My Canada does not include the Hamas flag

Is that my "White Privilege" on display?

My Libertarian/Tory starting point is simple: I’d like each of you to live your best life.

Attend the place of worship of your choice (or don’t), marry whom you choose, vote for whichever political candidate best reflects your own judgment and hopes for your community, peacefully assemble and say what you like in a public place (provided that it’s neither slanderous nor encourages harm to others), serve on a jury if called, join a union if you feel the need. Being free doesn’t mean you can speed through my neighbourhood, install a “peep camera” in a public bathroom, ignore codified Aboriginal treaties, shoot targets with a .308 rifle in a city park, abuse an official handicap parking permit or dodge your taxes.

Everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from the luxury of a tolerant, caring, democratic, unobtrusive, open society. I certainly want that for myself. Pretty basic stuff, but it is clearly a rare luxury when you look around our challenged world.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claims that Canada is the world’s first “Post-National State,” but I hold that most Canadians share core values, even a uniform culture, as much as that’s possible in a large geography with two distinctly different official languages. You all will have your own list, but I’d cite the following: support for the rule of law and democracy, equality of the sexes, a duty of care to others (both home and abroad), respect for your fellow man/woman (particularly so with age, experience and/or standing), patriotism, comfort with Christian statutory holidays and a Constitutional Monarchy, and a sense of pride in what we’ve built as a community — these are irrefutable demonstrations of what consciously binds us as a nation.

While it is tough to prove that Canada isn’t a “Post-National” mass of humanity, particularly this week, the selfless demonstration of the Newfoundland Regiment Battalion on June 30, 1916 is one of hundreds of examples of collective values that can’t be ignored. The unit’s fighting strength was about 929 at the start of that day, and “only sixty eight were available for roll call” on the day following the opening Battle of the Somme. It would be more than 30 years before Newfoundland would formally join Canada, but that only proves the point. The utter selflessness on display that day, leading to casualties which would have touched thousands of families on “The Rock,” speaks to a commitment to the greater good.

It is hard to come to any other conclusion that it was a sense of mutual respect, shared values and citizenship, where you take care of your global neighbour and promote an orderly, rules-based global society, that the people of Newfoundland clearly saw in the rest of Canada in 1949. Stronger together.

If you find that example dated, it wasn’t that long ago that 40,000 members of the Canadian Armed Forces deployed to Afghanistan over the course of a 13 year period. While there, our men and women fought and died to rid the world of the once-in-a-generation threat represented by Al-Qaeda. Once the heavy lifting was largely over, our troops stayed to build schools for young girls, despite the risk of being maimed by IED devices most days; demonstrating all of the same selflessness that we witnessed at The Somme in June 1916. The hope was that by sufficiently suppressing the influence of the Taliban, the Afghan people would be able to build a free, democratic nation after centuries of various forms of failure and despair. Unlike WWI, where Canadians (and Newfoundlanders) might have felt we/they were battling in defence of our various English and French-speaking homelands in (white) Northern Europe, this long mission took place in a nation where ~90% of the population was Muslim.

Our CAF neighbours tried, and died, to make Afghanistan a better place for it’s citizens — despite Canada’s lack of any romantic ancestral links to the land in question. What has transpired since with the return of the Taliban is unquestionably tragic, but it doesn’t undermine the shared values presented by those 40,000 Canadians and their families over that 13 year period. As well as the Liberal and Conservative governments that consciously ordered and supported the mission.

Building a democratic nation from scratch in a hostile environment is easier said than done. And a clear reminder of what a luxury this nation of ours is, as my 82 year-old friend Walter would remind us.

Most of us in the Western world don’t run the risk of terrorists entering our homes with the intent to erase our entire family, yet that’s exactly what Hamas did last weekend in Israel, among other livestreamed brutalities. Safe here in Canada, surrounded by either vast expanses of water or the American nuclear umbrella, I can’t pretend to know what so many experience in their daily lives, whether they live in Israel, Afghanistan, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang, etc.

As such, I run the risk of looking myopic to worry about which flags are flying on any given day in Toronto, or what venom a few individuals might be spouting at a rally in Edmonton, given the hardships and injustices that so many face globally — albeit a long way from our rocky shores — as they try to live whatever form of “their best life” might be possible.

I vacillate between being angry and despondent about what I have seen in Canada this week, and I hope to demonstrate that it’s really not just about the flags or the hateful speeches. I had taken for granted (hoped?) that Canadians, regardless of the decade that they or their family arrived in this part of the world, shared a common decency and respect for their neighbour. Whatever your religion, skin colour, gender, age, economic standing or political leanings.

The events of Monday and since have shaken my belief that those of us currently in Canada — whether we be Canadians by birth, Naturalized Canadians, Dual-Citizens, Permanent Residents, International Students or Refugees — are on the same team. To be clear, this is not what being on the same team looks like:

I’ll be the first to defend your right to Free Speech, but this is not that.

Over the course of four years at UWO, we studied a range of history’s great thinkers. There might be more poignant texts to draw from, and as much as I’d like to rely on Socrates or John Locke, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty seems appropriate:

It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself.

“What manner of men they are that do it.”

Like every non-Aboriginal Canadian, I come from immigrant stock. My family tree draws from Garafraxa settlers in 1842, and includes a Scot from the Orkney Islands who signed up with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1845. One English branch of the family tilled a farm in Grey County in 1853, and there’s Scotland and English-born shipyard staffers who arrived in Collingwood circa 1910.

Before we got to Canada, and since, my ancestors served: in the British Army in the 19th century, one died by torpedo in the British Merchant Marine, another volunteered at age 17 and deployed to France with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and a Polio-stricken Grandfather taught mechanics how to keep those beautiful Lancaster bombers flying in WWII. Committed citizens as that all sounds, the McQueen’s were nothing more than tenant farmers and drapers before we got to Canada, courtesy of the Earl of Galloway, for as far back as the tombstones will take us (mid-1750). I can trace one branch to 1560, and there’s not an aristocratic bone to be found among us. My late Mother was a grade one school teacher, and later a licenced Real Estate Agent, while my Dad is best-known as a writer. How everyone got here from The Isle of Skye, the Orkney Islands, and Yorkshire, may not matter any more, but I appreciate the gift that my sister and I were given.

You each have your own family tree, and I expect most had a harder time than we did. The point of above is not to provide bonafides, but to show just how invested we are in this country. “What manner of men [and women]” we are.

When folks talk about “White Privilege,” I am expected to reconcile my current place in the world with that family tree. In 1842, you usually “got in” to these parts because your trade was in demand; and, once you were assigned your 100 acres of stark rural land, you were largely on your own. There was no hospital, no watermain, no welfare, no OHIP, no foodbank, no Unemployment Insurance, no family reunification visas. Not even much of a standing Army.

These English and Scottish Pioneers and their children had the privilege of helping build that part of Canada West from almost nothing, while keeping an eye out to the south. It hadn’t been that long since the War of 1812, and the Fenian Raids were just one example of how fragile things were pre- and post-Confederation. The Great Migration from Britain that brought them here soon led to more English, Scottish and Irish-born “Immigration to the West” once the CPR was completed.

In the decades that followed, we’ve been joined by fellow immigrants from Continental Europe (the 3rd and 4th waves), and, since the 1970s, the so-called 5th wave has seen a majority of new Canadians drawn from South Asia, China and the Caribbean. When we got here is not relevant; what matters is what we did/do with our new lot in life.

Just because we had chartered a new path, didn’t mean that each one of us wasn’t conscious of horrific things that happened in the “Old Country” prior to our arrival in Canada, if not since.

There was indeed a time when English soldiers slaughtered and raped the Scottish. As a member of Clan MacQueen, I could hold a grudge over the Battle of Culloden or the Highland Clearances, and help finance the Scottish National Party as it democratically agitates for a “Free Scotland.” When Queen Elizabeth II died earlier this year, I guess many of “us” could have trooped down to Toronto’s Queen’s Park and celebrated in front of Queen Victoria’s statue. I mean, English troops did dump “my people” upside down into wells, which must have been the worst possible type of death at the time — for which there’s never been any form of justice.

A dated grievance, you say? Fair enough.

What about Irish Republicans? Their more recent political cause has seen plenty of fear, suffering and death over the decades. And yet they’ve not come to Canada to fight that battle.

Polish Canadians, who could still be bitter about the Polish-Ukrainian War — which led to the loss of 10,000 of their Countrymen in the 1900s — took no public pleasure in Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Nor did the Macedonians, when the “Regime of the Colonels” took over in Greece in 1967 — they, too, were yearning for political independence from Greece at the time. When Soviet Tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, there are no media reports of Canadians of Hungarian descent publicly celebrating hardship and death in Czechoslovakia, despite the fact that the Czech’s had battled it out with Hungary in 1918-1920, leading to untold casualties. You might be a Slav-Canadian, and feel America had blood on its hands for the ~500 civilians believed to have been killed during the NATO mission in Kosovo during the late 1990s, or side with Amnesty International in its claim that the bombing of a radio station was a “war crime.” None of the >300k Yugoslav Canadians held a rally in support of Milošević shorty after the USA was attacked on September 11th. There were no Thin Blue Line flags at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on, say, May 27, 2020, following the murder of George Floyd.

I could go on, as there have been countless opportunities for Canadians, new or otherwise, from every corner of the world, to bring the cultural, religious and/or political struggles of their family trees to these shores in an equally grotesque manner as we saw last week.

None seem to have done so. And don’t confuse fistfights between Eritrean diaspora, or silent protests in front of a Chinese Consulate, with the flying of the Hamas flag.

The timing of Monday’s “Pro-Palestinian Rally” was in poor taste in light of the Hamas Terrorist attacks, and gave folks the chance to voice their displeasure at, and I quote, “[what] has been going on for 70 years” during a live interview with CBC Reporter Idil Mussa. If you feel the need to rehash UN resolutions of 70 years ago, or whine about national borders moving around following a war (as they have done since the dawn of time), and chose that particular day to voice your complaints, so be it. “Each to their own,” as my late Mother would say.

But when this and other “Rallies” involved people with Hamas flags and featured “victory” speeches — these rallies went from reflections of free speech to being against the core values that have served Canada so well since that First Migration began, over 200 years ago.

While Canada’s Justice and Public Safety Ministers have come out against the “championing of violence,” I fear that it’ll have no impact on those who need to hear the message. My concern is that observers who say that Canada has become the world’s most generous “hotel” — which is a recent and evolving assessment — are correct. How else do you explain this relatively sudden change in our civil discourse?

If our nation’s economic prospects were excellent, perhaps we could consider tolerating the apparent degradation of our shared values. Yet that’s not the case, as TD Bank’s Economics Dept. put so bluntly in July:

Unfortunately for Canadians, little turnaround in Canadian living standards appears to be on the horizon. Real GDP per capita has already contracted over the last three quarters and our most recent forecast points to persistent contractions until the end of 2024. In the coming quarters, the economy is expected to suffer a cyclical slowdown as ambitious federal immigration targets continue to prop up population flows. Canada is also one of the few advanced countries that has not recovered its pre-pandemic level of per capita GDP. Longer-term, the OECD projects that Canada will rank dead last amongst OECD members in real GDP per capita growth out until 2060. This underscores that without fundamental changes to our approach to productivity and growth, Canada’s standard-of-living challenges will persist well into the future.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Canada’s widening real GDP per capita gap versus other major economies. The issue has largely flown under the radar as the Canadian economy seemingly masked ongoing productivity issues with what appears to be unsustainable growth via adding more workers. The crux of the problem remains the same: a sagging performance in labour productivity.”

With a tip of the hat to whomever coined the phrase, “My Canada includes Quebec,” it is time to take a similar stand, and say out loud: “My Canada does not include the Hamas flag.” The overwhelming majority of us believe Canada is at it’s best when we take care of our neighbour: whether they be next door or across the globe.

We don’t celebrate when they’re in unbearable pain.

If you’re one of those few people that do, I have to wonder “what manner of men [you] are that do it.” If you’re this selfish, I can’t believe you buy-in to the collective responsibility and duty that Canadians have proven they share when the chips are down. I assume that you’re one of those folks who see Canada as that great “hotel.” It’s not. At least we didn’t think so…and you’ve now got a lot of us challenging that assessment.

The French government’s own forceful reaction speaks to just how troubled so many of us are: “a 5-Year Prison Sentence for Sympathizers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.” To paraphrase Benjamin Netanyahu, the events of the past few days are going to reverberate for generations.

MRM

(this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece)

(photo credit: Street Photographer (A), New York, 1951, by Irving Penn)