I'm an American. Yet since 2016 I've found myself unable to celebrate my own national holiday and preferred to celebrate Canada Day instead. Why? Well, the immediate reasons are obvious, but let me tell you about a few other reasons I've always felt more at home with the neighbours upstairs.
For as long as I can remember — well before I knew the name Trudeau as anyone other than the (unrelated) Doonesbury cartoonist — the maple leaf has been a mark of quality. My mother often talks about how when she was young, my grandmother always used to look for Maple Leaf Foods when buying meat products at the grocery market. And a longstanding family joke is that I inherited my mother and grandmother's (and great-grandmother's) tendency towards kindness and doing for others even when they don't reciprocate, four matrilineal generations being "the Canadian side of the family." And I've never even visited Canada and neither did they.
But when I think about all the times the elephant has shit the bed and how Canada cleans up after America when it does, it all makes sense. Just like all the times the men in my family shit the bed and how the women cleaned it up. Unconditional love, no matter how much it hurt, just to maintain some peace, order, and good government — of the household at least. Canada is the put-upon better half who strives to make things right, and to do better and apologize when the drunk spouse fucks up. As Robin Williams once said, a nice apartment upstairs from a meth lab. You take your blows and you keep on fighting without laying any blame. You walked into a wall, but you're not going to make Mexico pay for it. You just don't argue anymore.
Yet in spite of all the trouble, Canada (like my own mother) did a good job of home-schooling me over the course of my own brightly-coloured (and personally tumultuous) 1980s childhood. America might be the powerhouse of commodified entertainment, but Canadians invest in the arts as a public service, and if we would only pay attention to the message their artists are sending, a message of caring, America would be all the better for it. Canada gave me Raffi, Fred Penner, DiC/Cookie Jar, Nelvana, and two friendly elephants in the bed: King Babar and the pachyderm partner of Sharon, Lois & Bram. A bit of trivia: Their buddy Eric Nagler was a Vietnam draft resister who went north rather than become a casualty of an unjust war that Canada refused to join. Someone tell Justin Trudeau that his father saved about 50,000 lives and a small part of my childhood. He pissed off Nixon. He shrugged, and said just watch me do it again. Skinnamarink-a-dink-a-dink, I love you.
At the same time, now that I've become a more than casual observer of Canadian politics, I can recognize that what brand Canada means to me isn't the same as for everyone else. Canada still has much more work to do as regards healing the wounded relationship with its First Peoples. Systemic racism and police brutality are a reality for too many people of colour. Hate crimes are on the rise. Right-wing provincial governments are dismantling the safety net. The petro-industrial-political complex entrenched in the prairie provinces is accelerating climate change and threatening to fracture the country. All the while, fossil fuel executives and their pet politicians like Jason Kenney get away with bamboozling their constituents, whose unsustainable livelihoods are never going to flourish again, no matter how many homophobic memes of Justin Trudeau they share on Facebook. Call him Caitlyn all you want. Call him Fruity Trudy, Justine, TruPaul, the Princess from Papineau, Prime Menstruator, all the other vitriolic trash pulled from the bowels of Ezra Levant's Rebel scum alliance. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, Forbes says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back.
So it should come as no surprise that I am more than a little upset about the detestable us vs. them dog-whistling from Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber, competing in this year's Canadian Idol contest for who gets to follow in Andrew "Undead Milkman" Scheer's clumsy goose-steps, to be the next irrelevant opposition leader with oppositional defiance disorder. I'm talking about Erin O'Foole and Peter Principle MacKay copying each other's homework and complaining about a Nova Scotia newspaper's decision to run a "disclaimer" on their front page, regarding a Canadian flag insert they handed out for readers to decorate their front windows with. Literally all the paper was saying, is something that Justin Trudeau has said for years: people experience things differently, and people who have a civil disagreement on certain issues based on their lived experiences aren't your enemies but your neighbours. But of course Harper's deputy ding-dongs decided to make an issue of "patriotism" over saluting the flag, because they apparently haven't heard how well that's going on the PR front for the foes of Colin Kaepernick. Let's just say this is not your (grand)father's Great Canadian Flag Debate.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is, the kind of culture war CRAP that seems to be standard operating procedure in the United States doesn't seem to have taken off as successfully in Canada. Plus, they don't have as many guns, and restrictions on those useless weapons of war continue to tighten, which seems to be something Canadians are generally OK with, save for a handful of rage-baiting yahoos. Meanwhile, "freedom of speech" south of 49 seems to be intertwined with the freedom to literally shoot someone's mouth off for shooting their mouth off. While at the same time gun ownership is tied in with the First Amendment as "religious expression," exemplified by making Moses the spokesman for the NRA. If the American flag doesn't mean God's gift to humanity to you, you get a rocket's red glare right in the face. Except, of course, if the Southern Swastika means more to you. Then you get elected president of the United States, even while hugging the Stars & Stripes. (Or groping it.)
America is all kinds of fucked up. Canada? They're just neurotic. Comes with the territory for living with an abusive partner for 150+ years. And they have their dark underbelly, their problems, don't get me wrong, like a battered wife who develops social anxiety due to her chaotic home environment and gets into gambling, or porn, or taking mother's little helper to ease the pain. (At least Canada chose weed instead of tranquilizers.) They have their share of dirty cops, political corruption, trashy tabloids and privileged, mediocre white-guy pundits and presenters. But from my vantage point, they're just so gosh-darn nice, and shame on successive U.S. governments for not being nicer to them. Because they just seem to be getting better in a way that they wouldn't be if Stephen Harper hadn't been roundly humiliated by the son of the man he so despised. A way that they wouldn't be if Harper had the opportunity to sell the farm to Donald Trump.
I love Canada. Obviously, I love Justin Trudeau for a lot of reasons. But I also like Canada's cultural emissaries and Canada's wildlife and natural landscape and Canada's je ne sais quoi that whether my family was aware of it or not, was always a mark of quality. What I really like is Canada's willingness to do better bit by bit, even if they have to be pushed in the direction of being bold and dramatic every so often. America is ossified. America is stuck. America is inflexible. America's way of life and letter of the law, as designated by a bunch of dead white male slaveholders in powdered wigs who remain on our fucking currency like deified Roman emperors well after Canada beat us to the punch with their own Harriet Tubman boss move, seems set in stone. We're tearing down statues, but not statutes. I expect the goddamn Second Amendment to remain on the books for the next 250 fucking years and untold number of school shootings and useless offerings of thoughts and prayers. And I'm not happy about that. Especially because of the threat it poses to my dear beloved Canada.
But I'm still going to celebrate Canada Day today. And probably, even after Trump is gone, I'm going to continue to celebrate Canada instead of the war of U.S. independence until America learns to be more like Canada. Until we get national healthcare, sane gun laws, restrictions on hate speech, official bilingualism, metrication, a proper child benefit program, federally legalized marijuana and medically-assisted euthanasia, and a Reconciliation project, I'm going to celebrate Canada. I'm going to celebrate Pirouette Pierre and his savoir faire, his son with the nice hair and dramatic flair, and the draft-dodging elephant and the bears who care, instead of Trump on a tear, a lack of healthcare due to people who won't share, Putin in his lair, and bombs bursting in air.
And hopefully, sometime before the year 2100, the border will open back up and I'll get to go to there. Bonne fête du Canada, mon frère!
