I am saddened by the gusto of the Scottish separatist movement
that has brought this new referendum.
I grew up in Canada, my parents are British hailing from various
English part, with Scots and Northern Irish grandparents, and my only child is
now living in the UK, er England.
As a Canadian, who is glad we are a united country acknowledging
our differences in our beginnings, and embracing newcomers, I find it hard to
understand the bitterness and wholesale neuroses that person, Alex Salmond, has
engendered.
It feels like an embittered spouse who cries unappreciated and
decides to make the household poorer by divorce, waving the decree nisi in the
hubris of the moment.
We too suffered our own Alex Salmond in the person of Rene
Levesque, a chain smoking separatist, a promoter of heroic-victim
French-Canadian nationalism, someone who lost his seat for six years after he
became Premier. We even had the separatist murder by garroting of the
Deputy Premier, Pierre Laporte and the kidnapping of your own James Cross, a
British diplomat. We had the slogan from the west, when they realized they had
a lot of oil, “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark”.
But we got through it all, because at the end of the day
Canadians woke up to reason and realized that in spite of and because of our
differences, we were better and stronger together. We are a just society,
in the words of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, an inclusive one, a multicultural one.
We continue to grumble within the confines of our marriage. The
French Canadians continue with scheduling more separatist referendums in their
platforms. The last one resulted in the loss of the Quebec Premier’s seat in
2014 and her resignation. The mid-west continues to be prosperous from its oil,
and denigrate the easterners, the real easterners continue to lobby for more
protection for their fishery industries, the real west continues to revel in
its life style of sports and leisure and huge real estate bonanzas; the
financial hub continues to take on scorn from all sides and bus it to work in
the dark, and the Canadian dollar continues steadily on a par with the US dollar.
The Canadian dollar was 68 US cents during all the separatist and oil turmoil.
Why? Because we are better and stronger together, and the world
knows it.
