Loyalties 3

Ah, yes, the True North Strong and Free.  O Canada, we stand on guard for thee...O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.  Doesn't that just give you goose bumps, Gentle Reader?  No?  Maybe...Nausea?  Before I get strung up for treason, allow me please to explain a thing or two.  I am not a traitor to my country.  I simply feel no natural love for this place.  Even though I was born and raised in this country, and even if I would be among the first to agree that in Canada people tend to enjoy a very superior quality of life...

Compared to....

Uganda?

I do appreciate and respect what Canada represents, and this is in some ways divergent from the reality that is the beautiful fiction, Canada. 

I love the multiculturalism in this country and indeed I think that Canada is the only nation that really does multiculturalism well.  It isn't perfect, but it is a work in progress.  This also squares well with Canada's still-evolving national identity.  This is still a young country.  I am also happy with the relative respect for individual rights and freedoms that we enjoy here.  I never have to worry about a fateful knock on my door in the middle of the night, of being taken away never to be seen again for writing things on this blog that some politicos would find offensive.  Despite the near dictatorship under Stephen Harper for the last ten years there is still a sense of freedom here that does make Canada the envy of many nations.  The natural beauty is almost unparalleled, and many regions of this country are counted among the most beautiful on earth.  We celebrate equal rights for all people: of all races, religions, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations.  We also enjoy relatively free public health care and publicly funded, if meagre and well below poverty level,  pensions for low-income seniors. 

There is some support for the poor and disabled, but the support available is lamentably poor and this country could well afford better care for its most vulnerable.  There is also no government funded post-secondary education and only an inadequate student loan program that plunges people into decades' worth of debt following graduation.  There is also still a general public stigma against the poor and poverty.  Being poor is still viewed as being so shameful that it is almost seen as a mortal sin, a sign of laziness, lack of ambition.  They don't want to work.  Meanwhile there is a growing population of middle class Canadians who are living from paycheque to paycheque and not really that far from finding themselves lining up at the food bank or having to sleep in low barrier shelters.

I am particularly disturbed by the subtle militarism in this country.  It has always been there, of course, and the Harper government squandered ten years trying to rewrite Canadian history, trying to frame us as a great military power.  Peace keeping was shelved and there was a process of rearming the Canadian military.  World War I was rewritten as the birth of the Canadian nation and the War of 1812 became the major turning point in the formation of Canada.  Remembrance Day observances became more de rigueur than ever and if you were a pacifist you were expected to keep quiet about it.  The war dead were reinvented as sacred heroes sacrificing their lives for Mother Canada.  If you weren't wearing a red poppy pinned to your lapel you kept a low profile.  If you had the colossal gall to wear a white poppy, a symbol of peace, you might get yelled at or even beaten up on the street.  Seriously.  Here in peaceful Canada.

The militarism in this country, however covert, is for me repugnant and is also for me the ultimate deal breaker.  If I were married to a spouse named Canada, otherwise good looking and nice, if rather boring with good manners, I would quickly be consigning myself to sleeping on the couch or in the guestroom to escape from my spouse's nasty bad breath, snoring, and tendency of farting most aromatically in the sack every night, not to mention the deplorable love-making skills.

Canada, I do not stand on guard for thee.  In war, everyone loses and the shedding of blood, no matter how apparently just the cause, is just and merely that: the shedding of blood.  Costa Rica abolished their military in 1948 and their only foreign invaders happen to be tourists and they happen to enjoy one of the most equal societies and highest standards of living in Latin America.  And if I could emigrate there, I probably would, given that I already speak fluent Spanish!

True North Strong And Free My Ass!