This post is a bit of a departure from my usual music related stuff, but I thought this issue warranted enough attention to make my opinion public.
First let me say that this post has not been driven by a new found obsession with Britain. While I like this tiny island I have decided to temporarily call home, there are number of issues that drive me to the brink of insanity.
Rather, this post is brought on by some reflection caused by a good friend of mine who I've had a few discussions with on the topic of Canadian-isms. As a fellow Canuck who has relocated overseas, he has very strong views on where Canada is heading, and why it's somewhere people only go when they are securely fastened into handbaskets. Following a discussion a few weeks ago on this subject, he sent me this article, which is a few years old, and is an American's view of Canada following Bush Jr's re-election in 2004.
I should start by saying that this isn't going to be a comparison post. I'm not going to pre-occupied with how our Southern neighbours fare on the issues I want to discuss. For once, I'm going to try and look at my homeland objectively. To divorce it from the international sphere of influence, and to figure out what's going on in my head.
My first reaction to the above linked article was a defensive one. I mean who is this Matt Labash to criticize Canada? He's only spent a short period of time in the Great White North, but he thinks he has it all figured out by reading a few articles by pundits who have put no more thought into it than himself. Then I realized I was being silly. I mean why should I take offense at an article written 3 years ago, by someone I've never heard of? Then I realized that my defensiveness was based on insecurity. Maybe this Labash character just may have something. Despite his gross exaggerations about the state of our healthcare, our comedians, and the quality of our musicians, he's right on the mark in a number of other areas. He's dead on about our insecurity, which is coupled with an inferiority complex caused by our geographical isolation next to that behemoth of modern culture, the US of A. Canadians are far to pre-occupied by how we fare in relation to our Southern neighbour to tackle the problems that have become endemic in our society. We constantly uphold our universal healthcare, our cultural mosaic, and the respect we have been given internationally as being better than what goes on in the US. This "well at least we're better than them" attitude keeps us from looking at the problems we have. If I decide to have children, I'm going to try and instill in them a principle that I use to hold, but has been forgotten for too long, that principle is that it doesn't matter what other people do, just do your best. This is a principle that we Canadians lost about 40 years ago when we decided as a group that as long as we were better than the Americans it was good enough.
It is this smugness that I want to discuss. I don't want to get into individual issues as I'm not nearly educated enough to debate them with vigour and facts. However, as someone who spent the majority of his life living in Canada, working in Canada, and learning in Canada, interacting with people from all walks of life, I think that I'm sufficiently educated to address the attitude that prevails across much of the country.
Where did this smug attitude towards the rest of the world begin? I think it has something to do with the 1950s. Lester B. Pearson, in my opinion the greatest Prime Minister our country has ever had, actually attempted to be a principled leader. His drive to help build peace in the mid-east and his commitment to the democratic aims of the United Nations gave Canadians a sense of pride. This was helped by the international recognition that Pearson received when he was awarded the International Peace Prize. Canadians, rightfully so, felt good about themselves. Felt that we were doing the right thing, and that we were part of some larger force for good in the world. This feeling began turning to a feeling of superiority when our Southern brothers began their violent quests in Vietnam and Latin America during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We were better than that, we were "peace keepers", we were committed to the fraternity of humanity, and look, we had been given a prize for it, so it must be true. We allowed ourselves to commit the greatest sin a society can do, and that is to think that it has already achieved all that it needs to. As the years went by, we clung to this belief that we were better than others. When coupled with our insecurity and inferiority complex, this belief became all that was necessary. As long as we held to our principles of universal healthcare, international peace, and cultural tolerance (a horrible word I know), then we were better than the rest. But the fact of the matter is that while we were paying token verbal tributes to the principles that had been given to us by our predecessors, we let our actions deviate from those principles, and scarcely thought about them, because we still saw ourselves as superior.
We have watched as our healthcare system has crumbled stone by stone, but have been immobilized by our belief that "it's better than the Americans'".
We watched as genocide erupted in Rwanda, and now Sudan, and we did nothing. But that was ok, because we were "peace keepers" and even had people stationed in these areas so that they could keep an eye on things without actually getting involved. The fact that we haven't played a significant role in peacekeeping operations since the 1950s doesn't stop us from patting ourselves on the back in this area.
We claimed to be a country that cared about the environment, as evidence by our pristine national parks and wide open spaces. Yet we pollute more per capita than any other country on the planet. And those parks? a small group of Canadian actually try to maintain them, while a larger group tries to cut them down for their raw materials.
We committed to the Kyoto protocol and then did nothing about it for a decade. And when we were called on this inaction by the international community, we elected a government that would tuck tail and run, blaming our inaction on the previous government and making more empty promises.
We claimed to be leaders in International aid and development, the fact that we committed less than 1% of government spending to this endeavour, and practically dismantled our government agency for disbursing this money didn't matter as long as our Prime Minister could get good photo-ops with his counterparts in the developing world.
We pride ourselves on being a space for dialogue on issues of international importance, but then attempt to silence speakers we don't like (remember that Israeli PM who tried to take part in a discussion at Concordia?).
But most troubling for me is how we treat our fellow Canadians. Ever since the underground railroad, Canada has prided itself on being a bastion of tolerance, and this was coupled with our devotion to multi-culturalism enshrined during the Trudeau years. Yet Canada remains a haven of intolerance. Forget the Nazi war criminals that have hidden in our suburbs for 60 years, we still keep Native Canadians shackled to reserves and then get violently upset when they start complaining about their state of affairs (see Burnt Church, Oka, and others). Immigrants, particularly those of non-english speaking countries, continue to fare worse on national standard of living indexes. But that's ok, because we "allow them to be themselves", unless of course they are Muslim and want to live in rural Quebec, where they have to abide by bigoted city pronouncements.
While urban Canada, particularly the centres of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver have become multi-cultural leaders, by force rather than by choice; rural Canada remains an insular, backwards society where bigotry keeps a low profile but still makes the final decisions. Try being a minority in Ponoka, Alberta or a homosexual in Norwich, Ontario to see what I mean.
So why don't we dispense with our holier than thou attitude and address the problems at hand. Let's face it, life isn't a competition. There are no points for being the best country in the world on any given issue. Being better than others doesn't negate the existence of our own problems. Instead of paying lip service to our arguably glorious past, lets look towards creating a magnificent future. But we can only do this if we stop looking around to see how others are doing, and just worry about being as we good as we can be.
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