To celebrate is to honour with ritual, also to praise and extol. Might there be such a thing as celebra-phobia? If so, British Columbians seem to have it, so reluctant are they to celebrate the anniversary of BC's graduation from a colony to a province of Canada exactly 150 years ago today.
Having been voted in 2021 by 20,000 polled folk from around the world as the world's best country (re. health, prosperity, opportunity, freedom, stable government etc.), Canada seems like a pretty good country to have become a province of. Yet British Columbians and their leaders decline to make an occasion of marking it.
When Canada acquired BC in July 1871 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. It's become fashionable to fling extremist terms like
“genocide” into public conversation (although no “genus” has
been killed in BC, unless perhaps before recorded history when waves of
“first peoples” arrived to eradicate even earlier peoples,
through warfare and slavery). Some might conclude that the
introduction of 18th century European “Enlightenment
values” was an improvement: maybe there is something to celebrate.
Of
course, July 2021 is not a good moment, when frightened and dismayed
we watch large tracks of BC burn in wildfires. People poised to flee
homes 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 was secured within Canada (the Constitution of which
eventually decentralized provinces into something more like separate
jurisdictions than many actual countries are), yet 150 years later
many people wish to de-stabilize it, 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.
With no "official" ceremony then, we must commit Private Acts of Celebration. We British
Columbians are good at performing private acts even though we have a
Canadian way of balancing them with a “live-and-let-live”
attitude.
Here are some acts
with which to celebrate BC every day:
Raise a glass of wine (or
whatever you drink), sit on a beach, a lakeside, or under a native
tree, communing with whatever native birds are around, and gaze at
the marvel of our landscape. Or walk in it, taking photos to leave
your great-grandchildren: “Images of BC At Age 150”.
Visit a gallery and contemplate art by past and current painters. Read a BC poet ... and also consider the words of two non-BC
poets which come to mind in our fractured times. When W. B. Yeats
wrote “the centre cannot hold / ... the best lack all conviction
while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, he could have
been foreseeing some aspects of contemporary Canada.
On the other hand
we could just as well say with Robert Louis Stevenson: “the world
is so full of a number of things / I'm sure we should all be as happy
as kings”. Yes: let's go with that one, as we celebrate the
milestone of BC's 150th birthday.
.
