In 2017, even more to celebrate
Even in a season when time’s passage is on our minds, it’s something of a New Year’s shot of rye to contemplate that Canada’s 150th birthday is only four years away.
For those of us who remember the celebrations of 1967, it seems like just yesterday that everyone was singing along to Bobby Gimby’s Ca-na-da and centennial projects were opening up in communities large and small across the country.
For those who don’t remember, it seems like just yesterday (possibly because it was!) that their elders were waxing nostalgic, recalling how they saw Prime Minister Lester Pearson riding the Expo 67 monorail with a youthful Queen Elizabeth or using their rose-coloured glasses to describe a simpler, less contentious era. Hard as it may be to imagine, people of all ages really did sing “north, south, east, west; there’ll be happy times” without irony.
Could a similarly national celebration be mounted in 2017? We’ll bet it could, and we’ll further bet it will be once ordinary Canadians become interested and start driving the agenda.
But you have to sympathize with our politicians and bureaucrats for moving slowly on the idea, as some observers have started to complain. After all, before you can urge people to climb on a bandwagon you need to agree on what the bandwagon looks like, and the last 50 years have been much more a story of confident regional identities than of an agreed national narrative. Never mind francophone Quebecers, it’s not at all clear that the average Albertan, British Columbian, Ontarian and Maritimer would agree among themselves on a precise description of the country they think everyone should celebrate.
Further, it would be all too easy for the celebration to become political, as we can extrapolate from the current fuss about the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., and from recent election campaigns in which parties battled as much about existential things like Canadian “values” as they did about policy.
In truth, of course, the apparent unity of national self-image in 1967 was probably a bit of an illusion. In those days Ottawa was more self-confident about its pre-eminence in our federal arrangements and the central Canadian media controlled the centennial story to a far greater extent than would be possible today.
In 2017, we can be certain a more realistic picture will be honoured, and part of it will be the virtues of a regionally diverse culture. With a little luck and sincere effort, the very process of organizing a national birthday party for today’s generations will help us come together on what we have to celebrate.
It says something very special about this country that except for the occasional tropical destination, there’s no place the vast majority of us would rather be.