Celebrating Canada

This year, signs posted around Charlottetown invited all comers to celebrate Canada Day with live music and fireworks at the P.E.I. capital’s Victoria Park. While the signs did nod to the nation’s unfinished business, acknowledging that the event would be held on unceded Mi-kmaq territory, the message sounded something like a return to some facsimile of normal. And if not in Charlottetown, the birthplace of Confederation, where?

The last couple of years have been fraught for Canada Day. First, the pandemic washed out festivities. Then, the discovery of unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools left the nation disinclined to party. To be sure, much work remains on both fronts, on improving public health and on reconciliation between Canada and First Nations.

With soaring inflation, record gas prices and ongoing housing crises, there remains plenty else to fret about.

And recent raucous protests have left no illusion that Canadians, at the 155th anniversary of Confederation, are of one mind about the state of their country.

Polarization and cultural rifts — while not as severe as elsewhere — are increasingly entrenched threats to the national good.

Yet, after the draining experience of pandemic protocols, and the unsettling weeks of convoy rage and mayhem, Canadians seem ready to celebrate the July 1 holiday.

If the bookings of cottages, campsites and rental cars are any indication, many will hit the road in the weeks ahead in search of summer fun and, perhaps, rediscover their country. The Canadian landscape can be counted on to do what it has always done — strike awe, wonder and humility into those who gaze upon it.

Summer is also usually when Canadians unplug from politics, from the details of policy, from the fulminations of strivers and opportunists. Instead, the season invites contemplation of deeper matters, in things as small as sandcastles and seashell collections, as large as what the times and our country require of us.

It surely means abandoning the childish notion that any one political leader is the cause of all woes or the answer to all the problems and challenges of a globalized world.

The wish for scapegoats and saviours is little more than a desire not to take responsibility. What has underwritten the current malaise in Canada is not a failure of specific policy or leadership, but failure of our own generosity and imagination.

Imagination, as the writer Ursula Le Guin once noted, is very different from wishful thinking. Wishful thinking, she said, is “cut loose from reality, a self-indulgence that is often merely childish, but may be dangerous.” Imagination, however, is an “indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.”

The late author’s words fit the occasion of Canada Day. Imagination is the tool by which we understand others, putting ourselves in their shoes and circumstances, trying to know their hearts and minds.

With luck, Canadians on the road this summer will learn something of how fellow citizens live in places unfamiliar to them, the specific joys and challenges and wounded sensibilities of others.

John Ralston Saul has written that the core of Canadian civilization — derived largely from Indigenous peoples — is that citizenship is a circle that welcomes and adapts, and that fairness and inclusion are the keys to how we function. They were simple ideas, he said. But in their simplicity is something foundational and abiding. Something we have not, of late, much honoured.

TVO’s The Agenda aired a program during the run up to Canada Day in which five former Ontario premiers discussed the troubling state of democracy in the country.

Kathleen Wynne, Dalton McGuinty, Ernie Eves, Bob Rae and David Peterson all spoke of the necessity of reducing partisanship, of listening to the other side, of working together and compromising, of realizing that all societies, like all people, contain internal contradictions that must be acknowledged and reconciled.

What the former premiers urged, essentially, were more generous attitudes and greater imagination.

For his part, McGuinty said he believed the cynicism that colours much of our contemporary discourse is only a thin veneer. Deep down, people have a fundamental yearning, he said, “to know that they can make a real and lasting difference, they want to do something good with their lives.” It is the responsibility of principled leadership to summon that power, he said.

It is the responsibility of all Canadians to give it expression. Happy Canada Day.