Well, quite the year for us Albertan Canadians.
I’ve decided to swear off
political blogging for at least a twelvemonth—after all Henry V is an uninteresting play because it’s essentially just a
line of victories and no one cares about consecutive wins—but it’s the flush (in both meanings of the word) of politics
that drives me to set these words down about about Canada, but
specifically my Canada.
What is this Canada? Does it
even exist any more?
Canada is an unwieldy state, a
nation far too big for its population. Every definitive moment in its history
is themed with working on a place that in very good sense has no business
existing as it is.
There are divisions between
East and West so deep it’s a wonder we’ve never got around to the world’s most
polite civil war. There are those who stand rigidly on their side of this
geographical divide and hold that we are a nation carved, East and
West, regions, Alberta and Quebec. I am not one of those.
Perhaps my vision has always
been to grand. For several years now I’ve wondered if I am not an Eastern
Canadian at heart. I know I am not, but if one were to embrace stereotypes,
then one could say that I am perhaps better suited to Montreal or Ottawa or
Halifax. If Easterners value learning above all, culture and art and history,
and are more attuned with their European roots, then perhaps that’s where I
belong. If Westerners only value hard work, and by work I mean physical labour,
and there’s no room for wasteful and frivolous pursuits like reading and
painting, where the aim in life is to make money no matter the how, where
traditional values and good Christian living are the norm, then truly I’m not a
Westerner. But this is also a stereotype, and neither is true, so I cannot be
either for I am not false in my identity.
I am a Canadian, truly.
My Canada stretches from ocean
to ocean, from border to Arctic. My Canada has a capital in Ottawa, a
breadbasket in the Prairies, a glory in the Rockies, and a conscience in
Regina. My Canada is a cultural mosaic with two official languages, three
levels of government, and one queen. My Canada has its faults, has made its
mistakes, and has a history of people marginalized and wronged to make up to.
But it is a great place. My Canada is not something to carve up, but something
to work and live for and even, if I may say something decidedly un-Canadian: to brag
about. It’s not to be broken by petty and short-sighted ideological and
geographical squabbles. It is a grand impossibility because the best ideas
should be just a little to big and a little too impossible for fear of being
lost to complacency.
A year ago, a man killed a
soldier, striking violence into the heart of our nation and shaking us as a
people. In Vancouver a week later I shook the hand of a uniformed veteran who
was standing vigilant for a day at a downtown war memorial, tears in his eyes
contagious. Standing there at a spot closer to Phoenix than Ottawa, he was
unified with his brethren in the East.
Yet there were some who
remained unmoved by those events for they were Eastern events, as foreign to
them as the war in Syria. In the Alberta floods of 2013 there was an outpouring
of support and aid from our Eastern family, and yet among them voices that
delighted at seeing a humbling of the loud, wealthy, redneck child in our
Confederation family.
This is not—as I’ve said—a political
or even an ideological post, but I must add that the recent federal election
exposed an ugly side to us that is tied to how we define what a Canadian is.
Forgetting that our nation is a mosaic grown strong because of its diversity,
there are those who would tell us that a Canadian is not a Muslim, not a
Punjabi or Arabic or Chinese speaker, not a woman in a niqab, not a refugee
looking for sanctuary. True, but neither is a Canadian a Christian, a French
or English speaker, a white man in a cowboy hat, or a fourth generation
fisherman. It’s not that simple, you see, but then it also can be, for a
Canadian is a person who lives in Canada, who adds their tile to the fuller
picture.
A Canadian is a person who
understands where this nation has come from in order to help steer it where it
needs to go. A Canadian tries to preserve the whole but understands the
strengths has always been in the adaptability of the parts. A Canadian is not
one who would try to subvert this, try to divide a nation and its people. A
Canadian is neither selective nor exclusive.
My Canada is like a marriage
or a tree or a child. It grows, it changes, it adapts. It must be nurtured and
can never remain as it was for a period forever. To stay unchanging means it
must die. To stop a marriage, a tree, a child at a point is to kill it.
So it goes with a nation. My
Canada is a flawed thing but also a glorious thing worth steering past the
divisions that threaten it. It, and all of us within, will be better for
getting past the chasms to the other side.
