July 1 – mackaycartoons

Wednesday June 30, 2021

July 7, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 30, 2021

Make Canada Day a time for reflection

By almost any standard, Canada can be judged one of the world’s best countries. Yet its riches, rewards and life-changing opportunities are not enjoyed equally by all who inhabit this land.

June 25, 2021

By almost any estimation, Canada’s history is filled with rousing stories of courage, vision and achievement. Yet there remains a long and shameful record of past injustices — many of which have yet to be set right.

Most notably, evidence of the glaring wrongs done to the people who first called this place home is now out in full public view as never before. As shocking as the recent discoveries of almost 1,000 unmarked gravesites at former First Nations residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan have been, they have also provided one more necessary jolt to this nation’s collective conscience.

All these contradictions and paradoxes explain why it is so difficult for people to know how to mark Canada’s 154th birthday on Thursday. Do we wave the flag or lower it to half-mast? More than a year into a devastating pandemic and just as the arrival of another summer offers glimmers of respite, many Canadians ache for something to celebrate, something like the festive national holiday they’ve cherished in years past.

June 2, 2021

Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has wisely called for this July 1st to be a more sober affair. Having reached a similar conclusion, many communities across the country have cancelled their traditional Canada Day festivities.

This is not the same as cancelling Canada Day itself, however, and no one is seriously recommending such a move that would, even for this one, fraught year alone, deny the country its nationwide holiday. But let’s also agree that after the discoveries of the graves of so many First Nations children, many Indigenous people would understandably consider the traditional celebrations with their parades and fireworks to be completely tone-deaf.

We do not anticipate a clear national consensus on the matter of July 1, 2021. Whatever people do or don’t do this Canada Day, we would only urge everyone to pause and reflect upon what Canada is, how we got here and what remains for us to do — together.

There are abundant national treasures for which we can all give thanks. Judged by our national living standard, our health care and education systems and by the enviable rights and freedoms we enjoy, it is easy to see why this is so. The land itself, in all its staggering beauty and enormity stretching across a continent, lies waiting for new generations to explore. No wonder hundreds of thousands of people from around the world arrive eagerly each year to start a new life with this goal in mind: becoming new Canadians. And how wonderful it is that they do.

June 26, 2018

But none of this can or should drown out the voices of the Indigenous people who knew and loved this land for millennia. They are reminding us daily of what we need to regret, lament and correct. For this to happen, the Trudeau government must move from reflection to taking the action it has promised for years. It continues to ignore far too many of the recommendations from the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The recent passage through Parliament of new legislation, Bill C-15, could bring overdue, transformative change by codifying with greater meaning than ever before the rights of Indigenous people to their land and self-government. But an even greater commitment to learn and change must be there, not just for our federal leaders but for all of us.

When that happens, even those who feel unable to celebrate the creation of Canada 154 years ago may be able to support something different: the creating of a new Canada today. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

Friday June 30, 2017

June 29, 2017 by Graeme MacKay

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Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 30, 2017

Some people don’t want to celebrate Canada 150, and that’s okay

As Canada gets set to blow out candles representing 150 years of being a nation some very loud voices are trying to drown out some of the cheering and hoots of celebration. Indigenous peoples are marking July 1 as a day to remind maple leaf flag waving people that it is in fact a day to celebrate colonialism, institutional racism, broken treaties, and genocide of first nations. It has added a very interesting twist and pause for thought on a usually sanguine and relaxing Summer holiday in Canada. It contrasts greatly with the comparatively optimistic and boosterish Canada we know from the hued and grainy films and memories of Canada’s centennial year. Not everyone in Canada is celebrating Canada150, and that’s okay.

June 27, 2017

Like many 48 year olds and many generations before and after me I’m a student of school taught Canadian history through elementary and into university levels. It has served as a launch pad to explore and read up on topics not covered in deep detail in those courses. History knowledge lends itself to appreciate all kinds of other facets of life from food to music, sports, arts & entertainment, science to geography, and the peoples who populate this planet. There are evolving and new interpretations of history and culture being revealed which shouldn’t be resisted, but indeed, be embraced.

As a white middle aged male I admit to bristling somewhat to Canada150 celebrations being referred to as “Colonialism150.” It falls like a wet rag on this annual occasion, made more significant because it’s called sesquicentennial, and forces one to look at the narratives we’ve understood to have built a country, mixed with national pride, and enforced by maple leaves on everything we consume, and the unending smugness we have towards our so called “ally” to the south. It’s intended to make people think beyond the celebratory images of Prime Ministers, and great hockey goals, and unique national food products. To step into the shoes of recent immigrants to Canada, with varied interpretations of a nation outside of what Stephen Harper once infamously dubbed “old-stock” Canadians.

September 22, 2015

Colonialism150 should make us all reflect on the hardships faced by our own ancestors, whether indigenous and non-ingenous, and put the struggles they faced into the perspective of other humans into a present, and future context. My Scottish ancestors were chased around their island sanctuary of Lewis by their English overlords, as my English ancestors from my other set of genes were scraping enough farthings together to flee from soot choked polluted Croydon in the 1840s to emigrate to Upper Canada. They were hardly “colonists” in the sense of rich land owners ordering natives around upon their arrival. As for my Newfoundland and Irish ancestors from the 2 other branches of my genealogy, just trust me that it wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for them either when they arrived on these shores in the early part of the 1800’s.

The Canada150 is a celebration of changing times. We look back to that innocent and optimistic age of 1967, when Canada was a country still populated by the veterans of both world wars, when peacekeeping was set in motion, universal healthcare and CPP were brought in, Expo67 and the swinging sixties were at its height. The elder Trudeau was on the verge of becoming Prime Minister at the time. Contrast that time with the era Trudeau the younger and Canada Day 50 years later has become a celebration of progressiveness by acknowledging institutional oppression of the past, including the one-time progressive concept of placing indigenous children in residential schools. Great strides have gone to undoing the evils suffered by first nations in recent years, but also of multicultural groups, LGBT, women, children, to the physically and mentally challenged – and we all know much more still has to be done. For the case of indigenous people much has been promised by the current Federal government but accommodation has to go beyond what respected First Nations activist Roberta Jamieson calls “gesture politics“, as in Justin Trudeau’s asinine decision to turn the colonial architecture of the old U.S. Embassy across from the Parliament Bldgs into an aboriginal something-or-ever instead of a National Portrait Gallery.

June 12, 2008

Perhaps the most significant aspect for Canada in the past 50 years was the reconciliation/accommodation of Quebec and French speaking minorities across Canada. Think back to the Quiet Revolution of the 60s, which simmered before the FLQ crisis of the early 70s, giving rise to the Parti Québécois, Bill 101, two referenda on separation, the Bloc Québécois, district society, a lot of hollering over borders, some flag burnings, standoffs, and much eye rolling – there are still on going problems, as there always will be, but I think, with a lot of overtures handed to a province which had been overlooked, Quebec in Canada is a lot better off in 2017 than it was in 1967, and that is something to celebrate.

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In the 50 years leading to this country’s bicentennial I’m betting the effort made to linguistic minorities since 1967 will be extended to indigenous peoples going forward. That hope is worth waving a Canadian flag about, with the acknowledgement that many indigenous peoples are not celebrating on July 1, and more has to be done to reconcile with the first nations people of the nation we’ve been calling “Canada” for 150 years. Cheer for the accomplishments of a nation born in 1867, but respect the original people of that very land. – Graeme MacKay

Published in the July 1st 2017 issue of the Calgary Herald

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