkies, it will be the most intriguing and exciting one in decades. Three parties have a chance to win. We will see party leaders at their best, and their worst. Some will rise to the occasion, and some will not. And in the process, many of these big questions about Canada and the future will come to the fore.
It may seem right for us to back off and hand over the discussion and the responsibility to the political process. After all, this is what parties and party leaders do. But it is we, not they, who in thousands of tiny acts and expressions create the feeling in the air of what Canada is, of what we want it to be. Political parties and their leaders are our instruments. It is up to them to live up to us, to reflect this Canada.
I hope for Canada Day, for every Canada Day, for our 150th anniversary year in 2017, for every day, that we see the specialness of the acts around us, for the inspiration that is in them.