Canadians Read online

  I would think they’d be Canadians out of their element—which is when Canadians often seem to be most Canadian of all.

  Whether it’s overcompensation for insecurity abroad or release from some unwritten rule back home that you Do Not Shout Out Who You Are hardly matters; it happens. You find this Canadian boast plastered on backpacks heading through Europe and across Asia. You find it in foreign airports at gates holding passengers for flights back to Canada. You find it on distant streets and in far-off restaurants where a logo on a ball cap, a city name on a sweatshirt, or the tacking on of an “eh?” at the end of the sentence sparks instant recognition. The ensuing conversation is filled with the familiar touchstones of residence and weather, the names that arise—prime minister and premiers, politicians, hockey players, criminals, newscasters, minor and major personalities in arts and business—known only to those who live in what has been called the cold and empty attic over the United States of America.

  The Canadian Identity, it seems, is truly elusive only at home. Beyond the borders Canadians know exactly who they are; within them they see themselves as part of a family, a street, a neighbourhood, a community, a province, a region and, on special occasions like Canada Day and Grey Cup weekend and, of course, during the Winter Olympics, a country called Canada.

  Beyond the borders, they pine; within the borders, they more often whine.

  Again, the contradiction that is Canada.

  THIS ABIDING PASSION for the red maple leaf is all the more remarkable given what a difficult time it had getting up the flagpole in the first place. While there remains a smattering of Canadians who rue that day in 1965 when the new flag was first raised—largely those who fought under the Red Ensign, plus the odd curmudgeon who’d still rather crank his telephone—the vast, vast majority of the country embraces the national flag.

  Such was not always the case.

  It took Canada forty years to adopt its own flag—relatively quick work considering the 115 years it took to get its own Constitution.

  And as for its national anthem, the tune took a hundred years from the first performance—at, ironically, a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebration— to formal adoption in 1980 by Parliament. By one count the song has been reworked twenty-one times since its debut—the only words not to be tinkered with being “O” and “Canada”—the result being that the only way most of us can get through it is to mumble.

  The flag’s history has its own bizarre twists. According to Rick Archbold’s delightful I Stand for Canada: The Story of the Maple Leaf Flag, a special committee was struck first in 1925 and then again in 1946 to come up with something new. The members picked through thousands of potential designs, but the suggestions either depressed or offended so many of them that both times they decided to just drop the notion altogether.

  The wave of nationalism that preceded Centennial Year, 1967, produced yet another push for a flag to call our own. Whether by design or folly, Prime Minister Lester Pearson chose to announce his intentions in front of a Winnipeg convention of the Royal Canadian Legion. He knew it would be a tough crowd, and it was. They applauded when he called for “a patriotism that will put Canada ahead of its parts”—yet booed the idea of a maple leaf and cheered wildly every time the traditional Red Ensign got mention.

  It’s unlikely, given the times, that the crowd included angry naturalists, but the fact of the matter is that the symbol then being considered, three maple leaves together, involved a species of maple not found west of Ontario. Crabgrass, found in every region and province, would hardly be suitable for a national flag.

  Pearson was accused of “selling us out to the pea-soupers” by those who saw the new flag, lacking any British connection, as a sop to Quebec. He was told to “Go home!” But he kept speaking, and by the time he was finished, reports say, the crowd was largely split on the issue, with virtually as many now cheering as booing the national leader. Encouraged by his Winnipeg reception, Pearson soldiered on.

  There was such resistance to the idea in Parliament, however, that Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker, the day’s most eloquent defender of all connections British, was able to use a filibuster to force Pearson to send the idea off to another parliamentary committee. Diefenbaker likely presumed that if committees could kill the idea twice before, it could happen a third time.

  But this committee was different. It opened the design to everyone from schoolkids to Group of Seven icon A.Y. Jackson. Had the committee swayed one way or another, Canadian backpacks might today have small patches showing a beaver surrounded by her ten kits (symbolizing the ten provinces, of course), a leaping salmon, the perennial moose or, my personal favourite, crossed hockey sticks over a single black puck.

  The red maple leaf proved a popular motif, though Pearson was accused at the time—and I’ve seen this claim repeated in print as recently as a few years ago—of a diabolical Liberal scheme to produce a flag that looked like “Liberal electioneering bunting.” It’s an intriguing point. Each fall I look about the Precambrian Shield forest in which our little cabin sits, but I have yet to come across a Tory blue maple leaf in the cavalcade of colour that is autumn in those parts.

  The flag debate, Archbold notes, was one of the nastiest in Canadian parliamentary history. Diefenbaker, sensing a groundswell against change, was magnificent, but his efforts came to an abrupt end when his own Quebec lieutenant, Léon Balcer, turned on him by asking the Liberal government to bring closure to debate and call a vote. On December 15, 1964, the House of Commons passed the bill 163–78, with many Conservatives, including Balcer, voting with the government.

  Diefenbaker had his own small last laugh, though, in his instructions for his funeral, which took place in the summer of 1979. As stipulated, the Canadian flag draped his coffin but, in a sly symbol of dominance, the Red Ensign draped over a small portion of the red maple leaf.

  Diefenbaker, much to his disappointment, was on the wrong side of this one. The effect of the new flag on the rest of the country was powerful and practically instantaneous. By 1967 Canada’s pre-eminent historian Arthur Lower could say:

  Since the adoption of the new flag, something very interesting has happened to the Canadian psyche, something that probably cannot yet be put into words.… There is nothing in this of turning backs on a hated past, nothing suggesting that old ties were irksome. The point is simply that the country is growing up, coming to see itself as an entity, taking the interest in itself that any organism, to be healthy, must. Each time that the average citizen looks at the new flag, he unconsciously says to himself, “That’s me!”

  WELL, NOT QUITE, SIR. If it were that simple, there would be no Great Canadian Identity Crisis, which would also mean no cottage industry for academics, no need for national and provincial royal commissions, no panel discussions, no CBC town hall meetings—and this book would be about hockey-playing dogs.

  Canadian patriotism is as fickle as Canadian weather. It was on display the day Pierre Trudeau took his final train journey; it flares periodically at sporting events, on certain holidays and, most assuredly, whenever tragedy strikes the Canadian armed forces.

  There is some thought, though, that it has been on the rise in recent years, owing not so much to Canadian success at the Winter Games as to … beer ads.

  The best example began in 2000 when Molson televised the first of its Great Canadian Rants, starring an actor who came to be known as “Joe Canadian.” Casually dressed and standing in front of a simple, squealing microphone, Joe railed against a string of American false assumptions about his country before closing off with the defiant shout “MY NAME IS JOE—AND I AM CANADIAN!”

  The Joe Canadian ad became a national sensation, shown for months on arena scoreboards and as loudly cheered at hockey games as the three stars. A couple of years later Molson’s sold out to Coors, the American beer company. Joe’s Great Canadian Rant was, suddenly, just another American product.

  EVEN SO, this notion of defining oneself in terms of what one
isn’t—the Joe Canadian rant readily boiling down to “I am not American”—remains the quickest and simplest reflection in the national mirror.

  Author Pierre Berton is often credited with the most novel definition— “A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe”—and often argued that being not American does matter and shouldn’t be dismissed, as others would have it, as some backward, negative notion that does more harm than good.

  Not long before his death in late 2004, Berton talked to his old friend Peter Newman about the outrage he felt about the takeover of Canada’s iconic CPR hotel chain—including Quebec’s Château Frontenac, Ottawa’s Château Laurier, and the world-famous Banff Springs Hotel— by the American-based Fairmont chain. It was important to preserve those things that separate Canadians from Americans, he believed, whether it be public policy or culture. Canadians, he argued, are different in background and geography and even dreams, and it is important to protect these dreams “or we won’t have a country at all.”

  Canadians spend so much time spinning this Rubik’s Cube of national identity that it has, from time to time, captured the attention of outsiders, usually Americans. At a Pittsburgh gathering of the Association of Canadian Studies a few years ago, Tom Barnes of the University of California suggested to a Toronto Star reporter that Canada needs to quit fretting so much. “Why all the angst, for God’s sake? Why? Why? Why?”

  At the time, Canadian bookstore shelves were featuring such titles as Canada in Question, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, The Anxious Years, and former prime minister Joe Clark’s A Nation Too Good to Lose.

  “How can you lose a nation?” Barnes asked.

  Perhaps the question isn’t so much losing it as finding it in the first place. No one seems to know exactly where to look. Or, for that matter, what to look for….

  Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi won the 2002 Booker prize, described his country as the world’s greatest “hotel” while stressing that, to him, it’s one of the more admirable qualities of the nation. “You bring your own cultural baggage with you,” Martel said, “and the government provides room service, heat, water and, on television, those quaint Heritage Minutes.”

  Even if he means no harm, I think Martel sells both the country and its citizens short, but much worse has been said. Richard Rodriguez, an American commentator, once told the Canadian Library Association that “Canada is the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist.” Even some Canadians would say the equivalent. When Lucien Bouchard was premier of Quebec he once argued that “Canada is divisible because Canada is not a real country.”

  Matt Jackson would beg to disagree.

  Jackson is neither an academic nor a politician, but a hitchhiker. Not long ago he completed a four-year trek through this country, travelling by thumb, car, truck, van, canoe, horseback, Twin Otter, and sail. When he returned to his Calgary home he published a small book of his photographs and notes, freely admitting that he’d been unable to find any simple and convenient definition.

  “I think I had this grand notion when I set off,” Jackson told the Calgary Herald, “that I would cover the country and discover the Canadian identity. And really … I found that we’re very different all over, so I don’t know that there’s one thing that ties everybody together completely…. I think that Canada is a lot more exotic than we give it credit for.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  Four

  The Wind That Wants a Flag

  “WHY ALL THE ANGST?” the academic from California asked. “Why? Why? Why?”

  Here’s why—or at least part of the reason why. In the autumn following the demise of the Meech Lake Accord, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced the establishment of a Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future. The commission was struck in response to continued criticism over the manner in which constitutional reform had been handled. It would travel the country, hearing out what were called “ordinary Canadians.”

  It became the catchphrase of the times and inadvertently underlined the very problem the political and media elite had stumbled up against in trying to push the accord through without the slightest thought of public input. To far too many supposedly intelligent observers, the term meant “stupid, dull citizens”—people with little education, no power and, for that matter, no personality. Ordinary. Unimportant. The masses. The very phrase, to the establishment, called up images of farmers with flat, uninteresting faces, suburban dwellers with insignificant jobs and dead imaginations, seniors with nothing to do but gripe, office workers more worried about their lawns than their jobs, truck drivers thinking about their next stop, taxi drivers who never shut up and never say anything, airport security workers bitching about who’s late coming back from break….

  It was a telling misread of their own country.

  THAT THE PEOPLE were outraged by the Meech Lake process, and remained so, was undeniable in the fall and winter of 1990–91. There was a fury in “the peaceable kingdom.”

  Looking back after so many years, the vitriol surprises me—even my own. “Angry” is not a word normally used to describe the daily column I have written now for four different newspapers. Stupid at times, insightful once in a while … sentimental, silly, sensible on a good day. But not “angry.” And yet, there it is right in the headline over the column I filed for the Ottawa Citizen on June 5, 1990: “The People Will Repay Our Devious Politicians.”

  It was the week Mulroney and the Canadian premiers had come to Ottawa for one last-ditch push on the accord that was scheduled to become law on June 23, 1990, now less than three weeks away. Three years earlier the deal had begun as a worthy attempt to bring Quebec into the Constitution Act it had refused to sign in 1982. But in execution it had evolved into a firestorm of controversy as critics, including Pierre Trudeau, argued that “distinct society” status for Quebec would unravel the very idea of ten equal provinces joined together in Confederation.

  By June 1990 the accord had come to symbolize an arrogance and an elitism that clearly rubbed the people the wrong way. It had become eleven men in suits deciding, behind closed doors, for an entire country that was denied any say at all. Those who were fronting the accord were saying it had no “egregious error” and couldn’t possibly be opened to discussion. The lone premier who was balking, Newfoundland’s Clyde Wells, was being beat up by the others to the point where the rumours around the Congress Centre had him in tears and on the verge of a mental collapse—merely because he dared challenge some of the premises behind the deal his predecessor had signed three years earlier.

  Before the week was out, the prime minister—using everything from heartfelt persuasion to, some said, control over bathroom breaks— managed to get the premiers to push on to the final date for confirmation, though Wells had insisted on an asterisk to his signed agreement. Two days later, Mulroney, already accused of gambling with the future of the country, would hold his famous interview in which he likened the constitutional gambit to knowing when to “roll the dice”—even further infuriating the people.

  Canada seemed very much in the midst of one of those “cataclysmic events” that Andrew Malcolm suggested the country had somehow missed in its history.

  The prime minister was saying Canada itself was at stake. And there was something about the arrogance of the closed meetings and the irrational sky-will-fall threats, something about that pretentious word “egregious,” that had seriously teed me off.

  In that column I contended that the media was missing the story by concentrating on the prime minister, the premiers, their spin doctors, and the various scrums that took place in and around the Congress Centre. “The big story is out among the people,” I wrote, “and it is a tale of such fury and anger that God be with the first of these secretive and devious politicians that dares call an election and ask the people what they think about the way things have been going. Somewhere, sometime, the people will have their revenge.”

  It did not
take long to begin. The failure of Meech led directly to the emergence of the Bloc Québécois, when a handful of disenchanted members of Parliament, both Conservative and Liberal, decided to give up on Canada, combine forces, and work toward sovereignty for Quebec. Meanwhile, the anger “ordinary” Westerners felt was pivotal in the now-soaring fortunes of the Reform Party that had been founded in 1987. Parliament itself was about to change dramatically.

  Before that first summer was out Ontario premier David Peterson, barely three years into his mandate, called a snap election—and was flattened by the New Democratic Party under Bob Rae. Some survived their next elections and some went down to crushing defeat, none quite so dramatically as the Conservative government itself. In the 1993 federal election the two great majorities of Brian Mulroney evaporated into a mere two seats; among the defeated was Kim Campbell, the leader who for a few short breaths had replaced Mulroney upon his retirement. None of the English-Canadian originals survived their support for the accord: within a little more than three years all were gone from office. It became known as “The Curse of Meech.”

  Ordinary Canadians, it turned out, were in an extraordinary and lasting snit.

  MULRONEY NAMED KEITH SPICER to chair the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future. Spicer had once been Commissioner of Official Languages and had gained more ink in that job—thanks, in no small part, to an equally brilliant young assistant named Michael Enright—than any commissioner since. It had been Spicer, with Enright’s help, who had coined the phrase “Westmount Rhodesians” to make the point that for bilingualism to work, everyone had to buy into it.