Canadian Nationalism in a Nutshell
by Roland Barphe, director of media studies at the Polyvalente de St-Tite, founder of l'Organisation Uni du Film Original Québécois (l'OUFOq), and editor of Excressences
(translation by Flann Kinsella)
Last week I noted that the myth of Quebec nationalism, as questionable as it is, survives because it is better than the competition. The modern, knowledgeable, myth-seeking Canadian, given a choice between the myth of Quebec and the myth of Canada, will immediately recognize the superiority of the myth of Quebec.
For one thing, the myth of Quebec is original. It arose out of events and circumstances unique to Quebec. The myth of Canada is found throughout the world.
The myth of Canada is simply the colonial myth described by V. S. Naipaul in The Middle Passage. It is commonly found in former colonies which did not obtain independence through revolution. It holds that nothing of consequence comes from the country concerned, except in one field: sport.
Naipaul observed that the only field in which Trinidadians believed they could hold their own with other countries was cricket. For Canadians the field is hockey.
In other fields we defer to foreign expertise. We watch American television and American movies. We drive American and Japanese and European cars. And above all, we adopt foreign ideas which have already failed elsewhere.
We have adopted Thatcherism. The United Kingdom has sunk into a morass of crime and greed, and we've adopted the policies that sank it there. They're foreign, so they must be good.
Canadians think of their country as an empty vessel, and are always searching outside Canada for people and things to put in it. We imported Americans to staff our universities. When Robin Mathews protested, he was called a racist. And an entire generation of Canadian scholars has been kept out of the universities because the universities were staffed in the 1960s with young Americans who are only now starting to retire.
The Canadian folk music tradition was allowed to wither away, and we put in its place an imitation of American folk music. So pop music is now dominated by American forms. It is possible to go to blues festivals in Canada at which all the bands consist of white Canadians.
The emptiness of Canadian culture is painfully illustrated by Canadian nationalism. Wil Ferguson has reported his Japanese students' parody of the nationalistic Canadian essays in the textbook they used in his English classes: Canada is a big country; it is very beautiful; I love Canada. Canadian nationalism was recently excited by a commercial which proudly identified Canadians as people who are not lumberjacks and who do not live in igloos – Canadians are proud of not being distinctive.
Canadian culture is also passive. When the British Conservatives tried to introduce a poll tax, the British rioted, and the tax was withdrawn. Brian Mulroney introduced the Goods and Services Tax, Canadians drove to the States to make their purchases for a while, then they settled down and paid the tax.
We do things last. We wait to find out what other people think is hip, and then we do it when we can be sure it's foreigner-approved. So Toronto built a giant concrete toilet bowl for a stadium just as Americans began to blow up their toilet bowl stadiums and replace them with stadiums in which the spectators can actually see the game. Of course, we did raise the toilet bowl design to new heights by putting a lid on it.
With all due respect to Wentworth Sutton, and that is a great deal, the reason that Western Canadians are alienated from Canada is not that they are compensating for guilt about being rich, but because they have every right to be.
Canadian Nationalism in a Nutshell © Coolth, 2001
Click the banner or click here for Coolth
Nutshell essays | Home