On Cemeteries and Anglo-Irish Patriots

     Yesterday, I ran to the top of Mount Royal. At least, I ran part way up. I did not go on the roads, but on the dirt paths which take you up the mountain more directly. They are also a little harder to navigate, so I got lost. I ended up in a cemetery. It looked small at first, because there were hedges and trees and things separating each bit of it, so I thought I would just run through it. In attempting this, I made my way well into it. Then I did not know how to get out. Every time I thought I saw an exit, it just led into another area. In the end I had to climb over a tall iron fence with spikes on the top to get out. I found a tree near the fence and used it to get over. On the other side of some dense brush, I found the road.

     About a week ago, I finished John Ralston Saul's biography of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, two of Canada's pre-Confederation founding fathers. The fathers of Canadian democracy, maybe. Saul describes in some detail the embarrassing antics of the mid-nineteenth century Anglo-Protestant Canadian merchant class, in particular the violence resulting from their religious devotion to England and Englishness. He notes several times in passing that most of these English patriots (it might be better to say "thugs who cited English patriotism as their motivation") were not English at all. They were Irish, Scottish, German, Dutch and what-have-you.

I was in an old part of the cemetery, I guess. Most of the dead buried there had died before 1915, many before 1900. They were nearly all perfect Canadian WASP names: Drummond, Nelson, Williams and things like that. Some of them had mausoleums. There were no ‘O’ prefixes and not even that many ‘Mc’ prefixes. Yet nearly all of them had been born somewhere in Ireland or Scotland — Ireland, more often. These, it occurred to me, might be the English patriots of which Saul writes.

     Of course, it was a different thing in those times to call oneself English. It was not implicitly to distinguish oneself from the Scots or others. Nevertheless, the fact that so many of these ardent English had in fact come from other parts is worth noting when one considers the thuggery perpetrated in the name of being “English.” None of this is to say that nobody English did anything wrong or participated in the riots Saul describes. Nor is it to denigrate in any way the Scots or Irish (Anglo or otherwise).

     Of course, the Canadian “English” come not only from the British Isles. I began recently to read about the history of ethnic Germans in Canada. There are a lot. There have been a lot all along. And many of them were what we might have considered English. There were German loyalists of no insignificant number. They spoke English. They were merchants.

     The fact is that English Canada is not nearly so English as we sometimes like to believe. It is easy to conceive Canada as a dichotomous country. It is intellectually satisfying, too. It makes sense. We have little cultural identity of our own, so English Canada looks to England. It happens to the best of us. I became a bit bleary watching the Queen at the opening ceremonies. I buy muesli from Poundbury. But Canada is not really English. Nor is it really just French, nor a hybrid of the two. Canada is something much more complicated. As convenient as it would be for English Canada to reach over the Atlantic and borrow an identity, it is not us and has never been us. We are just Canadian, and, while it would be nice to have the UK's access to all European Union job markets, I really would not have it any other way. Sorry, this got a little sentimental toward the end.