Canadians (7 page)

In fact, if a visitor from another world were shown a fat bumblebee with its tiny transparent wings and this massive land mass with its sniping regions, historical disputes, constitutional entanglements, and naysaying populace, the betting, surely, would be much higher on the fat insect staying afloat than on the strange, unwieldy creature called Canada.

And yet this country carries on, seemingly without a flight plan, flitting from one distraction to the next.

It's worth pointing out that, in the relative life span of countries, there almost always
has
been a Canada. Yet again we find the contradictions. Canadians talk and write obsessively about the “New Canada” as if Lester Pearson and Rocket Richard and Wayne and Shuster and Hugh MacLennan and Juliette all fell off some turnip truck a few decades back and the country is just now finding its legs. That black-and-white Canada of the newsreels has been replaced, so many would have you believe, by a colourful, vibrant, updated version that may or may not last, depending on everything from disaffected Westerners to disenchanted Newfoundlanders to disavowing Quebeckers. But the rarely acknowledged fact of the matter is that Canada, no matter how it defies logic, is already a greybeard among countries. And it has proven remarkably resilient.

It is the second-oldest federation after the American federation that came together between 1776 and 1792. The rest all came later: Australia in 1901, others after the Second World War. John A. Macdonald and Georges-Étienne Cartier were getting Canada's act together, in fact, around the same time as Bismarck and Garibaldi were working to unite the German and Italian states. And while France may be older, it has struggled through five constitutions compared with Canada's two … and perhaps counting. The years since Canada became this impossible country have seen fluctuations and convulsions and reorganizations in Russia, in China, in Japan, in Mexico, and in countless other sovereign states.

And yet no one ever talks about Canada's lasting power.

Just how long it can last.

Two

A Canadian Is…

IT IS OCTOBER 17, 2006. A cold rain is falling in a slant along Wellington Street, the lights from cars moving past Parliament Hill washing yellow down toward the parkway along the Ottawa River. It is nasty and miserable and those of us hurrying along the sidewalk are in danger of being splashed from the side as well as having our umbrellas ripped inside out from behind. We are heading this wretched night, heads bowed, collars tight to chin, to the National Library to hear a panel discussion on what, exactly, makes a Canadian.

True story.

Several months earlier, an enterprising young Rhodes scholar named Irvin Studin approached fifty Canadian writers, thinkers, business leaders, politicians, activists, academics, artists, and—obviously running a bit thin on contributors—even a few journalists and asked them to submit two-thousand-word essays beginning with the words
“A Canadian is …”

No two answers were the same, as might be expected, and some didn't even answer at all, which I'm tempted to suggest could be as profound an answer as some of those that were actually typed and delivered. It was a strange exercise: two thousand words not nearly enough, two thousand words way too much.

One thing “A Canadian is …,” however, is willing. As Stephen Leacock once wrote about a favourite character, “he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”
Leacock, of course, was writing nearly a century ago. The horse ridden today by alarmists is the computer keyboard. And it goes in as many directions as there are fingers on the keys.

I'm not quite sure why Studin included me in his survey, but I do know that the deadline attached to my contribution was outrageously tight, which would suggest the B or even C list, someone who can type fast subbing for a significant name that either dropped out or didn't deliver. And no money was offered, which almost always leads to the journalist's return note beginning “Much as I would love to….”

But the invitation was impossible to turn down. I found my brain riding madly off in all directions, asking the silly question while walking the dog, riding my bike, watching
Hockey Night in Canada,
and even trying to get to sleep at night. For someone who's never had trouble sleeping, this was disturbing indeed. I simply had no idea what the answer was.

In the end, the only way I could think of to complete that suggestive opening phrase was to go to the Statistics Canada website, look up the running census, and start off with “A Canadian is 32,146,547 different things altogether—and counting.…” It seemed smart at the time. On reflection, it seemed silly. On rereading, it seemed passable. Unable to make up my mind and, being Canadian, I went with it.

Canadians, I sometimes think, do lead the world in one matter. Not hockey, not pulp production, not snow, not even potholes, but in picking through their own belly-button lint. For a people known for their resourcefulness, this can often seem a dreadful waste of one's most important resource: time.

Compulsive self-introspection, however, seems oddly and uniquely Canadian. Americans don't seem to do much of it, apart from issue-based magazines that occupy but a fraction of the shelf space devoted to celebrity, sports, and even pornography.

British author Jeremy Paxman says that those he studied in his 1998 book,
The English: A Portrait of a People,
“have not devoted a lot of energy to discussing who they are.” He finds this most curious, since vanity is also a large part of the English makeup. At one point he quotes Cecil
Rhodes, who ardently believed that the English just “happen to be the best people in the world, with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace.” Why, then, would they waste time on something already self-evident?

The result is that the British, despite being one of the critical supply sources for the elusive Canadian identity, are a people rather more interested in other parts of the anatomy than the odd little scar where the umbilical cord was once attached.

Not so in Canada.

More than four decades after Hutchison published
The Unknown Country,
Andrew H. Malcolm produced
The Canadians
. Malcolm had been the Canadian correspondent for
The New York Times
from 1978 to 1982 and spent those four years getting out and around this nation far more than any comparable Canadian journalist. An enthusiastic, adventuresome Teddy Roosevelt look-alike, he fell in love with the country of his grandparents, which he took to calling the “Eagle Scout” of nations.

After four years Malcolm began to think that “for many Canadians perhaps their unfortunate identity was to search forever for an identity, a Sisyphean task guaranteed to ensure eternal angst. The search itself had become the identity.…”

And yet he, too, found contradiction in those seeking that elusive identity. There was, Malcolm discovered, reserved shyness, self-deprecating humour, a worrying sense of
not mattering
to the world at large, but also—as Walter Stewart had earlier suggested—an occasional but undeniable moral smugness, a condescension toward many things, mostly American. “What is it in Canada's history and character,” Malcolm asked, “that explains its superior inferiority complex…?”

I've often thought myself that Canadians ingeniously use this endless “search” for identity as a handy excuse to wallow in their own self-righteousness—particularly at those moments when America has put the stuck-up Canadian nose out of joint. It could be construed as a sort of verbal party trick to turn the conversation around to oneself and all the comforting goodness of being Canadian.

Or it might be, as Malcolm suggested, superiority and inferiority at the same time. That, at least, would be in keeping with the endless contradictions of Canada.

The case for an inferiority complex has been made so often that it's by far the more accepted of the two possibilities. CBC radio ran a contest several years ago challenging listeners to complete the sentence “As Canadian as….” The winner, to wide general approval, was “As Canadian as possible … under the circumstances.”

No wonder we get called the Clark Kent and the Woody Allen of Nations. The metaphors, appropriately, are from American culture; insecure Canadians would never make a national icon out of an awkward weakling. (They might, on the other hand, make him prime minister.)

Several people have suggested that this inferiority mindset has its source in the colonial mentality found throughout the former British Empire, a deep-rooted sense that whatever is Canadian or Indian or Australian or South African is not quite up to standard. The sun never set on the British Empire, but not much light shone down upon it. A sense of unworthiness was just one of the struggles Commonwealth nations had to overcome as they came into their own. “My generation of Canadians,” culture critic Robert Fulford told Malcolm, “grew up believing that, if we were very good or very smart, or both, we would someday graduate from Canada.”

Canadian heroes seem almost missing from the national canvas. There are some, of course, but hardly in the numbers Americans celebrate. “During my time in Canada,” Malcolm told me in an email from California, where he now works for the
Los Angeles Times,
“I was struck by the postage stamps—lacking heroes like Davy Crockett and Babe Ruth who are shared coast to coast generation after generation, the stamps in that era contained pictures of such things as antique furniture.

“Not exactly a stirring call to self-identity.”

PICKING THROUGH THE LINT of the national belly button is at once a useful and useless exercise. Useful to authors of thick books and newspaper columnists and talking heads and academics, all of whom have made a
cottage industry of it, but rather useless to people getting on with real lives in what has now been a real country for 140 years.

Al Purdy spent a lifetime looking at his country through poetry and prose and would regularly rail against those who dared dismiss the land he so adored. It irritated him that outsiders, usually Americans, acted as if the country were “a kind of vacuum between parentheses.” It was not, he said in his essay collection
No Other Country,
some godforsaken place devoid of culture or art or literature, some “4,000-mile wide chunk of Arctic desert.”

Purdy believed the country was essential to his own personality, his adult experiences on the road as formative as his parents had been while he was still a child at home. He once drew up a list of all his journeys across Canada and declared, “This is a map of myself, what I was and what I became. It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility: and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled.”

A big, hearty man who liked to order his beer two at a time—when I first met him I thought, wrongly, he was ordering for us both—Purdy felt that everyone else should share in his wild enthusiasm for figuring out what, exactly, made Canadians tick. It was his greatest passion during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of Centennial Year, Expo 67, and early Pierre Trudeau, a time when Canada seemed particularly anxious to distance itself from the Vietnam War, Watergate and, of course, Richard Nixon.

Purdy set off across the land, writing about the landscape and periodically dropping in to collect the wisdom of some of Canada's most respected minds. At Campbell River on Vancouver Island he called on Roderick Haig-Brown, a renowned nature writer and West Coast judge who considered fly fishing the ultimate court of decision.

The scotch had been poured, the judge's pipe lighted, and Purdy had deftly steered the conversation toward the country. He was certain that the London-born judge would be as puzzled as he was by the parochial nature of most Canadians—a people who, in a direct reversal of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, might list their address as the universe, the world, North America, Canada, province, city, street, room….

But Haig-Brown would have none of it. “‘What does the cockney know of rural England, or the countryman of London?'” he asked Purdy. “‘I'm not at all sure that provincialism is such an evil thing at that. No man becomes a great patriot without first learning the closer loyalties and learning them well: loyalty to family, to the place he calls home, to his province or state or country.'”

And as for Purdy's request to have Haig-Brown pontificate on “The Canadian Identity”—this country's equivalent of the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin—the country judge just shook his head. “‘That,'” he said, “‘is a question manufactured by writers and intellectuals.'”

The judge, it turned out, was far more interested in the coming salmon run.

A CANADIAN COMES to a fork in the road, the old joke goes. The sign pointing in one direction reads “Heaven.” The sign pointing in the other direction says “Panel Discussion on Heaven.” The Canadian heads straight for the panel discussion.

“The English,” Jeremy Paxman says, “at least, have the saving grace of being able to laugh at themselves. Which must be based on a profound self-assurance.” That may go some way toward explaining British comedy, but it does nothing to explain the Canadian penchant for self-deprecating humour. It has long been found on Canadian television—
SCTV, Corner Gas, Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes
—but increasingly, though not many Americans are aware of this, on U.S. television and in Hollywood movies.

Lorne Michaels, the creator of
Saturday Night Live,
is Canadian, as are, of course, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, the late John Candy, and a great many others widely considered
American
comedians by American audiences. If their humour has anything in common, it's in being slightly …
off
… neither American slapstick nor British wordplay but a form in which jokester and joke are so often one and the same. A Canadian, Michaels once said, would never have come up with a movie called
It's a Wonderful Life
. That would be bragging. The Canadian version would have to be
It's an All Right Life
.