Finding the real Canada

I’ve been thinking about Canada as a “country” a lot lately – spending time in the various provinces and cities of the nation will do that to you I suppose. Though, it is probably my time in Ottawa that has caused the most reflection since it is the capital in which the real history of nationhood is most prominent.

The first time I went to Ottawa for work many years ago I had the distinct feeling (one that has only grown) that finally I was visiting the “real” Canada. That is, the Canada depicted to me in the school films of my childhood – of parliament buildings, and the musical ride, children eating maple syrup on snow, and the rivers on which the voyageurs first “discovered” what was to become upper and lower Canada way back in the day. This was not the country I grew up in, but the one to which I felt bound by early education and history. My passport says it is my homeland, despite the fact I have never felt the connection between where I was raised and “the east”.

Growing up in Canada’s west, on Vancouver Island to be precise, it was hard not to feel left out in the depictions given of the nation. When BC was featured it was in one of three ways – coast salish history (never mind the coast salish people we sat in classes with, their way of life was only to be considered in the past), as final destination of the Canadian railway (great uniter of the land), or as a resource rich landscape with the sole purpose of fueling the epicentre of the country and its economy. Even in the 1970s we were still being taught that we lived in the wilderness, despite the cities and the towns, we were still the frontier without much purpose but to beat back the Indians and supply Ontario with wood and fish.

This view of BC and Alberta has changed in the 35 years of my lifetime, partly because of our evolving populace – a country of newer immigrants who did not have this same history forcefed to them, and partly because of an economy increasingly centered on international trade in Asia making Vancouver a gateway city to the potential riches of other countries. But despite that, I have a hard time believing that this could all be defined as a nation by anyone other than cartographers who like to draw lines on paper. But on second thought, wouldn’t the cartographers be as inclined as I am to draw those lines along the natural geographic boundaries that were the original distinctions between first nations and inuit cultures – the mountains, rivers, plains, and frozen tundra that dictated distinct patterns of life?

I am struck by something as simple as a sunset. Seen disappearing behind Vancouver’s north shore mountains, burning up the prarie outside of Calgary, dipping down over the Ottawa River – not the same in any one place, the excess or absence of late light making for a differing conception of time itself no matter the similar latitude of those three cities. The sunset of Newfoundland is different from Labrador, of Nunavut, of the St. Lawrence river. And yet all of these visions are contained within one lesser vision of a nationhood that seeks to erase the distinctions all together.

And I suppose that makes one ask (as all good imperialist analysts do) – what is it that makes a country or a nation anyways? In Canada the answer is clearly one of colonial expansion and subjugation of the aboriginal populations – that the desire for more resources and more land pushed the very small colonies of yesteryear into an ever increasing quest for unity and control. Which explains why our education of Canada always did focus on the seat of colonial power in Ottawa and parts of Quebec – because it is the “real” Canada whereas the rest of us are merely add-ons or drop-offs (as in the case of the Maritimes and Newfoundland which was originally a powerful resource base since dwindled).

Working for a federal institution I feel this on a daily basis, the calling of shots from Ottawa so out of step from the distinct needs of desires of the regions they control. We have always had a national question in Canada concerning the rights of Quebec, and more recently First Nations, but rarely do we ask what binds the rest of us together anyways? Our opposition to the aspirations of the French or the Cree? The fact that Tim Hortons now stretches across the country (which we identify as Canadian even though it is now American owned)? Our love of hockey? Not being American? Sadly it is these things that we cling to in order to prove our national loyalty because there are few other things to unite a geographic and cultural diaspora such as ours.

My homeland is my homeland. That is a geographic area defined by islands, cedar trees, salmon and bears. When I fly home from the east it is the glacial-peaked coastal mountains that tell me I have finally crossed the line to where I live, where I am from. It brings me into a city of many generations of immigrants and First Nations people who have for as little as a day or as long as ten thousand years called that place their own. Even in my small bustling neighbourhood there is no such thing as “shared culture” but a muliplicity of lifestyles that work alongside each other for good and for bad. It is not easy to define why this is my country, though I am sure that the academic legions have certainly tried. For me it is the place where I feel safe, and where the history written onto me every day far surpasses my early education about the importance of domination. This is not to minimize the real oppression that continues in BC, or in Vancouver – because it is still present in all its brutality. But despite over a century of trying to subjugate all the wildness in us, I still live in a place where people talk to trees and fret over the decline of wild fishes.

When I was growing up I so envied those children who got to eat maple syrup on snow. But what I didn’t realize is that the chance to see a bear or dolphin, play in the abandoned trappers’ cabins on my grandfather’s land, or fly a kite at Clover Point was just as precious. While some kids’ pursuits were modeled as truly Canadian, ours were not – and realizing the implications of that now I am truly glad of it.