It’s the first of the month, and that is always a time to think about how to improve oneself and make a fresh start. The month in question today is July, which means it is Canada Day.
This year there are calls to cancel Canada Day, and instead to think about how Canada has wronged its Indigenous population, given the recent findings of mass graves near residential school sites, of the children who were sent to those schools and died there.
I’m never very keen on extreme, ‘cancelling’, reactions like this. They can be divisive and stifle the opportunity to learn from things or encourage a balanced view. We shouldn’t go so far in one direction that we say we must ‘cancel’ Canada Day. By all means celebrate the things that are good about this country. But neither should we go so far in the other direction that we ignore the things about our history that make us uncomfortable. The best way, as I have always maintained, is the middle way. The middle way involves learning, about both the good and the bad.
I do recognise that when some people say we should ‘cancel’ Canada Day, they actually just mean ‘learn, and just cancel the usual celebrations’: if that’s what you, individually, are most comfortable doing, that’s your decision. I also think that the middle way does allow us to condemn things that are indisputably wrong, so do not assume that the ‘middle way’ is just about being neutral. My point here, though, is about the importance of learning and being informed, not just for Canadians on Canada Day, but for anyone any day. I feel like I still have lots I can learn about my own country.
Let me think back to the things I learned about Canada in school. We learned all about the Canadian environment and the climates, and we learned a bit about how the government worked; we learned about the two world wars and a bit about immigration to Canada over time and how the various provinces joined Confederation. We learned about John Cabot arriving at the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in 1497 and Samuel de Champlain ‘finding’ Quebec, and the colony of New France being set up in 1608. We learned about BC and why Victoria was chosen as the provincial capital despite being below the 49th parallel. This is all good, but did I leave school with a firm understanding of how the monarch fits into Canada’s system of government? No. Did I learn anything about Canada’s place in the Commonwealth? No. Did I learn about residential schools and what they did and the effects they continue to have on the First Nations population? No, and I was someone who listened and paid attention in school. Now, if I am very honest, I was always far less interested in Canadian history than I was in British history. That always looked so colourful, so rich, so endlessly fascinating, and yes, it certainly is all of those things. But I have found myself, well before starting this blog, becoming more and more interested in Canadian history, and have tried to keep learning about this fascinating country where I spent the first two-thirds of my life.
I feel like Canadian history and government were taught to us in such a way that skirted around some of the things that were important: it was a middle way, but a slightly watered-down middle way rather than the sensible balanced one that I encourage. For example, every Canadian, be they born here or newly-arrived, should know that we are a constitutional monarchy: it’s not pushing an agenda to say this, it’s not being old-fashioned to say this: it is simply a matter of fact, because this is how Canada’s government is structured, and it is not automatically a negative thing. There is room under the umbrella of constitutional monarchy for everyone. Every Canadian should also know that we are part of the Commonwealth, and should have some understanding of what that means. Yet I don’t think we learned much about either of these things in school, and looking at the curriculum for BC, at least, where I went to school, they’re still not there, at least not as far as I can tell. They do seem to talk about the concept of constitutional monarchy, but I sure hope they are explaining to students that that is the kind of government Canada has. I don’t see the Commonwealth there, though. Why? If people better understood the role of the monarchy and the Commonwealth, they might not be so quick to call them out and condemn them as racist and drag out all of those usual tired and ill-informed arguments.
The residential schools were another thing that barely registered in our social studies/history curriculum. They are in there now, introduced at some point after I finished school in 2006. As you drive through Victoria, where I went to school, you will drive through a number of Indian Reserves. I can recall driving through these and wondering why the houses looked so unkempt, why the front yards were full of junk, and why the people who lived there didn’t just take some pride in their property and tidy up. It was all very judgemental. But I have been thinking, would I have been so casually dismissive of the way people lived on reserves, if I had known more about the complex system of trauma and abuse and discrimination that had put so many of them there? I really hope not.
Anyway, this was just meant to be a short post. The main takeaway here is to keep learning. In any country, there are positive and negative things to learn: learn about them both. What more can you learn about where you’re from, or where you currently live? Sometimes that knowledge might be interesting purely for its own sake, while sometimes it might fill some gaps and explain some things you might have taken for granted, and make you think more deeply. Both types of knowledge are valuable.
What can Canada become? What is its potential? What is good about Canada? Celebrate that. What has Canada been, and done? Learn about that, so that we can continue what is good, and stop perpetuating what is not.
Further Reading
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/beechwood-cemetery-ottawa-reconciling-history-tour-1.6060442 Did you know someone tried to speak out about the terrible conditions at the residential schools in the 1900s? Neither did I until very recently. This article is also an encouraging example of ‘change the plaque’ rather than ‘let’s tear down the statue’.
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/etudinuit/1900-v1-n1-etudinuit3476/038219ar/ Another thing I only learned about recently is that there were tuberculosis hospitals set up for the Inuit population, among whom TB was particularly prevalent. This article made for an interesting read.
https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/ I found this to be a very helpful introduction to the topic of residential schools in Canada, answering a lot of the important ‘who, what, when, why’ questions.
https://monarchist.ca/index.php/our-monarchy/myths-about-the-monarchy This is still the best refutation of criticism and misunderstanding of the Canadian Crown that I have seen.
Also see my previous posts about ‘De-Mystifying the Monarchy’, ‘Clarifying the Commonwealth’, ‘Just Because X, Doesn’t Mean Y’, and ‘No More Black-and-White Thinking’.
And finally because it is Canada Day, have a look at ‘Nuancing Some Stereotypes’, to learn about what Canada is and isn’t.
How It Was Because 