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COMMENTARY
August 2, 2008
Belongings
Did you know, that what is called Colonel By Day in Ottawa -- Monday of the long weekend that has now commenced -- is called Simcoe Day in Toronto? Quite possibly you did know that. But did you also know that it is called McLaughlin Day in Oshawa, Joseph Brant Day in Burlington, John Galt Day in Guelph, and Alexander Mackenzie Day in Sarnia? That it is called New Brunswick Day in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan Day in Saskatchewan, and British Columbia Day in British Columbia? That it is called Natal Day in Nova Scotia, and Heritage Day in Alberta? Or that, in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, it is known as Civic Holiday? (Okay, I’ll stop now.)My own preference, as a traditionalist in these matters, would have been to call it Civic Holiday everywhere, or better yet, August Bank Holiday, since that is slightly more poetic. For a traditionalist, on balance, and after long consideration, will probably choose no heritage over a fake one. Which is not to say that Colonel By, Lord Simcoe, Chief Brant, or any of the other honoured gentlemen were not fine fellows, worthy of patriotic recollection. The man who built the Rideau Canal, with what soon became Ottawa at one end, is estimable indeed. John Graves Simcoe was the founding Lieutenant-Governor of our province who, incidentally, began abolishing slavery more than half a century before this admirable liberal idea caught on among our neighbours to the south. And a Mohawk leader (Thayendanegea, alias Joseph Brant) who has gone down in American folklore as the perpetrator of atrocities against revolutionist Yankee settlers has got to be a hero up here. (It should be mentioned that the Iroquois raids into what is now USA were in their nature retaliatory, and were anyway sanctioned by lawful British authority.) As a loyal Central Canadian, or “Upper Canadian” more precisely -- to say nothing of the initials U.E.L. -- I look west to e.g. my dear friends in Alberta and am inclined to ask them: What heritage? The province was only discovered the other day, and then only because it was on the way to the other ocean. We look forward to the day when they will be able to find themselves a proper noun! (Um, that was an example of affectionate ribbing, which I expect to be answered not with lawsuits, but in kind.) Truth is, I’m merely allergic to the word “heritage.” I will use the word, under duress, when no other seems to present itself. But without a plausible adjective affixed, it suggests a terrible emptiness. It suggests, too forcefully, the Canada of today -- the Canada of “multiculturalism” and the Mall Culture -- with a heritage that now consists of having disowned our heritage. For as our kids are taught in school, the old Canada was “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobic,” miscellaneously “intolerant” -- and best of all, Imperialist. They were taught that nothing happened here until suddenly, in 1982, Pierre Trudeau declared independence from Britain and gave us this sleigh load of charter rights. How can we claim ownership of things we have thrown away? No municipal ordinance, and not even a dress-up party in stage historical costumes, can supply what for instance the Americans still have: a nation, and even a student body, at least vaguely aware of the historical circumstances in which their nation came to be; a shared pride in America’s various accomplishments. And a shared shame in her flaws and failures, too. For by no means is anyone’s history entirely happy, unless it has been made up from scratch. Civic identity -- the sense of belonging to a city, province, nation -- is like any familial relation. There is bad mixed with the good, but the very mark of belonging is to feel some pride when your countryman does well, and “to feel his pain” when he doesn’t. This is an attitude, a habit of mind, that remains fairly robust today in sports events. We will cheer when a Canadian wins a medal at Beijing, we will groan if he misses. But it has largely disappeared from other areas of civic endeavour. And it is no coincidence that sports provides the one arena in our collective lives where an unapologetic elitism still prevails, and equalitarianism has still not been imposed, to create a uniform glaze of mediocrity. Shallow it may be, but in that one surviving pageant, my reader may still begin to descry the heart of civic virtue, and the roots of honour.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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