Six Birthday Wishes For Canada

Canada needs to reaffirm the virtues of courageous leadership and individual enterprise.

Well, well, a birthday coming up! I have lived outside Canada for much of my life. So, here, looking through a telescope, are a few thoughts on Canada – its past, its present, its future:

First, Canada was built by leaders and by people – natives, immigrants, individual Canadians – with high ambition, bold vision, and lots of backbone.

Difficult times are coming, and if we are going to survive them, we need to reaffirm the virtue of courageous leadership, of individual enterprise, and, yes, of that much discredited thing – “vision”: looking into the future and making it happen.

Self-deprecating humour, reasonableness, and a readiness to compromise are one side of the Canadian coin. But big ideas, audacious vision, and daring action are the other.

Canada itself is, in fact, the result of big choices, even of reckless gambles.

In fact, Canada is an unlikely nation. Just look at it on the map. It’s a huge galumphing awkwardly shaped giant, only six or seven human generations old, sprawling over the upper reaches of a vast continent and coexisting with the world’s superpower. This vast fragmented piece of geography is held together by a small, highly varied population: 34 million, including over six million French speakers. The total is less than California (38 million), and not that much more than the city of Tokyo (28 million). To create this giant, political choices needed to be daring – building railways, building seaways, building institutions, building elements of a welfare state, helping create a national culture – or cultures – accommodating differences, reconciling conflicts, and, most recently, healing wounds.

Unlike many nations, Canada always had an alluring alternative to being itself. It could join, piece by piece or as a block, the United States. It did not do so.

So Canada is not the product of laissez-faire or of “governments can’t pick winners” or of “government is the problem, not the solution.” Canada is the product, in its own way, of a strong state allied to a dynamic capitalist economy, of radical pioneering individualism and elitist dirigisme, a tricky balance, not always ideal in its details.

Our great model, our great measuring stick, our great neighbour comes from an entirely different tradition.

The United States had puritan exiles and tobacco speculators, a revolution and slave plantations, a civil war, and a westward moving frontier – the people moving ahead of government – with cowboys, ranchers, Indian wars, rustlers, and gun fights, and only then the state moving in – or sending the army – to settle things down.

Canada, from the beginning, had regulated fur trading monopolies, Indian fur trappers and traders, appointed governors, imperial overlords, parliamentary committees, and government, often, occupying and regulating the land, before the people got there – government, in large part, moving ahead of the people, with the native nations and Métis often caught, as it were, in front of the bulldozer.

In coming years, with world economic crises impending, with huge shifts in the world balance of power occurring, and with ecological disaster threatening, we will need to rediscover the values that created Canada in the first place: big, ambitious – even heroic – ideas both from government and from individuals: what my grandmother used to call “gumption” – individual guts, cutting-edge intelligence, and audacity of enterprise.

If we don’t have a high idea – and ideal – of what we can do, we will never even attempt to do it!

Failure or success, in the troubled future, will depend on how ambitious we are, how creative we are, and what sort of idea we have of ourselves, and of this, our highly improbable, even miraculous nation, Canada.