Canada is the second largest country in the world and one with the complex and diverse history. In his book of Fair Country, Canadian author and philosopher John Ralston Saul, tells this story. Hi! I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and today in part one of our interview with Dr. Saul, we discuss Canada’s identity.
John Ralston Saul: The way we’re attempting to imagine ourselves are mythology of ourselves. Our language is wrong. It’s essentially derivative. It’s colonial. Basically sees us as a sort of European U.S. derivative creation. It actually doesn’t describe the way the country functions. When you take the things that are interesting about Canada, that worked in Canada are taste for negotiation rather than violence, our preference for an egalitarian society, the way we really like inclusion rather than exclusion if we can figure out how to do it which leads to things like healthcare, our immigration policy which are its best allows us today to bring in 1% of our population a year, nobody else does that. If you look at these things and you say, “Where does that all come from? Why is it we can’t describe these things?” You know it’s something like immigration citizenship, we’re lucky to have a paragraph. That’s probably not a very good paragraph. It’s sort of multicultural, nice, diversity and then what? What does that mean anyway? The problem is of course, you can’t trace any of these stock back to European or U.S. roots. It simply doesn’t come from there. So then, you say, what if we’re going to make sense of ourselves, we better figure out where it does come from all of this stuff.
Saul says that by not understanding Canada’s roots, the country will suffer from an inherent lack of ambition which will prevent great successes and he says, “Understanding is impairing.”
John Ralston Saul: If you can’t describe yourself in an adequate way, think being illiterate, it’s like being functionally illiterate. You don’t have the language to describe what you’re going to do or what you would like to do. So you like at problems like, “Whites are Canadian business class.” You’re so scared to own things and it’s just desperate to a manager rather than an owner. Say, “Oh! That’s what everybody does in the world.” Well as in fact, you go to United States and say, “No, no, we like owning things.” We go to England and say, “Oh! No, no, we like owning things.” We go to France, “We like owning things.” Brazil, “We like owning things.” Come back to Canada and say, “Oh! We’re so sophisticated. We don’t bother owning things, we just like being employees.” And they can’t function because they don’t have the way of imagining the country right and it’s not about changing the people, it’s about changing the way of imagining the country.
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