Having decided to cancel Calgary’s Canada Day fireworks display, the city, in response to widespread public outrage, decided to reinstate the event. The rationale behind the cancellation was perhaps best expressed by city councilor Kourtney Penner who tweeted that such displays implicitly promoted “colonialism and racism.” She was, she said, “actively anti-racist, working at truth and reconciliation, and being responsive to the diverse community Calgary is.”
Last year the Port of Vancouver changed Canada Day to Canada Together Day, also cancelling its traditional fireworks display out of deference to the tragedy of Canada’s “genocidal” Residential Schools.
The “logic” behind such initiatives, however unapparent it may be to those who promote them, is that any celebration of Canada, past or present, is an insult to every Indigenous person in the country. But quite aside from this inane impulse to cancel fireworks displays, ought we not also to be canceling every aspect of Canada that would not exist but for the heinous invasion of our colonialist forbears? Aren’t our urban centers, technology and science, our computers, cars and televisions, indeed our Democracy itself, all insults to the self esteem of the Indigenous. Or is it possible the woke narrative endorsed by Penner and millions of others is grossly simplistic if not utterly stupid.
Of course they were guilty of some atrocities, but I marvel at the courage of those Western Europeans who set out into the darkness of an unknown world 7 or 8 hundred years ago to, yes, perhaps profit from their exploits, but clearly also to expand Man’s knowledge of the vast and mysterious realm to which he was born. At the same time, the trend to demonize these colonialist adventurers is made even more egregious in that it reviles them for failing to be 21st Century Post Moderns, for failing to adopt the ludicrous “progressive” Principle that all truths and values are equally valid, that no one Civilization has the right to criticize those of any other. Yes, Canada’s first Prime Minister had no right to refer to the Indigenous as “savages” though it seemed self-evident to him that the Culture of Ancient Greece in 500 B.C. was infinitely more civilized than that of America’s Indigenous 2000 years later! He should have known that Reason and Science are in no way superior to Superstition and Ritual. He apparently had not read Michel Foucault’s 1960s Neo-Marxist dissertations declaring all socioeconomic disparities to be merely matters of “oppression.”
The absurdity of the Left’s obsession with “White Supremacism,” both here in Canada and in the States, is that it views all of history through a 21st C. lens, utterly ignoring historical context in assessing events that occurred hundreds if not thousands of years ago! This entails a level of narrow-mindedness typical of religious fanatics, a state of mind so obsessed with its own agenda that the facts of reality are deemed irrelevant.
Yes, there were abuses in Canada’s Residential Schools, but that they were born of a sincere desire by our country’s founders to educate the Indigenous, is an inarguable fact. The notion that they were committing “Cultural Genocide” by attempting to teach science and math to those familiar with neither, would have seemed absurd to them. The Postmodern notion that all cultural regimes are equally valid, they would have found insane! Yet it is upon the standards of Postmodernism that Canada’s past and the history of Western Civilization itself are now being demonized by the brain-dead Left. Hence the “woke” impulse of the cities of Calgary and Vancouver to cancel anything that might suggest Canada to be something other than a perpetrator of racial intolerance! Hence the absurd reluctance of the mainstream media to express outrage over recent assaults on a host of Catholic churches here in Canada, or the two billion dollars of destruction perpetrated in 2020 by Black Lives Matter in the U.S.!