THE UNFINISHED CANADIAN
The People We Are
By Andrew Cohen
McClelland & Stewart,
270 pages, $29.99
REVIEWED BY ALLAN GREGG

As the title suggests, journalist turned academic Andrew Cohen sees Canadians as “unfinished,” a species whose insularity and self-satisfaction have prevented us from achieving our full national potential.

So that we can “become a more confident, more accomplished people,” he offers a plan. To become “future Canadians,” we need to rediscover our past by establishing national standards for teaching history and celebrating historic occasions. A more “mature” relationship with the United States, in which we would no longer fear absorption but harness our mutual interests to our mutual benefit is also prescribed. Our sense of civic-mindedness and creed could be strengthened by placing a higher value on citizenship: making it harder to come by, setting more rigorous standards for its attainment and doing more to integrate new Canadians into our host culture.

Some of Cohen’s medicine would be easy for Canadians to swallow and relatively simple for inspired governments to implement: Honour past and present achievement and achievers; create a culture (and presumably a tax regime) that encourages charity; restore historic buildings, monuments and sites.

Others might be greeted with more controversy and cultural resistance: Become more accepting of both the foibles and importance of our politicians; call on all taxpayers to invest in the national capital region; launch a 21st-century project of national enterprise to spark the collective imagination, as did the building of the railway.

If guiding us to be a better people and a more enriched nation was Cohen’s sole purpose – and if he were prepared to take the time and space to catalogue how we might reach this destination – this would be a laudable and worthy journey. For example, instituting a national historical curriculum would be a worthwhile and appealing initiative, though education is squarely in provincial jurisdiction.

In the same way, the evidence of increasing isolation from the mainstream among Canada’s foreign-born is alarming, and any bold, new thoughts on how to reverse this trend would certainly get my attention.

Sadly, though, Cohen has chosen not to turn his keen mind to these challenges; indeed, re-imagining “the future Canadian,” and offering how we might get there, warrants a scant 19 pages. He dedicates the vast majority of his analysis to tilting at the windmills of Canadian myths and lecturing us about “the people we are.”
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For many who knew Dalton Camp only in passing, he was something of an enigma. As the slayer of “the Old Man”, John Diefenback, he was a backroom boy, who developed a public profile in the 1960s that was more defined that most of the politicians he worked for. He was a columnists and commentator for three decades whose byline was invariably accompanied by his past affiliation with the Progressive Conservatives, yet he railed against the interests of Corporate Canada, greed and injustice with an uncompromising passion and consistency that created “secret fans” out of the likes of Jean Chretien and former NDP Leader, Stephen Lewis.

His personal personae was every bit as confounding.

Based on my own first encounter of him, he struck me as a bitter, negative, self-possessed man who had been trapped in time. The next time I saw him he was speaking at a private dinner celebrating his 60th Birthday. There, I experienced what to this day was, for me, the most erudite, well-reasoned and inspirational exhibition of public intellectualism I had ever witnessed. His command of language, cadence and pacing and boldness of thought, literally took my breath away.

Bewildered, and in need of some reconciliation between the myth and the man I had just met, I sought the counsel of a much more seasoned and Camp-familiar colleague. He explained my conundrum with (what at the time were), two incomprehensible words …”maiestas desidero”. He went on to point out that while Dalton was a true giant of considerable accomplishment and talent, he was also extremely bitter and harboured deep personal resentments over his failures, the most lasting of which was never becoming Prime Minister of Canada. I learned afterwards that his description of Camp (loosely translated) was “greatness missed”.
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