“Our fair Dominion now extends from Cape Race to Nootka Sound. May peace forever be our lot, and plenteous store abound” – Maple Leaf Forever (Canada’s unofficial anthem until the late ‘60s)
One day in university, myself and one of my roommates in our slum apartment near the UVic campus were discussing American politics (I was and remain a bit of a nerd). I remember that when the debate turned to the U.S. military, he accidentally said that “our troops” should be brought home from foreign entanglements.
Similarly, on election night last week, someone on the CBC panel argued that the Democrats do not represent “the majority of Canadians” before quickly correcting herself.
The truth is, many Hosers believe on some level that they are in some way citizens of a broader American empire. This is rarely clearly admitted or articulated, but is revealed in occasional Freudian slips – unintentional errors of speech that reveal subconscious feelings.
This little brother mentality is also apparent in attempts to import American history north – most laughably in the positively desperate desire on the part of some academics to pretend that pre-Confederation Canada had widespread slavery (it didn’t, but just imagine all the flashy American critical race theory conferences our professors could attend if it did!).
We are not the United States. The U.S. was founded as a republic with a Constitution proclaiming that the foremost right of citizens is to chase the “pursuit of happiness”. This hyper-individualistic, blank slate experiment created countless impressive technological innovations, while also giving birth to the capitalist hellscapes of Las Vegas and Disneyland, and thousands of cults. In America, nothing has ever been done in moderation.
Canada is a constitutional monarchy with a Constitution that emphasizes “peace, order, and good government”. Moderation is our middle name. We never dabbled in the idea of an individualistic blank slate country, instead cherishing the cultures of the peoples who joined together in Confederation: English and French Canadians in all their many regional manifestations, and the varied Indigenous peoples.
The founding American mythos is a bunch of rowdies tossing boxes of tea into the Boston harbour to protest a 3-cents-per-pound tea tax. Our founding story is that tens of thousands of Loyalists hated the American Revolutionaries so profoundly that they upped stakes and fled to Canada in horse-drawn wagons.
Our distinctive culture is not purely theoretical. We have the 7th most guns per capita in the world, but nowhere close to the number of mass shooting in the United States. Our most raucous political event in recent years was a bunch of fed up truckers and their supporters honking horns in our capital city. We largely disregard extreme levels of individualism, participating with pride in collective traditions like wearing poppies.
Whether or not you were happy with the results of the American election, we would all do well to remember our roots in this northern Dominion and resist the influence of American mannerisms, values, and even spelling. Let’s be proud of who we are.
Editor’s note: My 500-word Counter Current column is published once every two weeks in the Islands Marketplace paper on Salt Spring Island. This piece will appear in the November 15th, 2024 issue.
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I love that you caught the spelling divergence!
It is true, there are cultural differences. That’s a big topic. To make meaningful observations without reverting to cliches is difficult to do with such a short article. As you point out, our status as a dominion reflects our lingering colonial heritage. Our head of state is still King Charles. Whether this is in any way desirable is up for debate.
By contrast, a constitutional republic is a sovereign state that belongs to the people, free of any overlord such as, in our case, the monarchy. The point of democracy is to have a mechanism for collective decision making. The point of the constitution is to guarantee individual rights and freedoms (which democracy itself cannot do).
The constitution side of things is more fundamental than the democracy side because when we speak of human rights we speak of the rights of the individual. Freedom is not to be confused with individuality. These are two very different things.
Our own constitution is younger than the American prototype and we probably owe a tremendous debt to the founding fathers who recognized the need to enshrine basic human rights in a document that would be foundational to anything built on top of it.
For example – no human should ever be subject to any medication (let alone experimental medication) against their will. My right to say no to mRNA injections is not an expression of my individuality. It is about my sovereignty – very very different.
In Canada there are many people who believe that a moral argument can be made in favour of vaccine mandates – perhaps for doctors and nurses – but this is false. Such mandates should never be permissible in any civilized nation – period.
I know yours is not an article to justify vaccine mandates. I’m only using the example to illustrate a certain kind of collectivist thinking that is our undoing in Canada (or within the “liberal” left side of the spectrum in the US).
In BC we just experienced seven years of the worst governance in the history of the province and yet the political party that declared a bogus emergency, stripped us of our basic rights and enacted insane totalitarian measures (vaccine passports, contact tracing etc.) was rewarded with another mandate to govern. This kind of thing does not reflect well on Canadians and is not something to be celebrated.
There are too many Canadians who imagine it is the role of government to protect the collective from the individual when the very opposite is essential – it ought to be the role of the constitution to protect the individual from the collective. The founding fathers were the first to recognize this and we need their insight here in Canada as much as anywhere else in the world.
The past four years have revealed many of our shortcomings as a nation and a people. It would be too easy to blame the politicians for all that transpired. It will take deep soul searching to heal and to re-build as a nation.
I discuss all this on my channel “Truth Desk”:
https://rumble.com/v5tv1jk-truth-desk-059-reckoning.html
Michael Hey
Salt Spring Island, BC