Canada was thoroughly admired then because of the contributions of Canadian soldiers in WWII and the diplomacy of our leadership. Talking with old people they’d wax poetic about our men and women who had liberated France, Holland, Germany and Spain. It was a quarter century after that time when we were there and people talked of the Canadians soldiers as ‘strong and well mannered, humble and helpful.’ All these sorts of adjectives came up spontaneously where as the same folk would describe the ‘British liberators ‘. “Stiff and stuffy and the Americans ‘as brass and arrogant’.
The Russians weren’t spoken well of at all but by then we’d had decades of Cold War with Communist Russia backing Communist China in the invasion of Korea and countless others democracies attacked by these aetheist dictatorships. So many Canadians had died due to Communists. The Kennedy Missile Crisis was in our minds and the young minds of those we met still talked of the Berlin Airlift and the Marxist hoards so little different to the days of the Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan Power mongering bullies. Communists have always been the best at stealing the creative genius of the west.
I was in Western Europe and the East was still perceived as barbarian . Canadians were the west and the British Empire had been the most civilized of all the colonial powers. The Chinese and Middle Eastern Warlords and the war lords of India and Africa made even our Western Vlad the Implaler look moderate. In the west the Crucifixion of the Romans had lapsed centuries before but continued with the millions Armenians genocide and the tribal warfares which continue today. The Germans we met still carried their shame as did the Vichy French.
It was good to be Canadian and even Americans would wear Canadian or Australians flags on their back packs. Everyone hates #1 so the Americans being the principal superpower in the world were hated and envied liked every winner in history. Canada was simply not a threat and their ally.
In England I was actually helped immensely by the Canadian Consulate in a way I can’t imagine being helped to day It was all so friendly back then and the governments of Pearson and Diefenbaker were all so homey just as Mulroney and Chrétien were like folk who’d you’d associate with in the neighbourhood. Canada , all of Canada back then, not just the ‘city Canada’ today ruled by Toronto and Montreal, was friendly and safe. Nobody wanted to defund the police of the day. We liked leaving our doors unlocked and the judges lived in our neighbourhoods rather than in private elite enclaves like West Vancouver. Elitism was ever present but our leadership lived next door like Harper and Turner not like some jet setting playboy who preferred private island orgies to campfires in the wilderness. .
I graduated from University of Winnipeg and University of Manitoba. I fished and hiked and skied. Canadians collectively were people who spent their holidays in the woods or outside at the beach, Festivals were in parks not indoors. We were an outdoor people. Guns were sold on the shelves in the store and everyone who didn’t know a hunter knew someone who hunted. The north was not the isolated region of the day. There was just not the polarization and division of later Marxist Trudeau years. The world wasn’t black and white. My doctor was black. My friend Jewish. My family Métis. I simply didn’t think in ‘class’ or paranoid ‘him and them’ terms. We really thought of ourselves as Canadians . There was west and east and there was the north and maritime but we all were joined by Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Anne Murray, Stan Rogers. They sang songs of Canada, Northwest Passage and Edmund Fitzgerald. Our history was our culture. There was none of the globalist cancel culture or Marxist culturess homogenization. Canada was Canadian.
CBC was a Canadian radio station as Canadian as Hockey before it became the propaganda channel of today. Pravda or People’s Daily. I loved to listen to Barbara From as much as I enjoyed hearing hog prices and wheat prices on the news. The Winnipeg Free Press really was amazing long before the left wing media of today began its censorship attack on free speech with the government wanting to ban Little Sisters and Sun and Fox News. All the UN Canadian behaviour of dictatorship culminating in today legislations of censorship in the media making Canada a province of Beijing.
Canada was small and local and Canadians who came here were from all over but the culture of Canada was deep and full of spirituality. Even today the vast majority of Canadians except lying aetheist communist leadership acknowledges belief in a higher power. The boy PM Trudeau liked the angry adolescent glitz of Montreal and Hollywood and never understood the depth of the Laurentians. Canadians did. We embraced Canada as French and English and we’re welcomining of all before Pierre Trudeau made the constitution in his image and imported the stupidity of the revolutionary intellectuals, those perpetual partriarchal boys who simply didn’t understand the Beatles ‘we don’t want a revolution’ and ‘all we are saying is give love a chance’.
I loved taking the train that John A. Macdonald built across the country the early Canadians built hold to hold Canada together. John A Macdonald and the visionary early Canadians saw Canasa as a nation long Trudeau did nothing when the Macdonald statue was destroyed by his brown shirt friends. The west wisely or unwisely wanted to join the US by Macdonald kept us together. The train was everything.. It was the incredible chain that bound east and west . Living in Winnipeg at the hub and centre of the nation I felt the breadth and depth of Canada which was so well represented in the movies “My Winnipeg” by Guy Maddin.
There was the RCMP and their history with Musical Parade. There was Canada’s most exemplary relationship with the indigenous It was the best in the world where other conquered peopl were simply killed or starved. We had treaties something unheard of in Africa and South Asia where the ‘big boys’ trampled the little boys. The oldest law in the world was the Chinese Law of the Fish , there are big fish and little fish and the little fish nut be fast and numerous. Yet here in Canada we had the experiment of treating the French and the indigenous better than any other conquering country or tribes in history and better than either of these groups treated their conquered people. Yet today that is never spoken of as comparison is always intellectual and there is some paradise or perfection that history is compared with.
Captain Vancouver and Frazer and other explorers were all there then , Today that heritage was the basis of Colonel Hatfield, Canada’s explorer extraordinaire. . Our scientists made the Space Arm for NASA and the most amazing man of all, the crazy jet test flight guru , Bowie’s Major Tom, Colonel Hatfield , became the leader of International Space Station maintained by east and west.
The Berlin Wall fell and we heard about it as Canadians and we cheered as when Reagan and Gorbachev met and the Communist Marxist Dictatorship of Lenin and Stalin that killed a hundred million and worked only because of the misery of millions that Solzenitzen exposed like the Auschwitz work camps of Germany, fell. The collapse of the USSR was cheered by hundreds of millions .
Canada was civil rights and freedom. It was health care and education and peace. When ever I travelled to Europe I was met with smiles and friendship no longer a hippy on a bicycle but now a physicician specialist and writer coming from an admired country.
That changed in the last decade. The last time I was overseas in London and Paris and even when I was in Milan people asked about the censorship and dictatorship and the abuse of women and the horses riding down elders. I was ashamed of our leadership and have been since the first lies began with the double speak and gas lighting and arroganee so natural for the father and son became the norm in parliament. . None of the humility that Canada had worn so well as a spiritual centre, Just more flash and shallow words or virtue signalling and platitudes. The regime of the selfie . All the ‘foreign’ aid no longer about what the poor needed in other countries but just photo op opportunities and non accountable money stashes puppets. Third world banana country gave rise to third world maple syrup country.
I want to celebrate Canada Day. I am a Canadian as were my parent , the sons of immigrants, My grand parents came to Canada because of the law and order and education and lower and middle class opportunities. They came to work not to take. They didn’t come for welfare but rather to build and grow. They left the tyrannies of other countries and embraced the freedom of democracy .
I’ve white water canoed the northern streams and stayed in igloos and tents. I ‘ve hunted and fished and hiked and skied. I’ve loved listening to the wilderness songs . I’ve visited our spectacular Canadian Art and War Mueums. I’ve loved the Group of Seven and admired the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. Robertson Davies and Farley Mowatt writing. Margaret Lawrence and Emily Carr. I loved Canadian art and that distinctive feature of the Canadian melting pot of indigenous and immigrant all so inspired by the culture that our present PM was too stoned or stupid to grasp . Our PM puts down Canadians , Canada and is so lacking in culture and character he simply cannot appreciate Canada. He preferrs instead by his behaviour, the Beijing urban Maoist gang mentality and Hollywood paperrazie. Cooperation was the key to understanding Canada. Kindness was at it’s core. Those are forgotten words too often today.
Mines and logging and fisheries and people who knew the land were central not the gamblers of Wall Street and Montreal. I loved the architecture of Halifax and Victoria. I loved the research station in Churchill. There’s the Great Lakes and the Laurentians. But today I too often meet people who have immigrated to Canada but continue to live in their Old Country. Even the refugees seems to prefer to return to places of war they escaped to than see the Yukon or cross the country on the train and droad trips that were the mainstay of my child hood. I meet immigrants today who never left Richmond who don’t know English or French though thankfully their chilren have embraced Canada and we all love to hike and swim in the ‘wilderness’ together. .
I loved hunting with a new Canadian from Afghanistan and a new Canadian from Greece men who had hunted with their dads in their mountains of childhood. We all enjoyed eating Chinese Canadian and Indo Canadian meals in the little town cafes we stopped owned and run by locals who embrace Canada, all of it, not just a pavement patch like their pavement patch in another part of the world that may have had old culture but not the new culture of Canada which grew from all these strains and ideas
Today I hope for Canada. I pray for Canada. I believe that Canada will survive our present dangerously stupid corrupt leadership as it survived MacKenzie King who cavorted with prostitutes each night and believed his dog Spot channeled his dead mother. Canadians have been resilient if not tough. We’ve had to be collectively because we’ve had the weirdest anti Canadian leadership and swung back from these radical Marxist nutbar sto the central saniety we usually rally for.
Canada is my home. I love it as I love my family. But I’ve lived in Britain, America and Mexico and I have always come back to Canada as my home. It’s my home. I don’t criticize Niagara Falls or the Rocky Mountains.. I love the people and the architecture of the cities and the distinctive towns like Pemberton where the best potatoes grow or Kenora and Napanee and Salt Spring Islands and Bouchard Gardens. I talked with a Persian who loved their country the same way despite the Hitler like leadership that drove them out of Iran to live in Canada instead.
I fear the corruption of our present government with all its lies and egomania might make more leave again. Mobs love the Trudeaus of the world. The brain drain of Africa was caused by these sorts of little Napoleons. Not my idea of Canada but the brain drain of Canadians leaving for the freedom and meritocracy of the US where 80% of millionaires are self made in their own time and creativity is not stymied by the over whelming weight of corrupt institutionalize baksheesh Beurocracy of Canada.
Well, I’m ambivalent like a man who married the greatest bride and saw all his children grow and now fears afraid in old age because Trudeau promotes euthanasia like Pierre pushed abortion. I love Life and God and don’t want to live in fear like everyone does in countries that don’t know the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the American Revolution or 60’s Sexual Revolution. Canada was a post revolutin country till Trudeau paid a terrorist murderer 20 million dollars. The writing was on the wall,
I feared when Trudeau won another election that Canadians collectively were like the Germans of the thirties but thankfully despite his censorship we know the last election was won by Beijing and the dictator Xi . Canadian voted collectively against UN Canadian Trudeau. There is hope. We know this corruption today. Our media is more than the Corrupt CBC. We have an informed Canada though the SCAB Voters brought in on mass to destroy Canada rather than build it up like the immigrants of the Harper Chrétien days. Those were people who wanted Canada and what Canada was, not Antifida terrorists and radical iberal domestic Terrorists. Not the church arsonists or the climate change arsonists burning our forests. Even Queer Canada was Canadian before this anti maple leaf rainbow flag radical alphabet soup group began screaming we are coming for your children. I”m Canadian. We don’t do shit like that.
I’m old and opinionated and Canadian. I sill sing Happy Birthday Canada. Thank God for this amazing country, my home.
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