What is 'true patriot love'? Not waving a flag, but asking questions

I grew up in the comfortable suburbs of Ottawa, among the children of career civil servants, everyone as devoted to the country as a Canadian could possibly be. Yet it was the era of the Québec referendum, and everyone could not shut up about the slightly embarrassing question of "Canadian identity." Did it exist? What was the nature of it? Did we want to preserve it?

We never came to any answers that I can recall. Instead, conceding at least that we wanted to believe in a thing called Canada, we wrapped ourselves in flags and waited in the parking lot at the baseball stadium for a bus to Montréal. We weren't really feeling "true patriot love." The red-and-white outfits did the work our minds could not — they made us a part of something obvious and self-evident. At least for the day.

When the Québécois narrowly opted to stay, the air was full of relief. The country had been saved. And now the rest of us could put away such bald displays of love of country. Those maple leaf capes had never quite fit.

Years later I moved to the United States, whose clearly-defined patriotism was always taught to me as a wondrous thing: You pledge allegiance every morning at school. You speak of the First Amendment as though it came down on the stone tablets with Moses. The founding Fathers are not really dead but live figures you must genuflect to for their infinite wisdom. And I thought — because I was young — that the meaning people attached to those rituals mattered.

The 2016 election put an end to that.

For mostly unrelated reasons, I came back to Canada three months ago. Whenever I manage to get back here I feel most at home when I turn on the radio. Recently I tuned in and the hosts were talking about Uber, about what it would be like to have car-sharing in Vancouver, about its effects on traffic safety and the labour market. The hosts of the radio program were not thrilling orators. They spoke only of the facts and the numbers.

And listening to this, I practically fell out of my chair, so suddenly and thoroughly was I struck with a love of country.

Look: Canadians are not better people than Americans. Canada is rife with injustice, from our multiple opioid crises to the situation of Indigenous people across the country to our unbelievably sclerotic Parliament, which incredibly still has a whole chamber full of useless unelected rich people, and we keep it only because we're too lazy to get rid of the feudal tradition it represents.

But the one thing we do have is that we actually know that all of these things are wrong with us. We tell each other about it all the time. We often turn up our noses when called upon to be proud of ourselves. And I hope that keeps going, actually. I hope that we never become a country that is sure of our own miraculous advances. I hope we are always uncomfortable in flag capes, skeptical of our politicians and institutions, frustrated that we can't seem to make the place better than it is. It certainly beats the alternative.

Next in So, Canada...: Amanda Parris's take on "in all thy sons command:"