Life in a Strange Country

Canada is a strange country.

As we've been told a million times, it's a country of immigrants. Except for aboriginal peoples , every man jack and jill of us originated from other climes. Even the so-called First Nations came from somewhere else a long time ago. We're still arguing about their place of origin, and God knows what or whom they found when they got here -- they ain't talkin' -- but the truth is that we're all of immigrant stock.

Which is why, I suppose, we are highly tolerant of immigrants (although we weren't, strangely, in years gone by). And why we're so gosh-darn proud of our multicultural approach to life.

Like everything else, being a poster child for the global village has its upside and its downside.

On the upside, it makes the country an interesting and cost-effective place to visit. It allows tourists to travel the globe at bargain-basement prices. Since we love the money we get from tourists, that's a very good thing for us. It also gives us much better restaurants and interesting places to walk on Sunday afternoons.

On the downside, our global village status makes us wonder who we are. If new people keep arriving from different parts of the world, how are we to know what Canada is today? Is it merely the sum of its disparate parts? Or do the parts have to be absorbed somehow into a distinct whole?

There are no easy answers to this moving-target question, leaving us doomed to spend the 21st century trying to decide if Canada is a fancy hotel, as some complain, or a real country with a core identity that may be worth preserving.

You've got to feel sorry for the people who arrived early in the last century, or whose ancestors got here before that. They thought the question of Canada's identity had been settled on the Plains of Abraham. They honestly believed they represented the heart and soul of the Canadian way. For them, Canada had everything to do with their food, their songs, their clothes, their memories and their experiences. It had nothing to do with mosques or butter chicken or tsunamis. They thought they had forged a country out of prairie dirt, and created a new nation at Ypres, the Somme and Dieppe.

Well, they were wrong. But you can't blame them for feeling a little bit ticked to discover that they are nothing but a few more faces in an ever-changing crowd.

This reality of Canada is certainly very uncomfortable for those of us who have nowhere else to go, but it's not an uncommon situation. Remember the Picts? They had a culture -- now they have nothing. The Angles? The Jutes? Wither their national identities?

Or perhaps we could talk to the aboriginal peoples about how it feels to be over-run by people from across the ocean and subsumed into an alien culture. They might have some useful advice for us.

Seems like Canada is not finished yet, that it's still a work in progress. And none of us has a clue what this country will be when it's finally done cooking.

Strange place, though. Strange place.