Happy Dominion Day!

A lament for English Canada: a nation intentionally erased, primarily by the federal government.

The British North America Act of 1867 declares: 'The provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada.' Years later, a handful of parliamentarians objected that the word was 'too British.' And, in a debate that lasted all of five minutes, a new holiday was born...

In hindsight, it was a case of identity theft, an act of historical vandalism. A quarter-century ago [1982 to be exact], 13 members of Parliament hastily -- some say indecently -- renamed the country's national birthday in a swift bit of legislative sleight-of-hand...

...For millions of still-living Canadians the loss of the word "Dominion" was, as Quebec senator Hartland Molson said during the Senate debate on Bill C-201, "another very small step in the process, which has continued over the last few years, of downgrading tradition and obscuring our heritage."

He was right. "Dominion" was a symbol that once helped provide English-speaking Canadians with a sense of identity...To be stripped of a symbol system is to be told, in effect, that the traditions and customs that give substance to your life are without value.

Admittedly, replacing "Dominion" with "Canada" might seem a minor matter, nothing worth serious concern. And that might have been true, if it had been an isolated case. But the holiday name change was only one item in a long project of cultural engineering on the part of Canada's progressivist elites to replace those symbols that provided English-speaking Canada with its always-tenuous sense of collective identity...

...traditions, ways of thought, habits of mind, political practices that once made sense of our lives no longer attract the same acceptance.

That is certainly true of "English" Canada, understood in a sociological sense to refer to the non-Quebec, non-aboriginal parts of Canada. English Canada, composed of people with increasingly diverse linguistic, ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds, seems dispossessed of any substantive purpose for itself as a "nation," at least in the same way that francophone Quebecers still largely regard themselves as a nation...

...you would be hard pressed to discern a coherent and convincing metaphor -- a symbol statement, as it were -- the captures the collective purposes of English Canada. You might hear mumblings about multiculturalism, the Charter and universal health care, but even those are offered in a way that makes English Canada is little more than a lifestyle state, "the greatest hotel on earth," as writer Yann Martel put it. You arrive with your cultural baggage, receive government room service when you check in, and carry on in your suite according to your lifestyle preferences -- religious, linguistic, sexual, etc. -- without regard for the other guests...

Mark Steyn's observations last year:

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." A nation's collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what's left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense. Orwell understood that an assault on history is an assault on memory, and thus a totalitarian act...

...And, as Dominion Day became Canada Day, a nomenclature unsurpassed by any other nation's holiday in its yawning nullity, so some influential figures now wish to replace Victoria Day with Heritage Day, for only in Canada do we celebrate our heritage by obliterating it. In Trudeaupia, it's a permanent ongoing Year Zero, where every national symbol can always use a little work...

My brief thoughts last November: If only the RoC had a culture left to reclaim.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at July 1, 2006 12:25 PM