A GOOD CANADA

February 3, 2002
I once knew a good Canada
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun

It was certainly predictable that a column I wrote last week on Peter Gzowski would not be received with universal joy. By refusing to join in the general lamentation of those tens of thousands grieving at the shrine for a hero, and with the CBC carrying almost nothing else for 24 hours, nobody wanted to hear a note of doubt.

Besides, it's a very Canadian thing that you do not criticize the recently dead. You're supposed to wait a bit.

But that's difficult for media people. Our celebrity is very brief, and if you don't write what you think when media celebrities die, you won't get another chance. Most of us are stone plain forgotten after a few months. Wait a year to comment on Gzowski, and it wouldn't be publishable. Too many people wouldn't remember who he was.

Still, the vituperation was extraordinary. I kept one classic from a liberal type I know. It reads: "Your capacity for mean-spirited nastiness continues to amaze me. Sunday's Sun column on Peter Gzowski was a new low. Has the sneer been frozen on your crusty visage?"

He recommends a column written by Silver Donald Cameron, extolling the new Canada which Gzowski helped create. Its "incarnation," Cameron says, was Pierre Trudeau. "He defined an era and a nation." Helping Trudeau build it was the media team which Gzowski ran. Cameron goes on:

"The fresh sense of Canada and Canadians galvanized a nation of superb poets, historians, publishers, novelists, artists and musicians, all fascinated with Canada's people, its landscapes, its politics, its history. In the end they succeeded internationally because they were intensely Canadian - and therefore fresh."

Reading this, you can begin to understand why I caused such outrage. It wasn't that I had offended Gzowski. Few of these people knew Gzowski, only the public persona he projected. (I didn't know him either, though I was on his show for some time. He had a reputation for being chronically bitchy. But then who wouldn't be, if you had to get up at four in the morning for 15 years to go on the CBC?)

No, my real offence was to offend the Canada that Gzowski helped make. These people revere the new Canada. They have an image of it; they made it; they love it, and they become infuriated if anyone throws mud at it.

Now, I can understand this. I, too, used to know a Canada, a pretty good Canada, I thought. It fought a world war with great distinction, then surmounted a major depression, then won another world war, and went on to create the most prosperous living conditions almost any society has ever known.

It worked hard. It sacrificed. It had a superb school system. It was by current standards almost crime-free. It paid its way. It preserved its marriages, and it did not murder its unborn children. Its dollar, incidently, ran as high as 110 cents US.

Yet it made one major mistake. "I don't want my kids to go through what I went through," it used to say, and in consequence raised an entire generation of spoiled brats.

When they grew up, if that's what you could call it, they made it a generational cause to destroy the old Canada. It became a kind of credo to throw mud at it, to apologize for its "bigotries," to jeer (via the government-funded CBC and National Film Board) its war record, to dismantle its school system, to bankrupt its treasury, to demolish its social institutions, and to corrupt its moral foundation.

"You must learn to make love, not war," they lectured us, then proceeded to register the highest divorce rates in human history, meanwhile "loving" their grandchildren by saddling them with the cost of their various follies, and thereby sinking the Canadian dollar to something like 60 cents. Which, of course, demonstrates that the world's real view of the new Canada may not be quite as silvery as Silver Donald Cameron's.

So yes, I know what it's like to have mud thrown at your country. The Gzowski generation seem better at throwing it than they are at taking it.

But get used to it, boys. When the generation behind you wakes up to what you did to them, there'll be a whole lot more mud on the way.