My Life as a Goddess

by Guy Branum

  France colonized Canada, kind of. They basically just sent a bunch of fur trappers to buy beaver pelts from First Nations for exploitative sums. We call them “fur trappers,” but really, the Huron and Iroquois and Ojibwa were doing most of the actual trapping; the French were just middlemen who bought the pelts and rowed them back to port. “Canoe Jews” might be a more accurate job title than “fur trapper.” The French built two real cities, Montreal and Quebec, the primary purpose of which was to keep all the pelts in a fenced-in place, and eventually sent over some women to turn it into a real colony that could make babies and cheese for itself. Look, this is reductive, but there’s a lot to cover.

  In 1763, the Seven Years’ War was ending. It’s the war we always call the French and Indian War, but open up your minds, it’s a big wide world and the war was going on all over the place, and it all started because Frederick the Great wanted to take Silesia from Austria, so it’s also the Third Silesian war, but for our purposes, let’s call it the Seven Years’ War. France kind of lost and Britain kind of won, so at the Treaty of Paris,9 Britain gave Louis XV two choices: Give up the tiny Caribbean Islands of Martinique and Guadalupe, or all of Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. France weighed the options and kept their beautiful islands, rich with sugar plantations, and handed over half a continent to the British. That’s where Canada as we know it came from.

  Also, there were seventy thousand people there. France didn’t care, since it had its sugar colonies. The UK didn’t care, since they had soldiers in Quebec City and no one could invade New England from the North. The British colonies didn’t care. When they declared independence in 1776, they didn’t think to ask the Frogs up in the woods along the St. Lawrence to join them. Then, as now, no one was particularly worried about Canada.

  Then the colonies won their little war. In 1783, at yet another Paris peace conference, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland handed over its American possessions (the ones that mattered) to an upstart little republic. They were forced to deal with the question of those Americans who’d remained loyal to the crown, though. Around forty thousand Americans who’d supported the British sought relocation to another part of the empire, including four thousand Black Americans who’d been promised freedom in exchange for supporting the crown. The UK had to keep its word, though it also didn’t want to promise these people a nice life in Knightsbridge.

  So they went to their acres of snow.

  The black loyalists were taken mostly to Nova Scotia. Some used it as a staging ground from which to return to Africa, but most decided to make lives for themselves in this country where they would at least not be enslaved. White Canadians did their best to make that “at least” as meaningful as possible. For a century, they lived on the edge of Halifax, in a town called Africville. This was the birth of a sizable black population in Canada.

  The white loyalists were taken farther up the St. Lawrence River, past the francophone cities of Quebec and Montreal to the banks of Lake Ontario. Together with the refugees in the costal provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, they began the history of anglophone Canada. The Declaration of Independence states the core premise of the United States as being that “Governments . . . deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The core premise of Canada is “Nah, I’m good.”

  Or, as loyalist Mather Byles put it, “Which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

  Thousands of nice, quiet people who didn’t realize why there needed to be a fuss moved to the banks of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario and started building quiet farms that the cruelties of latitude would make somewhat less productive than the ones they left in the States. America started a government, Canadians started getting left alone. That couldn’t last.

  We Stand on Guard for Thee

  About forty years later, America tried to steal Canada. We don’t like to talk about it, we don’t describe it that way in history books. When we explain the War of 1812, we say some convoluted thing about how the British navy was stopping our ships, looking for draft dodgers. And we say stuff about tariffs. If you want to lie about why a war started, just say “tariffs” and everyone’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll believe you. But that’s not what happened. In 1812, Great Britain was dick-deep in the Napoleonic wars, trying really hard to keep the little general from decimating their nation the way he’d pretty much rolled over the rest of Europe and North Africa. With the British Royal Navy indisposed, members of the Anti-Federalist10 Party thought they had a fun opportunity to fuck over the Brits and, in the process, the fancy Federalist11 Party from Boston and New York that liked doing business with said Brits.

  Oh, because another thing about the United States is that all of our wars for a really long time were about slavery. Again, a subject we’re not super-keen to talk about. In 1812, the UK had banned the slave trade but the U.S. was still buying and selling black people. British ships were regularly stopping U.S. slave ships and freeing the captives. Just know that one of the reasons the Anti-Federalists wanted to piss off the Brits is America’s deep passion for owning black people as property.

  So we tried to snatch Canada’s wig while Britain was distracted and were very surprised to find out that the surly fuckers up north had no interest in being assimilated into our republic. Sure, we went and managed to blow up a chunk of the-city-which-would-become-Toronto, but as soon as the British beat Napoleon, they sent the royal navy up the Chesapeake and burned the White House to the ground. Never forget that our national anthem, in addition to having some considerably racist verses,12 is about our flag still flying after nineteen British warships shelled the shit out of Fort McHenry.

  Once it became clear that the UK would be able to defend its American holding, we sued for peace, and the U.S. and UK essentially promised to leave everything the same and never talk about it again. But Canada remembered.

  Je Me Souviens13

  One of the things I really love about Canada is its understanding of itself in the shadow of powerful, more interesting family members. Britain is the place that made Canada, that appointed its leaders until 1867, that could override its laws until 1931, that had to be asked permission for constitutional changes until 1982. That’s right, Canada didn’t own its own constitution until Cheers was on the air.

  Culturally, Canada has always been striving to be Britain’s good child. Teacups and u’s in “honour” and “colour.” The queen on quarters, in classrooms and post offices. A regent’s distant gaze always quietly judging the country she doesn’t love enough to live in. Canada wasn’t even allowed to have its own foreign minister until the 1980s: The person had to be called the “Minister for External Affairs” because they had to pretend Britain was still running their foreign policy. The UK didn’t care; they were probably busy negotiating some coal strike or Thatcher invading Uruguay. Canada does all the hard work of winning Britain’s wars for it, taking Vimy Ridge, driving in farther, faster at Juno Beach than any of the other invading forces at Normandy, but the UK is barely aware they exist.

  And America, big, loud, violent, and insane, sits right next to them. We flood them with media and products and threaten to wash away whatever sense of identity they’ve been able to cobble together. We talk about them only to mock them.14 Want to know why Ottawa is Canada’s capital? Because it’s farther away from the U.S. than the other cities that were being considered for the honor, and Queen Victoria thought that seemed safest from the Yanks. From day one, Canada has been waiting for the U.S. to come and conquer it—they just didn’t realize we’d do it through every means other than military force.

  We take their best and their brightest and put them into our industries, making our TV and films. They can come be successful here, we just ask that they stop being quite so Canadian. In 2005, when the Liberal Party of Canada was looking for its next leader, they had to find the best Canadian to lead Canada. So they went to the obvious plac
e: Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Michael Ignatieff was teaching and had lived for half a decade. When R. B. Bennett was done being prime minister of Canada back in the 1930s, he retired to England and was made a viscount, even though the Canadian government had asked the king not to give Canadians titles. Bennett didn’t care; he’d graduated. He was bigger than being Canadian.

  I love Canada because it has to manage its identity in the shadow of these two giant identities. And I love Canada because it has an identity that’s always been split and compromised. The First Nations were the real Canadians, of course, living there for millennia before the French showed. Then the British arrived and took political control, but the French and First Nations had the real, organic claim on Canadianness. The anglophones used their political and military might to marginalize and oppress the French, but the French were insulated from the sense of inferiority that anglophone Canadians had compared to British or U.S. culture. Questions of authenticity and loyalty were ever-present in Canada. Who is Canada? Why is Canada? These questions were always so much vaguer and smaller than the U.S. versions. But isn’t “vague and small” just another way of saying “nuanced”?

  In 1972, CBC radio host Peter Gzowski, as part of the long, barely motivated struggle to find a Canadian identity, decided to have a contest to create a national simile. If you want to know how barely motivated this struggle was, Canada had gotten a flag of its own less than ten years before. Nearly half the country opposed having a flag. It was a huge struggle. Canada passed national health care only as part of the compromise to push through having their stupid leaf flag. You might say, “Oh, well, they weren’t that big of a deal back then.” They were the eighth largest economy on the planet in 1960, but they didn’t want to make a fuss by doing something showy like having a flag.

  So Gzowski wanted a national simile. Something like “As American as apple pie.” Hundreds of suggestions streamed in, things that make perfect sense, like “As Canadian as hockey” or “As Canadian as maple syrup.” These suggestions didn’t win. The winner was Heather Scott of Sarnia, Ontario, who suggested “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” The core of their story is a flexible identity that grows and shrinks to accommodate the identities around them.

  Want to know the best story from Canadian history? It’s not one they’re going to tell you. If they are going to talk about what made Canada, what solidified it into a viable political entity, real Canadians will probably talk about John A. Macdonald, who became Canada’s first prime minister with the British North America Act of 1867.15 They will probably not mention that Macdonald was a drunk, or that he was caught taking bribes from railroad companies.16 Canadians will tell you about John A. Macdonald because they know Americans talk about George Washington, and John A. Macdonald is their corollary—their imperfect, boring, weird version of something America does better. They will talk to you about what they assume you will understand because they assume no American or British people would take the time to think outside of their own paradigms. They are right.

  John A. Macdonald is not the story. The real story happened about twenty-five years earlier, in 1841, when Upper Canada and Lower Canada, as Ontario and Quebec were then known, were merged for political purposes. For the first time, Canada was going to have a parliament with all the English speakers and French speakers in one place. The key question was whether they would end up fighting with each other, or if they would unite to fight against the British government, church, and businesses for reform and control of their own country. One of the Ontario liberals, Robert Baldwin, reached out to the leading Quebec liberal, Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine,17 and said the only way they could turn Canada from a colonial wood and beaver farm for Britain into a real, independent, vital country was to work together. That was a nice idea.

  Nice ideas rarely go smoothly. When Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and his francophone supporters were going to vote in his district outside Montreal, the Orange Order,18 an anti-Catholic militia, showed up and threatened to beat the shit out of any Catholics who tried to vote. It could have turned into a riot or a bloodbath, so Lafontaine asked his supporters to disperse. An anglophone Protestant member was sent to parliament from Lafontaine’s francophone Catholic district, and the cause of reform seemed imperiled.

  Baldwin heard about this and was pissed. There was no way a majority of Canadians could unite behind reform and equality without French voices in the movement. He needed Lafontaine. So Baldwin asked his dad, who’d been elected as an MP from Toronto,19 to step down. Baldwin brought Lafontaine into Ontario in the depths of winter20 and introduced him to the Protestant anglophone farmers, telling them that if Canada was going to succeed, they needed to elect Lafontaine to represent Toronto.21 They did. And when this first united Canadian parliament formed a government, Baldwin insisted Lafontaine be the Premier. English speakers were larger in number and could have easily dominated the government. Baldwin wanted Quebec, and Lafontaine, to understand they were equal partners. When they were named to united Canada’s first cabinet, they had to run for their seats again. This time the Orange Order showed up in Baldwin’s district and made sure he lost.

  Lafontaine knew exactly what he had to do. He had one of his francophone reformer MPs from Quebec resign and let Baldwin run for his seat.

  This is the promise of Canada. Nice people thinking about each other, because if they don’t, they will get pushed around by outside powers and freeze to death and be eaten by moose. Canada has failed this promise thousands of times. Don’t get me started on their treatment of the First Nations. We could have a chat about the Black Loyalists who were settled in Nova Scotia, then ignored by the federal and provincial government for the following century. There’s the whole Viola Desmond business.22 We could talk about the Supreme Court saying women weren’t “persons,” or the searing racism of the pioneering feminists who tried to prove that women were persons, but not blacks or Jews. I’m not saying Canada is perfect, but I’m saying Canada has a dream. A different dream from that of the United States, but one that’s just as beautiful.

  From Baldwin and Lafontaine committing themselves to working across religious and linguistic lines to Pierre Trudeau passing the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, to a nation rooting for a one-legged cancer patient to try to run across it,23 Canada has tried to create a society where people from varied backgrounds get to collaborate and succeed because they take care of each other. It’s almost as if they, bullied as they are by British and American culture, tried to build a nation that is the antithesis of an empire.

  My sister is an empire. A very big, very warlike, uncontrollable personality. I don’t want to think about her, or people or institutions like her, that keep control through threat of violence and fear. I want to talk about people and places that care about each other, that try to listen to others’ needs and respect them. I want to talk about people and places and things that nobody remembers to love. I want to talk about Canada.

  * * *

  1. With all due respect to Melvil Dewey and the film Party Girl, fuck card catalogs.

  2. Some of those people were actually kings. However, I was to learn that these real-life kings were way less likely to have magical swords than the ones in fantasy books, but way more likely to have gone to college in England. The current monarchs of Bahrain, Belgium, Bhutan, Brunei, Jordan, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Monaco, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all went to college in the UK. Before the existence of the Internet, determining that fact would have taken nine years.

  3. For your reference, here is a list (by no means exhaustive) of people Roseanne has argued about Israel with on Twitter: Hal Sparks, John Fugelsang, Joe Rogan, Mia Farrow, John Legend, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, and John Cusack. She does not fight with Anthony Bourdain about Israel; they may disagree, but she respects him too much to fight. That’s the chaos that Roseanne’s Twitter account is bringing to the table.

  4. While I love and respect Alice Munro, she needs to
learn to write something longer than a short story if she wants my respect, or that of Hulu.

  5. It’s “PAW-sta,” not “PAST-ah.”

  6. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine series is a good place to start.

  7. What about Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song?

  8. Read their constitution!

  9. Aren’t they all treaties of Paris?

  10. They hated government and loved slavery, so were kind of like the Neanderthal version of Republicans.

  11. They were wealthy bankers in New York and Boston who were out of touch with the common man, so basically, Democrats without all the gays, women, and POC getting in the way.

  12. It was, of course, a war about keeping slavery safe and legal.

  13. Je Me Souviens is the provincial motto of Quebec. It means “We remember,” which basically means “We remember the time before you English speakers showed up and took over,” which basically means “Just you wait, Johnny Canuck, just you wait.”

  14. Like this chapter!

  15. The law that created Canada as a nation was, of course, passed in London by the British parliament.

  16. Canada, as a nation, was formed largely to make sure they could build a railroad that went from Halifax to Vancouver.

  17. I may be telling you this story only because I think his name is cool.

  18. They are the same guys who were/are assholes in Northern Ireland.

  19. York. It was called York back then.

  20. I think. Read John Ralston Saul’s excellent book Extraordinary Canadians: Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin for actual history. This is mostly me telling cocktail-party stories. Winter makes it more dramatic.

  21. I really handled this Toronto/York thing poorly. I should have established this earlier in the chapter. I feel like we’re stuck calling it Toronto now.