Remaking Canada

Tomorrow will be the 135th Dominion Day, for those of us who believe the Canadian state was founded in 1867; and the 20th Canada Day, for those who believe it was founded in 1982.

As I've grown older, and made my own adjustments to developments in my "home and native land," I've come to recognize two nations. One is not English and the other French; rather, both are bilingual, and one of them is also bicultural. The other, to confuse the matter, is officially "multicultural" -- which means, I think, that it has and intends to admit to no culture at all.

There is also a confusion of tense; perhaps I should say that one of these nations is more in the past, the other in the present and immediate future. The year 1982 makes a good enough marker between them, for it was the year in which the former Canada was in some sense finally legislated out of existence, its constitution and its political and legal heritage overwritten by a new document, a new, "patriated constitution" (surreal idea) assembled here but passed into law by the House of Commons at Westminster.

My reader will see that I am trying to find the boundary between these two radically different, but strangely overlapping nations. It is hard to be precise, because the forces which created the New Canada, the "designer Canada" that was meant to replace the "organic Canada" into which I was born, had long been operating within that Old Canada. You can read its kittenish mewing in the works of that old bore, Frank Underhill, or in the pages of the Canadian Forum in the 1930s -- a kind of empty, frustrated, northern chauvinism crying to be hatched loose into the world; then demanding with ever increasing stridency that the country begin a kind of "long march" towards various socialist and nationalist, utopian, bureaucratic schemes.

Nationalism and socialism are forms of spilt religion. They are among the travesties that men turn to when they lose sight of God.

This nationalist force disappeared into the war effort of 1939-45, then re-emerged in the swelling civil service of the 1950s. It called itself "progressive" and "forward-looking," disarming resistance with its claim to be inevitable. And eventually it spread even through the general public: this movement to tailor-make a New Canada that would be "unBritish" and "unAmerican" and unhistorical; that would be many negatives and nothing positive; "the just society" -- gathering steam legislatively under prime minister Lester Pearson in the 1960s.

There was a divisive flag debate of 1964, when the Pearson government replaced the old Red Ensign under which my father and his father had sailed to the battlefields of Europe. They substituted the present maple leaf between two bars. This was, I think, the frontier; not Rome itself, but the Rubicon.

In his speech at the first flying of this flag -- a superior example of ad agency logo design from the mid-sixties, in the Liberal Party colours of red and white -- Pearson was careful to invoke "Her Majesty, our beloved Queen," and to refer to "Our nation, by God's grace." These are expressions you no longer hear, for they have since been dropped, purposefully, from our public usage. Yet the more enthusiastic Pearson toast, to "a new stage in Canada's forward march," now seems even more dated.

Alternatively we could draw the boundary with our own past at the complete triumph of Trudeaumania in the general election of 1968; or at prime minister Pierre Trudeau's rapid and deceitful legalization of abortion; or at his imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970, when Canada for the first time appeared before the world in the dress and demeanour of a banana republic.

But it was not until Oct. 27, 1982 -- after the introduction of state multiculturalism, of the "zap you're frozen" wage and price controls, of an unprecedented peacetime national debt, of the National Energy Policy to crush Alberta, of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that subverted both responsible government and our common law -- that "Dominion Day" was formally replaced, by an extraordinary Act of Parliament.

While legally, the Act had little significance, imposing no penalties for its non-observance, it was nevertheless a subtle coup d'état, intended also as the coup de grace, to the older Canadian sensibility. From henceforth, anyone who referred to his own country by its proud, ancient, original title as "The Dominion of Canada" could now be quietly ostracized. Whereas those who ignored the country's actual history, and opted instead for the replacement formula, could now be praised for their patriotism.

Tomorrow, all the innocent children will be assembled on Parliament Hill, smiling and laughing with their government-issue paper flags and their faces painted in those Liberal Party colours, to celebrate this New Canada. Not the tiniest hint of malice in any of them; nor the slightest knowledge, from what they learn or will learn in school, of their country's true history.

(I wrote before of my rather startling discovery, after stating in a column that Canada had "chosen" to go to war in 1939. What I wrote was the historical fact, and yet so many people younger than myself wrote in to correct me, saying they had been taught in school that Canada had only won independence from "colonial rule" in the 1960s or later. All these people had been taught lies; had been raised on lies.)

Two nations; deux nations. Not English and French, but rather, one nation by the grace of God, and the other by the grace of Pearson and Trudeau, occupying by chance the same territory. One founded upon deep truths, and the other on successive historical rewrites and a hotchpotch of pathetic little impostures. One with proud traditions of liberty and law going back through Confederation and Magna Carta to the wellsprings of the Gospels and the Greeks; the other a tawdry makeshift of the vanities of blackguard politicians.

I do not think one can owe one's allegiance equally to both countries. For the one is the purposeful denial of the other; a fake substituted for the original.

Yet: "His Dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the River even to the ends of the earth."

Anyone who can hold in his heart this magnificent saying, this prophecy from Zechariah, remains a citizen of the real Canada, of the true north strong and free.