March 2015
God Save Our Canadian Culture
Prior to the successful British invasion of Quebec in 1759, Canada’s culture was primarily that of our First Nations.
By 500 AD, the 7000 year cultural expansion of Canada’s First Nations had spread throughout our country. 1000 years later, in 1500 AD, foreign fishing fleets were using the east coast fishing banks as a staple food supply for Eastern Europe. By 1608 the fur trade began in earnest from Quebec City and a new French European influenced culture began to evolve in Canada. Huge influxes of settlers followed with those of French and English cultural heritage dominating the moral values as European communities spread westward.
Once they were conquered, First Nations, French and British colonies couldn’t abandon the culture of their homelands, but they then acquired broader cultural identities as new political institutions imposed control over society. Once Canada’s Constitution and name were established in 1867, the foundations were laid for Canada’s cultural evolution to this day. In 2017, Canada will be celebrating a mere 150 years of modern cultural development. However, Canadians must respect that our true culture extends back at least 9000 years of human survival in these lands. It is our responsibility to demonstrate that we can progress to greater nobility as we continue into our unknown future occupation of our country.
This ancient spiritual heritage includes many worthy cultural attributes:
- A spiritual desire to survive and persevere in climates that can be extremely harsh.
- A protective spirit for family love, survival and growth.
- A spiritual respect for our environment and its other living creatures.
- A spiritual love and sacrificial duty to others.
- A welcoming spirit for trade and learning from others.
- A belief and understanding of our spiritual environment and existence beyond our physical awareness.
All these Canadian cultural attributes are fairly common throughout humanity and this is a powerful reason why people are attracted to our nation of nations.
During the past 400 years, as the settlers arrived and immigration grew, they added many of their cultural attributes and heritages whilst building our nation:
- Religious Missionaries, Rabbis, Priests, Prophets and Mullah’s added spiritual beliefs and social values.
- Education in history, arts, sciences, and technologies produced broader visions of Canadian human cultural potential.
- Government was democratically granted secular power and influence over Canadian culture and its development across Canada.
- Just as the First Nations produced a diverse array of cultures tuned to their local conditions, Canada has evolved into a similar kaleidoscope of unique cultures seeking independence with connectivity to a broader national cultural identity.
By the 1950’s, Canada’s culture came under attack by the concept of the Two Solitudes of our English and French heritages. From time to time, our First Nations peoples would also request participation in this debate. But it seemed to be that by the 1970's, our Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, could find no consensus on what constitutes our Canadian culture so he followed his lawyer’s legal proclivity and brought home the right to modify our Constitution and establish a legal protection for a bilingual cultural component.
He also added our Charter of Rights to help solidify a few noble attributes of our Canadian culture. But, all this still left out the foundations of our culture. Our morals, values, ethics and responsibilities to our nation and each other were not enshrined and clearly established for future generations. Without these, our nation’s culture can be easily turned upside down and inside out. Our national culture can be manipulated into whatever new or recent perspectives find financial and political influence in our country. Clearly we need to restore our foundations in order to build the future of our nation.
Twenty five years after these significant steps towards defining our Canadian culture, our society has blossomed into greater diversity than ever before. Indeed, people from almost every nation and culture now live in Canada as Canadians. Many, including my wife will always be Barbadian-Canadian, but our children have become Canadian-Barbadian and their children will be Canadian-Canadian with a Barbadian Heritage. Yet all of this diversity shares a common human existence and a common spiritual existence just as did Canada’s forefathers (and foremothers).
During this recent era, humanity has begun to lift the veil off alternative self-identities and also loosened social restrictions on our morality. Our society is drifting away from the cultural guidelines accepted by our founders.
We appear to have discarded our rudder and keel. We are being pushed, shoved and pulled in many directions simultaneously. Some believe that to rid ourselves of the dangers to our cultural survival we must beach our ship and tie it securely to the present. We have lost our course towards a noble future. We see no progress and live by the ancient short-term mantra of “Live. Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we may die!”
There is another dangerous spirit washing over Canadian minds. Good and evil, truth and lies, right and wrong, black and white are all now “politically incorrect” concepts. Everything must be seen as shades of grey and nothing is right or wrong for humanity. Opinions and beliefs must succumb to this foolish and destructive perspective. Thousands of years of wisdom and insights are being ignored for inane tweets from a million souls seeking valueless knowledge from equally lost and drifting Canadians.
Out of these circumstances, it will be exceedingly difficult to restore and create new foundations for our culture. Yet if we don’t rebuild, we will see justice and fairness leave our courts and corruption and oppression will flourish. Freedom will disappear and democracy will turn into a charade if we don’t secure our values and respect our traditions. Canada is in a great danger that could overtake us within a generation.
Of course, my personal belief is that our Judeo-Christion and First Nations heritage provides ample basis for reconstruction of our Canadian cultural foundations. However, this would never be adequate or fair to many more recent cultural perspectives added to our nation. It appears that once again, as our former Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, did in helping shape the foundations of the United Nations, Canadians need to examine the good and evil natures of humanity in order to produce a noble secular foundation for our nation.
Religious freedom is often the mortar of cultural foundations, but the blocks must be made of righteous morals, values and ethics. To reveal these we must search our spiritual nature and enable it to rule over our carnal natures. If we cannot separate and learn to understand these two natures of humanity, we will never laydown foundations of noble wisdom. We will then be vulnerable to the weakness of compromised traditional values and perceptions that served up so much destruction and debasement in our evolutionary history.
So, let us prepare the parameters for our Canadian cultural identity.
There are those throughout history who chose to reject a belief in human spiritual reality. Canada’s founders rejected this extremism of agnosticism. Our founders ensured that Canada’s foundation culture required belief in God. We must never reject this binding catalyst for our Canadian culture.
“Never” is a strong word because it includes all of eternity. For Canada to exist in all eternity, we must entrench our belief in God for the simple reason that our forefathers believed that God is both the creator of humanity and the creator of eternity for humanity. According to them, without God humanity and Canada will soon cease to exist. This is a foundational belief and principle for being a Canadian. To deny God is to deny Canada's birthright.
Nevertheless, (a softer and less absolute expression), Canadian culture accepts that not all Canadians will believe in the God of our Judeo-Christian founders or the spirits of our First Nation peoples. Others may believe in other deities or in extra-terrestrials as their source of morals and values, thus strict requirement to adhere to all the religious beliefs and values of our forefathers could easily segregate and divide our country. In fact, it would be impossible to produce a consensus of beliefs in Canada.
Therefore, we need to delineate moral value principles that don’t contradict those of our forefathers whilst permitting other values that represent our Canadian attributes of tolerance and fairness. For example, the Ten Commandments of the Bible are a core building block of Canadian culture. These Commandments must be respected, yet our principle of political democracy must also be respected. This is why our society may choose from time to time to allow exceptions to the Ten Commandments. Our citizens may choose to live in conflict with our founding fathers’ morals and values, but our citizens must also understand and realize that conflict has been willfully created.
Such accommodations are necessary because as we experiment with modified cultural values, we must know and understand what changes have led to progress or desecration of our society and culture. For example, our forefathers understood that God created humanity and He wants to give everlasting life to those who believe in Him. Therefore it is only God’s right to give or take away this life. Thus. According to our forefathers, abortion and euthanasia are not righteous acts by humanity. Consequently, present day Canadians need to know and understand that such acts offend our founders, thus we have tainted our culture as it was originally envisioned.
Of course, such issues produce significant conflict within our country. Many would claim that our form of democracy is deficient as it does not protect the choice of the majority on such critical cultural matters. Others feel that financial considerations should not be allowed to change our fundamental cultural morality and values via political power plays. Many believe that we should be prepared to pay whatever cost to protect our cultural heritage rather than adopt unrighteous solutions to social problems.
Unfortunately, many rightly recognize that righteous back-peddling in Canada would likely be accompanied by self-righteous indignation and possibly fuel religious conflicts. The media and political temptation to fuel internal conflict would be impossible to extinguish. Canada has already burned down our forefathers’ temple of righteousness, so it will take an extra-ordinary revival of our cultural heritage to change the precipitous pathways we have chosen to follow.
Lest the self-righteous begin to throw the fireballs of past Canadian abuses, we have never experienced perfectly righteous behaviour within our society in the past, nor will we in the future. But that does not justify avoiding or derailing a Canadian need to define what our righteousness includes and excludes. We have lived in denial of this need and consequently our moral and legal foundations are pitted and starting to crumble.
Our forefathers had the foresight to see clearly the dangers of trying to combine church and state. 150 years later there are still old and now new forces intent upon establishing legal religious control and authority over communities within our national culture. Such a proposition is anathema to everything Canada stands for.
Canadian respect for individualism and self-determination was founded upon the personal human struggle needed to survive here. We will willingly surrender some of this freedom if it is needed to help our social fabric survive, but total surrender to an independent power and authority, whether political or religious, within our nation would appear to be suicide against our national heritage and culture.
Cultural values extremely opposed to our Canadian culture would never be welcome in Canada. Such perspectives would always conflict with our laws and human rights and should best find somewhere else to exist. This is a clear demonstration of how responsibility to respect our heritage takes precedence over our generous Charter of Rights.
There are hundreds of places where human rights are not as liberal as Canada, so it is not as though we would be mean to reject such extremism. It only makes sense that such people must conform to our Canadian culture or chose to live elsewhere where their spirit can be at peace.
Canadian culture is all about building a national culture and complexly vibrant national society. It is not about constructing feudal kingdoms or tribal mafias as exist elsewhere. We must not allow our political interests to co-opt such fringe groups who are intent upon changing our legal and cultural heritage to assimilate their conflicting cultural parameters.
We may not be able to foresee the possible threats to our culture far into the future, but we certainly can recognize some in the present. Cultural issues need to be resolved by prudent and wise thinking by all Canadians. Such important foundational concepts need to be defined and accepted by a simple majority of Canadians in a national referendum.
The Canadian Charter of Cultural Heritage, Values and Responsibilities will be the cornerstone of Canadian culture for the next 150 years. The questions are:
1. “Can we become a nation guided by noble ambitions and principles?”
2. "In the name of freedom, must we bend ourselves to accept abhorent cultural practices from other ancient societies?"
3. "Can we subsume our emotional natures long enough to let our universal human spirits agree on what is righteous for all Canadians?"
GOD SAVE CANADA!
Jim Reid, CFP Founder