In 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. As a dominion of the Empire, Canada was at war, too.
It was a wasting conflict — a slaughterhouse, really — killing more Canadians than all of Canada’s wars before or since. As the superb historian Tim Cook says: “It was a total, unlimited war … felt all the way back through Canadian society.”
About 620,000 Canadians served, of whom 60,000 died. It was devastating in a country of eight million; today, the equivalent would be 250,000 dead.
No one can say we have ignored the First World War. We marked the passing of the last serving Canadian soldier and talked of holding a state funeral. We remember the battles, such as Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge, the latter a national sacrament, a kind of touchstone.
For all that, though, we have not had an honest conversation about the Great War, rinsed of the sentimentality and nostalgia conferred by time and politics. We have never really examined our role.
What were we doing there? What did it do to us? Could we do it again?
In a fine essay in the current Maclean’s, Peter Shawn Taylor puts some of these questions to leading historians and commentators. He comes up with some hard truths.
One is that the Great War evoked a depth of sacrifice in a conservative, Christian, rural, lily-white, Anglo-Saxon country that seems “unfathomable” today. Canada was a more deferential society, half its population of British descent, willing to follow the mother country into the killing fields.
In reflecting on the Great War a century after its outbreak, what is striking is the consensus that Canada could mount no such effort today, that we lack the kind of pride, attachment or national honour that that enterprise demanded.
By and large, this is true. Our so-called new patriotism is an illusion, a creation of the media and politicians and usually based on success in international hockey.
So, cheering for Sidney Crosby and Carey Price is now the highest form of Canadianism. Or wearing red mittens and eating Timbits. Or waving the flag on Canada Day and wearing it on your backpack.
These paroxysms around the Olympics or other boasts (the strength of our banking system, our successful multiculturalism) bring a predictable breathlessness. We’re the best in the world! We’re the greatest!
This is what passes for patriotism in Canada in 2014. It demands nothing of us. Our pride in country, however real, does not seem to manifest itself in anything very substantial, such as volunteerism, voting or national service, community or military.
It suggests no sacrifice. We do not ask what we can do for our country, as John F. Kennedy told Americans in 1961. We ask what our country can do for us, particularly in regard to our social welfare.
So loose is our commitment to country, we barely ask anything of immigrants when they become citizens. Obey the law and pay your taxes, we tell them. That’s about it.
One of the reasons is that ethnic nationalism, an enduring attachment to where one comes from, continues to trump civic nationalism, a belief in rights, institutions, history and the values of citizenship.
This is not to say that Canadians, new and old, are not proud; they are, genuinely, and contented, too. It means that rather than building a country (or, heavens, fighting for it) they would rather renovate the kitchen. Balance the budget, keep cellphone rates low, fill in the potholes. No big ideas or no national projects, please.
Our indifference to country cuts both ways. For all our blood and treasure in the Great War, it is reasonable to ask a century later whether it was worth it.
Today’s patriotism-lite might have prevented Canada’s sons from marching off to war in 1914. It might also prevent their descendants from doing the same, in the face of a similar threat, in 2014.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.
