pyat | My Canada

bard_bloom asked us to talk about our countries. Specifically, our experience of them.

I am Canadian, but I don't drink beer.

I was born in Burlington, Ontario, a city of white-bread white folks, on the western shore of Lake Ontario. I was born in a hospital named for an Iroquis chief who was chased out of Ohio by American Revolutionaries who believed all men had certain inalienable rights.

When I was four I moved to Montreal, the world's second largest French speaking city. It was on the world stage then, a city of cobbled streets and space age arenas and geodesic domes. We lived next to a graveyard, but all my nightmares were about Daleks, or disembodied fingers.

I could not speak French, so I went to an English school with immigrant kids from India, Africa, and Eastern Europe, all of whom spoke English badly. We learned about the "mosaic", the Trudeau-era ideal of a country with no melting pots or assimilation, where all nations could live as they pleased. You could almost believe it was true, looking at my Grade 1 class.

The city I consider my home is Hamilton, a dingy, faded, blue-collar town, where men in mullets drive rusty cars, listen to Def Leppard, and vote Socialist. I went to school in the poorest catchment area in the country, but didn't know what marijuana smoke smelled like till I was in university.

I watched a lot of publicly-funded television, and dreamed of working, one day, as a writer for TV-Ontario. I went to school with mostly white kids, and learned more about the "mosaic," yet also learned to sing "God Save the Queen" and recite the Lord's Prayer at the start of every school day. My grade school was a memorial to Canadians who died in the Great War, dedicated to this purpose by a King. Brass plaques, 15 feet tall and affixed to pillars, listed the war dead and surrounded us at every assembly or gym class. I spent a lot of time reading the names. A glass case housed a hand-written copy of In Flanders Fields.

I learned French by listening to a talking pineapple. I read Farley Mowat and dreamed about wolves and owls and vast plains. I went on school trips to battlefields from the War of 1812, and learned about Billy Green and Laura Secord, and felt a great deal of nationalistic pride. Our textbooks explicitly told us that Canada was the best and greatest of nations. The 20th century belongs to Canada! A grade 9 history book painted a picture of a frightening alternate future in which Canada would become an American state.

I did not learn much about natives, other than that they fought on our side in 1812, and that Eskimos were happy, smiling people who preferred to be called "Inuit." Something called "Oka" happened and took a lot of people - of my generation, at least - by total surprise, and made me angry, and frightened. I was in my 20s before I realized that Canada's largest Native Reserve is a 25 minute drive from my house.

I visited an uncle in Edmonton, and tripped through praries, and badlands, and Rockies, and found a Tim Horton's everywhere I went. People in Edmonton own guns, yet are somehow also Canadian. I visited a friend in British Columbia, and wondered at the vast Chinese population in Vancouver, and grumbled about the Native who threw a bottle at our car.

I went to school in Toronto, where one could believe the ideal of Canada as a cultural mosaic once again, an open-minded, international place where all races lived (mostly) in (relative) ease. Quebec wanted to leave, and most of my classmates bussed or carpooled to Montreal for a massive unity rally. OUR Canada included Quebec. Jean Chretein was a hero, and the Liberals saved us from Mulroney. Trudeau's ideals were alive and well, in happy, smiling progressive, united Canada.

I worked at a rural newspaper, where locals would refer to the single black policeman in the county as "that chocolate fellow." I covered veterans marches, and spoke to men who didn't want turbans worn in veteran halls. I met and befriended men who'd parachuted into France 24 hours before D-Day. I met a town councillor who wept openly when someone poured root beer on a photo of the Queen. 9/11 happened, and everyone was a friend of America, suddenly. US flags outnumbered Canadian flags, and CF-18 fighters patrolled the skies over Dunnville.

Then Bush didn't mention Canada in the State of the Union addresss, and we got all huffy and anti-American again.

Now I work in Toronto, and get Tim Horton's coffee served to me by beautiful Liberian girls with names like "Eden." I can see a dozen high-rises under construction from the third floor of my office building, and hear a dozen languages in the market next door.

My Canada is a good place, though perhaps not as good as we like to paint it. We're humble to a fault, but we're also really smug about it. We mostly define ourselves as "not American." We're good to everyone who makes it here, and lousy to the people who were here first.

It's not as good a country as we claim, but I still think it is, by and large, the best place in the world to live.