On Parliament Hill
Parliament Hill: changing of the guard. The wailing of the pipes awakens a Celtic melancholy as deep as my genes; simultaneously, the sudden and unfamiliar uprush of love of country leaves my eyelashes and cheeks wet.
The soaring Peace Tower is supposed to embody our national ideals: peace, order and good government. Its architecture also evokes our “Mother Country,” origin of this ancient and colourful ritual, which continues to be carried out before buildings that are spiritual originals of these copies.
I have not set foot in the capital since 1966, and it’s a thrill to encounter glimpses of my young self. Then sixteen, I was returning from New York, where I had taken part in the United Nations Pilgrimage for Youth. Feeling my small-town childhood already behind me, I had my whole life ahead of me, as my mother never tired of saying.
That life has been amazing. As the rickety metal lift gates shut behind us in 1966, and we rose to the top of the tower to see the panorama of Ottawa, I never dreamed that when I stood again on this hill I would be half a century old. Or that my daughter, here by my side, would be the age I was then. Nor did I dream of how quickly the shared illusion of a unitary culture would pass away.
It would have been nearly inconceivable to me then that my husband, father of this daughter, would come from a country half a world away, culturally as well as geographically. In those days when Canada’s bilingualism was proudly new, to have a fluently bilingual child was an ambition I had already decided on, but I certainly did not dream that her second mother tongue would be Turkish. Nor could I have imagined that in her hometown, Mandarin and Punjabi would be far more common and practical than German, Spanish or French.
With my own short history, I did not understand the relentless speed with which countries, nations and cultures evolve. How far from what I could have imagined then has been the evolution of this country! Our generation proudly thought ourselves far-sighted and cosmopolitan. How naive and provincial our past selves seem when we look back now.
Ottawa seemed then to be almost entirely composed of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with a few of that exotic breed, French Canadians, who were unintelligible to us, since we had been taught only Parisian French, and by non-native speakers who hadn’t the least idea of how people acquire language.
In that post-imperial era, it went without saying that positions of social prominence and power were held by men. An unseen irony was that CBC radio announcers, all men too, of course, more often than not had British accents, rather than Canadian ones. The literature I learned to love in my school days was overwhelmingly British; Canadian literature had not yet been defined as a category.
Today, the changing guard are not soldiers, but students, mostly women, who do this summer job which helps to promote tourism. Their bearskin hats are faux, of course; nobody with any self-respect would be seen wearing real bearskins in this day and age. Ottawa is filled now with people from all over the world. As well as the many Chinese, Europeans, Indians, and Iranians, there are people from all over the Arab world, and all over the Caribbean. Downtown Ottawa is a hotbed of ethnic restaurants: on the short walk between and our bed and breakfast, run by Poles, we passed a Lebanese café and ate at a Thai restaurant.
The outdoor souvenir vendors on the hill are predominantly French-Canadians, their cultural difference visible from afar as they gesture expansively, flourishing lit cigarettes as they promote and sell their wares.
Peace, order and good government have been our ideals, and as a nation, we have tried to live up to them, although the results have been deeply flawed. As the anthem is played to mark the end of this ceremony, I am surprised to feel my eyes fill and my heart swell with an unexpected sense of national identity. I have tended to think of patriotism as an igonoble emotion; gratitude has been patriotism enough for me: gratitude at having been born in this, peaceful, safe, middle-of-the-road nation, rather than a country fed on rabid ethnic nationalism, or our smug, jingoistic southern neighbour.
Many times I have wondered what made us a nation, what makes us a nation still. Looking back at the history of the 20th century, and the dreadful wars that marred it, one sees inescapably how our very identity as Canadians was forged by the two great wars that tried our youthful society, newly separated from the old mother country. Can this be all a nation is? Something that comes into being, has meaning, only in the context of war? And the supreme irony: without World War II, I and many of my generation would never have been born, since our parents met and married as a direct result of that war.
And yes, that business about the mother country and the democratic ideas completely leaves out the aboriginal people who occupied this land long before the European descendants came to colonize it.
Yet here today, on Parliament Hill, on balanced reflection, I feel that after all, there has been more than war to bind us as a nation. We have tried to live up to certain ideals of civic nationhood, a society of rights and fairness for all. From seeing ourselves as dual in the beginning, we have slowly and painfully grown to “see” the native people, and then, in the era of the multiculturalism, to finally embrace the multiple nature that we have always had in fact. Together, we continue to seek a way in which men and women from all ethnic backgrounds, and all walks of life, can live peaceably together, strengthened, rather than divided and defeated by our differences. Canada has always been impractical, somewhat ungovernable. And yet after 140 years we are still on the map.
As we move forward, coming to terms as best we can with the darker aspects of the nation’s past, we must constantly seek for peaceful coexistence. We must preserve our simple but powerful liberal ideals of mutual respect, We are an island of hope, in a world where the clouds that gather over us are not only threats to nations, but threats also from disaffected individuals and groups who define themselves exclusively as oppositions. The world must come to see that the so-called enemy of the ideologue suicide bomber is just as illusory as his own unified group. He stands meaningless against that huge conglomerate of history, ideas, languages, cultures and literatures, known as “the west,” and the heedless, destructive rage against it leads nowhere.
If human society is to survive, we must come to realize, and fully act upon the certain knowledge that our shared world is one, the human race is one. Though the nation I have unexpectedly learned to love, warts and all, has in many ways already passed into history, we continue to reinvent ourselves, while intelligent and thoughtful people continue to arrive from all over the world come to resettle in Canada, filled with hope and optimism.
My thoughts are interrupted by my daughter’s voice, beside me. “Mom,” she says, “let’s tour the Parliament Buildings, and go up the Peace Tower.”
Pulling myself from my reverie, I smile at her. I remember that first time, 34 years ago, when I say “Yes. Let’s.” But this is not to be. The power outage that has darkened New York has also left Ontario with no power to spare. There will be no tours today. We must content ourselves with the unexpected bonus it gave us – seeing Ottawa while trying to go somewhere else.