Gesture suffers in execution
At first, being a hip group of guys and gals, Stephen Harper’s team must have loved the idea of an online survey about Canadian heroes and accomplishments. It will bypass media pundits, won’t cost much and could actually reach young people, they must have congratulated themselves. “Who knows? They might even chirp about it on their smartphones.”
But after receiving answers that sound like a catalogue of Conservative bêtes noires, Ottawa is surely older and wiser now.
The goal was to consult with Canadians about narratives for the country’s 150th birthday in 2017. It was, in principle, a sound idea.
The Americans have Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. The English have the Magna Carta, Shakespeare and victory over the Spanish Armada.
What and who would Canadians put on similar lists in a land that often seems lacking in the sort of shared cultural markers that unify and engender national pride elsewhere? Maybe we could learn something if we stopped focusing on what divides us long enough to ask these questions.
Unfortunately, an online survey was exactly the wrong way to go about it because there’s no way to be sure a sample is representative. There is no way to ensure that small organized groups do not mobilize to skew the results. And as a result, there is no way results will be credible to anyone who expected different answers.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the former Liberal prime minister responsible for the National Energy Program, comes first in the list of heroes prepared for Heritage Minister Shelley Glover this spring. He’s followed by Marathon of Hope runner Terry Fox, NDP icon Tommy Douglas, Nobel laureate and former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, astronaut Chris Hadfield, environmentalist David Suzuki, the late NDP leader Jack Layton, Tory and first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, hockey star Wayne Gretzky and former general and senator Romeo Dallaire.
The list of national accomplishments begins with medicare, followed by peacekeeping and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the rest of the top 10, bilingualism and multiculturalism compete with our contributions to victory in both World Wars.
With the exception of Fox, Hadfield, Gretzky, Macdonald and the war efforts, it’s hard to imagine results more associated with previous Liberal governments, and hence less appealing to the current Tory dispensation.
Some readers may believe they are truly representative of Canadian values, and prove the Conservatives have been taking the country in the wrong direction. But most of us — fans and foes of the Harper government alike — will recognize the picture is more complicated than that.
The online consultation makes no mention of Peter Lougheed, or the development of the oilsands industry, or Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Yet for many, these are entries without which the affair is an exercise in deliberate airbrushing.
And how could two giant Conservative accomplishments — the North American Free Trade Agreement and Canada’s contribution to ending apartheid in South Africa — be ignored?
The Harper government will be tempted to pretend the whole exercise never took place. Indeed, the fact that it took an access to information request by The Canadian Press to learn about the results suggests it has already decided to so. It should, instead, take two public actions. First, it should develop a more complete tally of heroes that honours everybody’s, even if some are regional or controversial. And it should include that oh-so-Canadian respect of regional difference on the list of top national accomplishments.
And second, for its own piece of mind at least, it should burn into its memory banks the following update on an old proverb: Never ask a question in an online survey if the answer might make Pierre Trudeau’s spirit do a pirouette.