So it’s July 1st, and I’m enjoying the day off. No picture today, because all I’ve got clean is jeans and t-shirts, and that’s hardly riveting material.
Complete non-sequitur: I’m trying to learn French, for a number of reasons both practical and philosophical. It’s useful to know more than one language, and I’m sort of eying getting into politics or government once (if?) I’m finally out of school; there’s an awful lot to be said for being able to use multiple languages to describe your world. I’ve gotten to the point where I can read a newspaper article in French (albeit more slowly than in English) but my verbal/auditory skills are not nearly as good. This is progress, but I want to be fluent, and I’m planning on taking a French course in the fall.
I grew up in the vast suburbs of Toronto, which is colloquially (and derisively) called the Centre of the Universe by the rest of the nation. Southern Ontario is often taken to be the sort of default Canada, which, considering the disproportionate number of people who live there, isn’t entirely unreasonable. But it doesn’t make sense with the national identity that we learn in school: we’re taught that tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism are key tenets of Canadian-ness. We compare our nation to a mosaic, where everyone contributes to the larger picture while retaining their individual identity. We pride ourselves in being a welcoming nation, building consensus and co-operating inside and outside our national borders. We affirm that all the disparate bits of Canada (and their associated cultures) are important, not just the populous Southern Ontario region.
Canada is a very large nation, and regional identity outside of Southern Ontario can be very important, even more important than national identity. While some regions have very strong regional identities, there can be a lot of overt and covert hostility towards people from the rest of Canada that goes along with that identity. I’m very much in favour of national identity, but our national identity favours diversity, and both the majority English and minority French need to recognize that isolation and segregation within Canada is harmful to everyone involved. Canada Day’s important to me, because it’s a day where in Ontario, I used to hear more French than usual (ie, I heard some instead of none). It’s a tangible reminder of our nation’s official linguistic diversity, (though a walk down a Toronto street will show far more daily linguistic diversity). It’s not a perfect nation by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s home, and I’m not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, and so it’s important to me to be able to speak both official languages.
And, since, as PilgrimSoul reminds us, mocking those Heritage Moments they used to run was somewhat of a national pastime, here’s a couple more to snark at:
“Doctor Penfield! I can smell! burnt! toast!”
“Noooo! We must keep our own names!”
“Men don’t wear pistols in Canada.”
Happy Canada Day / Bonne Fête du Canada!
I love those commercials! Yes, they’re corny, and the American in the Sam Steele is quite pathetic, but as someone who didn’t learn Canadian history growing up, they helped me learn things about Canada I’d never known. From an interpretive pov, I think they’re great. Should the subject matter and angle broaden? Absolutely.
I’m going to get the individuals wrong, but I remember my dad telling me about a trip to Montreal where he saw a rabbi, an Irishman and a black man (I know, I know, it sounds like a joke), all arguing in French, over which Italian restaurant to eat at and that’s what he loved about Montreal.
(Chuckling…) It was on a Montreal streetcorner: a tall Irish woman, all pale skin and red hair, two rather short coal-black men (from the West Indies, I wonder?) and a man who looked to be Chinese, all arguing, loudly and in French, about which Italian restaurant to go to for lunch. That, to me, was the best example of “diversity” that I could imagine. The other part that was fun was translating the fracas for my boss, who’d I’d brought along for the day. He was from Lousiana and knew some Cajun French, but that didn’thelp him there.
Yeah, Québecois is really something unto itself.
We totally debated the cultural merit and stereotypes that these commercials were portraying in my history classes back in undergrad. I may even have written an essay about this. If I wrote an essay, I think I came up with the idea and made the entire class talk about it. This sounds right.
That does sound right. And it sounds familiar, so I think you did it. As an interpreter, I’m a fan of anything that acts as an entry point for people into history, science, culture, etc. However, a 1 minute film gives you the tiniest peephole into a story, and leaving people with just that information isn’t enough. It would be really interesting to see a museum exhibit that began with one of those videos and then expanded on the narrative – artifacts, historical records, different sides of the story, different perspectives, etc.