O Canada, We Love You Just the Way You Are
Published by Cynthia Turpin on 2010-03-08
The Gazette
Thanks to the popularity of the Olympics, the world has probably never been more familiar with our national anthem than it is now. Fourteen times our athletes climbed the podium they'd promised to own, to collect their golden rewards, and 14 times that old familiar tune played to an international television audience. That's almost enough air time to qualify O Canada for pop status.
Maybe that's why so many Canadians responded so quickly and so angrily when the federal government proposed this week to make the anthem's lyrics more gender-neutral. No way, they muttered, and late yesterday the government backed down. Perhaps it's just as well. Tinkering with a national anthem is not to be undertaken lightly. Despite its current popularity, O Canada is not a pop song, but a secular hymn that belongs to everyone.
That said, however, we must admit that Canadians - or at least, English-speaking Canadians - do have something of a tradition of messing about with O Canada. We've made many changes to the song over the years, the last in 1968, when we removed some of those tiresome "stand on guard" repetitions and inserted a reference to God. So fixing the lyrics to include the nation's daughters as well as its sons, as suggested in this week's throne speech, is hardly sacrilegious. Even striking a committee to study the matter is characteristically Canadian, if a little bloodless. It was, after all, a joint committee of the Senate and Commons that recommended the 1968 changes.
Still, once you start making changes, where do you stop? There's that reference to God we added in 1968, for example. The Almighty is in the constitution ("Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law") but including God in the anthem is bound to irk many loyal atheists today. Should we remove it? And the phrase "native land" just isn't true for hundreds of thousands of foreign-born citizens with impeccably patriotic credentials.
Perhaps revisionist temptations are inevitable with an anthem like ours, one that tries to articulate the nation's ideals rather than focus, as the French and American anthems do, on one singularly proud or defiant moment in national history. Ideals shift, but heroic moments endure. And while the danger of a parliamentary committee hemming and hawing over what words should make our hearts glow has passed for now, the urge to tinker will remain.
Francophones have no such problems. Their version is unapologetically ethnocentric, and still sung exactly as it was written. In fact, it was originally their song, with music by Calixa Lavallée and lyrics by Judge Adolphe-Basile Routhier. It was first performed in Quebec City on St. Jean Baptiste Day in 1880 - a time, it's worth noting, when francophones called themselves Canadiens, anglophones tended to think of themselves as British, and the only people who called themselves Québécois were the residents of Quebec City.
That strong association with French Canada might be why no one bothered to write an English version of O Canada until 20 years later. Even then, it never really caught on nationally until the Second World War, and didn't officially become our national anthem until 1980.
For anglophones, at least, our anthem is rather like the nation itself - a work in progress, its gradual changes over the decades reflecting changes in our society. There's nothing wrong with that - but there's nothing wrong with leaving the lyrics alone, either.
