Tweet
I love holidays but this is one that I won't celebrate.
De fireworks dem pretty but racism, sexism, which still sees few women in the executive suite, deplorable treatment of the native people, decaying moral values are enough for starters. Definitely NOT a level playng field and what BURNS me the most is the denial and hypocrisy.
When I hear Jamaicans spouting on bout...mi soh proud to be Canadian mi jus
Mi remembe when Ben Johnson and im maddah did say dat. 
Anyway, as always my greetings for Canada Day as always are...
Happy Canada Day.....Fuddle Duddle!!
This woman raises a lot of excellent points too in her article released today.
Why I don't celebrate Canada Day
De fireworks dem pretty but racism, sexism, which still sees few women in the executive suite, deplorable treatment of the native people, decaying moral values are enough for starters. Definitely NOT a level playng field and what BURNS me the most is the denial and hypocrisy.
When I hear Jamaicans spouting on bout...mi soh proud to be Canadian mi jus
Mi remembe when Ben Johnson and im maddah did say dat. Anyway, as always my greetings for Canada Day as always are...
Happy Canada Day.....Fuddle Duddle!!
This woman raises a lot of excellent points too in her article released today.
Why I don't celebrate Canada Day
I don't celebrate Canada Day, never have. Political protests that talk about “taking back Canada” make me uncomfortable. “We,” the people who live here, have never had Canada, Even if some people’s romantic idea of what Canada was in some distant past when Tommy Douglas was standing for medicare ........I still wouldn’t celebrate Canada. July 1 was the day that Canada was formed. It was based on a deal between Upper and Lower Canada, the British colony and the French one. It was an unequal deal that we have been paying for ever since but more importantly both were based on the annihilation of most and marginalization of the rest of First Nations.When I ask groups who promote this romantic view of a country founded in colonialism why they do it, they usually answer that more people relate to it. I get that standing up for something you are losing is more powerful than fighting for something that never existed before. That’s why we won the abortion fight. We set up a clinic and then asked people to defend it against legal and political assault. But isn’t our job as activists to educate people not to feed into the mythology that keeps us all divided.
The Canadian Left has suffered from nationalism for as long as I’ve been an activist. I suppose it has to do with living next door to the United States. Up until recently we have legitimately been able to claim it is better here than there. Now our government has made us an international pariah worse, at least on environmental issues, than the US. After all, we let draft dodgers from the Vietnam War and even deserters come here. We let Chilean’s fleeing Pinochet’s vicious coup come here. We made friends with Cuba and stayed out of the war in Viet Nam and the war against Iraq. We adopted same sex marriage before any other country. We have single payer public health care. We fought for and won the best legal equality for women at least on paper, including abortion rights. And probably best of all, we have a magnificently multicultural country that despite continuing racism at almost every level, people are proud of. Almost all of these things came with a struggle when we had governments that responded to political pressure.
We can be proud of these accomplishments but that’s not the same as being proud of this country. In the 1970’s nationalism was a significant current on the Left. The Waffle, the youthful left wing of the NDP, was ahead of its time politically on many issues like women’s rights, Indigenous rights, self-determination for Quebec and environmental issues but it was nationalist. It saw the central economic problem for Canada as our economy being based on “branch plants” to US industry.
As a young woman who had travelled around the world in 1970 and in particular overland from Turkey to India, I could never accept this Canadian nationalism. On occasion, although they deny it now, some of those nationalists would compare Canada to a third-world country. This I knew to be false. Canada was just a milder version of the imperialist United States is how I saw it. Later the Council of Canadians formed as a nationalist group who helped to lead the fight against Free Trade . This was a critical battle but here too I couldn’t accept the argument of independence from the U.S. For me it was the arguments about how Free Trade would restructure the economy, export jobs and undermine social programs that made sense. When Quebec got involved in a coalition against Free Trade called the “Pro-Canada Network”, we had to change the name to Action Canada Network. To their credit the CoC became more and more internationalist as the free trade fight spread internationally through the fight against the FTAA and then more generally the international fight against neo-liberalism.
Yet Canadian nationalism still seems to have an echo in the fight against Stephen Harper under the rubric of taking back Canada from the Harperite plunderers.
The Canadian Left has suffered from nationalism for as long as I’ve been an activist. I suppose it has to do with living next door to the United States. Up until recently we have legitimately been able to claim it is better here than there. Now our government has made us an international pariah worse, at least on environmental issues, than the US. After all, we let draft dodgers from the Vietnam War and even deserters come here. We let Chilean’s fleeing Pinochet’s vicious coup come here. We made friends with Cuba and stayed out of the war in Viet Nam and the war against Iraq. We adopted same sex marriage before any other country. We have single payer public health care. We fought for and won the best legal equality for women at least on paper, including abortion rights. And probably best of all, we have a magnificently multicultural country that despite continuing racism at almost every level, people are proud of. Almost all of these things came with a struggle when we had governments that responded to political pressure.
We can be proud of these accomplishments but that’s not the same as being proud of this country. In the 1970’s nationalism was a significant current on the Left. The Waffle, the youthful left wing of the NDP, was ahead of its time politically on many issues like women’s rights, Indigenous rights, self-determination for Quebec and environmental issues but it was nationalist. It saw the central economic problem for Canada as our economy being based on “branch plants” to US industry.
As a young woman who had travelled around the world in 1970 and in particular overland from Turkey to India, I could never accept this Canadian nationalism. On occasion, although they deny it now, some of those nationalists would compare Canada to a third-world country. This I knew to be false. Canada was just a milder version of the imperialist United States is how I saw it. Later the Council of Canadians formed as a nationalist group who helped to lead the fight against Free Trade . This was a critical battle but here too I couldn’t accept the argument of independence from the U.S. For me it was the arguments about how Free Trade would restructure the economy, export jobs and undermine social programs that made sense. When Quebec got involved in a coalition against Free Trade called the “Pro-Canada Network”, we had to change the name to Action Canada Network. To their credit the CoC became more and more internationalist as the free trade fight spread internationally through the fight against the FTAA and then more generally the international fight against neo-liberalism.
Yet Canadian nationalism still seems to have an echo in the fight against Stephen Harper under the rubric of taking back Canada from the Harperite plunderers.
Comment