Your country is like your garden. It takes care, cultivating, weeding and the approval of others to make it a source of pride. And if Canada is your garden, it is showing a serious lack of care and concern.
And everyone has to care. There is no exception. No one is too busy. If you are too self-centred, too ignorant, you can simply leave the room, leave the province, leave the country. Canada has to be a caring country. Our winters are too long and cold for the indolent. The season of our gardens is too brief for the uncaring. There is absolutely no excuse for anybody to deny our heritage and the heritage of our progeny.
Canada is not a country for ideologues. Ideology divides and destroys. Canada is a country for builders, people with ideas, people with ambition and people who care. There are no social classes in this country and we must make the pact with each other that there never will be. There can be no upper class or lower class—nor is there the vaunted middle class. We are one.
We are a people who left caste, nobility, poverty and privilege in old worlds and came to build something new. And we shared. It is the land that offers the opportunities but it is the people who give it warmth. If a person sleeps on the street, we have failed. If a child goes hungry, we have failed and if a person cries out for help and we fail to listen, it is society that should answer for it.
Pierre Eliot Trudeau called on us to be a caring society. We have been side-tracked by troubles in the world. We forgot while serving ourselves. We believed alarmists who said we cannot afford to share, we have been told to be selfish and yet we dig deep into our pockets to help those reeling from natural disaster. We really have no idea of the empathy and caring of which we are capable.
Every one of us should spend some time asking ourselves what we are doing to help build this country. The pollsters tell us we have no glue, no social cohesion, no caring. And when was the last time the pollsters were right about anything? Canada cannot be just an ideal. We have the ability to make it a reality.
Remember the flag-waving episode in Montreal in October, 1995. It was the largest political type rally in Canada’s history. We cared then; we care today. The rally said in simple words that we love our country. It might be a good idea to repeat those words on a regular basis.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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