Skip to main content
opinion

Harry Bruce is a Halifax-based journalist. He recently won the Atlantic Journalists' Lifetime Achievement Award.

From sea unto sea unto sea, across sky after sky after sky, fireworks will declare Canada's 149th birthday, and one week later on July 8, I will revel in having reached my own 82nd. I am more than half as old as Canada, still here, and for that luckier than I once imagined possible.

I have spent nearly 30,000 days in our home and native land, and on not one did I ever hear a bomb burst, a machine-gun stutter, or a wounded soldier moan. On not one did I languish in jail for having lambasted a politician; or endure even the briefest torture by any practitioner of what the U.S. government calls "enhanced coercive interrogation techniques."

Around the world, the UN reports, the number of people who have fled their homes to escape warfare or deadly political and religious persecution has now surpassed 60 million, or 24 million more than the population of Canada. They are desperate refugees who have crossed international borders, or desperate "internally displaced persons" who have yet to leave homelands that have left them homeless.

Many have witnessed massacres, and the bloody slaughter of friends and relatives; lost everything except the clothes on their backs and farewell trinkets from loved ones who, even if still alive, they will never see again. And some families, having set out on nightmarish paths of escape, have seen toddlers of their own die of disease brought on by cold, hunger and thirst.

I can list such horrors and hardships, but Canada has so insulated me in safety and comfort that I am simply incapable of describing how it feels to endure them. My wife Penny and I have been together for 61 years, and have never heard a shot fired in anger. Neither have our three children, three grandchildren, or four great-grandchildren.

UN agencies report that 800 million people are dangerously malnourished and go to bed hungry every night. But rarely in my eight decades, has my gluttonous stomach been denied its three square meals a day. Ah yes, bacon and eggs with Ethiopian coffee; Montreal smoked meat on rye with a slice of dill pickle; local lamb chops, grilled medium rare, if you please, with a baked potato, sugar peas, robust red wine from Portugal, and a wedge of gorgonzola. Splendid!

Of the 1.17 million people who live in the island republic of East Timor near Indonesia, some 400,000 must walk more than 30 minutes to get water. Water.org tells the story of an Indonesian woman named Sarmanah. To sustain her young children and dying husband, she grows vegetables, runs a small shop and, starting at dawn, walks several times a day to a river or to a line-up at the village well to get 10 litres of water to carry home.

Nearly 700 million people have no access at all to safe water, but I'm certainly not one of them. We have in our condo one huge bathtub, two showers, two bathroom sinks, a double kitchen sink and, all in all, five taps. From each tap flows all the hot and cold water we could possibly want, mixed to the exact temperature we want. (Sarmanah would not applaud my wallowing in 100-litre baths.) Then there's the washing machine, and two flush toilets.

Some 2.4 billion people have been defecating out in the open all their lives. More people have cellphones than flush toilets, which is one reason why water-borne diseases every year kill nearly two million children under the age of five. Our own offspring never faced either that risk or not having a good doctor.

We've made our homes in small towns in Ontario and New Brunswick, on a stretch of the Nova Scotia coast, and in Moncton, Saint John, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. As I remember the people in all these places, most were good-humoured, generous, unbigoted, and helpful to both neighbours and strangers.

Canada has long been a true (if imperfect) democracy. And now, by comparison with the mean-spirited, racist and isolationist Trumpishness that's infected the public life of not only the U.S. but nations all over Europe, we look more and more like a last bastion of intelligent and good-hearted government.

Our population, just over 36 million, amounts to a miniscule 0.5 per cent of the world's 7.4 billion people. Enough of ours are impoverished, deprived and underprivileged to qualify as a national disgrace and yet, for most of us, no other country comes closer to being paradise on Earth. As for me, I live in a marvelous little city by the sea, in a marvelous region of a marvelous country, but I still haven't the faintest idea why I deserve to.

Interact with The Globe