WHY CANADA
Friday, July 1, 2011
today’s Musing written and published from Cranston in south- east Calgary, near the Bow River valley
Morning walk: 9C/48F, clear skies and spectacular mountain panorama as we walked the ridge-route; Gusta greeted walkers, runners, bikers and off-leash dogs with equal enthusiasm while my left shoulder’s rotator cuff felt the torque of her straining dog-sled style pulling to connect. Freshness and watching rafters float down the Bow was a great start to a slow holiday morning.
I thought I would set aside normal inclinations to boast about our brand of freedom, our scarcely visible but positively real patriotism, tribute to our armed forces serving nobly as well as their fallen (seems odd, doesn’t it, to be thinking of freshly fallen soldiers in peace-time but Afghanistan has brought us that sad joy).
I could wax about why I remember May 2nd, 1670 (the date King Charles I granted a charter to The Company Of Adventurers Trading Into Hudson’s Bay . . . now known as the Hudson’s Bay Company) or the boldly worn pride of new Canadians who will be sworn in as citizens today, or the current visit of Will and Kate . . .
But I would rather write about something more significant – vowels.
Yes, vowels. Vowels seem to have taken on new meaning in our society and in our language. For instance: i-Pad, U-TUBE, DIY, 4ever, 2U2, 4NR, FAT, 2G2G4G, OOO, IMO, FYI, STFU
You get the picture? They permeate our life in abbreviations and anagrams, like ROFLMAO and LOL etc. like road signs that convey meaning without a word spoken, often without a word at all (imagine a sign in the shape of an octagon – we stop without regard to whether it is painted red or has letters like stop, or arrêt).
So, I was thinking, in tribute to today’s holiday, about a new version:
A-CANADA (a.ka. eh-CANADA)
E-CANADA (on a per/capita basis, we use computers, email and ATM’s ..a.ka. e-CASH more than any other country)
i-CANADA (ditto for use of iPHONE, iPAD etc. ..)
O-CANADA (our national anthem), also pronounced OH-Canada which is not a tribute to Canadian actress Sandra Oh, though it could be because she is very good and we should be proud of her, or of our anthem’s composer Calixa Lavallée
u-CANADA (I think this labels our self-reliance and independent nature as well as U-HAUL ever could)
Y-CANADA (this is more complicated . . . )
Y, WHY-CANADA?
Exactly? What is it? What is it to you? To me? To the world?
What defines us?
My country celebrates, Canada Day, anniversary of when, in 1867, our founding fathers of confederation first coalesced as a country. Most Canadians, myself included, are descendants of people who came much later. My grandfather, Eduard, arrived at Ellis Island in New York 1910 and later came to Canada after first settling in Minnesota. He, his bride and his brothers lived and farmed in the Outram area of south-eastern Saskatchewan south of Estevan. They came to Canada for the opportunity to work hard and develop the prairie in exchange for free land, a magnet that drew so many from eastern Europe in those days.
I am a 2nd generation Canadian. I was born in Estevan and moved to Alberta in 1960 when my dad got a job in Red Deer. I’ve been an Alberta resident ever since (Red Deer, Calgary, Carseland, Edmonton, St. Albert, Stony Plain, Edmonton, Calgary). While I have dreams of living in a warmer place for a large portion of the year, that is out of a desire for winter-avoidance and paradise-enjoyment as opposed to renouncing citizenship.
Our country, as a land, is as old as earth. Our first-nations citizens have been here for millennia. But, for most Canadians, we feel our country is very young. Compared to the U.S., Europe and China . . . our culture, our history and our brand of citizenship is very young indeed. Our citizens (except for the war of 1812 where the British beat back American invaders), have never had to fight to defend our country. While we have a proud history of our soldiers going to foreign soil to fight wars, defend freedom or to keep the pace, the closest we’ve ever come to being invaded by a threatening force was during WWII when one of Hitler’s U-boats prowled the St. Lawrence Seaway . . .
No country with a brain could contemplate taking us over, patrolling our borders or purporting to harness us, or direct us, or resolve any of our insoluble problems. Yes, we have problems. We throw solutions at them, like any other country, and progress comes slowly. As Mao Tse Tung once said to Charles De Gaulle, commenting on his boasts about the society produced by the French Revolution after nearly two hundred years, “we’ll see”.
We do not, as a country, have the luxury at looking back at a long history over many hundreds or thousands of years. We are at times naiive, at times inundated by influences (ie: American culture/media), the determination of our partners (NAFTA, NATO, UN), but mostly we are influenced by the richness that so many, often arriving with scarcely the shirts on their backs, brought with them – thirst for opportunity, need for a safe place to work and raise their family, and a place to appreciate and celebrate their ethnicity and cultural history they brought from all over the world. This is a country that has never done melting-pot very well. We have, however, mastered the art of open-arms, open-borders and open-hearts.
I was heartened this morning – a long quiz in the paper – questions to test our knowledge of Canada. I got two wrong. I didn’t know the composer of O Canada and I didn’t know the oldest dinosaur bone’s in Canada were found in Nova Scotia – in the Bay of Fundy, very near the home of my favourite food, the Digby scallop (but since I bought some yesterday at Billingsgate I think I deserve part marks for that).
Y-Canada, why Canada?
We’ll see!
Happy Canada Day.
Mark Kolke
311,360
