LONDON - Until the deaths
last week of four Canadian soldiers
accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably
almost no one outside their home country had been aware that
Canadian troops were deployed in the region.
And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of
the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly
everything Canada ever does.
It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless
aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to
be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of
the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she
risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But
when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still,
while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her
yet again.
That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American
continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of
Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two
different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the
new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it
deserved.
Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two
world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire
population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War,
and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian
troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.
Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect,
its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or
other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a re-run.
The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and
ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack.
More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy
landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on
D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy
and the fourth-largest air force in the world.
The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it
had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was
acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American
actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated -- a
touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any
notion of a separate Canadian identity.
So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their
nationality -- unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston,
Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and
Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer,
British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be
Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or
Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons
and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them.
The Canadians proudly say of themselves -- and are unheard by anyone
else -that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping
forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on
Earth -- in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from
Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.
Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular
non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which
out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators.
Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace -- a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement
for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.
So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless
friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?
Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable
things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something
of a figure of fun.
It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a
high cost.
This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all
too tragically well.
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