Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Better Together: learn from Canada you guys

I am saddened by the gusto of the Scottish separatist movement that has brought this new referendum.
I grew up in Canada, my parents are British hailing from various English part, with Scots and Northern Irish grandparents, and my only child is now living in the UK, er England.

As a Canadian, who is glad we are a united country acknowledging our differences in our beginnings, and embracing newcomers, I find it hard to understand the bitterness and wholesale neuroses that person, Alex Salmond, has engendered.

It feels like an embittered spouse who cries unappreciated and decides to make the household poorer by divorce, waving the decree nisi in the hubris of the moment.

We too suffered our own Alex Salmond in the person of Rene Levesque, a chain smoking separatist, a promoter of heroic-victim French-Canadian nationalism, someone who lost his seat for six years after he became Premier.  We even had the separatist murder by garroting of the Deputy Premier, Pierre Laporte and the kidnapping of your own James Cross, a British diplomat. We had the slogan from the west, when they realized they had a lot of oil, “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark”.

But we got through it all, because at the end of the day Canadians woke up to reason and realized that in spite of and because of our differences, we were better and stronger together.  We are a just society, in the words of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, an inclusive one, a multicultural one.

We continue to grumble within the confines of our marriage. The French Canadians continue with scheduling more separatist referendums in their platforms. The last one resulted in the loss of the Quebec Premier’s seat in 2014 and her resignation. The mid-west continues to be prosperous from its oil, and denigrate the easterners, the real easterners continue to lobby for more protection for their fishery industries, the real west continues to revel in its life style of sports and leisure and huge real estate bonanzas; the financial hub continues to take on scorn from all sides and bus it to work in the dark, and the Canadian dollar continues steadily on a par with the US dollar. The Canadian dollar was 68 US cents during all the separatist and oil turmoil.


Why? Because we are better and stronger together, and the world knows it.