The people in the story of Canada
A fantasy portrayal or a white-washed dream
By
“The advice I give to all adventurers is to seek a place where they may sleep in safety” - Samuel de Champlain
I have a dream. It will never happen. I’m not being cynical, it is not something within the universe of feasibility. It can’t happen. Once I get on with it you will see why. But I love this dream, and I don’t care that it won’t come true. The thing I do at the end of almost every day, once too tired to do anything else, is sit in a comfortable chair, close my eyes, and imagine the greatest cinematic masterpiece that will never be created.
Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings guy, is the director of this never-to-be filmic imagining. And the score, which is grand and triumphant in timbre, is composed by none other than maestro Ennio Morricone. For reasons the reader may later, pleasantly or otherwise, be surprised to discover, I will for now withhold comment regarding the actors.
What I envision being brought to life by auteur Jackson is the story of Canada. However, not some rushed job, done in a single film. Or even in a trilogy of films. I imagine something far more lofty. Nothing less than a 15 or 20 part epic film series done with Peter Jackson level artistry and big budget production.
Since I am the producer, I ask Mr. Jackson to focus the first few films entirely on pre-European contact indigenous history. By about halfway through the fourth film, contact with the Europeans is introduced. The eighth and ninth films are all about Samuel de Champlain - they are by far my favorite. Mr. Jackson outdid himself and the hypothetical critics raved about the swashbuckling bombast, and the unmatched spirit of adventure invoked through the daring life story of one of history's most brilliant explorers and nation builders.
The three films on John A. MacDonald includes the life of Louis Riel (we bring in Tom Flanagan to consult on the historical details). William Lyon Mackenzie, Wilfrid Laurier and all the great early Canadian prime ministers are given inspired cinematic treatment. The Difenbaker film is entirely hopeful and romantically patriotic during the first half, but then descends into veiled cynicism with a nostalgic lament George Grant would approve of. Pierre Elliott Trudeau is depicted as a Mao-obsessed sniveling liberal narcissist. And Justin Little Potato is the only other villain who excels so completely in he/his awfulness.
But the point of this essay is not to embarrass myself by revealing my nerdy little pre-bedtime routine. I have an agenda with this essay. Ponder the possibility, for just a minute, that these films were not just imagination, but reality. Peter Jackson unexpectedly developed an obsession with Canada, and for reasons no one is ever able to explain, hired me as the producer of a 20 part epic film series that he masterfully directed.
At the end of the collaboration, when the films are completed and Canadians finally get the chance to see the illustrious history of their beloved dominion come to life on the silver screen, a glaringly obvious inconsistency that makes absolutely no sense and does not comport with what everyone knows about Canadian history, is right out front and center and distractingly cannot be ignored: All of the famous Canadians of European descent, from Champlain to Macdonald to Diefenbaker are played by actors of African descent.
Unfortunately the partners that Mr. Jackson and I relied on to finance the films, insisted we use only black actors in the roles of European-descended Canadian historical figures. It was the only way we could get these films made, and the finance company assured us it was for inclusion and diversity, so we went ahead with this somewhat unorthodox but supposedly equitable approach. On viewing the final results, we realized our mistake.
My point is this: If white actors don’t play the European roles, the movie sucks, even if Peter Jackson directs it. The reason is that race is not the entirely obsolete and unimportant thing that white people are constantly told it is. White Canadians are told to be post-ethnic and inhabit a post-nation. While I do not subscribe to racism, race essentialism, or even race obsession, I refuse to be bullied into admitting that something like the whiteness of my skin - an immutable and defining physical feature of the ancestral founders of Canada - is something I can’t be interested in or positive about.
If the actor playing Samuel De Champlain was a black man, it would not only be historically inaccurate, it would be laughably inauthentic - no one would be able to suspend disbelief. The film would flop. As would any film about African history that outlandishly starred white actors portrayed as famous historical Africans.
Think about this little analogy the next time European ancestry, whiteness, white identity, the anglo-sphere, WASPs or any other term referring to white ethnicity comes up. White people are people too, and it is important we not problematize them or any of their immutable characteristics, stereotypical behaviours, or identity features. It is also important they tell their stories and take pride in the great works of their founding fathers, as flawed as they may have been.
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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read An environment programmed for irrationality
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The allegory is very good but true non the less which brings me to the fact that my wife and I are buying the stick available at Canadian Tire for our tv,s the reasons being several. Both of us are tired of the non news or propaganda we are subjected to by mainstream Canadian companies, fed up with the queer and black mostly adds that do not even come close to matching % wise the population and the cost of buying strictly Canadian content.
We are looking forward to paying less for more the news we will watch will be from many other countries ie BBC Al Jazeera, from Australia and many other countries even Fox news is preferable to the C ommunist B roadcasting C lowns. Netflix and others will soon be forced by the goons in ottawa to have mostly Canadian content so we will be tuning in the the US versions . Goodbye canada, cheerio to the small potato and his dictator wishes, ta ta communist idiots at CBC CTV Global et al.
Interesting. I consider the possibility that there is a genuine dichotomy of traditionalist “vs” cosmopolitan. It also translates into conservative “vs” liberal, and a few other splits. All with similar characteristics. Most of us tend one way or the other…. Or somewhere in between! Generally the “identitarians” fall into the traditionalist and conservative camp, which is why those of us who are “traditional leftists” (!) refer to identity politics and wokeism as a reactionary, right wing phenomenon that has infiltrated the “left” via postmodernism. Frances Widdowson has discussed this too. There are a few books coming out now that support this hypothesis (two very recent ones are Finkelstein’s “I’ll Burn that Bridge When I Come to it” and very new: “Woke is Not Left” by Neiman). The dichotomy you describe is also well known from early work on nationalism (see in particular Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”) and the distinction between ethnic and civic (or cosmopolitan) nationalisms. While you are quite right to argue that traditionalists should not be lumped as xenophobes, there is a correlation that is very well known. Ironic that the conservatives are fighting the woke who see themselves as “progressives” — while the latter (Kendi etc) advocate racialism! I think you will find responses from those of us on the non-woke Left indicating a rejecting of terms like “white” because we see “race” as an arbitrary unscientific concept. I wrote a column on that in Peace Magazine recently that may interest you: https://web.ncf.ca/fs766/Collins_Race_PeaceMagazineJan2023.pdf