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Editor's Note: The following is an expanded online version of the debate published Saturday in the Focus Section of The Globe.
We stand on guard for … what?
This Tuesday, July 1, Canadians celebrate. But in a new century of changes at home and abroad, what still binds us? It must be more than lazy clichés about beer, lakes and hockey.
John Allemang talks it out with fellow Globe writer Michael Valpy, CBC host Evan Solomon and Jennifer Welsh, a Canadian scholar at Oxford University
John Allemang: I have to admit from my perspective, that Canada Day feels just a little corny and synthetic, which is why I wanted to chat with you three. Do you feel the desired warm, inner glow when July 1 comes around? Do you know how you're supposed to celebrate it? Or are our uncertainties about Canada Day (right down to its vague name) indicative of its essential summer-holiday meaninglessness?
Evan Solomon: For me, Canada Day starts with memories: fireworks with the family, my mother teetering between the pleasures of bursting lights and the terror of the kids getting killed; a lake just starting to be bug-free and turning to warmth; the beginning of summer, the permission to be lazy, so unCanadian. I was born in 1968, a year after Expo, when Canada suddenly came of age, so the Dominion Day of my past had a genuine thrill to it. Being Canadian felt like the coin of life had been flipped and we called the right side. The July 1 of my past retains the sepia colours of nostalgia not just for family memories but for a past when national character meant something.
Should I apologize now for being so earnest so fast?
Jennifer Welsh: Like Evan, I associate Canada Day with the start of summer. And God, how we rejoice at warm weather after that freak snow storm in May. July 1st: Feeling sun-burned after a sports day and barbecue, lying on the lawn in Wascana Park in Regina watching the fireworks. Bug-free? Dream on, Evan. I remember more than just a whiff of Off around the picnic table (surprised we didn't all die young from inhaling it.)
Canada Day, like the country, is endlessly decentralized. There doesn't seem to be a central recipe for how to celebrate it— chalk it up to the nature of the federation. My brother took his family from Bowen Island, B.C., to Atlantic Canada one summer, stopping in Ottawa for Canada Day. The entire family was overwhelmed to realize we actually had an interesting capital and a pretty glitzy Canada Day. Doesn't this sum up Ottawa's problem? It throws a bash and people hardly notice.
The part of Canada Day that brings a lump to my throat is the sight of those immigrants who have recently become citizens, who chose to make our community their home and profess commitment to its values.
As to national character, in my field, international relations, national character is seen as a source of a country's power.
What am I actually doing for Canada Day? I'm in the U.K., where it isn't a holiday. But in the past few years, I've adopted the subversive practice of wearing red and white on Canada Day. This year, perhaps I will dress my baby daughter in that too.
Michael Valpy: Frankly, July 1 doesn't mean much to me, although it's okay to have a national day hanging around. I don't like its godawful name. (What is this official penchant to be bland when we're really not?) I've ceased being proud of my country — over its me-first foreign policy, its desiccated aid, its UN voting pattern, its environmental record, its widening inequality at home. I run up the Queen's Canadian standard (yes, I have one) on the flagpole at the farm as a kind of private conversation with myself and otherwise ignore the day.
Jennifer, like you I enjoy seeing immigrants initiated into citizenship. But I confess to an enormous curiosity about what's going on in the minds of our new citizens, given the phenomenon of transnationalism that buzzes immigration scholars these days — a lot of people having equally deep and complex allegiances both to their old and new cultures.
