What’s to Celebrate on Canada Day?

There was a time when I considered myself to be a proud and unapologetic nationalist: Canada, or so I had come to believe, was an exceptional nation, with exceptional values.

Understand that when I spoke of “Canadian exceptionalism,” I did not mean it in the same sense that academics speak of “American exceptionalism;” I did not consider that Canada should be above international law, but that Canada should be treated as a model for international law. It was we who invented peacekeeping; we who respected the Environment; we who worked tirelessly to protect Human Rights, multiculturalism and economic equality through our generous bundle of social programs. Our history was a marked contrast to that of our southern neighbour (the only comparison which, even today, carries any real weight with most Canadians); we’d had no history of slavery, no legacy of genocide against the aboriginals.* And all of this because of we, as Canadians, were nice; because historical circumstances had somehow conspired in such a way as to make Canada fundamentally and unimpeachably good.

What a load of horseshit.

Do you know why Canada didn’t have slavery in colonial days? It’s because Canada’s economy was based on trading furs, for which slaves are completely useless**. That’s pretty much the same reason Canada didn’t engage in genocide (at least, not until much later in our history): if you’re colonizing land, then the people who live there are a hindrance to you; if, on the other hand, you’re harvesting land for furs, then interaction with people who know the land is massively beneficial.

Likewise, as for the moral superiority of modern Canada…well, it was a pretty illusion while it lasted. We now have a government which is openly contemptuous of democracy; which has striven, in every way it can, to disenfranchise opponents, to hush dissent, to bury any inconvenient facts and to drown the population in its sickeningly glurgy vision of Canadian ‘values.’ It has ripped Canada’s parliamentary traditions assunder so thoroughly that I begin to despair that they can never be put back together, and bullied their way into introducing laws which shred any appearance of environmental accountability.  Peacekeeping has become the way of the past; our soldiers go overseas to fight a long, bloody, ultimately unwinnable war in Afghanistan to prop-up the world’s most corrupt autocracy and we are encouraged to cheer them on.  Our national media actively applauds these changes when it’s not flinching away in terror of Stephen Harper’s wrath. Economic inequality continues to seethe and boil; the dream of a comfortable way of life slips further and further out of reach for more and more of the population, but enough people remain behind these policies that there seems no chance of ever reversing them.

So no: Canada is not exceptional.

Canada, like every other nation ever raised by Human hands, is Human and therefore flawed.

So is there any reason to celebrate this Canada Day?

I would argue yes. Perhaps, afterall, once we are denuded of all of our ridiculous nationalistic fantasies, Humanity itself is something that is worth celebrating.

_________________________________________________

*Well…a bit of one, but less so than just about everyone else in the Americas.

**Think about it; imagine arming a bunch of slaves with rifles, axes and provisions, giving them a canoe, letting them paddle-off into the wilderness, and honestly expecting them to come back when their traps are full. It would be ridiculous.