By Doug Draper, publisher, Niagara At Large
When I returned to my home and native land of Canada following a trip to the land of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts this spring, there seemed little to feel proud and patriotic about back here.
Tall ships from U.S. and Canada gather in Port Dalhousie Harbour in St. Catharines, Ontario for Canada Day weekend. Photo by Doug Draper
There was the ongoing federal Senate scandal featuring Duffy, Wallin and company, the continued outrage over hundreds of millions of our tax dollars former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals flushed down the crapper to cancel two controversial plans to build gas-fired power plants in Oakville and Mississauga, the ongoing vaudeville act of Rob and Doug Ford in Toronto, just to mention some of the highlights or low points, if you will. And I am losing track f how many mayors have been forced to leave office in disgrace in Quebec.
The ongoing campaign by the Harper government in Ottawa to dismantle the programs that once earned Canada a reputation as a world leader in environmental protection and its obvious determination to rebrand the country as a ‘military power’ rather than a peacekeeper doesn’t do much for my pride in where we, as a nation, is going either.
That left me writing in another recent commentary on Niagara At Large that I don’t know how much flag waving I can do on this Canada Day. For as long as I have written regular columns for this and other news venues, I have done my best to write something uplifting about our nation, and this time I was beginning to doubt that I could do that.
Then I remember something that was said to me during an interview I did some 25 years ago with, of all people, Abbie Hoffman, the late so-called American radical from the 1960s and 70s, who was hardly regarded as a patriot by many more conservative types in his native land.
Hoffman was telling me about a time he was hauled before the U.S. Congress’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, now gone but then a still active relic of the red-scare, blacklisting, Joe McCarthy era of the 1950s. In Hoffman’s case, he was called on the floor and having his love of country questioned for his demonstration against the government and its warring activities in Vietnam.
“That was the biggest insult of all insults,” said Hoffman of his government’s effort to brand him as un-American, “because I felt what I was doing was patriotic, but no in the sens of what people would say: ‘My country, right or wrong’.”
“My country was always right because a country is only land and people. But the government? That’s another question. That can be damn wrong.”
So I say let’s think of the beauty of the land and its rich diversity of people. Governments come and go, and if we exercise the will get engaged as people, we can make quick work of those governments that are compromising the values that have made Canada, since its birth close to a century and a half ago, one of the greatest countries in the world to live in. And that may be enough reason for hope and celebration on this Canada Day.
Finally, Niagara At Large also wishes our neighbours in the United States a happy and peaceful Fourth of July.
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