Anyone under the delusion that Canada and the United States are really one very big country in North America, competely dominated by the latter, might have spent this Easter weekend in the larger one, Canada, to gain a more realistic perspective.
It was the last weekend for NHL regular-season hockey and virtually nobody in Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, or Montreal wasn’t paying attention to the results. (The first three made it into the playoffs, the last two managed to knock each other out.) All of the Canadian teams will be playing against teams housed in US cities, which will, as a whole, be very uninterested (here we can except Detroit) in the next two months of the NHL playoffs while Canadians will have daily entertainment covered on the national tv network, the CBC. US hockey fans will have to turn their aerials to the north.
On Easter Saturday there was a 3-hour wait at the British Columbia-Washington border crossings as many thousand Canadians had their traditional Easter weekend visits to the gorgeous tulip fields of the Skagit Valley in Washington wrecked by the vigilent US defence forces dealing with terrorism. Apparently no terrorists were caught in the lineups, although the photographer on assignment for the Vancouver Province newspaper was convinced to not spend the rest of his day trying to get across the border for his annual tulip-field shot. There are no 3-hour border waits left in Europe – well, truckers entering Serbia or Ukraine claim they suffer such harassments – and it is hard to see what the US gains from convincing its neighbours to spend their money at home.
Then there is the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge in eastern France, where Canadian troops succeeded in overrunning German positions, after Brits and French had failed for years, losing many thousands of soldiers in the attempts. Military buffs are convinced that this operation, in which 3500 Canadian soldiers were killed in one day, is the glue around which the nation was formed. Others point out that the murderous war continued right on nonetheless.
On Easter Sunday, six Canadian soldiers were killed in the murderous fields around Kandahar, Aghanistan, where 2,500 of the 11,500 soldiers deployed are Canadian while most NATO countries continue to refuse to send their troops – apparently individual German soldiers can refuse to take part in operations they object to on ethical grounds. And on Easter Monday, the leaders of Canada, France and Great Britain gathered at the spectacular Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the battle. There, on soil deeded to Canada by France, the Queen of England, who is also still the Queen of Canada, demonstrated more power in her 80th year than the rest of her family combined will be able to do when the question of succession in Canada arrives. The Prime Minister of France was best-dressed and had the best hairdo while the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, a supposed lightweight who is beginning to punch above his weight, profited from his natural informality and the presence of his very pleasant family, whom most Canadians, to their approval, had never seen before. Back in Ottawa, the Governor-General, the Queen’s representative in Canada and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, presided over ceremonies at the War Memorial. Dressed in a long white coat and black fur hat to fend off a winter still hanging around in eastern Canada, Michelle Jean, the very attractive young black bilingual immigrant from Haiti who is now the Governor-General, would have caught the immediate attention of even the Prime Minister of France. Just a month ago she was in Kandahar, she noted, and in battle dress. It’s not the image the world – not to mention the United States – has of Canada, but they have simply failed to note the dramatic changes taking place in the world’s second-largest country, something most Canadians are not unhappy about. As the world’s second-largest source of both oil and water, Canadians are watching that southern border even more suspiciously than do the border guards wasting their (and out time) at Blaine, Washington.