A Dominion Day Reflection on July 4th

Happy belated Canada Day!

I was far too busy on Dominion Day (more popularly known as “Canada Day”) celebrating the real life of Canada with my friends and family to have been able, on that day, to write a reflection on what it means to be Canadian, so here I am doing it on American Independence Day—which seems weirdly appropriate.

Canada is a weird country. It has recently been written off as “not a real country” by Elon Musk and as “an artificial country with very little meaning” by the leader of the third-largest Canadian political party. While Canada used to have some identity as a union of “two nations”, that is, English and French Canada, this identity has been largely supplanted by the idea of the “Canadian mosaic”, in which Canada is a loose union of multicultural immigrants which allows everyone to keep their original culture. And both these versions of our national identity have recently been splashed with blood as the patent injustice that was the residential school system (and, of course, the longstanding deliberate exclusion of our aboriginal peoples from our national identity) has come to light. It’s hard to be proud to be a Canadian right now.

Given this longstanding struggle with what our national identity really is, there isn’t much of a “Canadian culture” to speak of. I often, only half-jokingly, represent Canadian culture as sitting in a donut shop talking about hockey and complaining about our jobs. And we don’t even do that that much anymore, what with the rise of the internet.

All this is in spite of rather a large number of rather significant contributions to the world, not the least of which is hockey… but there too lies a lot of Canadian angst. We let the Americans into the NHL, and now, because they have all the money to buy up all the best Canadian hockey players, Canadian teams almost never win the Stanley Cup. So it goes with so many of our greatest. Many of the most well-known actors and comedians who rise to fame in America are Canadian. William Shatner, Christopher Plummer, Jim Carrey, John Candy, Michael J. Fox, Mike Meyers, Ryan Reynolds… the list goes on and on, and goes even further when famous musicians and inventors are included. Even Elon Musk, for all his denunciation of Canada, spent some of his most formative years here. But success is generally found in the States, rather than in our own country.

Which brings me back to the question of Canadian identity. Who are we? And the most consistent, most long-standing, most universal answer that I think we can give is… We are not Americans.

Not that Canadians dislike Americans. Mostly we don’t dislike them. Most of us even like them, and like them a lot. My father, a proud Canadian, always said that, in all his travels, he found Americans to be the most friendly and open-hearted of all the people he met. But we’re not American. Our country was conceived, even before it began, as “not American”, as refugees from the American revolution made their way north to settle here, and that identity was firmly established in the official founding of our country, even as we adopted our national Latin motto, a mari usque ad mare—from Psalm 72:8, from which we also drew our name, the Dominion of Canada: “His dominion shall be from sea to sea”. Our first great national project was the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a project that was a precondition for getting my province, British Columbia, on board with joining Canada four years after Confederation, and which was considered essential for the settlement of the Canadian prairies—both of which were key moves designed to stop American expansionism to the north.

So, yes, we are very much an artificial country (as are all countries!) with an identify founded on being not American—but that doesn’t mean that our identity is without meaning. All definitions are somewhat arbitrary, and they exist, in fact, to delineate meaning, with one word setting up a “border” to help limit and thus more precisely define another—that artificial process is, in fact, a key part of how we humans begin to perceive meaning in the first place. Words matter, and offering alternatives can not only be healthy but also helpful to both parties involved. Canada offers, as an alternative to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the contrasting tri-colon crescendo of “peace, order, and good government”: we don’t always do a much better job in practice of any of these three, any more than Americans necessarily do a good job of giving everyone equal access to their chosen three ideals, but the alternatives offered here are, in fact, complementary, and not any more in actual opposition to one another than Canadians are to Americans.

And so, here on the Fourth of July, I offer to our rebellious cousins this olive branch: it was, in fact, your decision to rebel that created us, and our alternative, peaceful path to freedom and independence may even be something you might learn from. My father also always used to say, “everyone is of some use, even if only to serve as a horrible example.” I wouldn’t actually apply this to our American cousins, but I do think there are things to be learned from both of the two alternative approaches our related countries have adopted.

And, much as I love “the land of the free and the home of the brave” to the south (and a bit to the north-west) of us, I am happy to have inspired in me “true patriot love” for “the true North, strong and free.” I am proud to be not American, and thus Canadian.