A Country Worth Living In

Five generations ago, two families from the Madeiran archipelago launched themselves on a transatlantic gamble. Lured by half truths and shady contracts, they embarked for the terra incognita of a small, anomalously anglophone part of South America named British Guiana. Inconvenienced by emancipation, “King Sugar” had turned to the deceptions of indentureship, which was little more than a higher form of slavery, to maintain its supply of cheap labour. The Madeirans took their place among Indian and Chinese coolies who had also been duped by the myth of a better life, and they tried to make the most of their situation. One account of the period notes that Portuguese workers were “despised by black Creoles as ‘white niggers’ who had come to do slave work, while West Indian whites never regarded them as true Europeans. They were not a success in the sugar-fields and those who stayed on soon moved into retail trade.”

In 1910 one of the families moved again, sailing north to Nova Scotia. It sent a son to the Great War, where he survived a gas attack fighting for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The other family stayed on in B.G., tended its import business, and worked and married its way into the heart of the respectable middle class. Late in the 1960s, independence came. But Guiana, like much of the British West Indies, was ill prepared for the new political freedoms. Resurgent racial tensions, Cold War politics and poor leadership overwhelmed the young nation. More than 40 years later, it remains overwhelmed. After independence, a dictatorial government kept in power through rigged elections drove the middle class abroad. They now live scattered across the globe, mainly in Britain, the United States and Canada. Five years ago, after half a life of indecision, I joined the Canadian portion of that exodus. In 2010, having fulfilled my residency requirements, I will become eligible for Canadian citizenship.

Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship is Ottawa’s new and improved version of its guide to Canadian rights and responsibilities for immigrants. Given the diversity and complexity of its intended audience, and the national penchant for treading lightly around questions of race, culture or religion, it is almost by definition an extended exercise in the production of inoffensive prose. Perhaps that is the fate of all such guides, doomed to sail between the Scylla of hectoring nationalism and the Charybdis of milquetoasty ingratiation. As a result, its drafters seem to have given careful thought to what might be called its narrative strategy. Happily, however, the outcome is a sensible, commendably harmless and often quite charming handbook for aspiring Canadians.

The basic structural compromise seems to be that while Dead White Males are allotted the lion’s share of the text, Other People are compensated with sidebars and photographs. Wherever possible, the wrinkles of History are smoothed over with ocular proof of the glories of multicultural Canada. Sometimes this is taken to extremes that a satirist could not improve upon. One section, with the misleadingly bold title “Who We Are,” begins with a throat-clearing paragraph on Canada’s inheritance of “the oldest continuous constitutional tradition in the world” before vaulting into the more ecumenical advice that “to understand what it means to be Canadian, it is important to know about our three founding peoples—Aboriginal, French and British.” To my immigrant ears, the penultimate phrase suggests a degree of simultaneity and common purpose somewhat absent from the abbreviated history that follows. But the mix is the message: hovering around this text there is a page full of First Nations photographs faced by images of a St. Patrick’s Day parade, a Dancing Scot (at the Glengarry Highland Games), a black family at the Fête Nationale in Quebec and an Acadian fiddler. Perched approvingly above, next to a sidebar with the heading “Unity in Diversity” Governor General John Buchan (“1st Baron Tweedsmuir”) looks on, decked out in a spectacular “Blood (Kainai First Nation) headdress.” Ismaili Muslims, Polish dancers, Ukrainians and West Indians appear among more than a dozen multi-ethnic images on the following spread.

It must be said that one striking and welcome exception to this all-embracing approach occurs two pages earlier in a sidebar that tells us that:

But nowhere else is the authorial voice so assertive. Each section’s manner generally adapts to the task at hand: backslapping cordiality for the introduction (“Welcome! It took courage to move to a new country”); evasive bureaucratese for the “Arts and Culture” paragraph in the section on Modern Canada (“Canadian artists have a long history of achievement in which Canadians take pride”) and even a little well-judged humour (“The autonomy of Quebec within Canada remains a lively topic— part of the dynamic that continues to shape our country”). Sans doute, le mot juste, in the same way I suppose that the plight of Aghanistan’s women remains a lively topic for critics of our involvement in that misbegotten war.

Inevitably, there are apologies (“Regrettably, from 1914 to 1920, Ottawa interned over 8,000 former Austro-Hungarian subjects”; “Regrettably, the state of [the Second World War] and public opinion in B.C. led to the relocation of West Coast Japanese Canadians”), but these lapses are contextualized very sensibly. Some may choose to carp on the absence of women—aside from Her Majesty, the first woman mentioned in the main text is the suffragette Emily Stowe, on page 21—but the booklet generally succeeds at presenting a persuasively neutral mini-history of Canada and its institutions.

I did not expect to know much about the usual roll call of names and dates, nor anything about the arcana of national symbols and mottos, but I was genuinely surprised to learn that Canadian football “differs in a number of ways from American football.” Also, after wading through the details of constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, and federal and provincial governance—much of it drearily familiar to anyone who has grown up in a Commonwealth country—I was delighted to learn that “no one, including family members” can “insist that you tell them how you voted.” Immediately, I foresaw myself voting for Mr. Ignatieff (out of an unshakeable admiration for The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, the Isaiah Berlin biography et al.) while loudly condemning him for running such a lacklustre campaign. I also noticed that there was no mention, amid the details of majority and minority governments, of the recent imbroglio that prompted the governor general to genuinely intervene in affairs of state.

By the end of Discover Canada’s 62 pages (complete with maps, lists, follow-up information and a few blank pages for notes), I felt reassured that I’d chosen a country worth living in. Like many other West Indians, I came here hoping to find the New World and the Old. I wanted to live in a place that is US American in its cosmopolitan, can-do optimism, but tastefully European in most other ways. Nothing I have experienced in the last few years—admittedly, I have lived only in Toronto— has altered this general impression. As a CBC listener, I know too well the ways in which my new home falls short of its highest ideals—future guides ought to mention the national talent for political self-flagellation—but how many other countries aim so high?