Canada for SpartansIn the government guidebook Discover Canada, required reading for people seeking to become Canadian citizens, the word 'war' appears thirty-five times and Ontario and Quebec become a single region
Stephen Henighan, in Geist (Spring 2011): If I did not recognize the land described in Discover Canada, that was the volume's intention: to drive a wedge between old Canadians and new Canadians... between the liberal, statist, internationalist culture of the past and what the authors hope will be the conservative, militaristic culture of the future...
Medicare... is bypassed in a fleeting reference to the Canada Health Act. Tommy Douglas may have been voted 'the Greatest Canadian' in 2004, but his name does not appear here. The CBC, government aid agencies,... the right to unionize, gay and lesbian rights -- all vanish... Peacekeeping receives one grudging mention... Canada is a bellicose nation, adamant about its 'Christian civilizations' and fixated on 'the rule of law.'...
The only two waves of political refugees identified by the guide are Hungarians who 'escaped Soviet tyranny' in 1956 and Vietnamese who 'fled from Communism' after 1975... [not] military governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, or right-wing death squads in El Salvator or Guatemala... [or] men who came to Canada from the United States as refugees from the Vietnam War, and women who accompanied them. The dignity of General Pinochet takes precedence over an accurate account of the origins of Canada's population...
The bottom of the opening two-page spread on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship is emblazoned with photos of happy soldiers. Would-be citizens must study the names of all Canadians who have won the Victoria Cross... [Description of] The two Riel rebellions tilts the emphasis toward the battlefield... Tory gun-lovers can thrill to a photograph of a gun-wielding hunter (who, unassailably, is Inuit)...
The most enduring lesson... citizenship applicants can learn from this volume is that Canada is a country whose government misrepresents its past in order to deprive them of the information they need to engage in debate about its future.
