Letters: Canadian identity? We just feel it |
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Letters: Canadian identity? We just feel it
Readers weigh in on national identity, floor-crossing MPs, the targeting of Jewish children's camps, living vicariously, and more
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Canadian patriotism ‘is there and in strength’
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Re: In search of a distinct Canadian identity — Conrad Black, Feb. 14
Letters: Canadian identity? We just feel it Back to video
Canadians don’t wear patriotism on our sleeves, but if provoked, it is there and in strength. Canada is a light under a basket. Probably a reasonable description is that we’re Americans, with manners. Carnival-like patriotic gestures, boasting and gamesman-show-like gimmicks aren’t in our national DNA. It may be hard to nail down, however most Canadians feel it, but can’t always name it.
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan said, “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” There could be a little something to that, but just because our identity isn’t always openly displayed doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Some things just can’t be put into words.
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Douglas Cornish, Ottawa
Floor-crossers and pieces of silver
Re: Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux crosses the floor to the Liberals — Jordan Gowling, Feb. 18
It’s becoming unbearable to watch the talking heads on CTV and CBC trying to justify why three conservative MPs decided to join the Carney Liberals.
From the perspective of the defecting MPs, it all boils down to Conservative chief Pierre Poilièvre’s leadership and personality, all the while brushing aside the fact that they were elected by a majority of voters in their ridings in a supposedly democratic process.
If these three MPs were at all honest with the voters who elected them, they would at a minimum sit as independents, where they would be able to vote with their conscience and not be bound to any one party.
As we are getting closer to Easter, this whole imbroglio reminds me of Judas Iscariot and the 30 pieces of silver.
Ed Lacelle, Gatineau, Que.
Letters: How to prevent another Tumbler Ridge?
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Targeting Jewish children’s camps a new low
Re: Ontario Camps Association denounces anti-Israel campaign targeting Canadian Jewish summer camps — Kenn Oliver, Feb. 16
Let’s be honest. This is not an anti-Zionist campaign. This is pure antisemitism; Jew-hate all tarted up to look like something noble to the well-intentioned, but ignorant and uninformed.
After anti-Israel protesters targeted Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital a couple of years ago, scaling its sign, banging drums outside the windows of sick and dying people, and jumping on the hoods of the doctors’ cars as they attempted to enter or leave the hospital, I didn’t think they could sink any lower.
I stand corrected. Apparently they can sink lower in their efforts to isolate, demonize and ultimately erase the Jewish people. Now they are targeting children.
It is children who attend summer camps, and by identifying and publicizing the names and locations of the camps to the haters in their ranks, they place the lives of the most vulnerable demographic in our society at risk.
Sadly we saw at Bondi Beach in Australia, and just last week in Tumbler Ridge here in our own backyard, how easy it is for someone with a twisted mind and hate in their heart to enter a facility of children and murder indiscriminately. Have we learned nothing from these massacres?
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Given that the war in Gaza is over (for now), people should be asking what the real agenda of “Just Peace” is.
E. Joan O’Callaghan, Toronto
Evil versus mental illness
Re: NP View: Tumbler Ridge murderer was given a pass again and again — Editorial, Feb. 14; and The Tumbler Ridge murders were preventable — Sabrina Maddeaux, Feb. 14
National Post’s Feb. 14 editorial about the Tumbler Ridge shootings was prefaced by the comment: “This is what evil looks like.”
No, this not what evil looks like, but it may be what mental illness looks like.
What the likes of psychopaths such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong un do, is what evil looks like.
Morton Doran, Calgary
When a national newspaper devotes five pages to a tragic occurrence in a remote community in Canada, it is a certainty that our national consciousness has been wounded. How could this happen in Canada where the right to carry firearms is not constitutionally enshrined as it is in our neighbour to the south? How could this happen in a country where people are seemingly more polite and less violently disposed?
The fact is that there are no differences between the factors causing mental illness in the young and our country’s ability to identify and treat it.
Our kids watch the same violence in the media and are exposed to the same TikTok influencers. Our society struggles with the same current social shibboleths and the availability of drugs, identity choices and the same lack of mental health resources — the latter particularly so in remote communities.
Sabrina Maddeaux’s article in particular on the prevention of such murders struck a cord for me. She notes that more investment in mental health services and less platitudes are essential and goes on appropriately to link mental health with drug policy, law enforcement reform and online safety.
While her insights are correct, the problem is much deeper. We live in a society besieged by those who would subvert the very rules conceived to facilitate our living together, along with our inability to satisfy the growing population and the need to strengthen social institutions to accommodate a more permissive society. While Canadian health care is the most obvious, our overflowing prisons, our overburdened welfare requirements, our overtaxed legal system and the growing breakdown of the nuclear family are just four of the many examples of how and why our Canadian national identity is now in crisis.
Rock climbers and the human spirit
Re: Portrait of an extraordinary individual — Colby Cosh, Feb. 17 (print / NP Platformed newsletter)
Leave it to Colby Cosh to raise the purpose-of-life question in the middle of Canada’s very cold February slog, when even the sun seems unconvinced. Why go outside at all? Why climb a mountain when staying home is safer, warmer, sensible? Such utilitarian thinking commands our attention but never quite justifies life.
Clearly rock climber Greg Cameron risked death by choice and not necessity. That’s a luxury and is precisely the point. Maybe the answer is contained in the question, “Why climb Everest?” Because it’s there.
Some of us are not satisfied with just being here. We want to explore its essence to test the fact of it. We want to press our pulse against the world and feel resistance. The climb gathers everything into a single wager — fear, will, gravity, sky — where the ups may or may not lead anywhere. Doing the unnecessary becomes essential. Not for survival, but for meaning.
That is why Cosh’s meditation on “what rock climbers tell us about the human spirit” felt like such a gift in the morning paper. It startled us awake. Age may turn many of us into spectators, our risk-taking years behind us, but that does not make the spectacle trivial. We may no longer grip the rock face ourselves, yet reading about those who do is not a substitute for living. It is a way of remembering what it costs. Vicarious experience at its best sharpens judgment, deepens gratitude, and keeps alive the knowledge that risk is part of the human bargain. We may stand on the ground, but we still recognize the climb.
Tony D’Andrea, Toronto
Re: Photos show former prince Andrew leaving police station after being questioned for almost 12 hours — National Post staff, Feb. 19
In 1948, Egypt’s King Farouk, observing the brushfires of political tumult springing up in the aftermath of World War II, concluded that the existing global order was slated to be overthrown: “The whole world is in revolt. Soon, there will be only five Kings left — the King of England, the King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Hearts, and the King of Diamonds.”
With the startling news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother to our King Charles, I dare say that the chances of the House of Windsor dynasty continuing to occupy the throne suddenly don’t look so good. However, I remain confident those other kings will go on ruling wherever there are casinos.
Orest Slepokura, Calgary
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