This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Aug. 31, 1940.
Our carefree childhood in Canada has passed, and the strange sensations of adolescence are disturbing us. People are looking at us and are beginning to notice how big we are.
This is the feeling I had when I read a new book by John MacCormac, who for many years has been a New York Times correspondent. He was born in Canada of Irish parents, and is married to an English wife. The book is called Canada, America’s Problem.
We certainly had not thought of ourselves as anyone’s problem until Charles Lindbergh made his unflattering radio talk, in which he upbraided us for entering the war without anyone’s leave. He said we had embarrassed the United States by throwing stones at Germany, knowing that if Germany throws stones at us they might hit the United States, as well. MacCormac’s comment on this is that it was a tactless utterance on the part of the colonel, but not pointless.
We have an anomalous position in Canada, belonging politically to Europe and geographically to the American continent, which is something that none of us thought about. Now all at once it appears that Canada is a problem child in the family of nations. MacCormac tells us we are more loyal to Britain than we are to Canada. We criticize our own statesmen but fly into a panic if anything is said against Great Britain’s policies.
It is quite a pleasant experience to read a book all about ourselves. I know now more about Canada than I did last week, for I have had several night sessions with this new book. Canada is the third largest country in the world, exceeded only by China and Russia. We carry more freight by air than any other country.
Though we have a cold climate, there are compensations. Summer, though short, is potent. Wheat in the Peace River Country ripens in 90 days from the day it was sown. Crabapples ripen on the shores of Great Slave Lake, more than 800 kilometres north of Edmonton. Potato vines at Port Simpson have been known to grow an inch and a half a day.
Inside the Arctic Circle, heather blooms on the hillsides and the caribou feed on it. In 1931, there were fewer than a thousand white people in the Arctic Circle and now no one knows the number, but it has greatly increased.
The Arctic region has suddenly come alive to us, and to the United States, because it is the air route to Asia, and if the present war threat continues, the Alaska Highway will certainly be built. So if we have not looked at a map of the Arctic since we were at school, we had better put one on the kitchen wall now and acquaint ourselves with it.
Montreal is the world’s largest inland seaport, and when the St. Lawrence seaway project is realized, ocean vessels will dock at Fort William in the very heart of Canada. Because the St. Lawrence flows east, Canada looks eastward. No wonder Jacques Cartier called it the River of Canada, for it, more than any other natural feature, has determined the character of Canada.
Canada has more space than she can ever fill, and more scenery than she knows what to do with, and therein lies the great law of compensation, for the land that is inhospitable to settlers becomes attractive to hunters and tourists. Canadians used to be sensitive about the cold winters, but now we know that ice and snow and rugged mountains may be turned into good business.
If it is true that Americans know but little about Canada, as MacCormac states in his book, it is equally true that Canadians know little about themselves. I wonder how many people on Vancouver Island have seen the salmon run, or the big mill at Chemainus in action, or the rainbow on Elk Falls, or the lights coming on in Vancouver seen from the top of Grouse Mountain? I know people in Ontario who will tell you rather proudly that they have never “bothered” to go to Niagara Falls.
MacCormac’s book will set us thinking, if we are wise enough to read it, especially the chapter on Canadian-American relations.
I thought I knew Canadian history fairly well, but this book puts forward some angles I had not thought of. Canada, the writer says, is sometimes said to be a product of the United States, and so it is, but in the same manner that Protestantism is a product of Catholicism.
The first English-speaking settlers came to Canada as protestants of the American Revolution. They fled in fear and resentment and lived the same way; slowly the fear passed but the resentment remains.
I think MacCormac, to be perfectly fair, might have said there are still Americans who retained the resentment (with good reason) caused from their War of Independence. But we are glad to say that in spite of these resentments, we have the undefended border and a great deal of admiration and good will on both sides of it. For 126 years we have enjoyed what John W. Dafoe aptly calls “peace with friction.”
It is not profitable now to review the causes of the friction. The present war wipes out all the minutes of previous meetings. It is a cause for thankfulness now in Canada that the Americans own Alaska. And there are not many people in Canada today who do not feel apologetic for the saucy slogan of 1911, “no truck or trade with the Yankees.” Canada and the United States are now part of a great crusade.
Great things are happening in these hard days, which the slow pace of peace would have been long in bringing about. India is offered a modified independence; communal kitchens are a probability in England; children of the slums are living in the English manor houses; women all over Canada have rolled up their sleeves and are preserving the fruit crop as a community enterprise, with no thought of reward other than the satisfaction that comes from work well done.
People are saying: “What can I do to help win the war? What is left to live for if the Nazi nightmare should prevail?”
The writer of this book on Canada has a clear vision of what a Nazi victory would mean. I quote: “Nazism denies both God and reason. Rejecting simultaneously faith and science, it sets up its throne in the subconscious mind of man and asks his followers to defy the dark shapes that wander there. What National Socialism sought to make of Germany was a cunning madman, celebrating a Black Mass by the light of burning encyclopedias.”
The last phrase is worth the price of the book.
Let us in Canada cease from trivialities and be done with chattering criticism. We have only one enemy: the powers of darkness that are seeking to subjugate the soul of man. Whoever fights against that enemy is our friend and blood-brother, whatever his country or creed.
