City Councils Proclaim Anti-Canada Day

Post-Covid-lockdowns, in 2022 and 2023 Canadian residents of Victoria BC again gathered for Canada Day on July 1st, although it's now considered Anti-Canada Day by some (including Winnipeg -- and Victoria municipal councilors and their "Family"). 

Re-naming Canada's national day in 2024 is being proposed in 2023*, the better to free us to repudiate our founding fathers and cultural mothers (and all of the British Isles), and to make room for maple-syrupy declarations of allyship with the "marginalized and victimized".

That way, we will be able to go on apology-overdrive for being a liberal democracy. 

Apologizing is what Canada does best. Victoria's City Council wants to have a "review", meaning a thinly disguised process to de-platform history with "thoughtful analysis" -- and to enforce compelled speech about it. 

To culturally-correct drumming we will sing the new version of our national anthem: No Ca-nadaaa ...🎶

Participants in Canada Day festivals are asked to leave their maple leaf flags at home, in case the white spaces on them are offensive to vulnerable groups.

In Victoria, statues of colonial figures will kindly stay locked in their crates.

Editorial: Victoria Portrait Facing Uncertain Future Amid Debate About Colonial Symbols (iheartradio.ca)

See below: An old-fashioned insubordination celebration (!)      Canada Day Picnic 2021 in a municipal park, held when Victoria Council decided to "cancel" Canada Day -- but others did not. 

*https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/victoria-considers-taking-lead-on-canada-day-events-again-7366576

Change-of-Name Law Looming?

Forced Change of Names: First they came for the street names, and then they came for the surnames ...  

Apparently some folks with anti-European leanings consider BC's street names "colonialist", which for some reason to them means "unsafe". (History is dangerous, it seems, so they demand CHANGE. Street signs, addresses, maps … all must be changed, at vast public and private expense. Safety-ism First!

How soon before everyone who shares surnames with certain historical figures will be forced to change them? (New Government Directive produces Discredited Surname List …  If your name is on it you must change it in the name of equity, inclusion and diversity. Plus job prospects, university admission and access to food and housing.)

If you share a surname such as as Macdonald, Cook, Holmes, Pemberton, Dean, Robson, Seymour, Dunsmuir, McNeill, Helmcken, Blanshard, Wallace, Wark, Trutch -- and many others -- you will need to legally change yours, and will then be issued a Non-Colonial-Name Passport, which will allow you to travel, receive services, and possess personal stationery.

Please be advised that Canada Post has committed to a new standard of non-delivery of mail to "triggering" addressees.

The Government will begin this name-laundering reform with public education, but if propagandistic coercion fails to work, fines and social ostracism may be considered.

Some colonial-era explorers' street names will survive (such as Quadra, San Juan, and Gonzales) as they were named for "brown people". Some Anglo-citizens have responded with a nascent #mynametoo movement on Twitter.

Investors' tip: cancelled street signs will one day become valuable collectors' items, like once-censored books are today. Above is one such sign, for a Mr. McKenzie who was the manager of early Vancouver Island's colonial Craigflower Farm (another shady Scot then ...). 

Some obstreperous free-thinker citizens are not reconciled to this name-banning:

In an act of reconciliation, Victoria's Trutch Street gets a new name - Victoria Times Colonist

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-s-trutch-street-lekwungen-truth-1.6351665

Vancouver mayor looks to change street named after colonial B.C. politician Sir Joseph Trutch - BC | Globalnews.ca

Name-Laundering

The ornithologists' group “Bird Names For Birds” is trying to erase human names from the birdwatchers' catalogues of species, in the interests of racial diversity. The Audubon Society's naming committee resisted this at first but is caving in to pressure (perhaps changing its own name to the AuduBAN Committee?). Once a campaign like this takes flight, of course, it will spread beyond birds to more earth-bound species names, such as those of plants.

We will have to say goodbye, presumably, to the "Black-eyed Susan" daisy, as well as Indian plum, Oriental lily, Chinese evergreen and Japanese anemone. To refer to the China doll (Raderachera sinica) will probably be considered hate speech. Many varieties of cactus too are offensive to name-launderers: "Ladyfinger cactus" sounds sexist, "African Milk Tree" racist, and the Easter cactus and Bishop's Cap cactus are clearly offensively white-western-Christian.

But why stop at Avia and Botanica? What about farm animals? About the Rhode Island Red chicken, the Clydesdale horse, the Holstein milk cow? All white European/American place names behind those. 

And what about pets? It's raining racist cats and dogs out there. The famously aristocratic superiority of the Siamese cat won't help it now to hang on to its time-honoured name. Nor will the "Russian Blue" keep his. (Russians are bear people; Russians aren't pussycats, and its racist to suggest otherwise.) And dogs? Forget you ever heard of the Pekinese. And what about the shameful national nomenclature embedded in Irish wolfhound, German Shepherd, French poodle? Possibly Australians won't be as bothered about the Australian sheepdog (being more laid-back in the out-back), and the label “English bulldog” has become a symbol of national pride. But wait, it's shamefully colonialist, isn't it?

A co-founder of the ornithological group “Bird Names For Birds” objects to naming species after humans, meaning after “folks that were involved in colonial times”. But then who wasn't “involved in the times” when they were born, when they were alive? How could they not be? That they also were the first to identify and describe a species is just a thing they did then, and attaching their name to the catalogued species not only acknowledges their contribution to science, it gives us historical and biographical markers to go with the scientific ones. 

The attacks on names, as on monuments and statues, are actually attacks on historical scholarship. Will it stop? Will we even be allowed to keep our own names? If it can't be attached to a species or a street, can your name even attach to yourself? If it shows guilty association with your times, your country, your ancestry ... and hearkens back to the "Age of Exploration", dawn of democratic humanism, developed nation-hood, and famous familial names? 

-- ban it. But how will we know who anyone is? Clearly, we need a new directory: Field Guide to the Culture Wars, though it's hard to see what language it could be written in -- not one using the Roman alphabet, obviously.

.

What John A. Macdonald Thinks About the Removal of his Statue

Dear Victoria:
How you have changed since I was your MP, back in 1878 -82 -- you're all grown up now! Yet - not so much. Many wise, well-educated, hard-working folks lived here 140 years ago, in civilized homes full of books and art, some even had pianos brought all the way around the Cape. I'm sure there are some residents like that today -- literate, temperate, cosmopolitan. I recognize a few trees too, which were mere saplings back in my day. Their survival is miraculous, given the vast stretches of pavement one sees now.

That my statue survived as long as it did may also be surprising. Its removal in 2018 is not surprising, given the tenor of the times -- nor, for me, is it a matter of regret.

The bad time was not when my statue (from the Latin "stare": to stand) was stood-down; the bad time was when it was put up. I had to stand immobile, as cold stone, I who had once been flesh and blood. I was even called "fiery" in my time, full of heat and lust for life and for work. Making a nation out of widely scattered regions, gathering together an educated populace from folks of many backgrounds, harmonizing quarrelling political parties and meshing liberal with conservative -- that was not easy. Who knew that of all my sins and weaknesses, it would be the part about educating the populace that would bring hatred on my head in the 21st century? I came from the Scottish tradition that believed education, learning, scholarship and literacy were to be shared among all races. How could I have known it would somehow become wrong not to have left the aboriginals out? I still don't get it.

But as I say, it was not being removed that bothered me, it was being erected as lifeless rock in the first place. As Prime Minister, binding provinces together through a railway (British Columbia would be American Columbia had we not got that railway built) it was my job to "put out fires", not to become rock. After becoming, like everybody does, dead meat and crumbling bone I then had to become stone, and stand alone in the midst of the gawking crowd. Better to be granted the dignified anonymity of death. I like it best when people walking by on the street don't notice me, to tell you the truth.

We public figures never get to retire from the public gaze. As statues we must stand for decades while the curious (and the incurious) stream past us. Facial reactions change as people respond like puppets to the ideologies of each era. One year they're all taking your picture, and the next they only stop to glare. Some even scrawled scurrilous messages on my plaques. Thousands of other Canadian "Johns" and "Macdonalds" get to rest in peaceful privacy, not molested in sculptural form, and I confess to envying them. Being taken down as a statue gave me in a counterintuitive way something of a lift. Being stationary on a plinth in the first place was the come-down, for one who was once so alive.

My real monument is Canada, great nation which I and others molded together. I understand, Victoria, that Canada is well-thought of across the world these days, especially among the millions who live without such niceties as education, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Being one of those who secured those blessings is monument enough for me. The standing legal statutes are my memorial. History itself is my memorial, however some folks may want to obfuscate history with ideology.

I've been in the actual "fuscus" (dark) these past many months -- in a dark storage-room owned by the Municipality of Victoria. But it's been a relief to lie down. Now please excuse me while I continue to rest in this moment of obscurity, for it may not last. I've heard that I still have admirers and they want me standing upright again. Others meanwhile are preparing a plaque of insults about me to accompany my resurrection. It all sounds very tribal and childish, so who knows how well-rested I may need to be in future?
Sincerely yours,
John A. Macdonald, PM