My Canada

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.