What is a Canadian?

 What is a Canadian?

It was 1967, and I stepped off the airplane onto Canadian soil, intending to become a Canadian. Eagerly looking around, I searched for what Canadians look like. At the Calgary airport, I couldn’t identify even one. Being a teenager, I noticed other teens were wearing shorts down to their knees, while mine were shorter. Canadian boys at the time also had longer hair than what I was used to.

A year later, I knew that there were hardly any Canadians in Canada. All the people here identified by other nationalities that became Canadian but retained some traits from some old country. People were expressing a need to not be British, and there was a new flag with a red Canadian maple leaf. The indigenous race also had many faces and spoke a variety of languages. They were not the most popular members of the Canadian social order.

As soon as I understood a little English, I was bombarded by ethnic jokes. How many Ukrainians does it take to change a light bulb? I can’t remember but it was the same number as Newfies if told by an eastern Canadian. People joked about Wops, Gays, and Polacks, and they had annoying names for every nation, skin color, or country of origin. I was called a Camel Jockey even though I only rode a camel once in a fair. I rode an elephant twice.

People from English-speaking countries fared better than others, but they were also ranked. There were the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Australians, Jamaicans, Africans, Indians from India, Americans with a variety of accents, and of course Londoners who could be identified by their speech right to a neighborhood in the British capital. One young woman said she was a true Canadian for many generations, but her last name was German.

I saw several fields with white crosses in cemeteries. Here were the Canadians. Didn’t matter where they came from, when Canadian freedom and way of life were threatened, they all donned uniforms and took guns. Fascist ideas that now are making a bit of a comeback were not popular with Canadians.

A couple of days ago, a program aired on “The Agenda” TVO, examining reasons young people in Ontario are leaving Toronto in great numbers. Many are heading to Alberta and Nova Scotia. According to them, the number of young people leaving Ontario grew by 94% from 2019 to 2022.

The main reason for leaving is the price and availability of housing plus other economic reasons. The COVID pandemic played a big role. Young professionals discovered they can work remotely. At times, they can work for Ontario wages, living for Alberta expenses. One young lady mentioned that her husband and her can save a thousand dollars a month on rent, saying that it goes a long way towards daycare and paying student loans.

Millennials who are now approaching forty and wish to have a family can no longer afford to live in Toronto. They may lose family support and familiar communities, but find living in a new place exciting. Calgary and Edmonton no longer seem as backward as they used to be. Alberta also is doing a marketing campaign geared to draw them. There are posters on the public transit system that they don’t miss. Others, such as electricians, plumbers, roofers, and new immigrants, see the trend and also move. The interior provinces are being built up at the expense of the larger economies in the east. Smaller communities, such as ours, don’t get the bulk of the population movement, but even a small percentage makes a big difference. Many are looking for public green spaces. It’s hard to beat tiny mountain towns in green spaces and proximity to wildlife.

There is some movement away from Alberta, offsetting the dominant trend. We all know about the doctors and nurses discouraged by the government’s attitude towards them. Some folks consider moving here but fear the negative reputation circulating. They worry about separatism, unbending Conservative attitudes, and the possibility that all the jobs here are oil-related. People are scared to find themselves without public health care or the availability of doctors.

This trend is offset by the fact that after a move, the new folks will be able to change things. They know that the major cities in Alberta are progressive thinking and that even global warming is considered important by much of the population. The wind and hydroelectric projects here are not invisible. Energy companies are not hiding the fact that they are involved in clean energy. Politics can change.

Years ago, I was looking for a typical Canadian and had a hard time finding one. Now, fifty years later, they are more obvious. Canadians are more or less the Europeans of North America, regardless of their skin color, accents, religions, or nations of origin. We are not the European imperialists of the past but a modern, well-educated new nation that