Despite our slow, cold spring, it seems we’re right on track with summer in the Pontiac. The corn is looking just about knee high. Strawberries are ripe for the picking, mostly. And the peonies, in their exaggerated curtsies, have laid themselves to rest, heads bowed, finally surrendering to hot and heavy humidity.
Every year, the end of June offers itself as a moment of transition, with Canada Day marking a distinct and sudden break between the anticipation of summer and the frantic race that is our trying to savour it before it disappears – somehow both a celebration of its beginning, and a forced acceptance of its inevitable end.
This country’s birthday also offers an opportunity for shared reflection on a different kind of transition – one between who we’ve been and who we may want to become, both as a nation, and as individual members of it.
In recent years, Canadianness has been through the wringer.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned some in this country believe that to be Canadian is to be without restrictions to one’s individual freedom, even when those restrictions are designed to protect the health of the whole community.
Canadianness, as some seemed to hold, was the absolute right to this individual freedom, and the prioritizing of this right over any responsibility to care for others. This identity was strengthened in opposition to that which threatened it. A version of what it means to be Canadian that seemed to be determined by fear.
Then, this year, an inconsistent threat to our sovereignty from the temperamental, fitful president south of the border spurred a new brand of Canadian patriotism. Elbows up, we were told. The protection and strengthening of Canada’s economy took centre stage. Without much talk about what values we hold dear as Canadians, an aggressive patriotism was again built by defining ourselves in opposition to that which was, is, threatening us – a defensive and somewhat empty nationalism, determined not by who we are, but by who we are not.
Last week, with the passing of Bill C-5, this threat pushed Canada to weaken its own laws designed to protect the environment, labour rights, and people’s health from harmful industrial practices. On Sunday, to appease President Trump, our government backed down on the digital sales tax it was set to roll out on Monday – a tax this same government designed – which would have forced tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb to pay three per cent on revenues made in Canada and would have brought in an estimated $7 billion over five years.
It seems much easier to define ourselves in opposition to an external threat than to do the hard work of reconciling our complicated history with the various ideas of what it means to be Canadian today. That work needs to be active and ongoing, at dinner tables, on the dock, and in the pages of local newspapers, so that the next time we are forced to endure a nation-wide challenge, be it a public health crisis or a threat to our sovereignty, we’re more practiced in talking to each other, we’re comfortable in our differences, but we know well enough not to throw our core values under the bus.
