I’ve always had a little trouble celebrating Canada Day.
[rssbreak]Once, when I was a kid playing the bugle in the Scarborough Firefighters Drum and Bugle Corps, out near Highland Creek, I fainted during the ceremony just as we were playing O Canada. There was some vomiting, too.
It was as though my spirit rose up and my body fell, bugle and all, to the hot tar beneath. In later years, as I got to know a little bit of what I thought was Canada’s history, I wondered if the upchucking wasn’t a kind of primal protest.
After all, here was a country that was quickly axing its way through what was left of our forests and its creatures and selling them off at fire-sale rates. The same nation inflicted a head tax on the Chinese, turned away Jews fleeing the Holocaust and incarcerated citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War. Who was going to stand on guard for that?
Then there are the aboriginal Canadians whose many nations back when I was a kid were portrayed as shrunken and defeated and as having left no imprint on the singular European-derived monoculture that replaced them.
No wonder I fainted. The marvel is that the whole band didn’t hit the tar face first.
Now, all of the above is mainly true. But then I discovered John Ralston Saul’s latest book, A Fair Country. And I’m ready to rethink our national creation myths.
“Stop the whitewash!” he shouts. For 250 of Canada’s 400 ?years, First Nations were the dominant force on the continent – and they’ve handed down every quality we like about ourselves.
Take our immigration system. We accept far more newcomers than any other nation in the world. And more of them stay to become citizens.
“You find the roots of that in aboriginal civilizations,” he told a crowd earlier this year at the Toronto Dollar Supper Club. “You don’t find this anywhere else in Western civilizations.”
The Europeans introduced the idea of race and the melting pot, but “long before they succeeded at that, they started adapting to aboriginal ideas of the circle, the inclusionary circle: you bring people in and the circle enlarges and changes shape,” he says.
And then there’s our tendency to keep talking about things without resolving them. Our Constitution, for instance. It still hasn’t been ratified. We’re still haggling over it. Saul explains this as an extension of the aboriginal practice of whinging on, no matter how long, until consensus is reached.
We’ve even enshrined aboriginal oral traditions in our legal system. Several times in recent years the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of native land claims based upon the memory of spoken agreements as recounted by native elders.
“With that,” says Saul, “the Supreme Court rejected the whole Western tradition of written law in favour of oral memory. No other Western country has done that.”
It all sounds romantic, I know. And of course, there still is that other Canada, of Ipperwash and residential schools. No, I wasn’t marching July 1, but for the Metis nation we all are, I did take out my bugle and give it a bit of a wary ta-da.3
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