Showing posts with label canada day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label canada day. Show all posts

Saturday, July 1, 2023

A Reflection On This Canada Day

While there are many who would tell us that Canada feels broken, it is only so to those who get their news from demagogues and their ilk. There is, however, much to be reflective and humble about, and this country does a pretty solid job of cultivating both. Not for us the jingoistic flag-waving of our southern neigbours.

Perhaps we can better appreciate our own capacities by contrasting our country with the United States, which has a virtuoso ability to endlessly tear itself apart. The recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, discrimination against the LGBTQ community, and student debt relief all attest to that fact. And given that there is a very fertile environment within which their demagogues thrive, there is no relief in sight for that benighted nation. Hatred, intolerance and discrimination, paraded as patriotism, are cancers eating away at that country. Their refusal to confront their historic and current racism only ensures that the erosion continues.

By contrast, despite its many problems, Canada stands as a beacon of hope. Yes, we have an epidemic of homelessness, opiate abuse, ongoing environmental decline and governments too influenced (controlled?) by the corporate agenda. But we also have an open and generous heart collectively and individually, one that is reflected in our daily actions and government policy. We are a country that has not lost hope for something better, although that hope is often sorely tested. Our multiculturalism and our efforts at reconciliation speak to the better angels of our nature. 

In short, our faith in ourselves and others, our compassion for others, help to define us as a country. It is something we might be inclined to doubt if we listen to the outsized influence social media have conferred upon the unhinged and extreme, but if we read enough and are sufficiently self-aware, we can put those into the category and perspective they belong.

None of this should give us a sense of complacency, however; I do look at the future with trepidation and, at times, despair. That this Canada Day sees many of us staying indoors because of the 500 wildfires raging and polluting our air is cause for grave concern, and an alarming harbinger of worse to come. 

This Canada Day also sees us becoming more insular in our outlook. One has only to look at the outrage directed toward the government at Bill C-18, the implementation of which will see Google and Meta withholding Canadian news from their sites. Personally, as a newspaper reader, I am not alarmed by that threat - relying on those two giants for news is like living one's life in a dimly-lit closet. Choosing to read only a narrow range of news, something that newspapers serve to prevent, means that we live our lives in boxes, and our awareness of the world around us decreases tremendously. I am not hopeful of any great renaissance of traditional media, but I do fear the expanding umbra of ignorance that "narrowcasting" promotes.

But to end as I began, we are still a young nation that has resisted the cynicism marring many older ones. Deep down, I think we feel that there is still much potential for the betterment of ourselves and others in the country we call home. Canada, and all it represents, is a country that lights a candle instead of cursing the enveloping darkness.

HAPPY CANADA DAY.





Friday, July 1, 2022

Happy Canada Day

 As factious as we can be, I hope most of us can at least agree on this:

H/t Theo Moudakis







Wednesday, July 1, 2020

On Canada Day

On this day it is often difficult for us not to feel smug when we look at so much of the world beyond our borders. While such complacence is never a good idea, in her column today Susan Delacourt reminds us we have much to be thankful for, especially vis-à-vis the United States:
Happy Canada Day in the age of COVID-19 — the border between this country and the United States has never been this sharply defined, literally and politically. As many states in America are tumbling back into a resurgence of the virus, Canada and its health-care system are slowly emerging from the crisis in much better shape than our neighbour to the south.
The increasingly dire situation in Donald Trump's Amerika has prompted a turnabout in the thinking of Wendal Potter,
who used to work with the Cigna health-insurance firm, [and now says] he [is] sorry for all the lies he used to tell about Canada’s health-care system and pointed to the COVID-19 response in our two countries as proof of which one was better.

Potter’s Twitter thread confessed that big money was spent in his business “to push the idea that Canada’s single-payer system was awful & the U.S. system much better.” Now, however, he said it’s clear “it was a lie & the nations’ COVID responses prove it.”

Potter has now posted a video as well, called One Pandemic, Two Countries, which plainly states: “When it comes to keeping people safe from COVID, Canada has the United States beat by a long shot.”
Here is that video, and Happy Canada Day, everyone:


Saturday, July 1, 2017

A Reflection On Canada Day


Most people who have lived in this country for any amount of time, I suspect, would agree that Canada is the best place in the world to be a citizen. While we often take much for granted, I am sure that, like me, the majority have a deep and abiding respect and love for the land that we call home. It's just that we are a quiet people, content in the knowledge of our strengths (and well-aware of our weaknesses), without a deep compulsion to brag about our good fortune.

Rick Salutin, reflecting on our country while watching people waiting for appointments or loved ones in the atrium of Toronto Western Hospital, observes a core value that makes us what we are:
What unites people there, waiting for their appointments, or for those they’ve brought to appointments? Neither health nor sickness, though most don’t look too fit. It’s something else: none is worried about how they’ll pay for it.

Absence of money anxieties is the unifying factor. Could this also be what unifies the country, as it does the atrium? Frank Graves of EKOS research found it so recently: far atop a list of sources of Canadian identity, leaving the anthem, the flag, and Mounties in the shade, was medicare.
While flag-waving and other patriotic gestures and symbols are on the decline, there is something deep and abiding that unites us as a country.
Nation states were always at their best a way for humans to embrace their common destiny: that we are social beings despite pretensions to splendid individualism (“I’m a loner, eh?”). Boiling the solution down till little but medicare remains at the bottom of the pan, reduces the concoction to a bold, unique minimum.

Which brings me back to the people hanging in the atrium at the Western, looking ethnically and multiculturally diverse but not particularly feeling the diversity because they’re all Canadians brought together by the Canadian way of dealing with the basic stuff of life and death, and forestalling the latter, as much as possible, for the former: Not through some abstraction like Canadian niceness, but by their commitment to pay their taxes, assuring that everyone else there needn’t worry about money while awaiting the good, or bad, news.
Americans are great at waving the flag and boasting that they are "the greatest country on earth." Yet they are now in the process, should the Senate bill pass, of ultimately removing over 35 million of their fellow citizens from health care coverage while the same bill also cuts a tax on investment income for people earning $200,000 or more. One could perhaps draw an inverse relationship between mindless jingoism and quality of life.

We, on the other hand, are a proud but quiet, even subdued nation. And for some very, very good reasons....

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Happy Canada Day



I was originally going to take the day off from blogging, but then, after reading the editorial in today's Star along with some letters reflecting what people would wish for Canada, I decided to briefly add my own thoughts.

Certainly, there are a number of challenges we face both as a country and as a society; traditional values of inclusiveness, consultation, negotiation, and compromise have all suffered badly under the Harper regime. But perhaps the gravest consequence of that cabal's rule is our aspirations as a nation; once grand in scope and vision (think, for example, of the nation-building involved in consturcting a rail system linking all parts of Canada, or the development of a national health-care system) they have grown muted, mercenary and small-minded. (Think, for example of Martha-Hall Findlay's recent sad assertion that building pipelines is a nation-building exercise.)

My own life-experience has taught me that we are at our best, both individually and collectively, when we have a deep sense of purpose; indeed, as we get older, no longer encumbered by the structure that defines so much of our lives during the working years, maintaining or rediscovering that sense of purpose is vital to the continuance of a meaningful life. The same is true, I believe, with nations. Under our current government, of course, there is no such purpose, unless you think it noble and worthwhile to despoil the environment, contribute to the growing catastrophe of climate change, or pay as little income tax as possible. Such cribbed conceptions reflect the souls of bean-counters, not leaders of society.

There is no dearth of projects to which Canada could aspire to, and in the process inspire the hearts and minds of the people. A national pharmacare program is eminently doable. Responsibly building a green economy would be another. A national housing strategy, a national childcare program, perhaps even a guaranteed annual income - all are within our reach.

We are approaching a turning point in our evolution as a nation. The upcoming election in 2015 will likely have far-reaching consequences for our future. Which vision will prevail, 'business as usual' or a bold rediscovery of our potential as a people and as a nation?