Folly at The Forks 'reimagines' Canada Day right out of existence
National Post, 24 June 2022
A national day is about making history present in order to build a better future
Eventually it will just be called “Day.”
The folks at The Forks in Winnipeg — the geographic heart of what was once upon a time the Dominion of Canada — caused a bit of a stir with their announcement this week of their annual Canada Day festivities. Not exactly Canada Day, mind you.
“We are reimagining a Canada Day, a new day, that includes a reflective, inclusive and fun day for everyone to come together,” the announcement read. There will be “pop-up stages” and “pipe ceremonies” and “picnic tables” and so forth, but nothing about Confederation, the country or Canada itself. Canada Day has been reimagined right out of existence.
The French announcement is even more clear, with no mention of Canada at all: “July 1st at the dawn of a new time!”
One hopes that those who run The Forks are innocent of all history, otherwise they might have thought twice about invoking the “dawn of a new time” in French. The most notable usage of that formulation in the language of Molière was during the French Revolution — a new day to be sure, but hardly a happy one.
Lloyd Axworthy, the longtime Liberal cabinet minister, now Winnipeg’s elder statesman, was not impressed. The foreign minister who sought to emphasize Canada’s “soft power” was likely dismayed that The Forks opted for all softness and no Canada.
Canada Day at The Forks will be about “instaurons de nouvelles traditions”, which sounds elegant en français but really means cancelling existing actual traditions. The “new” traditions of the “new day” will be, by definition, not traditions, but impositions that those in authority intend to inflict upon everyone else for years to come.
We have been on this road for a long time. Our national day used to be called Dominion Day, which expressed something concrete about our history. Confederation made us a dominion — a term rich in British history and with biblical roots (Psalm 72).
In 1982, Parliament, flush with the frisson of renaming the British North America Act the “Constitution Act 1867,” waved through on a voice vote the change of Dominion Day to Canada Day. It remains an embarrassment, a country so devoid of imagination that its national day is “insert name here” Day. Can you imagine a United States Day, a United Kingdom Day, or an Ireland Day? Do you think Bangladeshis would prefer Bangladesh Day over their Victory Day?
Canada Day is the most uninspired national holiday name, save for the practice in Quebec, which went from St-Jean-Baptiste to la fête nationale. What is your national day? It’s called “national day.” Marvellous.
France tried a “la nouvelle tradition” of going in for la fête nationale but the French nation is less deferential to the French state, so Bastille Day remains in common usage.
The folly at The Forks makes a common mistake today, namely that one can construct an alternative history. History is not like that. We’ve got what we’ve got. It can be celebrated, lamented, ignored, learned from. It can even be, with sufficient creativity of imagination and magnanimity of heart, healed.
Declaring a “new day” instead of “Canada Day” is a shorthand — perhaps even underhanded — way of lamenting our history and then attempting to ignore it. But history cannot be replaced with an alternative story; it can be complemented, contextualized, corrected. But that takes a measure of courage and imagination beyond those doing the reimagining at The Forks.
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