Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Welcome to Fascinating Facts and Tantalizing Trivia

A Hartson Dowd Column

 March 28, 2007

A British newspaper salutes Canada...... . . . this is a good read.  It is
funny how it took someone in England to put it into words... Sunday
Telegraph Article From today's UK wires:

Salute to a brave and modest nation - Kevin Myers, The Sunday Telegraph
LONDON -



Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan , probably
almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops
are deployed in the region.  And as always, Canada will 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, it's
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, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter 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
it's 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 on-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 past year more grieving Canadian families knew
that cost all too tragically well.

*********************
Please pass this on to any of your friends or relatives who served in the
Canadian Forces or anyone who is proud to be Canadian; it is a wonderful
tribute to those who choose to serve their country and the world in our
quiet Canadian way. ****************************