Let’s Have a National Day That Celebrates the Founding of Our Country

Commentary

In 1497, John Cabot claimed Newfoundland for King Henry VII of England. He sent back reports of a fertile country surrounded by waters teeming with fish. It was the eastern coast of Asia, he thought, “the country of Grand Khan”—an imaginary conflation of the Chinese emperor and the ruler of the Mongols.

Other, later reports were less favourable. Jacques Cartier called the northern bank of the St. Lawrence River “the land that God gave to Cain.” Two centuries on, Voltaire sneered at “a few acres of snow.” At the beginning of the 19th century, settlers farther west had opened what they called a “howling wilderness.”

Strange, forbidding beginnings! We might trace them even further back to Leif Erikson’s short-lived Norse outpost on the shore of northern Newfoundland, and of course to the astounding journey from Asia across the Bering Strait, which peopled the New World in waves beginning some 20,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age. But neither foreshadowed the trans-continental, bilingual, bicultural parliamentary monarchy that was to come.

This year on July 1, we can be proud of our ancestors’ success in transforming some of the least inviting land in the world into the rich country that we now call Canada. But our national day, now somewhat absurdly called “Canada Day,” does not celebrate the founding of our country.

The drive to national autonomy and unity was felt nearly everywhere in the trans-Atlantic world of the 19th century. It was achieved earlier and less painfully in Canada than in the more famous examples of Italy or Germany (both unified in 1871). Our national day recognizes the confederation of the jurisdictions now called Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Four provinces within the British Empire that had escaped American conquest were joined together as the Dominion of Canada in 1867. “Dominion Day,” as July 1 was known until 1982, is a better name and should be restored.

The history of Canada long predates Confederation. The virtue of “Dominion Day” is that it clearly separates the establishment of our country and its constitutional order from the union of those four original provinces. That union grew and expanded to fill half a continent. Now all those developments are misleadingly conflated. But we should, I think, have a holiday celebrating the founding of the country. June 24 would be the ideal date. Not only is that Saint-Jean Baptiste Day—an old mid-summer festival of the French ancien régime which is now the main provincial holiday in Quebec—but it is also the date on which John Cabot landed on the coast of Newfoundland.

Now, 529 years later and 159 years since Confederation, we can take stock of how far we’ve come. Sometimes it seems a miracle that we have survived. Our country still stands, despite the American and French Revolutions, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, two World Wars, the Cold War, domestic terrorism, and crises of national unity.

But Canada has often seemed a disappointment, a place that never quite lives up to its enormous potential. The old joke was that Canada was destined to enjoy the very best of the Old and New Worlds: French culture, British government, and American efficiency; but instead we got American culture, French government, and British efficiency. Likewise, our seventh Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, inaccurately predicted that the 20th century would belong to Canada. Many since the 19th century have lamented that Canada was “rich by nature, poor by policy.”

But Canada has punched far above its weight in the past—especially in the literal meaning of the word. Facing down the Americans in 1812, the Fenian Raids in the 1860s and ’70s, our first overseas deployment in the South African War (1899–1902), the capture of Vimy Ridge (1917) which stabilized the Allied front in World War I, and our storming of Juno Beach in 1944 all rank high in the annals of war, and some of them were never expected to succeed. We ended World War II with the third-largest navy in the world.

A cloud of forgetfulness hangs over those achievements, and successive governments have preferred to emphasize peacekeeping—even when we failed, as in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Mali. The decline of the British Empire after the two world wars was as great a blow to Canada as to the Mother Country, and our elites preferred oblivion, and, as it seemed, a fresh start. Anglo-Canadian nationalism once meant pride in a greater British identity and fighting for the empire. Quebecois nationalism took shape amidst indifference to imperial adventures, opposition to conscription, and later the secularism of the Quiet Revolution.

The end of empire did not reconcile the Two Solitudes. But Canada tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural, middle power between Britain and America, between Europe and the New World, and (as it seemed under Pierre Trudeau) between the West and the USSR. That world order is long gone now, and Canada awaits a new purpose. Are we to be “‘the most European of non-European countries,” and a North American outpost of a renewed European world order? Or will our destiny lie in a formal association with Britain and the other English-speaking former Dominions—commonly called CANZUK? Either, combined with our proximity to the USA, would place us in an enviable position, and few countries can even contemplate such possibilities.

But simply maintaining the North American ancien régime and a stable parliamentary monarchy in the New World is as good a national mission as any. That mission is now under strain, and will take enormous effort to continue. New crises are upon us. The American trade war, tariffs, exaggerated threats of annexation, and out-of-control immigration have awakened something long dormant in our political classes. The post-national clap-trap of the past decade has been mercifully cast aside, and politicians now grope like blind men in the dark in search of a national identity and symbols to rally around.

This Dominion Day, let us hope they find what they seek!

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.