Who's Canada's team? Eh?? EH!!

Ed. here. It's been a while since we did the mailbag bit, wherein I answer readers' questions about Walt or WWW or whatever. Today we have space for just one. Justine Truedough writes: I notice that Walt seems to be a fan of the Montréal Canadiens. Can you tell me why?

Bonne question, Justine! By way of answer, I've selected a passage from The Unfinished Canadian, by Andrew Cohen (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), a fine book mentioned by Walt in his second post today. He highlighted these paragraphs in the last chapter, "The Future Canadian". I've added an appropriate photo.

Hockey is Canada's high church. For this is the country of the Trail Smokeaters, the Edmonton Oilers, the Toronto Maple Leafs -- and the Olympic women's hockey team. Most famously, it is the country of the Montréal Canadiens. Even their name says something about us. Up the late 1800s, les Canadiens were the real Canadians, those who spoke French and lived in Québec. It is fitting that the name of the greatest team in hockey should marry Montréal, once the foremost city of Canada, and les Canadiens, the first Canadians. They have come to represent not just the city and Québec but something greater than that, the country itself.

For les Canadiens are what we were, what we are, and what we may be. For years, they were French and English in perfect balance, one of those few national institutions that brought us together. They were Harvey, Harris, Worsley, and Moore. They were Savard, Rousseau, Tremblay, and Plante. They were the country itself, winning and losing, but mostly winning. In the history of the sport, no team has won more professional championships. Twenty-four pennants hang from the rafters of the Bell Centre in Montreal.

And how they won! They were élan itself. The fire of Maurice Richard, the moxie of Doug Harvey, the tenacity of Henri Richard, the power of Bernie Geoffrion, the wings of Yvan Cournoyer, the tentacles of Ken Dryden. Most of all, there was Jean Béliveau, the quintessence of class itself, floating above the maelstrom, his stick a paintbrush sweeping across an incandescent white and blue canvas. Their retired numbers hang from the rafters, too. This is our national portrait gallery.

Their language was not so much English and French, but success. They were what we were. Today, the Canadiens are not just English and French; in fact, they are hardly either, any more. Today they are the world -- Swiss, Finns, Russians, Americans, French, Czechs and Kazakhstanis.

They have no identity crisis. They have no resentment or jealousy or ambiguity and show moderation in everything but the pursuit of excellence. They do not ask who they are and no one asks them. Their temple is cloaked in history -- the championships they have won, the torches they have passed. They know where they are from and who came before them. They do not agonize over divided loyalties or different nationalities. They know instinctively where they belong, in the Dominion of Success. These are les Canadiens....

Canada -- the greatest hotel on earth!

Walt has just finished reading The Unfinished Canadian, by Andrew Cohen (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), and can't resist passing along -- without editorial comment [Who? Me? Ed.] -- this passage from the chapter entitled "The Casual Canadian".

Canada is becoming "a community of communities" -- the vision of Canada expressed by former prime minister Joe Clark -- though surely not as he imagined it....

Yann Martel, the award-winning novelist, calls Canada "the greatest hotel on earth. It welcomes people from everywhere." A perceptive and apt description, it imagines a Canada in which everyone is a visitor, occupying a room, a floor, or even a wing, depending on the means. No one stays for very long because no one wants to make an extended commitment.

A hotel is impermanence, by its very nature the most tenuous of loyalties. People come and go. In point of fact, this is actually true of Canada; some 30 per cent of immigrants are thought to return home after getting citizenship....

This compartmentalization of Canada emerges in unsavoury ways: in the grim, urban corridors where Jamaican, Haitian and other street gangs fight each other; in the high-rise housing projects filled with Somalis and other struggling minorities; in the epidemic of violence against women in the Indo-Canadian community; in the desire of some Muslims in Ontario to use Sharia law; in the arrests of eighteen suspected terrorists, all of them Muslim, whom no authority would identify as such....

There are reasons for worry. Michael Valpy, the journalist and author, sees trouble among second-generation minorities who are not entering mainstream society and risk becoming part of the underclass.

Tarek Fatah, a broadcaster, warns of fundamentalist Islamists who use multiculturalism to present themselves as moderates to "hide their misogynist, homophobic and segregationist agenda." He warns that if Canadians don't redouble their efforts to integrate and promote a secular society, "we risk creating a fragmented nation, divided into twenty-first-century religious and racial tribes, suspicious of each other and longing for the home we left behind."

Walt agrees with and endorses every word, except for the second part of the quote from Tarek Fatah (last sentence in the preceding paragraph) which is hopelessly idealistic and downright naive. The damage has been done, and I can't think of any politically acceptable way to undo it. Can you?

Footnote: Americans and Britons needn't feel smug or safe. Citizenship of the UK and/or USA is harder to get than Canadian -- Canucks are just stupid about this -- but the description of the minority ghettos of Toronto could just as easily apply to New York, or London, or just about any "Western" city.