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Canada Day: Celebrating for the Right Reasons

Editor’s note: “It is time for the world to make an official declaration of peace. All countries should scrap armies and form a unified international peace corps with the aim of cleaning up and fixing all of the issues which the planet currently faces. At Omega Morphosis, we hope to be your community for world peace.” - Andy Gwaltney

Canada Day is a day meant to celebrate not only Canada’s historical roots, but also its culture. The very idea of Canadian unity has been tested over recent years perhaps more than it has been over the past century. This may have something to do with the gradually-increased worldwide focus on globalization, recent political divisiveness, an evolution in how Canadians see themselves on the world stage—or perhaps a mix of all three. For this Canada Day, I propose that we examine what Canada was in its infancy, who we are today, and where we’re headed as a nation.

As the vast majority of Canadians already know, July 1 is celebrated as “Canada Day” in honour of our country’s foundation. That’s usually where the knowledge ends. But there are some key nuances to Canadian identity that set us apart from most other countries on the globe. Arguably one of the most culturally-significant facts about our nation’s formation is that no revolution was ever required in order for Canada to naturally form. Slowly, measuredly and peacefully growing distinct from our classical European roots and our former ties to English monarchy, we separated ourselves from old colonial rule; this is a claim that few nations have the ability to make.

Since the Cold War, Canada has been globally-renowned as being a “peacekeeping-nation”. The Canadian military has been participating in peacekeeping missions with the United Nations since 1954, and our country’s work alongside the UN in global peacekeeping efforts peaked in the 80s when Canada was providing a whopping 10% of the UN peacekeeping forces. However since 1995, Canada’s participation in UN peacekeeping efforts has been sharply declining, and as of July 31, 2019, there have only been 150 official Canadian peacekeepers in service worldwide. Canada’s decline in peacekeeping efforts are mainly attributable to 3 main reasons: first, the Somalian peacekeeping missions of the early 90s were marred by the shameful scandal of two Canadian peacekeepers torturing and killing a Somali teenager; second, Canadian peacekeepers in Croatia and Bosnia were held hostage in Serb facilities to act as a deterrent against NATO bombings, leading to mass criticism of NATO’s Military Rules of Engagement; and third, the inability of Romeo Dallaire’s Rwandan peacekeeping mission to stop the genocide of ethnic Tutsis served as one final blow to the global reputation of peacekeeping. In addition to these, decreased military spending and the War in Afghanistan in the early 21st century helped to cement Canada’s peacekeeping decline.

Today, “Canadian peacekeeping” has sadly fallen by the wayside. Be it disillusionment in the effectiveness of peacekeeping efforts or just a purely Canadian evolution away from global benevolence towards self-preservation, our peacekeeping roots (and peacekeeping identity) have faded markedly. Perhaps it is the height of naivety to long for the peace-pushing glory days of old—but our old peacekeeping heritage is one of the defining characteristics of our Canadian identity; it’s what this writer believes is what we all should have continued striving for, and it’s what I believe we can and should strive for again.

The terrors of war spread the cloud of hopelessness, and in today’s tech-tied global network, that’s a cloud that is impossible to escape. But we must try. Effort and naivety and despair and blood are all attributes of the monster of war that we’ve all sadly grown to know all too well. But naïve or not, I will support Canadian peacekeeping efforts today and well into the future; not because it’s our national identity, not even because it’s fashionable—I’ll do it because I believe it’s downright better to hope and to die in failure than to succumb to violence without even trying to fight back (even peacefully). Weakness is not a part of our legacy—peaceful cooperation is. That’s a Canadian characteristic I wish to encourage and celebrate; I sincerely hope we can all agree to that.