Here we are, once again celebrating as a nation the birth of Canada. In past years I would go downtown to wander among the thousands (and thousands) of people, Ottawans and visitors who traveled who knows how many hundreds or thousands of miles to be here, in the nations capital, waving paper flags, buying “Canada Day” trinkets, shouting “Happy Canada Day”, watching performances on “The Hill”, and trying to find a good spot to see the fireworks.

It’s not gonna happen for me this time.

With each passing year my levels of cynicism have been over taking my levels of patriotism and this year I just can’t do it.

I find it more and more difficult to listen without heckling (or laughing out loud) while our politicians pontificate at length in carefully scripted speeches that reflect on the wonderful democracy we live in - while I reflect on the stupidity of daily Question Period and try to guess how many others are wondering just what sort of democracy it really is if the individual Members of Parliament, elected to their positions (in most cases) by the greatest minority of the electorate, have their votes dictated to them by the whip of party they represent.

When our politicians talk about “equality and justice” for all I can’t help but think of the legislation they passed that legally allows people to be put into prisons without having access to a fair and open trial where they can confront their accusers and the evidence against them.

Recently we learned that our national intelligence agency has turned its efforts to file-building on Aboriginal protesters and their supporters as potential threats to national security. What sort of country sends its national spy agency after peaceful domestic protesters? Indeed, what sort of country places the first inhabitants of the land in the positions of poverty and despair that ours does?

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that there are far (far) worse places to live and raise a family than Canada. I could have been unlucky enough to be born in Zimbabwe, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any number of other places where even writing a post like this would be reason enough for the authorities to send some of their representatives over for a visit, and I am truly appreciative that I don’t live in one of those places, but (and there’s always a but isn’t there?) there are, IMO, important things missing.

I don’t see any real vision in the Canadian leadership. And for the benefit of my partisan buddies who may think I’m simply pi$$ed about who is sitting in the Big Chair today it’s not just our current leadership either - when was the last time Canada had a Prime Minister with any vision? Mores’ the pity the last one I can think of that at least seemed to have any spark was Brian Mulroney, and his was a dim one.

I don’t see Canada as a nation striving to be more than it currently is, unless of course you count Harper’s plan to bolster the military (not a bad thing), but then put it to use in ways that are not necessarily compatible with our once respected “peacekeeping” role. And I don’t see Canadians as a people striving to be more than we currently are.

Because of that there are a great many Canadians who are most certainly not going to have a “Happy Canada Day” today. That’s not something I imagine Canadians in general really want to think about, or be reminded of, today, but acknowledged or not it remains a simple national truth that can’t actually be addressed with the salve of “it could always be worse“.

In a little while I’m gonna head to the beach where a bunch of us are having a pot luck BBQ get together well away from the hype and crowds of downtown, and after that I’ll probably join a few friends who are off on a bit of a ride — and maybe somewhere in the day I’ll see something that will give me hope that we haven’t entered a period of national stagnation - or worse.

My good friend and esteemed colleague (and I mean that for real, not just in the Parliamentary sense) has decided that his glass of maple syrop is half-empty. I suspect at least half of this curmudgeonry is born of a concern that excessive reflection on the good stuff about Canada, as opposed to stern concentration on the bad, will deepen the apathy he so correctly fears.

Bosh. There’s no shortage people committed to bringing my country’s deficiencies to my attention; indeed, the Shaidles and Right Girls and the Small Dead Enemas have made a full time job out of reiterating their explicit hatred for Canada, 365 days of the year. And certainly, as Stage points out, there’s no shortage of things to complain about. As Orwell said, any life honestly examined is a failure - and the same thing is true of any country. No-one, and no nation, lives up to their ideals. But unless we periodically recognize and celebrate those ideals, instead of wallowing in our failure to achieve them, we condemn ourselves to depressed apathy and social inertia.

Our American friends have always been better at that than us. The United States (like Christianity or socialism) is a tremendous idea that somehow perpetually fails to live up to its own promise, and gets permanently mired in the messy reality of the human experience. But that doesn’t stop Americans from celebrating the dream, the vision. The danger, as we’ve seen, is that many of them forget that there is still a huge gap between the vision and the reality. But I sometimes wish we had a little more of the American capacity for uncritical celebration of our national virtues. I don’t have any problem seeing the warts - but there’s more to us than warts.

What do I celebrate?

I’d celebrate our version of multiculturalism, currently under fashionable attack from just about every quarter, almost invariably from people without a clue what it really means. It’s a remarkable and unique vision, in that it recognizes the reality of how cultures work in the real world. It doesn’t demand obeisance, or ritual abandonment of your personal beliefs. It says: culture is a malleable, changing thing, the response of a particular group at a particular time and place to a social, physical and economic environment. When any of those variables change, the culture will change. Good ideas that strengthen the community will survive and promulgate - bad ideas, or ideas that worked in environment A but not so well here - will fade away. We don’t define an imaginary ideal - we celebrate what is. It’s a becoming, not a static, imaginary object like a Normal Rockwell painting.

I’d celebrate a culture of political criticism that treats the leadership as fallible, mockable humans, not as demigods. I read many pundits who say they miss the “grandeur” attached to the American presidency or the Crown: I say, keep’em lifesized. You guys can shoot your presidents, we’ll just pie our PMs.

I’d celebrate a country that, like me, doesn’t get too dogmatic or ideological, and doesn’t strive after ideological purity. Free markets? Yup, some good points there, let’s have some of that, with a side of regulation please. Socialism? Yup, some good points there, let’s add a dollop of that. Federalism? Yup, that’s us. More provincial powers? Sure, we can look at that too. Ideologies are just constructs, imperfect and incomplete models of a reality too complicated to accommodate within a rigid framework. Like the Inuit kamotiks whose runners are always slightly loose, we allow for the bumps; we season our ideologies with pragmatism.

For some reason our friends in the URQ quadrant seem to feel the need to disparage, discount or deny all the things I like best about my country, as though its only merit was its potential to be molded into something else. And now my buddy Stageleft is joining the chorus of disillusionment. But I note he’s off to a celebratory barbecue. Probably not so many flags. Just a bunch of people, a few different languages, some beers and wine. Probably music on a few decks, likely from a few different countries. Folks sitting around, laughing, eating, drinking, socializing, bitching about the government, on a warm, sunny day in well kept park, in the safe and comfy capital of our country.

You say you want to see something that will make you feel better about Canada, Stage? You don’t have to look too far.