Recent comments on CEC about the “Canadian” content of teams like the one that played in the World Cup have prompted me to ask myself some questions. Questions like:
Given the rapid, irrevocable ethnic/racial transformation of the country, does the concept of “Canadian” have any meaning? In the early 70s Pierre Trudeau asked, “What is a Canadian anyway”. His son, a half century later, declared that Canada was a “post national state”.
If both Trudeaus were right, then how could there be a Canada without Canadians? The team I saw on TV playing Belgium, Croatia and Morocco is not particularly Canadian. Or maybe, the fact that they are Canadian citizens stands as proof that the category “Canadian” is meaningless.
If that is the case, then the Council of European Canadians is a misnomer. We are a council of people of European ancestry who once belonged to a nation that no longer exists except in name.
You said that you were rooting for Morocco, Funny, because i realized that I identified with Croatia. In other words, I saw myself better reflected in the composition of the Croatian team than I did in the “Canadian” team.
Apparently my loyalties have shifted away from those based on geography, toward those based on ethnicity. That was definitely not the case when Team Canada faced the Soviets in the Summit series of 1972, I identified with all the players on the team. Phil Esposito (Italian). Frank and Peter Mahovlich (Yugoslavia). Stan Mikita (Czechoslovakian), Savard, Cournoyer, Lapointe (Quebecois). One team. Canada.
Loyalty to an ethnostate comes naturally. Loyalty to 3rd world migrants and home grown racial minorities must be engineered by constant propaganda and indoctrination, not only by governments, but by corporations in their TV commercials. The messages are both blatant and subliminal.
It is interesting that the woke mouthpieces of the NHL tell us that racial minorities need to see themselves reflected on the rosters of NHL teams . They need role models to encourage them to play hockey they say. Yet, apparently, whites do not require role models. No one in wokedom complains about the fact that basketball, baseball, football and college track and field teams do not feature whites in proportion to the number of whites in society at large. Systemic discrimination anyone?
Some of us have proposed that we promote provincial separatism. But they fail to notice that provinces have also become a haven for non-Europoean colonization. Would there be fewer Somalis in Edmonton had Alberta been a separate country? Would there be fewer Chinese, Koreans or South Asians if BC was a sovereign state? Did Quebec nationalists prevent the growth of black diasporas in Montreal and elsewhere? The PQ were civic nationalists, not ethnic nationalists. It didn’t matter if you were a Haitian or a black Africa from the Ivory Coast. You spoke French and so you would fit in and bolster the culture. Bullshit. Language alone cannot identify a people.
We don’t have a national home anymore. We are exiled in a place that is no longer ours. I don’t recognize Vancouver anymore, nor would I Calgary or Edmonton if I went back there. I don’t recognize places, or the people that occupy them. So why should I cheer for the teams they stock, or the artificial entity they call “Canada”? I cheered the Freedom Convoy and to my surprise, the maple leaf flag for once became a symbol to resistance and hope. But it was a chimera.
All this is to say that I feel stateless. If there was another country like Slovakia or Poland or Hungary to find refuge in, why not abandon ship?
I am in a bad mood.
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