I’ve been writing in this newspaper for a while now (more than 12 happy years), and the subject of “Canada Day” has come up before. There is a basic point I like to make about this occasion, and which I hope never to overlook. The Canada into which I was born (along with all those born here before about 1964) does not much resemble the Canada of today—except for an aggregation of landscapes that, despite our tireless efforts, have not changed significantly in two generations.
I will not, and vow I will never, call it “Canada Day” without inverted commas. It would not matter to me if every other living Canadian called it that without further thought. It continues to be Dominion Day, in my view: the patriotic anniversary of my own country. God Himself cannot rewrite history; I recognize no Act of Parliament that attempts to do so.
Our bureaucratic masters are now contriving a similar “update” to our national motto, to make it: “From sea to sea to sea.” Michael Ignatieff, for whom Canada provided a passport of convenience, and later, a convenient political career, is among those eagerly advancing this puerile idea. Stephen Harper, as my readers may have noticed, annoys me terribly when (as quite frequently) he sells out his own constituency; but Ignatieff is to my mind emblematic of that class of Martians who occupied this country in the 1960s: of men with no unaffected earthly loyalties.
Our flag, our heraldic arms, even the words of our national anthem, have been replaced or tampered with, over this time. In every case, something was quietly deleted from our actual heritage, which occluded the vanity of the Liberal Party. And we, “the people,” I am ashamed to say, let them get away with it.
The Canada to which I remain loyal was not a creature of bureaucratic edicts, but of heroic human acts. She was, from Cabot, Cartier, and Champlain, the very embodiment of human loyalty. For I am not referring only to the United Empire Loyalists among my own ancestors, who for all their distinction were one fragment of the whole. The very implantation of what is called Canada, in the wilderness of this New World, was an act of divine loyalty. It was a loyalty recalled in blood and guts, centuries later, in the battlefields of France. And while I am by no means “ethnically” French, I am in my heart a mediaeval Frenchman.
In conversation with Americans, I have often been struck by a national attitude quite different from my own. A friend in Minnesota calls it, “the fiction of self-sufficiency.” Americans have been told they are self-sufficient, as part of their national mythology; they’ve even been told they are self-created, and that the United States is the world’s self-sufficient, self-created country. The rest of us are “slaves of history.”
While the idea may be related to many admirable traits in the American character—to their optimism, their independent spirit, their willingness to face problems, and work—it undermines the most fundamental truth about life and history. No person, no nation, ever invented itself. Whether individual or society, we are the products of circumstances that go vastly beyond ourselves.
Our own Canadian self-understanding was, from the beginning, more mature. It did not involve self-sufficiency, or self-creation. It only began to do so in the 1960s.
We understood ourselves to be transplants, from the Old World to the New; to have arrived as adults not babies. We understood that without a governing moral and yes, symbolic order—that without the Christian civilization we carried in our souls—we were zilch, nothing. We did not exist in and of ourselves. Even our purpose was prefigured: to spread Christendom in our own persons. When we formed an independent state, our motto harkened back to our true origins. It was: A mari usque ad mare, “From sea to sea.”
Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae. The passage was taken directly from the Psalms.
“And He shall have Dominion, from the sea also unto the sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” The river was taken to be the St. Lawrence, along which we first settled; the “He” being, unambiguously, not us, but Christ.
Merely to remember this, today, is to “reveal” oneself as a “theocrat”—notwithstanding neither I, nor any of the Fathers of Confederation, nor even the Pope in Rome, has ever proposed to put our civil government under priests. But if the word is to be abused, to denote all those who believe the Christian religion should be maintained as the foundation of our social, legal, political, and cosmological order, then I shall be proud to assume the title of Theocrat, and make it my most precious badge.
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