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The Canada Day search for kismet

It’s the season of birthdays and, like most holidays — personal and collective — the anticipation of such events often fosters expectations so lofty the reality of the celebration has little chance to live up to its hype.
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It’s the season of birthdays and, like most holidays — personal and collective — the anticipation of such events often fosters expectations so lofty the reality of the celebration has little chance to live up to its hype. Birthdays, of course, have to carry the added baggage of marking the passage of time, which is pretty much the point of birthdays. Call it the one-day-older-and-deeper-in-debt syndrome if you need to label it but it mostly amounts to a gnawing discomfort at the passage of time and the shockingly bigger number you’re celebrating this year than the one you celebrated last year, which has had a whole year to lose its shock value.

141 is a shockingly big number. Smaller than 232 for sure, and way smaller than some of the old and ancient world celebrations that range up into the thousands. Nonetheless, Happy Birthday Canada; Happy Birthday USA. Many happy returns… or, at least in the case of the USA, happier than this year’s, tinted as it is by the twin funks of presidential politics and the uneasy feeling the entire country is circling the bowl.

Canada Day, a suitably modest if terminally unimaginative moniker for our national holiday of Self, was particularly sweet this year. Canada Day was sunny where I celebrated and that’s a feat whose statistical probability generally hovers around the same range as a fair to middling professional baseball player’s batting average. It brought to mind my very first Canada Day which clinched my suspicion that my adopted country was every bit as weird as I was.

Having struggled through my first Montreal winter, including as it did my first experience with multiple days of -40° temperatures, the slushfest of spring and the totally unexpected sight of normally modest, staid Canadians virtually peeling down to nekkedness on the day the thermometer finally topped +20°C, I was really looking forward to seeing how Canadians celebrated their national day of being.

I saw several things that year I’d never seen before and learned a great deal about the spirit, grit and collective weirdness of the people who had welcomed me to their world even after conducting an investigation into my background. I watched grown men gather around a barbecue and diligently sear hamburgers and hot dogs to the point of immolation… notwithstanding a persistent drizzle of rain that threatened to douse the best efforts of a gas grill. I nearly froze to death on the first day of July. I listened with rapt fascination to a group of intelligent people earnestly discuss what it means to be Canadian… without ever reaching a conclusion or anything that even the most optimistic diplomat would consider a consensus. I saw a woman eat a hamburger with a fork and knife. I exploded my first Safety Firework.

Almost 30 Canada Days later, things have changed. For starters, it was hot and sunny this year, lending credence to the arguments in favour of global warming so damaged by June’s remarkably close impersonation of January. I didn’t see anyone eat anything with inappropriate utensils. And with a bold sense of leadership and an award-winning plan to change the world, my own hometown even celebrated with an almost unmotorized parade this year. I’m still unclear whether going engine-free was supposed to spark sympathy for those struggling to keep their SUVs rolling in an era of expensive gasoline, the opening salvo in the municipality’s new austerity budget or another step closer to sustainability. But it seems fitting that those terminally cute Olympic Mascots, incapable as they are of self-powered locomotion, were hauled around in the back of a vehicle that burns something other than gasoline. All animals are equal… some are just more equal than others. I think George Orwell said that. Or was it Juan Samaranch?

Anyway, some things never change and the essence of Canada Day still seems to be the search for the elusive kismet which makes all true Canadians Canadian and not, for example, Tibetans. It’s that special essence, that indispensable, elemental, bred-in-the-bone distinguishing feature mothers and fathers drill into the soft spots of their children’s heads until it becomes as much a part of them as their DNA. Incapable of definition, it can be approximated thus: Canadians are not Americans! Hegel would be proud.

And how are we not American? Well, being Canadian, we’re not prone to jump to conclusions when dithering will do, but here are at least some of the crucial elements.

At important moments of its evolution, war defined and gave focus to the USA. The American Revolution cast off forever the tyrannical shackles of the British Monarchy. The Civil War settled forever that other defining question plaguing Canadian life: Can Quebec secede from Confederation? Naturally, the Civil War settled that question in a strictly American context, the South standing in, all but linguistically, for Quebec.

Canada eschews war. Canada was negotiated in the smoky backrooms of genteel gentlemen’s clubs. If America is defined by war, Canada is more accurately defined by such boardgames as Risk, Diplomacy, and, most especially, Monopoly. Whereas America was formed at the point of a gun, Canada was formed with a nod and a wink and a sherry toast.

America settled the west because settling the west was its Manifest Destiny. Think Moses. The teeming American masses yearned to breathe fresh air and discover the wonders of smoking meats with mesquite. Canada, on the other hand, settled the west because it was a sound business move. Think Rupert Murdoch. Canada’s political managers sought to diversify the nascent country’s portfolio and assure it would forever have hinterlands eastern politicians could ignore, piss off, pillage and from which would spring an inconsequential political party that would someday rise to power only to discover there was little it could do until it abandoned its principles in a deluded effort to convince those easterners to award it a majority.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while Canada adopted a modest, suitably Canadian low profile, America knew it was bound for glory. America strode into the future with a spring in its step and the certainty of missionaries bringing the word of God to the Godless. America set the bar, raised the standards and eventually had enough faith in its role as the Only Remaining Superpower, that it was comfortable turning the office of President and the Executive branch of government over to a group of rabble that would make a Junta blush.

Canada was less certain of its future and, just to be safe, built all its major cities within 100 miles — converted in the late 20 th century to approximately 160 kilometres — of the US-Canada border. After all, if we weren’t so close to and so dependent on our good friends to the south, how could we be so certain of what we’re not?

Happy Canada Day, eh? Happy 4 th of July. Canada and the US, like salt and pepper.