Altered States - "Where is Here?"

Having just come through another Canada Day, politicians of all stripes spent their time in numerous events yesterday, welcoming new Canadians with sincere "Canada is a special country" sentiments. Citizens set off fireworks, gathered for parties, frequented concerts in parks, and generally used the July 1st holiday as cause for letting loose a little.There's no question that this is a great country to celebrate, but beneath it all lay a subtle query about "Who are we?" Every Canada Day, new polls come out showing that Canadians remain largely ignorant of their past and increasingly perplexed about their present status. Our country had been built by hard work and institutions that forged something of a framework that gathered this country together. Without government would there have been a ribbon of rail stretching across the country? With no allegiance to the King and Britain, would we have signed up in such large numbers to "storm the beaches" as Churchill summoned? Could we have maintained order in the vast west and north without the RCMP - our national police force?Martin Gannon, Professor at the University of Maryland, defines national character as "any activity, phenomenon, or institution that represents a people's values."  Nowhere is this more true than in Canada - a land so vast and lightly populated that only a sheer act of national will working through its institutions could have made it possible.And yet the Canadians who celebrated their country yesterday no longer show the deeper level of such allegiances to their national institutions as they used to. The RCMP remains sullied; no one knows if the railway is publicly owned or not; the CBC fights for its existence; the Governor General is a nice symbolic post, but doesn't thrust our sense of loyalty beyond our own borders; legions across the country are slowly closing down; our military, while still a subject of national pride, is nevertheless accepted at a distance because we can't square in our minds that we are warriors and peacekeepers at the same time.And nowhere has our allegiance to an institution crumbled so steeply as with our national government. Canadians don't know what to think anymore. We never really celebrated heroes in this country, but we did express a heightened respect for prime ministers and government officials. There was a benign belief that order and good government represented "Canada," and that we were set apart from other nations by our deep trust in those institutions that held us together despite vast geography, harsh climate, regional differences, and various racial and ethnic preferences. Alas, that state has altered and Canada is now ... what?Northrop Frye said it simply: "The fundamental question in Canada is not 'Who am I?' but, 'Where is here?' " It appears we are now a collection of various regions and that we are experiencing great difficulty in forming a national consensus once more. We pride ourselves in our health care system, but only some 40% of it is now truly public. We say hockey is our national sport while willingly accepting its rank commercialization and cultural centre south of the border. We take pride in our military but want out of Afghanistan. We say we are environmentalists but continue to accept policy options on climate change that constitute an international embarrassment."Where is here?" The answer to that question will determine the future of Canadian politics. If "here" is Alberta, Ontario, Quebec or Newfoundland, then we are in serious trouble. We are not regions but a people, and it is in our national institutions that we find one another in the dark and move forward with more courage. The loss of faith in those institutions means only that we have lost faith in ourselves and our ability to keep together.