The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?
I am Canadian. I am a proud Canadian. But am I a patriotic Canadian? To me, proud allows for criticism, patriotic does not. Patriotic is rabid, ‘fight to the death for my country’ energy. Let’s hold that in reserve and explore pride.
I don’t have Canadian flags flying over my property. I don’t even have a Team Canada hockey jersey to wear when the world juniors or olympics are on.
There are times my country screws up. In 1988, we signed a free trade agreement (NAFTA) with the US. I was an undergrad studying International Relations at the time, and a lot of our professors were focused on International Development.
Their assessment was perhaps insightful although it sounded extreme: Canada was the richest third world economy and signing NAFTA was the beginning of Canada losing our sovereignty.
Over the next almost forty years, we gave more and more control of our economy to the US. When the agreed upon deal disadvantaged the US, it was ignored (softwood lumber). When the deal was seen as advantaging Canada (the auto pact), it had to be subverted. About the only win we got was protecting our dairy farmers and consumers from cheaper, less-healthy US dairy products (because of the chemicals Americans feed their cows, their milk doesn’t meet our safety standards. Yeah bureaucracy!).
Don’t even get me started about Diefenbaker and the Avro Arrow. Despite that spectacular political failure of national defense, Canada has thrived in aviation.
Canadair, Bombardier, De Havilland are all Canadian aviation companies that defined and still define Canada. All three make the water bombers that you see on the news worldwide every year fighting forest fires in North America, Europe or Australia.
If you’ve ever seen a bush pilot flying a floatplane, chances are he was flying a De Havilland Otter or Beaver (American company Cessna makes them too, but they’re perceived as not as rugged).
Remember seeing pictures of the American space shuttle with a robotic arm extended? Ever notice the Canadian flag on the arm? That’s the Spar Aerospace Canadarm. It’s on the international space station, too.
Ever seen a Blackberry mobile device? They dominated the first and second generations of mobile phones. They’re pretty much gone now, but they were designed and made by Research in Motion, a Canadian company. To this day, people talk longingly of Blackberry’s messaging system, BBM.
Much of the infrastructure used in corporate phone systems was developed by Northern Telecom (later Nortel). Yep, Canadian.
There are almost two hundred countries in the world, and Canada helps feed a lot of them. We’re the fourth largest exporter of food (fifth if you count the twenty-seven countries of the EU as a single exporter).
The three Canadians whom other Canadians tend to be most proud of are the man who designed our universal healthcare (Tommy Douglas), a teenage boy who died of cancer (Terry Fox) and a world-famous hockey player whom we don’t like anymore since he’s fallen in with a certain corrupt US politician.
Am I a proud Canadian? Fer sure, eh?
Am I a patriotic Canadian? Well, if the country to our south tries to annex us and make us a 51st state, you’ll see.