Andrew Coyne, Canada is a French country:
But if the history of Canada is an unbroken chain of sovereignty, Francis to Elizabeth, Champlain to Johnston; if what is important about it is not the change from French to British rule but the continuity between them—if we are not a British monarchy, or even a French monarchy and then a British one, but simply a monarchy, throughout—then the Conquest is not the pivotal event in our history: it is just an event. The effect, in turn, is to deracinate the British inheritance. What is valuable is the inheritance—Crown, Parliament, the common law, the Constitution—not its Britishness.
It’s practically a legal requirement for Canadians to do some serious thinking about their heritage and how this place came to be, and those of us who’ve lived through a Quebec separatism scare or two probably understand how to do this better than most. This article by Coyne is quite possibly the single most interesting thing I’ve read on the subject in at least 20 years. And there’s something deeply, deeply appealing about his thesis — if he’s right about what the Prime Minister is trying to do; even if Harper isn’t trying to do this, however, I still love the idea. The subtle unification of the two European-derived narratives into a singular story is one hell of a rhetorical trick; for the life of me, I can’t figure out why no one has done this before.
We’re reaching the point where, as a country, it no longer makes sense to define ourselves in opposition to something else, or at least in negative terms (“not British,” “not French,” “not American,” etc). Official policy surrounding concepts like multiculturalism make this difficult — we’ve lacked, almost by design, a unifying narrative to explain how we got here because we’ve fostered the creation of thousands of individual narratives. Because we were, and still are, an immigrant nation (and because most great Canadian fictional works have, at their core, been immigrant stories), the idea of having a singular story is alien to us; we don’t have a parallel to “in order to form a more perfect union” or anything along those lines. It was just a bunch of people who showed up, some more people who showed up, shots were fired, stuff happened, and then we turned into this weird country. And — for some bizarre reason — we teach this as history, but we don’t celebrate it as heritage. Maybe it’s because we just don’t understand the implications of that history.
I’m certainly not going to argue in favor of diminishing the other narratives of formation — mine, yours, the natives, anyone else’s. But while we can all talk about how we got here, in some sense we should probably have an idea of how here got here. This single national narrative — either as an idea started by the PMO, or as an original creation by Coyne and others — is a hell of a good start.
