Oh Canada – Can We Ever Get Back To The Promise Symbolized By That Flag?

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Right there with the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the first time The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, it was one of those events in my childhood that I will remember as if it took place yesterday.

It was the day – 50 years ago this February 15^th, 2015 – that this Canada I am a native citizen of finally embraced a flag of its own, with all of the pride I felt at the time as it was being raised, for the very first time, at a public school I was attending in Welland, Ontario.

For me, and I think for so many other younger Canadians, this new flag was not, as was said by more than a few of our elders, the resemblance of a “beer label.” It was afresh, free-lying symbol of a nation finally breaking out from its ‘Mother England’ apron strings and forging ahead with defining its own character as one of the world’s most progressive and compassionate beacons of a fair, equal and just democracy.

It was only a few years later that Canada hosted one great party for the world called ‘Expo 67’, followed by the election of a very energetic and exciting federal leader, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (man his son Justin does not have the smarts to stand in the shadow of), who made it impossible for our most powerful American neighbour to the south to ignore.

By the mid- to late-1960s, it seemed that Canada, as one of the healthiest, most prosperous and democratically just and free democracies on the face of this earth, had finally arrived. For young Canadians like me, it seemed as though if we got an education and worked hard enough, we could make the kind of home for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren that all too many others in this world could only dream of.

Since then, we have gone from that to a country that has watched what was a world class universal, publicly paid for health care system be systematically compromised by federal and provincial tax cutting, to a point where it makes more sense now –from an economic point of view – to let older, sicker citizens, who place the biggest cost burden on our health system, die.

Since then, the Chretien and Martin federal Liberal governments, followed more robustly by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, have all but gone out of the business of making enough transfer payments to provincial governments to support public health care.

Over the past two or three decades, we have also witnessed the evaporation of a once vibrant middle class, as tens-of-millions of good paying manufacturing jobs have been outsources to sweatshops overseas under so-called ‘free trade agreements’ that have done more to make it easy for corporations to give the boots to Canada than to protect Canadian jobs..

We now live in a country where one of the world’s greatest environmental agencies – Environment Canada – has been gutted to a point where it might just as well be buried, and where some of the world-leading environmental regulations have been slashed so the current Harper government can realize its tar sands agenda with less public scrutiny.

We have also witnessed a country that made it possible for all our young Canadian citizens with promise to have access to post-secondary education to one where they only have access if they leave college or university burdened with debt equal to that of making a down payment on a home.

We  now live in a country where most of our young people are not only burdened with that debt, but are made to spend hundreds of hours working for free as “unpaid interns,” only to find out later that our federal government will use a “foreign workers program” to import cheaper labour rather than ensure our own young people land a decent-paying job.

We once sent soldiers to other parts of the world who were, first and foremost, called “peacekeepers,” and Canada once had a global reputation as a negotiator rather than a country that went in taking sides – chossing one group or nation against another.

In the Canada we live in today, people who question the federal government of our day are regarded as threats or enemies of this country’s insterests. Doesn’t matter how many of the same people who grew up with pride for our flag raise concerns over the efforts by this same government to deconstruct all of the best things Canada has stood for.

Forget about 50 years ago as if it was yesterday. Now we are the bad Canadians. We are the threat to this country’s tar sands related interests. For the tar sands sponsored Harper government, we  are no longer proud Canadians. We are the  enemy.

As so many anonymous Harper  supporting trolls have told me and others who won’t get with the tar sands program – ‘If you don’t like this country, then get the hell out.”

Oh Canada, what has become of thee?

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