[Editor's Note: The Publisher wishes to apologize for the delay in posting this piece. Immediately after being assigned to it, the writer fled the city and refused to ever speak to us again. Our office intern Alfonso was able to trek into the remote lake country to recover the column from the writer, sustaining some serious water-balloon related injuries in the process. We miss you, Alfonso, and wish you a speedy recovery!]
Today is apparently Canada Day. I had almost forgotten, you see, but then Facebook helpfully woke me up at 4 o’clock in the morning with a loud, urgent, buzzing notification of animated maple leaves and fireworks, and after the initial panic had abated I was set straight and decided the subject needed to be addressed.
So here I am, writing this from the main room of a remote cabin high in the Gatineau hills, far from the traffic and noise and people and absurdity of the nation’s capital, and where it’s easy to forget about the basic elements of space and time. That probably has something to do with the way the light reflects off the lake or the sound of the lightly drizzling rain I can hear outside or that beer is served with breakfast, but it’s more likely that we’ll never know exactly why. Whatever it is, it’s exactly why I am here in my own Eagle’s Nest - my brain has been too susceptible to distraction lately and even in it’s usual modestly-boring way, Ottawa is still able to keep me from doing anything productive. At times like these I need to step into a quiet void to regroup, otherwise I'd likely just go completely mad altogether.
Even in quiet years the city becomes a chaotic mess every July 1st, when a few hundred thousand people descend on Parliament Hill to watch a mediocre concert, wave at whichever minor Royal is in town, get buzzed by some Air Force jets before getting hammered completely on overpriced liquor. This year is a whole different beast altogether though: everything has been ramped up to Peak Nonsense for the country’s 150th birthday. Advertisements have been implanted in my brain for months. U2 will be in town for five minutes [Editor’s note: It was NOT U2, but simply Bono and The Edge performing a single song on the main stage]. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall will be in attendance, no doubt before he goes off to speak at some quack-science homeopathy seminar later this week. The streets have been closed for days and tourists have been flooding even the quiet neighborhoods, begging locals for directions or help on how to use our woefully incapable transit system, or how to kill time. My answer to both is pretty simple, bub: it’s every man for himself; get the hell out of town and save yourself.
Canada 150™ is exactly the kind of program I have come to expect from the Government of Canada: a feel-good branding exercise like Own The Podium or Have It Your Way that we convince ourselves is in the spirit of a Norman Rockwell painting but is more the style of a cheap beer company or Tim Hortons for which I have no time or patience, though I can almost never quite put my finger on precisely why.
For instance, the Canada 150 logo seems perfectly fine to me and not – as some reactionary bigots on Facebook seem to think – a secret attempt by the Trudeau government to turn wholesome children queer with a desecrated Canadian flag. Perhaps I don’t mind it because I am (barely) clever enough to remember that it was in fact the Harper government that chose the design, or because even if it was such a secret plot it could only do our collective conscious some good. We could all stand to have our minds (among other things) blown more often. Nor am I particularly opposed to the idea that this anniversary is somehow more special because it is the sesquicentennial…if only because it affords me the opportunity to try and spell “sesquicentennial” while sipping a beer and making obsessive observations about the weather (and thus fulfilling two vital Canadian stereotypes).
Anyway, I must acknowledge that the whole phenomenon does provide a reasonable excuse to sit here, now on a deck (the rain has ceased, it turns out) in the middle of the wilderness, getting baked while Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and The Hip’s critically underappreciated Last of the Unplucked Gems play on the radio, and think about Canada, even though I find the older I get the more I find myself completely perplexed by the very idea of nation-states. Ugh, whatever.
This country, as surely you must have figured out by now, is 150 years old. Maybe. Depending on your generation, background, and political philosophy we either became a country in 1867 when a bunch of quasi-genocidal anglophiles lobbied the British for self-government, 1930-something when the Westminster Statute expanded the ability of that government, the 1980s when the Constitution was finally repatriated with its much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or some 20,000 years ago when the first humans settled in the area that would come be Canada. At least, until the Eurotrash arrived and - using a combination of biological warfare and the regular kind - killed most of them, scattered the rest, and built a new place out of their bones.
To be fair there has been some progress since then: the highest officials of the white man’s government will work in a building that’s no longer named for a major proponent of a system of cultural destruction and child rape. Additionally, the pub-sized Victorian-era beaux-arts building across the street from Parliament Hill which has been vacant for decades will become a new cultural appreciation center, uh, somehow. Still, I’m sure they would have preferred some money to make their water drinkable or homes livable so it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that as we approached the annual orgy of red and white, there would be some choice words about the whole proceedings - and righteously so.
So I’ll be forgiven – surely - that I can’t help but grin a bit that while I sit out here in the emerging sun, on my second cup of gritty cottage coffee the downpour continues on Parliament Hill, keeping the crowds away or at lest damp. It shouldn’t improve my mood but it does...Canada Day should never go quite as smoothly as the government wants it to.
At any rate, either the fresh coffee or the next beer or the brightening day has perked me up somewhat and I’m able to get past the full force of my negativity and think about some of the upsides. In the past six months, for instance, this country has emerged as one of the stalwart pillars of the liberal international order and, along with France and Germany, stand as the last line of defense for the whole of Western Civilization. The rise of an independent and assertive foreign policy in the face of the American retreat from global leadership is something to be proud of.
Plus, you know, all of the hokey stuff you see in the commercials. I’m taking advantage of a beautiful landscapes right now, and the image of the easy-going multiculturalist scoiety is a great idea as long as we’re willing to fight for it. It is nice – and serves a greater good - that you can get bitten by a poisonous snake (which will become a real thing as climate change brings more of them here) or get hit by a car or get drunk on powerful beer at your cottage while writing your Canada Day blog post and accidentally fall down some rickety wooden stairs onto sharp rocks, and still have your hospital bill covered without having to worry about going bankrupt or being shit on by Human Turdbag Ted Cruz.
There’s an argument to be made, I’m convinced, that a critical, distinguishing trait separating civilized nations from the uncivilized is the ability to recognize and acknowledge the bad parts of one’s history and problems of the present while celebrating the good. We should do that more often, especially as Canada 150® tries valiantly to simplify everything into vague, sugar-laden Tim Horton’s style jingoism. But the hard part is doing it: if the mantra of the post-Harper years is to be that “better is always possible” then we have to be willing to put the work into making the possible real.
Jesus! An honest-to-fuck deer has just walked up to the shoreline a few dozen feet from me, hopped into the water, and has begun to swim across the lake. I have no idea if he’s ever done that before or does it often, or if he even knows where the hell he’s going, but off he goes anyway. Maybe he’s taking a morning constitutional, or swimming out to die. Either way I take it as a sign that the lake has become too tempting to resist; an omen form nature that I’m starting to ramble and this whole thing is going to fly apart if I keep it up.
[Editor's Note: This is the end of the recovered transcript. Have a safe long weekend, everyone.]
