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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 2, 2001
Who are we?
I wrote last week a piece controversial even by my own fairly aggressive standards on the shame and disgust I feel as a Canadian in this moment of our history. It was an attack on the Chretien government more broadly on a ruling party that is profoundly cynical and corrupt but I did not exempt myself nor my fellow Canadians from collaboration in this state of affairs. "We allow it to desecrate our past and demoralize our present." The responses to this column which are still coming in have been instructive. I think I have already received more e-mails and other communications about it than about anything I have ever written. This did not entirely surprise me. What I could not expect is that by a huge margin the letters were on my side. I was struck especially by the number of people most of them complete strangers who wrote something like You were speaking for me. Among the small number of the outraged at least those writing to me personally the message was Why don't you move to the States? or You are a right-wing nutcase. How the hell did you get a job with a Canadian news organization? In other words what I've been familiar with for years people who cannot confute my arguments and therefore demand I be suppressed. But there was a third category perhaps the most telling. These were people who more-or-less agreed with what I was saying but felt the need to correct what they imagined to be historical inaccuracies. In particular I was told again and again that I was wrong to think Canada had any choice in going to war in 1939 since the country was then a British colony. In further exchange with several of these people I learned that they had been taught in school that Canada was "a British colony" until -- it varied from person to person --"1945" or "the late fifties" or "the sixties" or most commonly 1982 . This last was the year when the Trudeau government "patriated" the Canadian constitution. I was astounded not only by this ignorance but by the persistent argument that "everybody knows" or that "we all learned that in school" etc. Even when I gave references several correspondents were disinclined to believe that they had been taught nonsense. In one case I fear I may have triggered something like a nervous breakdown. The young writer acknowledged that he had been quite wrong but added You have attacked my whole identity. I've just realized that everyone I've ever respected was lying to me. For the record (and you may go read the history for yourself) this business about Canada being a colony in 1939 is not merely wrong it is malignant nonsense. It is a post-Centennial post-Atwood rewritten history of Canada; what I would call the "Pearson flag" version. Canada sovereign and self-governing from 1867 won its independence in all other respects at Vimy Ridge in the Great War of 1914--18. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 confirmed in constitutional law what was already well-established in fact. Canada most certainly did not have to declare war on Germany in 1939. Moreover even our previous adherence to the British Empire was in the cause of an "empire federationism" through which we Canadians and fellow "British subjects" expected to inherit leadership of the Empire from the English in the fullness of time. That particular "great white hope" -- embraced by Stephen Leacock and so many of his generation as the foundation of their Canadian patriotism -- perished in the Great War so that from the 1920s we no longer looked to Westminster for anything beyond the occasional Privy Council ruling on e.g. some vexed matter of Dominion-provincial jurisdiction. Prime Ministers Pearson Trudeau Chretien even Mulroney to some extent have presided over a rewriting of Canadian history. Starting with Lester Pearson's arguably benign programme to "build" a new Canadian identity around a new Canadian flag we have come to disown our actual and rather proud past; and to replace it with something delusionary -- a kind of glib pomo fairytale version parallel to that observed by the poet Philip Larkin in the people who thought that sex was invented in 1963. If you are curious about our actual history and have time to read just one book may I recommend The Kingdom of Canada by W.L. Morton. The first edition was written and published before the Pearson era and the second (of 1969) remains soundly free of his Liberal-party "Canadian nationalist" agenda. If you are under the age of say fifty you may need it to correct what you were taught in school. I wish everyone could also see the six-part documentary No Price Too High by the Canadian film producers Deanne Judson and Richard Nielsen from 1997. It is probably the best historical film ever made in this country founded on a very broad research effort and using extraordinary National Film Board and other archival footage. Alas owing to the usual "politically correct" resistance from the CBC it has probably been shown more often in the United States. For people who were not there it depicts a Canada that responded spontaneously and heroically to a tremendous challenge and next to Britain itself played the major international role in the resistance to Nazism between 1939 and Pearl Harbour. And as for those British we armed them we fed them we cheered them we shamed the Yankees into sending convoys of supplies. We did not have to be drafted; we lied about our ages to sign up at seventeen. And yes we were loyal to our king his majesty the King of Canada. The idea of "Canada the Good Canada as Peacekeeper Canada the Multicultural" -- is in historical terms an aggregation of lies and delusions. The real history is far more interesting and far less smug. But we have been ruled for most of two generations by a party that has done everything in its power to replace this history this identity with something shallowly feelgood happyface and vague. It has done this for the cynical purpose of cornering the vote from the vast new immigrant constituencies. It is right that new immigrants should be made to feel at home. It is wrong that we should sacrifice our very Canadian identity to appease them -- so that today we do not even know who we are. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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