Telling lies about Canada

Every country has its myths, based on its history, its character, or its perception of its place among the nations. Why should Canada be an exception?

It is not. Canada’s myths arise from our vast geography, our disinclination to join the United States in rebelling against a British heritage, and our retention of French and British cultures in a mix but not a mould that includes original peoples and later arrivals from around the world.

The myths that spring from a nation’s experiences are not necessarily entirely false. They usually contain a considerable degree of truth.

It is for this reason, on this Canada Day July 1st 2009, the 142nd since Confederation, that I quarrel with Doug Saunders of The Globe and Mail, over his article Lies Our Country Told Us. (I’d link you to it, but none seems available.)

Mr. Saunders says, “We are not the Canada we think we are. The country of our imagination — northern, colonial, rooted in a history of British settlement and only recently becoming pluralistic and multihued — is an illusion.”

He goes on to cite several of what he terms “lies” to buttress his argument.

I’m here to say I disagree with him on every one of them. Let’s take these so-called “lies” (or myths) one by one:

• “We are a northern nation.”

Not a lie.

Mr. Saunders argues that we lag way behind Norway and Russia in developing our north. And it’s never, he asserts, “been a major part of the Canadian identity.”

Tell that to Pierre Berton! He was born and raised in the Yukon and many of his 50 books provide telling narratives of how the North has figured prominently in Canadian life. Those like Klondike and The Mysterious North are as gripping and readable today as when they were written. 

Or Ken McGoogan, author of romantic histories of the Arctic, such as Race to the Polar Sea and Ancient Mariner.

Of course, we’ve not used slave labor to built vast cities in the sub-Arctic, as the Soviet Union did.

But we’re pulling out oil and gas, gold, diamonds, furs and fish from the North. We’re asserting our Arctic sovereignty. And we’re trying to ensure a better future for the native Inuit and First Nations people of the region.

• “We are the People of 1867.”

Not a lie.

In suggesting this statement is a lie, Mr. Saunders tries to knock down the incontrovertible fact that Canada as a modern nation came into being in a Confederation designed expressly to accommodate the formerly warring communities of the English and the French.

He makes much of the fact that Canada had a heavy out-migration from 1867 to the early 1900s. That’s true, and many New England communities are today made up in the main of the descendants of French Canadians who moved to the mills of Boston and other towns for a better life. But countless hundreds of thousands of others stayed.

It is true, as Mr. Saunders says, that our population growth took off in the Laurier era when “stout men in sheepskin coats” — immigrants from eastern Europe — began to populate the prairies. A natural outgrowth of Canada having claimed for itself the relatively empty Northwest. The newcomers joined a country where being English dominated everything.

• “First we were colonial, then we became multicultural.”

Not a lie.

On this so-called “lie”, Mr. Saunders makes the weakest case of all. He cites research by Peter Henshaw, a University of Western Ontario historian, to argue that multiculturalism was promoted by English Canada as early as the 1930s. Henshaw names Governor General John Buchan as a chief architect. The motive, allegedly, was to weaken any true Canadian nationalism by mixing it up with a lot of competing loyalties.

My recollection of my school days in that era was that the Empire was everything, everything had to be British, and to be a Canada Firster was almost to be disloyal. There was no room for any other culture.

I don’t think a conspiratorial injection of multiculturalism ever figured into things.

Beginning in the 1960s, Canada changed from having been a mean and narrow country, drowned in the rigid strictures of Protestantism outside Quebec, and Catholicism inside, to a more generous, forward-looking, and liberated land of diversity, tolerance, and freedom of choice.

Our postwar immigration, our shedding of most of the vestiges of colonialism, and the entrenchment of multiculturalism as a core Canadian principle, made it all possible.

As we celebrate this Canada Day, there’s no need to tell lies about Canada. The truths we hold in common are the glue that will keep us together.