It is also an assessment that is belied by numbers. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The Conservative stance is epic in its wariness, bigoted in its aspiration and fictive in its details. The link between the war in Afghanistan and prior Canadian wars as the Conservative lobby maintains it is both mired in nostalgia for a Canada that is long past (the government’s obsession with things Royal another symptom of this) and a foot in the sand against the tide of an ineluctable future rolling in. It is the last look back, the protest and lament of a portion of society aware that the world is relentlessly moving forward and, in effect, forgetting it. The romance, the precursor of the novel, is the yearning of a society for a version of itself that it knows is no longer viable and is on the wane.
The correlation of Canadian wars promotes, through remembrance of various kinds, a nostalgic and highly politicized view of the country in which “knowledge” of our history functions as the literary romance does. The commemorations and rituals that invoked the role of the Forces and ordinary citizens’ debt to them were conducted with panache, Remembrance Day most of all, and soon the presence of a soldier would be made formally a mainstay at the oath-taking ceremonies of new citizens.Prior episodes of combat provide a romantic link to the country as it is imagined to have been, though not necessarily as it was.
If, as Christie Blatchford notes her book Fifteen Days, it had once been the case that troops were instructed not to create controversy by wearing their uniforms in public, now the opposite was true. The binding mortar of the new Canada that replaced the old was provided by its cult of the hero and a larger and more prominent military, and a discipline that extended to a terse intolerance of dissent voiced by unruly parts at home. “You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it,” warned Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006, the harbinger of his boast the elevation of the role of the Canadian Forces. Activate your Online Access Now Article content If you are a Home delivery print subscriber, unlimited online access is included in your subscription. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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