Canadian Heritage Committee on June 2nd, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We will call the meeting to order as it is now 8:45 a.m.

Pursuant to the order of order of reference of Wednesday, June 1, 2016, Bill C-210, an act to amend the National Anthem Act will now be dealt with by this committee. The summary of the bill is that this enactment amends the national anthem to substitute the words “of us” for the words “thy sons” in the English version of the national anthem. This, therefore, makes the national anthem gender neutral.

Between 8:45 a.m. and 9:45 a.m., we have one witness to speak to this bill. We will deal with the witness, Mr. Champion, of The Dorchester Review.

Welcome.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Chair, before we begin, I have a point of order. When I was in the midst of speaking, you put the question, which as we know is contrary to the rules. I was outlining that there were a number of witnesses who wished to appear here.

My concern was if we proceeded with the very, very unusual and compressed time frame that had been contemplated in the motion, we would not be able to accommodate some of those witnesses. That is indeed the case. I'm aware of some, and there may be many, many more in this country who aren't aware that this was coming to committee.

Among those who were not able to be accommodated was the grandson of Stanley Weir, the composer of O Canada, who has views on this and wishes to be heard. His wife, as I understand it, is ill in hospital, and on such short notice he was not able to accommodate us, even by teleconference.

Similarly, Rudyard Griffiths is another individual I know who wished to come and present to this committee. He is a well-known historian, founder of The Dominion Institute, and a very distinguished and respected individual on questions such as this. He was also unable to be accommodated.

I hope at the end of hearing this witness we will have a willingness to reconsider, since first of all, the motion was put inappropriately under our rules, but also because it has effectively prevented Canadians from being able to participate. I hope we will reconsider that concept and consider opening it up to to further witnesses at future meetings.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

I think the alacrity with which everyone is dealing with this bill, as you well know, Mr. Van Loan, has to do with the health of the mover of this bill. His health is indeed critical and we need to deal with this bill as soon as possible.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Yes, and I have the greatest regard for that and the greatest concern for that. However, that is not a basis on which public policy is made, especially public policy on an institution or a symbol that belongs to all Canadians. It should be made on the questions of policy related to that particular matter. It should not be an opportunity to shorten a process and deny Canadians the opportunity to have their say and deny Canadians the opportunity to have input into it.

That is essentially the consequence of what that motion did. The motion, I might add, once again, was put improperly under our rules because you cannot put a motion while someone is speaking on the floor, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Van Loan, I don't think we will revisit this. The committee spoke. The committee made its decision and supported the chair's ruling, so we will move on now. This was duly voted on by a majority in the House of Commons. We are now dealing with the bill, having had it decided on by a majority in the House of Commons.

I'm going to begin. I will introduce Mr. Champion again and welcome him.

Mr. Champion, you have 10 minutes to speak to the issue. Then there will be some questions for you by the members.

[Dr. Chris Champion, Editor, The Dorchester Review]

Good morning. My name is Chris Champion. I'm a Canadian historian with a Ph.D. in Canadian history. I'm the founder and editor of the The Dorchester Review, which is an independent and relatively small circulation journal, but it's about 100 pages per issue. It's in the old style of those journals that John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier used to read in the library. It's a journal of history and also historical commentary, which is a little bit unique.

We are dedicated to the proposition that history is not for dummies. We have about a thousand readers, just under. They are spread across every province and territory. One of our newest subscribers is the Bibliothèque de l'Assemblée nationale du Québec, which subscribed yesterday. This, I must I say, shows the wit and wisdom of the librarians of the National Assembly.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!

These are the words, the true words, of O Canada.

I am referring here to the version that begins with "O Canada! Our home and native land!"

Sir George-Étienne Cartier sang another O Canada,

that is entitled Ô Canada! mon pays! mes amours!

It's the one he wrote in 1834, during the Confederation meetings. The story is that with fellow delegates from Montreal and Quebec, he sang the words, the song drifting across the peaceful waters of Charlottetown Bay. It is said that he sang with tears in his eyes, for it was a moment of triumph as well as tragedy, death as well as new birth. Quebec could not be a free-standing country, but it would regain its own elected assembly, which had been lost as a consequence of the Rebellion of 1837. Cartier sang with tears because Quebec, the old British province created in 1763, was to be reborn as a nation in all but name, an old country within a new country.

You see, O Canada, both Cartier's and Routhier's later song of the same name, is their song. These are songs of the national survival of French Canadians, and they reach back to Champlain, Laval, Sister Mary the Incarnation, and Dollard des Ormeaux's Battle of Long Sault on the Ottawa River. That is where O Canada really comes from: 400 years of history.

Shakespeare said, “If music be the food of love, play on.” As well, the greatest music, John Senior wrote, is the music of words singing in our heart, that is, of poetry, literature, and history, Madam Chair.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!

As English Canadians, we have to admit that it's not really our song. This is why historically French Canadian nationalists saw English Canadians, descendants of the old Ontario governing military and Protestant clerical elite, as more than a little crass and bumptious to be taking their song, tinkering with the words, and making it our national anthem. Didn't we have songs of our own? Couldn't we just sing The Maple Leaf Forever and leave their song alone?

I think we should try to remember this when we are talking about the English version of O Canada. Some people have said there was something, with all due respect, a little bit spurious about it all along.

There were many attempts to put O Canada into English, at least 18 translations before the First World War, full of patriotic and religious fervour. Many of those who tried were clergy of the Anglican or Methodist tradition, in which the country was totally steeped on the English Canadian side in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Robert Stanley Weir's was only one of these versions.

People back then knew full well that in English literature going back to Shakespeare and the authorized Bible, in the music of Handel, in the hymns that almost all English Canadians sang for almost 200 years, the word “sons” properly understood in context commonly did not refer only to men.

The first lines of Handel's great oratorio Joshua, for example, are these:

Ye sons of Israel, ev'ry tribe attend, Let grateful songs and hymns to Heav'n ascend!

This refers to all the people of Israel—mothers, fathers, daughters, sons—who Joshua led to the promised land in the story. Likewise in Malachi's prophecy that the Saviour will come, it reads, “For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”

“Ye sons of Jacob” refers to all the people waiting in hope, and previous generations of Canadians knew this because Canadians used to learn these stories in school. It was part of their cultural formation so they would know where our society came from; what it means to be a free people; what it means to have rights and responsibilities; what it means to be a Canadian citizen.

When these well-formed Canadian women and girls sang O Canada, they understood what the words meant. It seems that many people today do not understand, and because they don't understand, they seek to change. But St. Francis taught, seek first to understand. Some have pointed out that Weir originally wrote the line as “thou dost in us command”. True, “thou dost in us”, dust in us, dustiness; it's no wonder he changed it. It sounds like we need a vacuum cleaner.

Given the rich tradition that we come from, Madam Chair, the words “in us” sounded flat to Weir the poet, and they sound flat, in my view, today.

The “in all of us” is rather banal for a national anthem. As a friend of mine says, they are changing poetry into mere doggerel. It is inferior and insipid language. In fact, a quick quotation search turns up only one example of “in all of us”, and that is in the grunge singer Kurt Cobain's suicide note. Try it.

When Robert Weir fixed that line, being a good poet, he elevated the language and he improved the poem, and it has stood the test of time. One hundred years is not bad in modern English Canadian terms. Moreover, it is rooted in 3,000 years of tradition handed down from the Jews to our ancestors.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have two more minutes, Mr. Champion.

[Dr. Chris Champion]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It has stood the test of time. Generations of Canadians have memorized it, and it has become part of who we are. To quote Rudyard Griffiths, heritage is sometimes compared to a rich tapestry: once you begin pulling at loose threads, you start to pick away at the image and the beauty unravels until you have eventually nothing left.

Madam Chair, what these ladies and gentlemen are proposing is a mistake. It should be common sense that you simply don't change heritage—because it's heritage. You don't change heritage on a whim because, watch out, somebody else can come along and have another whim. You are setting a precedent for pulling out the threads. You are tearing open the cloth. I'm sure they have good intentions, but they are getting short-term satisfaction and doing long-term harm. Of course, then your motto becomes,

Je me souviens peu or Je ne me souviens plus.

You are telling the world we are a superficial people, perhaps even lightweights. Once the tinkering begins, who can say we will not wake up and find there is a new national anthem every time we open our daily newspaper?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Mr. Champion.

Now we have the part of the committee hearings where you get questions from members. This is a seven-minute round.

I shall begin with Ms. Dabrusin, for the Liberals.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Good morning. Thank you for your insight.

I am an MP and the mother of two daughters. I think it's important to talk about our national anthem and our history. I agree that we need to seriously reflect on our history and the change we are discussing today.

We look at the original words. In 1908 it was “true patriot love thou dost in us command”, which, as you said, I hear me in those words; they include me. But the words were changed.

I'll get to my question, because it's important that we consider this.

If you look at the Canadian Encyclopedia, in 1913 there was a version that was published that had “thy sons command”, and then there was a copyright in 1914 for that wording, but we don't actually have anything from the writer to tell us why he made those changes. There's nothing about a change about poetry or the need to consider any other issues. We don't know, and that's important.

I think we need to take a look at the snapshot of what was going on in 1913 and 1914, because we're going to consider history, and I would like you to comment on that when we get there.

At that point, the suffrage movement was becoming very active. In 1912 the Political Equality League had formed. Nellie McClung was one of its members.

In 1914 they launched a play about women in Parliament called Mock Parliament, which was very funny because, in fact, women couldn't be in Parliament. If we were having this discussion at that time, I wouldn't be here. They were taking this play on the road to get people to think about it.

Then women did get the right to vote. About four years after the copyrighted change, the first time some women in this country were allowed to vote federally was in 1918. Then in 1921 some women in this country were not only able to vote, but for the first time were also able to be elected. This is important to my personal history, because the first female MP elected in 1921 was Agnes Macphail. She was from East York, which is part of my riding.

That's my history and women's history, but it's also a very important part of Canadian history. That means a lot to me when we're going to take some time to think about what we're doing here looking at the national anthem.

Today we have parity in cabinet. That's a great change. But women make up only 26% of the House of Commons, so there is still a long way to go. Taking the snapshot from 1913 to 1914, it was a very tumultuous time when we were looking at the suffrage movement.

You didn't quite raise it, but I've heard another argument about why we should have “thy sons command”, related to the First World War. That's an interesting piece, because in 1913 we weren't at war yet. But when we get to 1914, and we consider our involvement in the war, women were also involved in World War I. That's an important part of Canadian history. There were 3,141 Canadian nurses that served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps. In fact, 46 of them gave their lives in the line of duty, so women also died serving this country during World War I.

I have a strong respect for history and women's participation in the First World War. When we take a look at where we are now, women are actively involved in our military and in serving our country, and that's something for which I think we need to show quite a bit of respect.

I'm looking at this and I'm taking into account this history. Where were we? We were looking at the women's suffrage movement, an active time when we were talking about including women. We were talking about a change that happened, at least in first editions, before the First World War, and then changed after.

I look at what I'm going to tell my daughters when I go home today about what we're proposing and the discussions we're having here in Parliament today, in 2016, about our national anthem. These are two girls who every day in school sing the national anthem. They're proud Canadians.

What you're proposing is an objection to amending back to the original version, really, the wording of our national anthem to make it inclusive of all genders. I want to know, what do I tell them about the fact that a historian came to Parliament and testified today that in order to honour our history we need to exclude them? If I can add to that, because I would be interested in hearing your answer to this, how do I explain to my daughters that their true patriot love is not relevant to our country?

Thank you.

[Dr. Chris Champion]

Madam Chair, I think you would be misinforming your daughters if you told them that was the case, and so would their teachers, because as I said fairly clearly in my opening remarks, the words “thy sons” are not exclusive in the context of our tradition.

It may be that in schools nowadays, people are not taught much about that deeper tradition, and when they see O Canada they think, “Hang on here, there's something wrong with this. This is sexist. This is not gender neutral.” That is simply a lack of well-rooted education in our culture and history. The equality of women and men is extremely important, but if this change is supposed to advance equality, it won't do much.

How much will it accomplish? In fact, nothing, because if we look at 500 years of our literature—in English, again, because we're talking about the English version—we're talking about poetry, and the word “sons” has in this type of context never referred only to men.

I quoted Handel's Joshua and other texts, which used to be extremely familiar to Canadians. If Canadians are not familiar with them now, that's unfortunate, and it explains why a superficial change like this could be seen to be meaningful when it isn't. It's merely making inferior poetry, lower-quality poetry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Champion.

Now I go to Mr. Van Loan from the Conservatives. You have seven minutes, Mr. Van Loan.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

In my speech in the Commons on this, I reviewed national anthems in a couple of countries, like Russia and Germany, that have undergone frequent changes. There are places where institutes, symbols, and national anthems endure for a long period of time. There are other countries in which they tend to frequently be changed and rewritten.

Why would you characterize the difference, and how would you characterize the difference between those two kinds of countries: those that often change their symbols and totems, and those which keep and maintain them over time?

[Dr. Chris Champion]

Thanks for the question.

Madam Chair, it represents the tradition that we come from. We in Canada have the privilege of being part of a group of countries, like Australia, the United States, India, New Zealand, and other places, many that you can count in the Commonwealth, such as Trinidad and Jamaica, where the tradition is deeply rooted. We have a stable political system. Normally these countries have retained their parliamentary institutions intact, their mode of electing members, and so on.

I have not done the comparison, but I think if you lined them up, you would probably find those countries with a stable political system would tend to make fewer superficial changes of this nature, knowing that the tradition hangs together. It's an organic whole in a sense, and when you eliminate the phrase “in all thy sons command”, I think you're erasing a piece of our collective memory, because tradition cannot be established from above by fiat. It has to grow from the ground up in people's psyche, and it takes time for that to develop into tradition.

George Orwell wrote that he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. That's why he had a ministry of truth whose job was to change history and to change the history books, the newspapers, movies, and radio. I haven't read the book in a long time, but maybe the ministry of truth even changed the national anthem.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Our Conservative government, in a throne speech, proposed the idea of returning to the “thou dost in us command”, and there was an extraordinarily negative public reaction to that.

You talked about the impact of changing these symbols. Why do you think we had such a negative public reaction to that proposal?

[Dr. Chris Champion]

I think it's a simple matter of people's familiarity.

When you talk to new Canadians, they tend to like and want to attach to the traditions we have. There's a sense that new Canadians want to know who we are. They want to know what they're joining. They want to know who we are together and to integrate and attach. They want to feel proud, and they want to know why. If they see us constantly picking away at our own heritage, I think they'll find no fixed term of reference, and we start to look as if we don't know where we came from.

It's rather like poetry. We memorize poetry by repetition, but if the words keep changing, we'll never be able to learn them.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

You mentioned legitimacy, in the sense of the lack of legitimacy if politicians are making these decisions from the top down. If that is being done, particularly in a context where the rules of our democratic institutions—such as this committee on how it should operate—are broken, if the opportunity for public input is denied.... We're sitting here debating this less than 24 hours after a decision was made in Parliament to send it to us. I can tell you that probably an overwhelming majority of Canadians do not even know that this committee is occurring and that there would be any opportunity to have their say.

When institutions are changed in that fashion, ignoring our democratic rules and ignoring our democratic institutions by politicians, top down, what does that do to the legitimacy of these symbols? How will that affect Canadians' attitudes towards them?

[Dr. Chris Champion]

Madam Chair, I really am struck by the arrogance of what members are proposing to do in this bill. They are taking something that is 100 years old, that is a classic poem by a Canadian poet—normally, we respect our poets and their work, and in fact we support them—and in place of that imposing the ephemeral present-day preoccupations and anxieties on it.

Now, in the future, let us hope that the population is perhaps better educated in our tradition. They wouldn't have this anxiety about the national anthem. They wouldn't have this kind of psychic angst about it, because they would know what the words meant.

I think what is happening here is quick and dirty. How many Canadians really know it's happening is, I think, a legitimate question. It's going through so precipitately that I doubt very many people are aware of or really understand the change.

We have to note that Canadian governments historically, and I can only speak to you as a Canadian historian, have a track record of changing our heritage without consulting Canadians, without ensuring a wide consensus. When the Canadian flag was adopted in 1964, there was considerable public debate, but it was passed with a majority of English Canadians opposed and most French Canadians indifferent. You could read my book, which documents both. Even then, the government of the day used closure to impose it. Now, 50 years have passed and we all love the flag—don't get me wrong—but the way it was done was quick and dirty.

Likewise, Dominion Day was changed to Canada Day in 1982 by a snap vote in the House of Commons when there was no quorum. There were only 13 members present. If you read the record, most people were not aware of what was happening in the House. It was a sneaky move behind closed doors, a fait accompli.

There's a bit of a track record of this behind closed doors, these kinds of sneaky and quick and dirty changes to our heritage, which I think, maybe for good sentimental motivations, for good personal motives, is being done here, but I think that personal motives, personal affection, and regard for one member is not a good basis on which to make such a historic change to something that is so familiar and rooted in our tradition.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Champion.

We now go to Mr. MacGregor for the New Democrats, please, for seven minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

With respect to Dr. Champion, and I sincerely thank him for appearing as a witness today, I have no questions for the witness.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Mr. MacGregor.

We go to the Liberals. We do not have a Liberal name here. I think we do not have any—

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Madam Chair, I have a comment to make, based on the presentation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Will you be the next Liberal speaker?

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

I have no question, but I have a comment based on the presentation. I feel that I need to express myself.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Yes, Mr. Samson, go ahead.