Problems regarding true patriot love
During a recent visit to New York, a question that I was consistently asked was: How do Canadians feel about the recent presidential election and the prospect of having Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America?
Typically, I feel unfit to act as the de facto representative of the Canadian people, but in this case, I would answer that the election had caused ripples through Canadian society. My newsfeed has been cluttered with friends looking south of the border and discussing the state of America, political pundits weighing in on how Trump was elected, and countless commenters congratulating Canadians on how our country stacks up in comparison to the United States. Celebrities like Bryan Cranston and Barbara Streisand have pledged to make their way up north if Trump won the election, and the Canadian immigration website crashed on election night, which left Canadians feeling pretty good about the Great White North. It’s important, however, to not romanticize our own country in lieu of the recent American election results.
The issue with romanticizing Canada, in comparison to the United States, is that it runs the risk of glossing over our own national problems in order to focus on issues that are taking place south of the border.Discrimination towards minority groups, especially Islamophobia, have been a focus of the 2016 election race, with Trump calling for a ban of all Muslims from entering the United States at a November 2015 rally. During this same time, in Canada, a mosque was firebombed in Peterborough and a Hindu temple was vandalized in Kitchener. Citing the various hate crimes in both countries is not meant to draw a false equivalency between the two political climates, but rather to illustrate that Canada has its own set of racial problems and prejudices that it needs to overcome. National issues of discrimination towards minority groups were often passed over because of the more inflammatory, and therefore more titillating, incidences incited by Trump.
The history of the Canadian government has been rife with injustices towards the indigenous peoples of Canada, from the integration of residential schools, to the current addiction and poverty issues that can be found in reservations and Aboriginal communities across the country. Current Canadian affairs are not limited to issues in our treatment of minority groups.There are also environmental concerns, like the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline, and the boiled water advisories that stretch across Canada. To focus on the trouble in America, rather than acknowledge our own societal inadequacies, is to pat ourselves on the back instead of confronting our own nation’s shortcomings, accepting them and taking the necessary steps to dealing with them. This isn’t to say that we should throw on blinders and ignore the political situations in other countries, whose own decisions can have dramatic effects on Canadians both at home and as global citizens, but we shouldn’t allow the issues that we have no vote in to overshadow the problems that we have the power to change.
As the world waits expectantly to see what president-elect Donald J. Trump will do, politicians in Canada, like Conservative leader hopeful Kellie Leitch, have already come out in support of taking some of Trump’s message and transplanting it into the Canadian political sphere. While her remarks on “anti-Canadian values” have not been universally well received, The Globe and Mail has reported an increase in hate crimes across Canada.If you find this news as troubling as I do, it’s important to get involved in your own community, in any capacity that you see fit, and work towards making Canada a country that we can continue to take pride in. Instead of posting pictures on Facebook about how we are bystanders in the national train wreck that is the American political climate, we should be looking at the problems in our own country and trying to find ways that we can improve our own society, or do both because life’s too short to not repost a GIF every once in awhile.
Photo courtesy of M-Cheung_CC-BY-NC-2.0.