Why are we British Columbians so self-effacing? On our sesquicentennial anniversary (July 20, 2021), were we hiding our lamp under a bigleaf maple? Maybe we'll celebrate the BC Day holiday on August 2nd, at least.
The colony of British Columbia joined Canada 150 years ago (July 20, 1871), extending the federation to the Pacific Ocean. A sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) is a significant milestone – but there was no official provincial celebration of it in 2021. Yet there's much to celebrate: when Canada absorbed British Columbia (so named to distinguish it from American Columbia, lying on the lower part of the Columbia River) it gained a bonanza – a cornucopia of natural resources, fertile landscape, environmental diversity, hundreds of miles of coastline and a population of hardworking, largely educated and feisty citizens descended from adventurous independent-minded explorers and settlers.
Sometimes we seem to act as if the bonanza (based on the word “bonus” -- good) was more like a “malanza” (based on “malus” -- bad). We sink into a sea of dispute. We fling extremist terms like “genocide” into the conversation (although no “genus” has been killed, unless perhaps before recorded history when waves of “first peoples” arrived to eradicate even earlier peoples, through warfare and slavery).
Of course, July 2021 is not a good moment for celebration, as we watch large tracks of BC burn in wildfires. People poised to flee homes and farms with whatever they can cram into their vehicles are not thinking about having a party. And many British Columbians are participating in the death struggle for the province's last precious old growth forest, logged almost to extinction. Many are worrying about global warming, and maybe with a global threat bearing down, a local celebration gets overshadowed. We've forgotten how to party anyway, only just emerging from the sixteen-month COVID lockdown. Now we're plagued by an infection of ethnic dispute. A lockdown seems to have been a petri dish for festering resentments between identity groups.
In 1871, BC's governance and finances were stabilized within the Dominion of Canada, yet 150 years later many people wish to de-stabilize, to fracture the province into separate “nations”. One thing history has taught us is that a nation can only have one government, otherwise it is merely a collection of feuding tribes. Some may be aiming for a kind of freedom for their identity group, but there is no freedom in the Politics of Resentment, and we are weary of resentment rhetoric, of competing visions of history, of “my trauma is bigger than your trauma”. It leads to what the media call “public acts of racism”, and it leaves us too disheartened even to celebrate the birth of our province. That is historically sad.
Since provincial leaders seemed to have felt it unseemly to seem happy on our 150th birthday, we have to commit Private Acts of Celebration. We British Columbians are good at performing private acts -- so let's have a Happy BC Day on August 2nd.
