| Sitting in traffic recently, I noticed the bumper sticker on the car in front of me. "If you don’t stand behind our troops," it read, "you’re welcome to stand in front of them." I was struck by the irony. After all, "our troops" were currently engaged in Afghanistan in the name of liberation and democracy. Good enough for Afghans, it would seem, but not for those Canadians who might question the motives and wisdom of this latest venture.
Count me among them. For the record, I think Canada was right to stay out of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and wrong to send troops to Afghanistan. Why I take this position — and I admit I might be wrong to do so — is not the point. If democracy means anything, it is the right of the individual to voice dissension against the majority will of the day, as represented by the elected government.
That said, it’s easy to identify the new sense of belligerence, militarism and intolerance that has crept into Canadian public discourse of late. It’s there in the bumper stickers, in Don Cherry’s blue-collar jingoism, in Rick Mercer’s white-collar rah-rah tours of combat zones, and — most notably — in the recent veneration of Canada’s role in the capture of Vimy Ridge in the First World War. Indeed, during the recent 90th anniversary celebrations of that event, any meaningful criticism of the mythology of Vimy’s legacy was unwelcome.
Easy to identify, and perhaps also easy to understand. The effort that Canadian soldiers made to seize the German fortification at Vimy in April 1917 — with the loss of 3,598 lives and more than 7,000 others seriously wounded — created a legacy far more significant than the battle itself. It rarely features large in official histories of the war and was scarcely a pivotal moment in determining its outcome.
For Canadians, what matters more is the symbolism of Vimy. For the first time, all four Canadian divisions fought together, and for the last time they did so under the command of a British officer. So it was that Vimy quickly came to represent Canada’s coming of age as a nation. It had entered the war in August 1914 as the necessary consequence of its colonial status; the achievement of Canadian troops at Vimy, succeeding where British and French soldiers had previously failed, marked Canada’s birth as a nation.
More than this national symbolism, however, Vimy fuelled a new nationalist mythology. Canada was not merely a nation, now, but a nation whose qualities and values had been tested and proven. Strength, independence, determination, sacrifice and resolve could all be read into the bloody slaughter of Vimy, qualities that marked the essence of what it meant to be Canadian.
Ninety years later, it’s obvious that such a reading of Vimy — and therefore of the Canadian psyche — appeals to those who support the current effort to police Afghanistan. And, in turn, those who would question the wisdom of the present mission are, by logical extension, dishonouring the legacy and memory of Vimy.
Yet — and this is vital — the veneration of Vimy is a relatively new phenomenon, just as is the new breed of militarism and intolerance of dissent that’s entered public debate in Canada. For example, in the centenary celebrations of 1967 there was virtually no reference to the capture of Vimy Ridge or what it meant to the evolution of Canada. Instead, public attention was focused on the ideals and values that Canada had come to embrace and support in the 1960s. These included collective responsibility (via the post-war welfare state), racial inclusiveness (at a time when the U.S. was still bitterly divided along race lines) and a sense of pluralistic tolerance.
It’d be tempting to suggest that all this touchy-feely stuff was just a symptom of the time. After all, 1967 was the Summer of Love. In June, the Beatles performed "All You Need Is Love" via satellite to a worldwide audience of more than 400 million. As you spun the dial that year, it was hard to catch the sound of irony or cynicism anywhere.
And yet it’s a mistake to imagine that such tunes naively echoed a simpler, calmer world than the one we inhabit today. True, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had proposed a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and, along with the U.K., banned the weaponization of outer space, but only after China had shocked the world by detonating its first hydrogen bomb. Simultaneously, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War that June mocked the Beatles’s clarion cry.
Even in Canada, these were hardly halcyon days. In July, visiting French president Charles de Gaulle addressed a crowd of 100,000 in Montreal and declared "Vive la Quebec libre," effectively recognizing the province’s claim to independence. Three months later, René Lévesque — who had helped to engineer Quebec’s "Quit Revolution" under the government of Jean Lesage — quit the provincial Liberal party to form the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association and, a year later, the Parti Québécois.
Yet other events signified Canada’s coming of age in a way that Vimy had only hinted at. In April, Parliament voted in favour of making "O, Canada!" the official national anthem, while in Montreal Expo ’67 placed Canada firmly on the world map. A month later, the Toronto Maple Leafs won their fourth Stanley Cup in just six years — and their last for the next four decades — just in time to coincide with the official celebrations for Canada’s centenary.
In short, it may be fanciful to describe 1967 as Canada‘s "last good year," as did historian Pierre Berton, but it’s also churlish to deny that for a few months the openness and possibilities of nationhood were celebrated in a manner far more significant than the one-dimensional victory at Vimy 50 years earlier. |
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