Canadians (27 page)

“The only thing incurable about me,” he said, laughing, “is my optimism.”

ONE SUCH OPTIMIST is
The Globe and Mail
's John Ibbitson, who recently published a book called
The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream
. In a seeming slap to the perpetual doomsayer's face, he begins with the surprising proposal that “Some time, not too long ago, while no one was watching, Canada became the world's most successful country.”

Canada works, Ibbitson argues. In part through luck. In part by intent. Whatever the reason, Canada stands at the forefront of a
fundamental world change. Ibbitson further contends that it is Canadian history, with its very lack of dramatic confrontation, that makes this country unique.

The legendary politeness of Canadians, he says, is hardly accidental; how else could the French and English have continued after 1759? Such polite accommodation would go on to serve Canada wonderfully well as wave after wave of immigrants—first from France, Britain, and Western Europe, then from Eastern Europe, southern Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa—transformed it from a country of two founding nations into one nation in search of not only its identity but a purpose higher than collecting taxes and issuing passports.

Ibbitson—who comes from Gravenhurst, a small town in central Ontario that has also produced Dr. Norman Bethune—sees a Canada that is increasingly colour blind and that will one day be colour blended. His Canada is urban and ethnically diverse. It has a strong economy and good social programs. Of course it has its problems, from homelessness to unresolved Aboriginal issues. All the same, it works. Canada, he would argue, is already the world's first truly cosmopolitan society.

“The result,” Ibbitson said in a subsequent
Globe
article, “is nothing less than a miracle.” Canadian cities no longer have one dominant race. They're places where equality rules, where gay and lesbian couples and communities are accepted, where people even remember to pick up their dog poop in the parks. “This has never happened anywhere before,” he writes. “Not like this.”

There's nothing accidental about politeness in this country, he believes. Others might joke about it, but politeness stands at the very core of how this country operates. “It is the means by which we accommodate each other. It is the secret recipe for a nation of different cultures, languages and customs, whose citizens all get along.” Politeness is what led to the social revolution that modern Canada exhibits to the world, a country that he sees as “young, creative, polyglot, open-minded, forward-looking, fabulous.”

It might sound Pollyanna-ish, but Ibbitson is hardly naive. He knows the Aboriginal situation is untenable. He deplores the deterioration of
Canada's military over the past decades. He thinks foreign policy has become “a mess”—not the least of which is the strained relationship between the two countries that claim Sweetgrass on one side of the razor wire and Coutts on the other.

Where he separates himself dramatically from those who similarly worry about Canada's place in the world is his view of the past. He advises Canadians to adopt “ahistoricism”—to move away from the past of Riel, Conscription, Quebec sovereignty, the national energy program, and Meech Lake and embrace instead the country as seen through the eyes of those recently arrived. History, Ibbitson claims, dwells too much on misery, brings up little but old resentments. Besides, the flood of immigrants in recent years has “swamped” the history of the old Canada. Stop picking at old wounds, he advises. Stop acting superior. “The Canada we are becoming is moving past all that. The emerging Canada is nothing less than the engine of the social revolution that, if the world is lucky, will one day overtake the world. You don't think it's possible? Think of where we were a century ago. Think of what we have been through since then, what we have endured, what we have learned.

“Think of what Canada could be in a century, if we don't screw up.”

THERE DID SEEM, throughout 2006, to be a new and welcome sense of Canada and the world. Although he didn't win the Liberal leadership race—coming second to Stéphane Dion and then serving as deputy leader of the party—Michael Ignatieff did manage to get Canadians discussing the country's international role, even if it was to disagree with his various stands.

“We are a country of peacemakers,” he said during the leadership campaign, “especially because we are also a country of immigrants, many of whom have come to Canada to escape the horrors of conflict. As a nation of immigrants from the zones of war, we have a special vocation for peace, and it is by exercising this vocation that we maintain our unity as a people. We have a voice that other countries listen to. Let us use it.”

It was also a year in which Conrad Black experienced a change of heart toward the country of his birth. When he so dramatically renounced
his citizenship in 2001 to take up a British title, Black dismissed Canada as an underachieving socialist nation perhaps suitable to “someone just arrived from Haiti or Romania.” Then, as his own world began shrinking in an American courtroom, Lord Black of Crossharbour returned to live in Toronto and prepared to challenge the fraud and racketeering charges laid by a federal court in Chicago. He also began his fight to be reinstated as a Canadian citizen.

Speaking to the Empire Club in downtown Toronto, Black followed the traditional toast to the Queen with a stunning reversal of his former position. He seemed remarkably changed by the “deliverance” of a Stephen Harper Conservative Canada. Canada, Black had now decided, “is geopolitically among the ten most important” members of the United Nations, largely due to its immense natural resources and future prospects. “Canada today,” he said to the surprised crowd,

is more important to the world than Italy. Europe is dyspeptic with collapsed birth rates and stagnant economies. The U.S. has little disposable influence in the world, the UN is a shambles, NATO is in disarray, and the coalition of the willing is a fraud. We must not let it go to our heads, but Canada is one of the world's great powers. We shouldn't let that go to our heads. We should get used to it.

But get used to
what?
Just what sort of power, if any power at all, does Canada represent in this first gulp of the twenty-first century? It had come out of the First World War—after the Canadian military's proud performance at Vimy Ridge and at Passchendaele—sure it was a country of substance. It emerged from the Second World War considered a “middle power” by itself and others, a sense enhanced by Lester Pearson's Nobel Prize–winning efforts in helping solve the Suez Crisis of 1956. If Canada wasn't moving up or down the shifting list of military nations, it was seen as standing in the middle in a conciliatory and helpful way.

Its reputation as an international peacekeeper evolved under Pearson and has persisted to this day, even though the Nobel winner, on accepting his prize, rather accurately predicted that the only time the world might actually come together as one to confront an issue would be
when “We discover Martian space ships hovering over Earth's air space.” He also said, again with great prescience, that “The grim fact, however, is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.”

Pearson's legacy has been largely forgotten in today's Canada. Schoolchildren seem little, if at all, aware of his story. He is not generally held to sit among the great prime ministers of the country, even though it was during his years in Ottawa that such matters as medicare and the Canada Pension Plan came into being. He gave the country its flag and bilingualism. As Richard Gwyn once wrote, “We are all Pearson's children.”

And yet, a poll published when he left office in 1972 found that more than two-thirds of Canadians couldn't name a single one of his government's accomplishments. Thirty-five years later, a similar poll might find that two-thirds of Canadians couldn't even name him as a prime minister.

I often drive from Ottawa to Toronto and back again. And because my brain tends to grind to a complete halt on the faster, four-lane highways, I usually skip the recommended route and head along Highway 7 before dropping down to the dreaded and dreary 401 heading into Toronto. About two hours along this rolling two-lane highway that cuts through the eastern Ontario bog and the southern reaches of the Canadian Shield, I pass by the turnoff to Tweed—where some people claim Elvis Presley is alive and well—and head east toward Madoc, passing by the Lester B. Pearson Peace Park.

Sometimes I stop. But even on a beautiful day with the smell of pine in the air it's a sad stop, for the Lester B. Pearson Peace Park is one of the saddest sights in all of Canada. It was built in 1967, one of the thousands of Centennial Projects undertaken in Pearson's last full year in office. The park is rundown; a bent gate blocks passage. A hand-painted “No Trespassing” sign hangs from the fence and another sign warns that “violators will be prosecuted.”

As a symbol for world peace, it is an embarrassment.

Pearson deserves better. He was, after all, the original Canadian Jiminy Cricket for the United States. When he died,
New York Times
columnist
James Reston hailed him as “a wise and joyful man who told us the truth about America and made us swallow it.”

Pearson had a world vision. It came naturally from his long tenure in External Affairs before moving into elected politics. And he knew that, no matter how much wishful thinking might have it otherwise, there was no real separation between Canada's relations with the United States and with the rest of the world. They were one and the same. Always had been. Always would be. And it would be Canada's relationship with the superpower next door, more than anything else, that would define its role in the world at large.

When Pierre Trudeau took over the leadership of the Liberal Party from Pearson in 1968, he tried to bring some needed realism to Canada's self-concept of its place in international relations. “Personally,” he said, “I tend to discount the weight of our influence in the world … I think we should be modest, much more modest than we were, I think, in the postwar years when we were an important power because of the disruption of Europe and so on. But right now we're going back to our normal size … we must use modesty.… We shouldn't be trying to run the world.”

It was a message he repeated in March of that year when he spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “I hope,” he told the gathered media, “that we Canadians do not have an exaggerated view of our own importance.” A year later, in Calgary, he said “You only review your foreign policy once in a generation.”

A generation has now passed. The clock calling for review has been ringing its alarm for some time. Allan Gotlieb, Canadian ambassador to Washington during the Mulroney–Reagan years, once accused Canada of demonstrating “bipolar behaviour” in its foreign policy. The country makes visionary pronouncements, endlessly moralizes, and boasts of superior values, but doesn't really do or accomplish much. Gotlieb said Canadians seemed forever “attracted to opposite poles in our thinking about the world.” I think he has it right—especially in how Canadians deal with the United States in times of international stress. Then the bipolar behaviour can be extreme.

Back in June 1973, with anti-American sentiment running at least as high over Richard Nixon and the fallout from Vietnam and Watergate as it does today over George W. Bush and Iraq, Canadian radio broadcaster Gordon Sinclair took to the airwaves with a stirring defence of American generosity and abilities. “Our neighbours have faced it alone,” Sinclair ranted in a broadcast that became a bestselling recording in the United States, “and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.”

Now, more than three decades later, such dramatic polarization largely remains. When CBC radio described the rapport between new Prime Minister Harper and President Bush as “the strongest relationship in history,”
Canadian Dimension
magazine editorialized, “Really? What about Hitler and Quisling?”

There are those determined nationalists, like publisher and author Mel Hurtig and Maude Barlow, founder of the Council of Canadians, who would have Canada put as much distance as possible between it and whatever lies on the other side of that border, especially the American missile defence plan. Hurtig and Barlow are highly intelligent and deeply concerned about the loss of Canadian resources, particularly future pressures on Canadian water. “Now,” says Hurtig, author of
The Vanishing Country,
“not later, now is the time for Canadians to take a firm stand to ensure the survival of the country that we love as a proud, independent, sovereign country.” Barlow's concern, as expressed in
Too Close for Comfort,
is that the Canadian government, falling increasingly under control of big business, is committed to a “North American fortress with a common economic, security resource and regulatory and foreign policy framework.”

At the moment, Jiminy Cricket has so many different voices to choose from that it's hard to determine the smarter thing to say and the better route to take. There are those who would have Canada involve itself only in United Nations peacekeeping, which began in 1948 and took more permanent form in the Pearson and Trudeau years. And there are those who say the day of the Pearsonian peacekeeper has fallen sadly out of
synch with the realities of today's world.

Historian Jack Granatstein is one who believes a rethink is long past due. In
Who Killed the Canadian Military?
he details the long decline of what was once a proud and powerful force, lamenting that such obvious military weakness undermines any reputation Canada might naively think it enjoys around the world. Power, to Granatstein—as well as to a great many others—is hard power. Soft power, whatever it means, is to invite ridicule.