But when I refer to casting off our national inferiority complex, I don’t mean the permission we suddenly seem to have given ourselves to be overjoyed by our nation’s athletic accomplishments. Rather, I’m talking about the way most of our major national policies of the past half-century have really just been masks for our national angst. Multiculturalism, universal health care, soft power diplomacy, economic and cultural nationalism and others are all, in part, efforts to downplay our own fear that we are an insignificant nation. Through them, we reassure ourselves of our moral superiority, especially toward the Americans.
Maybe Vancouver finally made us willing to stop defining ourselves through our belief in giant government programs and our fear and resentment of the United States.
Now, perhaps, we can also give ourselves permission to stop trying to manufacture a distinctly Canadian culture and just let one evolve naturally.
We are not Americans. We are never going to be Americans. No amount of economic or cultural protectionism is going to keep U.S. influences out. But also, American influences were never going to impoverish us or strip our identity away.
Maybe now, with the Olympics over and our new-found national confidence high, we’ll get past our common belief that universal health care makes us a better country and gives us superior care. For far too long we have planned health care through this sort of political filter rather than a medical one.
Perhaps instead of sneering at the Americans about their melting pot approach to immigration and insisting our multicultural approach is superior, we’ll now come to see the two as different sides of the same coin.
I think we have already come to understand that while we were tremendous peacekeepers under the UN, what the world needs now is peacemakers. There was nothing wrong with our old role. We were very good at it. But now we have moved on. We have re-equipped ourselves and are getting on with the heavy lifting of fighting in hot spots and bringing aid directly to stricken regions.
Those who still cling to the old notion of Canada as only ever a non-fighting nation, that works only through the UN and cares deeply what the rest of the world thinks of us, have been left behind by events.
Lorne Gunter, “In Vancouver and Whistler, shades of Vimy”, National Post, 2010-03-03
March 3, 2010
QotD: Canada’s national inferiority complex
Filed under: Cancon, Quotations — Tags: Culture, Morality, Olympics, Protectionism, SocializedMedicine — Nicholas @ 09:37
Comments Off on QotD: Canada’s national inferiority complex
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
