Will Canada Ever Get Woke ?

Maybe, but not in my lifetime. Canada’s colonial mentality, although showing its age, has brought so much wealth to those who adhere to its cultural imperatives that this mentality is not going to be tossed aside anytime soon. 

To be Canadian is to be trapped in a historical narrative of conquest, arriving from British soil, not unlike the Spanish, French, and Portuguese forays into the Americas, that has as its raison d’être the never-ending extraction of wealth from the land and its people.

Recently, however, Canadians have discovered that something is amiss among the fundamental ideas of colonial expansion. For one, before declaring that the new colony was terra nullius, an empty land devoid of inhabitants, ready to be colonized by European settlers, it should have been recognized that the Indigenous people living in the coveted territory had rights to the land that predated the arrival of the settlers. In a symbolic gesture, the act of signing of treaties with the indigenous peoples recognized their rights to the land, but in the realpolitik of the day, the treaties were empty gestures, never to be respected, never to impede in any meaningful way the land grab that was about to take place.

Essentially our Fathers of Confederation faced a problem: how to build a nation on stolen land? The answer: first round up the undesirables, take their ancestral lands, and relocate them on reserves of impoverished territory that cannot support their traditional way of life, in other words, genocide by administrative decree.

Although partially successful, placing indigenous peoples on reserves did not solve the problem. Too many of them hung on to their lives and their traditions. Since the military solution of entering into the reserves and slaughtering the “natives” was a non-starter, the Canadian Government of the day, led by Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, who was also Minister of Indian Affairs, decided instead to create the Indian Residential schools with the goal of assimilating Indigenous children and adolescents into what was the, for the most part, European culture -- in the words of Sir John, “take the Indian out of the child.”

In creating the Residential schools, the Canadian Government removed by consent or by force tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes, some as young as two or four years of age; attempted to deprive these children of any connections with their parents; underfunded and willfully neglected the educational system so thousands of students perished from malnutrition, poor medical care, and disease; created a system where child labor was a norm and where academic achievements were severely compromised; and failed to provide oversight and accountability, which led to rampant physical and sexual abuse of the children. More than 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to attend the schools during the 19th and 20th centuries. An estimated 6,000 children died while attending these schools.

Eventually, Canadians learned about their horrible fate. Much of it was documented in the report tabled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. Years later, the memories of the cultural genocide resurfaced in 2021 when thousands of unmarked graves containing the bodies of indigenous children who were living in the residential schools were discovered. The nation was reminded of its shameful past.

Yet, looking at how Canadians reacted to the newly discovered graves suggests that something had changed in the national zeitgeist. The traditional boisterous festivities to celebrate Canada Day were muted, partially by the COVID pandemic, more so by the somber realization that the nation had been founded on a fundamental injustice towards Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Many Canadians decided to forego donning the nation’s colors of red and white, and chose instead to wear orange in recognition of the crimes committed against the innocent children who had been identified as being part of the “Indian problem.” Many municipalities decided to cancel Canada Day events, but in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, the anger boiled over: protesters threw red paint on the statue of Queen Victoria in front of the provincial legislature, the monarch who had come to symbolize the rise of the British Empire, and then toppled her statue, as well as statue of Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s reigning monarch and Canada’s present head of state.

In my recollection, this was a first in Canadian history. Never before have we seen such a public desecration of the symbols of empire. After all, Canada had been initially settled by British loyalists. No matter. The collective shame of having the nation founded on the colonial desire to expand the empire, killing innocent children in the process, was too much to bear. It was as if Canadians had finally realized that their colonial past was not something to be celebrated. They were awoken by a painful remembrance of the past that affected the way they felt about the present.

But what about the future? Are Canadians ready to continue to explore the consequences and possible remedies of the imperial project that gave birth to the nation: the European quest to plunder the planet at the expense of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, a project that continues today no longer under the flags of the respective mother or father lands, but under the logos of the multinational corporations who run the world and the financiers who try their best not to attract any attention to themselves or the hoard of wealth they have stashed away in offshore tax havens?

The stakes are high. The health of the planet is in peril, as is the well-being of future generations of Canadians. The economic model we have come to know after the end of the Second World War, heavily dependent on the extraction and exportation of non-renewable resources, is no longer sustainable. Likewise, for our current levels of consumption.

We have a stark choice before us. Either we abandon our obsession of trying to perpetually grow the economy and realize that there are limits to growth, in particular how much carbon dioxide we dump into the atmosphere, or we will face the unintended consequences of our collective actions, an inhospitable planet.

 We can no longer hide behind the veil of willful ignorance.

Making the necessary changes will not be easy. It requires a deep structural change to the way we have been taught to lead our lives. The practice of making our collective decisions based on what is best for economic growth has been incredibly successful in creating wealth, with the exception, of course, of Canada’s indigenous peoples, who were never really considered to be part of the plan to raise the material well-being of the population.

Considering that my grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression, had difficulty putting enough food on the table and to clothe their children properly, I understand how Canadians have benefited enormously from the economic imperialism first foisted upon us by the British and then continued by our desire to imitate the lifestyles of our rich, white, American cousins.

Our attachment to the modus operandi of perpetual wealth accumulation is our collective sacred flaw. We can talk about many things, but the one thing we are unable to do is sustain a discussion about how our lifestyles are no longer sustainable given the consequences of climate change. We need to wake up and smell the coffee. All of us, not just Canadians, need to reduce our consumption: less movement on the ground, less air travel, less construction, less plastic, less meat. Moreover, in the political realm we must stop using public funds to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and we need to raise taxes on corporate profits and the transfer of funds between generations in order to pay for the required structural changes within Canada and to help defray the costs of transitioning away from fossil fuels in the developing world. There is no way around it. There are no technological fixes on the horizon. The longer we delay, the worse the situation will get. We need to act now.