Dead wrong: the blurred vision of ‘Mother Canada’
“How on earth is a husband (like me) to write to a wife (like you) about … a war like this?’
Speaking at the Vimy Memorial on April 9, 2007, Prime Minster Stephen Harper declared: “We Canadians here today are a long way from home. But there may be no place on earth that makes us feel more Canadian. Because we sense, all around us, the presence of our ancestors.”
Vimy, Harper argued, was Canada’s “creation story,” the “birth of a nation” those ‘ancestors’ would want us to remember with pride. How does he know their wishes?
“It is sometimes said,” he concluded, “that the dead speak to the living. So let us, together, listen to the final prayer of those whose actions we are honouring today. We may hear them say softly: ‘I love my family, I love my comrades, I love my country, and I will defend their freedom to the end.’”
Imagine, for a moment, a leftwing PM claiming to hear the dead chant in unison: ‘We were cannon-fodder, we killed our brothers, we died for our oppressors, and we will curse their imperial folly forever.’ The ridicule would not only have been deafening but deserved: why would 60,000 men be expected to speak in one voice about the tragedy that engulfed them?
The same year Harper read his ghostly communiqué, a major scholarly ‘Canadian Reassessment’ of Vimy punched hole after hole in the “spiritually satisfying” but factually “problematic” official version. The purported ‘triumph’, the historians agreed, constituted no strategic breakthrough, was secured not by infantry gallantry but artillery ferocity, and was directed largely by the British (“airbrushed out of popular memory”). As one contributor concluded, Vimy became “a story that could be told as a stirring narrative, but it was also one whose religious, political and nationalist meaning superseded the mere historical details.”
The collection was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press, a coincidental but appropriate nod to the prime minister who tried to prevent Canada being drawn into “the vortex of European militarism,” an internecine conflagration he correctly divined would bitterly divide the Dominion. Mr. Harper, indeed, invited not a single Francophone to hear his Vimy speech, perhaps because the high death toll on the Ridge led the Borden government to introduce conscription, a measure still deeply resented in Quebec.
Not that Vimy gets all the glory from Great War enthusiasts. The year 2007 also saw the release of Paul Gross’ maplesyrup movie Passchendaele, revelling in the mud, blood and guts of probably the most hellishly futile engagement in military history. The problem, though, is not that Harper, Gross and others deny the horrors involved, but rather exploit them to revive the century-old propaganda figure of ‘Johnny Canuck,’ the soldier-saviour without whom (the myth runs) we would not be free. And nowhere does this lie run more strongly than through the concrete veins of that ultimate monument to Harper-era jingoism: ‘Mother Canada.’
The scope of the ‘Never Forgotten National Memorial’ extends far beyond its proposed controversial location at Green Cove. The main statue, in fact, supposedly performing the miracle of “welcoming back the dead,” is intended only as the central altar of an expansive cult offering multiple means not just of worshipping but interacting with The Fallen. A ‘Necklace of Tears,’ for example (linked markers representing heroes ‘adopted’ by members of the public), will be strung across the Trans Canada Trail. And each ‘tear’ will be high-tech, capable of being scanned “by a smart device for a full description of the fallen hero.”
You can, though, go one step further and ask a hero for his own description. “To be based in homes, schools, clubs and libraries across the country,” the NFNM Foundation website explains, a ‘Letters To Our Fallen’ program will “provide a unique opportunity for young Canadians” not only to “actually compose heartfelt letters” but receive a reply, “respectfully” penned “and mailed back by a dedicated volunteer member of the memorial staff.”
In A Terrible Beauty: The Art of Canada at War, Heather Robertson quotes a letter from an anonymous stretcher-bearer in the killing fields of France: “How on earth is a husband (like me) to write to a wife (like you) about … a war like this? None of us are heroes. To read of ‘Our Splendid Canadians’ makes us ill.” If that man ‘fell,’ his name could be selected to receive a letter thanking ‘him’ for being, what else, a ‘splendid Canadian.’ And ‘he’ would gratefully respond, spoon-feeding the young patriot rousing clichés fit to cheer a prime minister. Some prime ministers, anyway.
A few days before his death in Flanders, the British war poet Charles Sorley (1895-1915) urged people to “say not soft things” about “the millions of the mouthless dead:” to give them no praise, shed no tears, bestow no honour.
“Say only this,” he urged: “They are dead.”
Stephen Harper, however, loves not only saying ‘soft things’ to, but hearing ‘soft things’ from, them. If the diseased vision of ‘Mother Canada’, championed by his cabinet, ever comes to pass, one of its most pernicious affects will be to silence dissenting, or simply unheroic, voices: to ensure they remain ‘ever forgotten.’