Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.Forty-four years ago, 13 members of Parliament rechristened Canada’s national birthday with a duplicitous act of legislative legerdemain. In retrospect, it was an act of identity theft, a case of historical vandalism.At 4 pm EST on Friday, July 9, 1982, the House of Commons was all but empty. The 13 parliamentarians taking up space in the then 282-seat chamber were, by some accounts, half asleep as they began private members’ hour. Then one of the more wakeful Liberals noticed Tory MPs were slow to arrive in the chamber. Someone — exactly who has never been firmly determined — remembered Bill C-201, a private member’s bill sponsored by Liberal MP Hal Herbert that had been mouldering on the shelf since receiving first reading in May of 1980.The bill, An Act to Amend the Holidays Act, proposed to rename the July 1 national holiday from the traditional Dominion Day to Canada Day. This wasn’t the first time the name-change had been attempted. Between 1946 and 1982, there had been more than two dozen attempts to push revisionist legislation through the House of Commons. But there had always been sufficient opposition to keep Parliament’s progressivist types at bay. On this July afternoon, however, MPs seized the opportunity to recast history with all the underhanded haste of a shoplifter.Deputy Speaker Lloyd Francis called up the languishing legislation and sped it through to third reading without much more than a querulous murmur from the attendant parliamentarians. Francis inquired whether the bill had unanimous consent. Somehow, it did.The whole process took five minutes. MPs celebrated by declaring an early end to the session at 4:05 pm.Arguably, the bill should not have been brought to a vote. At the time, at least 20 MPs were required to be in the House to conduct business. With only 13 members in the House that afternoon, there was no quorum to pass legislation. Not that Speaker Jeanne Sauvé was disturbed by such procedural infelicities. When the irregularity was brought to her attention, she said that since no one called a quorum count, a quorum was deemed to exist, and, thus, no procedural rules were violated.And so today, nearly half a century later, Canadians mark the nation’s birthday with an antiseptic appellation that Tory MP Walter Baker once characterized as “sterile, neutral, dull, and somewhat plastic.”.To say this nowadays is, no doubt, to be labelled as a recalcitrant nostalgist or dismissed as a colonialist romantic. Indeed, I remember when I first wrote a newspaper article on this topic 20 years ago, a younger colleague scathingly told me to get with the times: “It’s Canada Day now. Get used to it. It (Dominion Day) only means something to people your age.”She was right. Canadians have largely taken to Canada Day. Thousands will attend events in towns and cities across the country to mark Canada’s 159th birthday. Politicians will speak with kumbaya lyricism of the country’s greatness despite our high debt and low productivity. And we’ll all guiltily genuflect, as instructed, in acknowledgement of our status as “settler-occupiers.”So why revisit a lost cause? For this reason, for millions of Canadians, the loss of “Dominion” was, as Quebec Senator Hartland Molson said during the Senate debate on Bill C-201, “another very small step in the process, which has continued over the last few years, of downgrading tradition and obscuring our heritage.”He was right. But even four decades later, there are still a few of us who lament the blithe forsaking of our pre-multikulti heritage. “Dominion” was one of those symbols that contributed to English-speaking Canadians’ sense of identity.Symbols are metaphors of meaning, compact artifacts that encapsulate our attachments to things beyond ourselves. Monuments, flags, and public celebrations are symbols that resonate with a transcendent significance. To be stripped of the symbolic orders you grew up with, that your fathers and uncles defended, is to be told, in effect, that the traditions and customs that lend coherence to your life are valueless.What was so precious about “Dominion?” A New Brunswicker, Sir Leonard Tilley, one of the Fathers of Confederation, came up with the word as a way to speak to the aspirations of the Confederation generation.He and others who attended a conference in London in December of 1866 to discuss Confederation initially thought to give the new nation the official name of the Kingdom of Canada. But some fretted that our republican neighbours might not appreciate having a kingdom on their northern border. One morning, while Tilley perused the Bible, he came across the eighth verse of Psalm 72: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea and from the River unto the ends of the Earth.” The concept appealed to Tilley’s hopes that he and the others would create a country that might someday stretch across the northern half of the North American continent from sea to sea..The other delegates liked Tilley’s idea. Queen Victoria was persuaded of the virtues of “Dominion.” Thus, Canada’s foundational document, the British North America Act of 1867, sets out how “the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada.”A century later, Canada’s self-anointed progressive elites objected that the word was too British and betrayed a colonial mentality. As usual, they were rewriting history to serve their ideological ends. There is nothing “British” about the word; indeed, its etymological roots can be traced to ancient Hebrew words that mean “to let rule.”From Confederation through to the end of the Second World War, Canadians marked July 1 as Dominion Day. It’s doubtful Ukrainian celebrants, much less the Irish or Scots, thought they were being “British.” As law professor Robert Martin wrote, “the phrase ‘Dominion status’ was a constitutional term of art used to signify an independent, self-governing Commonwealth state.”For a long time, “dominion” was embedded in the country’s culture and institutions — from the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (now boringly known as Statistics Canada) and the Dominion Land Survey to the Dominion Observatory. The word was also common in the private sphere. Dozens of companies and organizations included it in their titles — from the Dominion Football Association and the Toronto-Dominion Bank to Dominion Bridge and the Dominion Construction Company. I fondly remember Sunday breakfasts in the Dominion Hotel in Victoria, BC.In the late 1940s, however, the “dominion” government began eliminating “dominion” from institutional titles and official documents, largely out of concern that it offended Quebecers. When Louis St. Laurent became prime minister in 1948, “the tensions were eased by quietly dropping references to the dominion, viewed by (Quebec premier Maurice) Duplessis as an oppressive word implying Quebec’s subservience to the government in Ottawa,” geographer Alan Rayburn wrote in a 1990 Canadian Geographic essay.By the 1970s, the media and the federal government were full-tilt in excising references to dominion. Never mind that the word remains part of Canada’s official title since the British North American Act was incorporated into the Canadian Constitution in 1982 as the Constitution Act, 1867..Nonetheless, for all intents and purposes, “dominion” is as dead as a dodo. Does it matter? Well, consider this: A nation’s self-understanding depends on the sense of identity shared by citizens. As scholar Benedict Anderson points out, the citizens of even the smallest state never know or meet more than a few fellow citizens. Yet their consciousness contains images and knowledge of flags, monuments, documents, ceremonies, etc., that express a sense of communion with those unknown others.In this sense, a nation is an “imagined community,” to borrow Anderson’s phrase, an invented response to shared circumstances of history, geography, culture, and demography. Out of this shared experience, he says, comes a collective perception that informs a citizen’s “nation-ness.”During the Senate debate on Bill C-201, Liberal Senator Anne Bell seemed to recognize, however unwittingly, that with the change of name, Canada’s nation-ness was at stake. The abandonment of Dominion Day reflected a “dying” tradition, she said, but she was worried Canada would be spiritually poorer without it. “We have a political concept, we have a geographical concept, but I am afraid we are losing the spiritual concept of Canada. I believe that ‘Dominion’ has a connotation of a firm foundation and an assurance of growth. It takes us above and beyond rather small partisan political concepts of the country.”Today, in the wake of globalization, mass immigration, and demographic shifts, Canada seems to be fragmenting into ethnic and religious enclaves with little shared historical experience or common interest. To be sure, the last year has seen a resurgence of national sentiment, but you can’t maintain such sentiment solely on anti-Trumpism and elbows-up rhetoric. Except for the politicians, who are obliged to pretend otherwise, few Canadians would assert with justifiable confidence a deep sense of nation-ness or proclaim a firm foundation for ‘who we are’ as a people.Senator Bell’s sentiments may well have been a prescient lament for the nation.Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.
