'Canada," former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard once rather explosively said, "is not a real country." Irvin Studin begs to differ.
The country is real; it's the people in it he wants to pinch.
Studin, a 30-year-old Rhodes Scholar who was once listed by Maclean's magazine as one of "100 Young Canadians to Watch," has just edited a book titled What Is a Canadian? He himself has always felt Canadian, having arrived here at the age of three months. He was in the room the moment his father Yuri, a Russian-Jewish émigré from Ukraine, became Canadian: It was Sept. 15, 1987, and Mario Lemieux had just converted a pass from Wayne Gretzky.
"I knew my father had become a Canadian when he suddenly leapt out of his chair when Canada won that Canada Cup." But what, he long wondered, is a Canadian?
While studying in England, Studin became fascinated by a 1958 book by David Ben-Gurion called What Is a Jew? The first prime minister of Israel had sought out 50 leading Jewish thinkers and asked them for their thoughts. One famous jurist wired back, "I have nothing to say on the subject." That, too, was included.
Studin got a few similar responses when he sent out invitations to more than 50 Canadians, but just a few. He avoided elected politicians and went with historians, academics, poets, authors and even -- we have to presume desperation here -- the odd newspaper columnist. No one was paid and all royalties go toward setting up new scholarships in Canadian studies.
He selected men and women, old and somewhat young, both official languages, aboriginals, New Canadians and voices from the various regions.
He could not, unfortunately, include the dead. The names of Mordecai Richler, Pierre Berton, Carol Shields, Fernand Dumont, Jane Jacobs, Robert Stanfield and Dalton Camp all appear on his wish sheet, but they could not contribute. John Kenneth Galbraith put him off saying he was too busy, at 97, then died. Claude Ryan agreed but asked, rather plaintively, "Will it come out soon?" and did not live to contribute.
Studin's personal pick from the dead would have been Irving Layton -- "My favourite poet" -- who once began a poem on this vast country with "A dull people/ but the rivers of this country are wide and beautiful." Studin spent months going through the short essays and selecting. At one point, he scribbled off a note to publisher Doug Gibson saying, "A Canadian is tired of reading what a Canadian is!" But he persisted, and the book is at best an insight into something that confuses us all, at worst a curiosity that makes for quick reads, a chapter at a time.
There is no possibility of going into the deeper arguments and theories here, but a small sampling of the initial response to Studin's leading question gives some hints as to what follows:
Allan Fotheringham, columnist: "A Canadian is . . . someone who crosses the road to get to the middle."
John Crosbie, former federal cabinet minister: "A Canadian is . . . one of the most fortunate and favoured persons on our Planet Earth."
Audrey McLaughlin, former leader of the New Democratic Party: "A Canadian is . . . someone who lives in a nation on trial."
George Bowering, poet: "A Canadian is . . . a person who will probably be dumbstruck if you ask him the question 'What is a Canadian?' "
Charlotte Gray, historian/author: "A Canadian is . . . likely to suffer from historical amnesia."
Mark Kingwell, philosopher: "A Canadian is . . . an imaginary creature with various mythological traits, some of them charming, some irritating, many of them contradictory."
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Saskatchewan provincial court judge: "A Canadian is . . . fascinated by how people survive in what can seem a harsh and unforgiving environment."
Christian Dufour, legal expert on federal-provincial relations: "A Canadian is . . . at the outset a Québecois, a habitant who lives in the St. Lawrence Valley and speaks French. It's worth recalling that the name meant that, and only that, during most of the country's history."
Aritha Van Herk, author: "A Canadian is part of a jigsaw puzzle, always trying to find that one missing piece that has fallen behind the wainscoting."
Wade MacLauchlan, president of the University of Prince Edward Island: "A Canadian is . . . lucky."
Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto: "A Canadian is . . . almost always unsure of what it means to be Canadian. Maybe this is a strength. Maybe it is evidence of our tolerance and pluralism and of our enlightened post-modernness. Let a thousand identities bloom!"
Sujit Choudhry, Toronto law professor: "A Canadian is . . . a participant in an ongoing constitutional conversation."
And on that alarming note, let us round it out with a comment that, at times during this project, Irvin Studin himself would have completely agreed.
William Watson, economics professor and author, McGill University: "A Canadian is . . . as a rule too fond by half of contemplating what a Canadian is."
Roy MacGregor