Saturday, July 7, 2012

True Patriot Love


Canada Day. The 4th of July. Two great nations. Same continent. Two great national holidays. Same week. Lucky us! As citizens/ex-pats of one country and residents of the other, we celebrate both and, if possible, we’ll take a full seven days of vacation time!

American friends often ask me if Canada Day is similar to the 4th of July. Well, maybe I’m not asked all THAT often, but I am happy to tell you all about it in case you are just dying to ask. The answer is, kinda sorta.

Celebrations in both countries involve community parades, festivals, cook outs, family gatherings and patriotic displays of affection for the homeland, and both culminate in fireworks. In Canada, though, this is fairly understated as we Canadians are not that demonstrative a people. I found that I actually became so much more emphatically Canadian after we moved to the US. For example, I hadn’t ever actually watched a whole hockey game in my entire life until we moved to Buffalo in 1999. But I became an avid fan of the game when we arrived in the US just because I thought it was my patriotic duty. Everyone we met would say, “Hey, you must love Hockey!” So, I thought I better start.

I also found that the word, “eh?” started slipping into my vocabulary whether or not I bid it to part my lips. Total strangers, some of whom you would not expect to be linguistically attuned, like parking lot attendants, were constantly shouting at me, “Hey, you’re Canadian, eh?”  “Uh, yeah, I am. How did you know?” “You’ve got that accent, eh?” “Ha, Ha! Yes, I guess I do… (pause)… EH?”

Anyway, back to our national holiday. I don’t remember as a kid that there was a lot of fuss made over Canada’s Birthday on July 1st. Apparently the Canadian government began to organize national celebrations around 1958, but I seem to recall that it wasn’t until our centennial year in 1967 that any escalation of revelry might actually have been interpreted as patriotic or, heaven forbid, garish.  It was likely Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in the 1970s attempting to rebrand Canada as a fun country that created some excitement around Canada Day. Up until that point we had been a pretty stodgy group. If any of you are familiar with our prime ministers of the 50s and 60s, John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, you know the very definition of stodgy. Good statesmen, but not party dudes.

Although very similar in structure to the “It’s a Capitol Fourth!” concerts broadcast on TV from Washington, DC, our annual concerts from Parliament Hill in Ottawa have a uniquely Canadian flavour (US translation: flavor.) They are bilingual to a fault, featuring two hosts, one announcing in English and the other repeating exactly the same thing en francais. Performers are carefully chosen to represent each region of Canada in utter political correctness and are equally divided between French and English. You can count on there being at least one group of First Nations dancers. Sometimes you’ll see a celebrity act like Burton Cummings or kd lang. And no one from western Canada will have ever heard of the acts from Quebec. They are usually really bad concerts.

Then it’s on to the fireworks. When I was a kid, it was many a Canadian’s ambition to actually be present in person for 4th of July fireworks in Boston or Washington. Watching these loud, lavish pyrotechnic displays on US TV always filled us with awe at the grandness of it all. Once Ken and I were in a small town in New Brunswick on July 4th. All the locals were talking excitedly about their annual trek down to the beach to watch the fireworks that would be visible across the water from the northern corner of Maine. After dark, everyone waited in a hush for the show to start. “There’s one!” someone shouted. On the horizon, it was a burst the size of a pea, it was so far away. Everyone around us “ooo’d” and “ahhh’d.” This is SO Canadian.

So, you see, both of our countries have similarities and differences. It isn’t so much what we do, but how we do it. But one thing I will tell you for sure that is the same regardless of which side of the border you come from: fireworks on TV just don’t translate!



July 1st is a statutory holiday in Canada. Patriotic celebrations are held in communities across the country to mark the day in 1867 when the British North America Act joined together four provinces to create Canada as a Dominion under the British Empire. Anniversary celebrations were henceforth known as Dominion Day. On July 1, 1982, Her Majesty, the Queen, visited Ottawa to sign the Canada Act which quietly, peacefully —repatriated our constitution making Canada an independent country in the Commonwealth. At that time, the name of the annual national hoopla changed to Canada Day. Her Majesty is still Canada’s monarch.

We fly the Maple Leaf at our house in Dayton, Ohio to celebrate Canada Day.








2 comments:

  1. I may have told you about my cousins in Detroit: they used to take their kids to Red Wings games, and for years, the little guys thought of the Canadian National anthem as "the hockey song." That cracks me up every time I think about it. Of course, the Hockey Night in Canada theme is the REAL "hockey song." Do you feel the need for a bath coming on?

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  2. You may be intrigued to learn that John Diefenbaker may not have been as stodgy as we have come to believe. It seems he may have had an unacknowledged son. See http://goo.gl/t2CMN worth reading for the headline alone. A part of me really hopes this man has finally found his father. It will give us proper Canadians a contender in the heady lifestyles so often reported in the American media. Maybe it will give Kristen Stewart a rest from all the media attention when the press turns it's goggles on Canada's former PM.

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