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It took me about five years to think
of Canada as my home.
I came here in 1987, but in the beginning
Britain was always the place I'd just left, the national flavour and
culture with which I identified. I was somehow visiting Canada.
Of
course I could appreciate much of its beauty and many of its benefits, but
inner patriotism, inner comfort, is much more complex than a mere
measuring of lifestyle.
Then the transformation took place. I
remember it well. We used to go back to see my parents and friends every
year, and suddenly as I boarded the plane at Heathrow Airport for Canada I
was coming home. The trips to London became fewer as the years went by,
and will only increase now because my father is ill.
I was there
last week. And for a reason I can't entirely articulate, I felt more
Canadian than ever, and more proud of the country in which I live. It has
nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with the CBC, official
multiculturalism, the protection of the French language or subsidies for
Canadian authors. Goodness no.
It's about something much deeper
and more significant. Something which many of the critics of our society
will never be able to properly comprehend.
We are a genuinely
tolerant group. Canadians didn't need the government and its bureaucrats
to tell us that all people were deserving of respect and equal rights.
Canada rejected the racism of its southern neighbour more than two
centuries ago. Canadians fought and died struggling to end slavery,
smuggled Afro-Americans to freedom, welcomed a black regiment into its
forces in the War of 1812.
CELEBRATION OF DIFFERENCES
We
greeted hundreds of thousands of immigrants not with the notion of the
melting pot but with the acceptance, and celebration, of differences. Of
course there is racism here, but far less than anywhere else I have ever
been.
We built a nation founded on something approaching
egalitarianism. By this I don't mean the enforced blandness of communism,
but a superb absence of the class system. Now this is important. I grew up
surrounded by the differences between the classes, and when I go back to
Britain I almost feel it around me like an old coat that should have been
thrown on the fire long ago.
My vowel sounds, my vocabulary, my
place of birth, everything about me in Britain establishes me as a product
of the working class. It doesn't matter how many universities I attended
or how many books I have written. I'm the son of a cab driver from the
wrong side of the tracks.
When I came to Canada I was astounded,
liberated, by the fact I was judged not by my ancestors but my abilities.
There are some types here who play the rancid old game, putting on a
strange English-type accent, propping up a class system that never really
existed. But they are few, and generally disregarded.
When I
travel as a Canadian I receive smiles. For all their pride, many Americans
still travel with a Maple Leaf flag on their backpack, nervous that being
from the United States might get them into trouble. It's unfair they
should have to be concerned, but there is surely some reason for this. Our
hands are not spotless, but compared to most nations we have a stellar
record and reputation.
We fought Nazism while Washington and
Moscow sat by and watched; we treated Apartheid with such disdain that
black South Africans think of Canada as the noblest of states; we wave the
flag with modesty and not mawkishness; we insist our political leaders
laugh at themselves; we think right is greater than might; and we see
compromise not as a weakness but as a strength.
A perfect country?
Please! Part of my job is to see the problems and expose them. But when we
view what is ours from far away, then we see that while the clouds have
seemed to hang overhead, the sun is, in fact, shining bright. So bright it
almost blinds those not lucky enough to call themselves Canadian.
God bless this country. And thank you for allowing me to become
part of it.
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Michael
Coren is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster
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