I lost my beloved mother a year ago. In some ways, I am grateful she is not alive to see what has become of the country she loved so deeply.

My mother was a patriot in the most earnest and unfashionable sense of the word. She stood for O Canada at every hockey game, every figure skating event, every Olympic broadcast. She would sing O Canada loudly in public, often much to my embarrassment. When I moved to the United States for school, she warned me that I had to return, basically on pain of death. She believed in public education, universal healthcare, civility, pluralism, and the quiet decency that Canadians liked to imagine set us apart. She believed Canada was, fundamentally, a good country. Particularly in comparison to our neighbours to the South. 

Today, I am not so sure.

Or perhaps the problem is that she (and perhaps we) mistook our collective mythology for history.

Canada’s 21st century self-image has always rested on a comforting narrative: that we are kinder than others, more tolerant than others, less susceptible to the uglier currents of nationalism and prejudice. When I was last there, the war museum in Ottawa proudly displayed a picture of the liberation of Buchenwald in its World War Two section, with a quote about this being “why we fought the war.” Revisionist history at its finest. Not only was the plight of the Jews irrelevant to Canadian involvement in the war, when Jews were desperately attempting to flee Europe, Canada famously........

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