There is more to this great country than canoes and maple syrup.
Most Canadians consider ourselves more polite than our neighbours to the south. We prefer a rational discussion to a screaming match, a timely apology to a multi-generational feud, and a solution where everyone comes out ahead as infinitely better than one where someone loses.
What we are not is a bunch of rustic canoeists, happily portaging our way around problems like COVID and the world housing crisis, in a maple syrup buzz.
COVID hit this country hard; we are still trying to deal with the consequences. And there are many.
Our health-care system is a mess, for a variety of reasons, the key one being it was not strong and resilient enough going into COVID. Successive governments of varying stripes bought into the bizarre notion that a country can have a world-class health-care system while laying off nurses, closing hospitals and trying to squeeze every penny spent on hospitals in the expectation of getting change.
As has been said countless times in response to one of those governments’ catch phrases – you do not get more for less, you get less for less. Our health-care system has been on the equivalent of a starvation diet for a long time, and lacked the strength to cope effectively with a global pandemic.
Health-care professionals, especially highly-qualified nurses in management positions, have been retiring at a phenomenal rate, and there are no middle-management people qualified to step in and replace them. We, and our leaders, have finally figured out what “running lean and mean” really means.
COVID also messed up supply chains, causing unanticipated shortages in many sectors. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the construction industry.
Communities that have never seen housing shortages before are having to deal with them now. Prices of houses have hit the stratosphere, and rent is keeping pace. Waiting lists for subsidized housing are long, and getting longer. Rents have gone beyond what people on welfare, disability and small pensions can pay. No one, in a climate like we have, should have to live in a tent.
Which brings us to global climate change.
While global warming has a certain appeal in the dead of winter, with visions of palm trees swaying in the balmy breezes over Parliament Hill dancing through our maple syrup-befuddled minds, we are facing a less attractive reality.
That reality involves the haze of forest fire smoke that has some former anti-maskers inquiring about N-95s.
We understand, at long last, that the climate issues we have been warned about for decades are not some future hazard to fear. They are a real and present danger.
Canadians are not immune to flooding, droughts and devastating storms. That “green dark forest… too silent to be real*” is being incinerated in huge forest fires burning out of control in several provinces.
Canadians have always had a tendency to meet challenges with tenacity and creativity. We need only look at the number of inventions that have a Canadian connection. Most of us know about insulin and baseball, but a quick glance through Wikipedia indicates we also can claim credit for canola, developed from natural rapeseed; instant mashed potatoes; the caulking gun; the IMAX movie system; gas masks; crokinole; Easy-Off oven cleaner; the BlackBerry; Ebola vaccine; and – fortunately for this publication’s readers – newsprint; plus innumerable other things, most of which we can be proud of.
This Canada Day, let us celebrate all that is Canadian. This country is so much more than the doughnut capital of the world.
We are strong, resilient, creative and determined. We tend to tackle problems rather than hiding from them. We have a reputation for being polite, but also are known for not backing down from a fight.
There is no better time than now to acknowledge our heritage, celebrate our present, and look to the future with determination to make it the best it can possibly be, for all of us.
Oh, Canada, eh!
*Gordon Lightfoot, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”
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Pauline Kerr is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter; she can be reached at pkerr@midwesternnewspapers.com.
