The Sunday Telegraph Prints Filler About Canada, by Kevin Myers

My friend Sherry of British Columbia sent me a piece that appeared a while back in the London Sunday Telegraph and later in The National Post. It’s still circulating around the net by email and apprently some Canadians like it a lot.

Kevin Myers (an Irishman with a blarny gift), wrote what he calls a “Salute To Canada”, in which he says some moving things, some perceptive things and some pathetically ridiculous things. He sees Canada from the outside and fails to understand the inner dynamic of this country.

(Myers’ copy is in bold).

He starts out with this rather odd line -

Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops are deployed in the region.

And as always, Canada will bury its dead, just as the rest of the world, as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.  It seems that Canada’s historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance.  A fire breaks out; she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts.

Thoughtful Canadians will say that by participating in the First World War, we showed our blind ignorance. Our participation in that bit of rankly stupid business is best forgotten. Unfortunately we have to remember it for the debacle it was.

For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet it’s purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy.  Almost 10% of Canada’s entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died.  The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the ‘British.’

Some clever lines, but what Mr. Myers doesn’t get really, is that Canadians and those who come here to become Canadians (in fact we’re ALL immigrants here, except for the native people whom we brutalized) - like the peace and quiet of a normal country that doesn’t (usually) meddle in other peoples’ business. Afghanistan was one of our more egregious mistakes, although we did give the U.S. the finger when they begged us to go with them on what was clearly a fools mission in Iraq. Unfortunately both our present P.M. and our Leader of the Opposition endorsed the British/American invasion of Iraq – praised the misguided and mendacious U.S. administration, and generally made asses of themselves. The point is…Canadians didn’t want it and our P.M. of the day – a better Canadian by the way – than the 2 bozos mentioned above – told the Americans, “No Way”. Canadians said, “Thank God”.

The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attacks. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone.

Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world. The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time.

Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated – a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality – unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British.

Peacekeeping Betrayed

Who cares really, as long as we ourselves know! Following the horrendous experience of WW.2, there was an impulse on the part of some Canadians to follow in the U.S. footsteps and militarize. We resisted the impulse and made quite a name for ourselves as Peacekeepers. In fact until the advent of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper and that other one – “peacekeeping” was our middle name. But as we got more sucked into the Yankee orbit after 9/11, we beat an embarrassing retreat from peacekeeping to the point where now – Canada has only 65 peacekeepers on active duty…on a par with the tiny nation of Mali.

It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

The paragraph above is just claptrap.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves – and are unheard by anyone else – that 1% of the world’s population has provided 10% of the world’s peacekeeping forces.

Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth – in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

See above – the betrayal of peacekeeping. Unhappily, Canadians HAVE forgotten the pride they felt back in the peacekeeping days, Mr. Myers.

Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace – a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

Canadians don’t need international credit. And here Mr. Myers puts his finger on Canada’s Achilles heel. In many ways we are no better than anyone else.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan. Hmmm. One of our biggest and worst foreign policy mistakes since the Boer War and WW.1. There is – unfortunately – no honour in Afghanistan. It is – I regret to say – a tragedy of immense proportions, both for the civilians of that country who have died in record numbers and for the Canadians who have been killed or maimed and damaged for life. (My own belief is that despite some U.N. involvement, the Afghan War is illegal).

Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost. This past year more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.

Mr. Myers must have been short of things to write about. Perhaps a line or two about the history of his own war-mongering nation would be in order.

Lest we forget.

I found Mr. Myers’ article gratuitous, fawning and will indeed forget it as quickly as possible.

Those who seek an ideal country will need to look a great deal further than the Canada of today, I’m afraid.