It’s Canada Day—the Canadian national holiday, equivalent to our Independence Day—and it seems only right and proper to consider what good neighbors Canadians are—to us and the entire world.
I could get silly
and talk about Leslie
Nielsen or one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Due
South. But I’ve already done that.
And Canadians are way more
than wacky comedians and upright Mounties in a cynical American city.
They’re even more than mail-order pharmacies and refuges for
cabernet-toting discontents fleeing whichever administration gets into office
down here.
They are pretty much in every
way the kind of neighbor you’d like to have on your street. They don’t throw
loud parties, or park huge SUVs in their driveway, or toss their clapped-out
washing machines in their weed-infested front yard.
They quietly go about their
lives as conscientious citizens of the world, picking up the trash they find
(and disposing of it responsibly) and pitching in whenever asked
to help set the worst things to rights. They define the term “stand-up guys”.
Three things in particular I’m
thinking about:
Teheran, 1979. In the midst of
the chaos of the overthrow of the Shah, six American diplomats were given
shelter in the Canadian embassy for 79 days, until they could be extracted by a
joint Canadian-CIA mission. It was an act of both neighborly kindness and extreme
courage for the Canadians to hide the Americans, especially at a time when it
was clear that “diplomatic courtesies” didn’t rate high on the Iranian
revolutionary priority list.
The Canadians risked personal
safety and national policy to help out six Americans, who’d probably
been trash-talking hockey teams right up until the embassy takeover. They
didn’t hesitate and they didn’t flinch.
My second example of Canadian
rectitude is Lt. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire. Dallaire had just about the worst job
of the 1990s: Force Commander of United Nations Assistance Mission Rwanda
(UNAMIR), from 1993 to 1996. During the worst genocide of the second half of
the 20th Century, Dallaire commanded forces without resources,
with limited remit and no backing from his political masters. I
cannot believe the fortitude of a man who still managed to save thousands of
the people under his care.
Although at a terrible,
terrible cost. Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle told the
story much better than I could, so I’ll let
him do it. It was an impossible command, an impossible
remit and an impossible expectation. But Dallaire took it on.
I can just picture most
American generals after that posting—speaking engagements, management
consulting, appearances on talk shows, joining a racist régime and presiding
over the destruction of American values. Dallaire went back to Canada, where
PTSD led him to a suicide attempt. His big public outing has been to testify at
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against Colonel Théoneste
Bagosora, who was subsequently convicted of war crimes. He also advocated for
children affected by war—something he’s an expert in.
Third, Canadians at every level have
consistently shown their decency and humanity and neighborliness. On September
11th 2001, ordinary citizens of the small Newfoundland town of
Gander opened their homes and their hearts to more than 7000 air passengers and
crew whose planes had been diverted to their airport following the terrorist
attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. They fed, housed and cared for the
sojourners—as, frankly, they’ve done for more than 150 years.
Canada, after all, was the
last stop on the Underground Railroad, where escaping slaves could find the
guarantee of freedom and safety that wasn’t available to them in the United
States.
In the musical world, Canada
has given us Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Sarah McLachlan.
Imma let Justin Bieber, Celine Dion and Nickelback slide. Their writers include
Margaret Atwood (whose The Handmaid’s Tale has taken on new
elements of horror as it turned out to be more prescient than we though when
she first published it), Michael Ondaatje, Louise Penny, Robertson Davies,
Alice Munro.
The entertainment industry has
been enriched by (for instance) directors Arthur Hiller, David Cronenberg, Atom
Egoyan, Paul Haggis, Ivan Reitman; and actors Nathan Fillion, Nick Mancuso,
Genviève Bujold, Dan Ackroyd, Anna Paquin, John Candy, Sandra Oh, Rick Moranis,
Raymond Burr, Donald Sutherland, Jim Carrey, Graham Greene, Paul Gross… Canada
is where American production companies go to film movies and TV shows that look
like the States, but don’t cost like the States. Where would Star Trek:
TOS be without William Shatner and James Doohan?
Also, I got two words for you:
Tommy Chong.
I cannot express my admiration
for the country that produced people like this. You don’t think of them a lot,
because good neighbors don’t get in your face. But you’re always really, really
glad they’re there.
Also—Canada will never, ever be the 51st state of the US.
©2026 Bas Bleu
