Looking at our past through rose-coloured glasses

There’s a puzzling contradiction on social media around the religious bigotry that has become an election issue.

On the one hand, I see the people saying, “I want my Canada back,” or, “I miss the country we used to be,” or variations on that sentiment.

In the same breath, there are references to what we did in 1938, when a ship carrying German Jews was turned back and its passengers had to return to Germany. There are also references to unwelcome immigrants over the years: Irish Catholic (micks), Italian (wops and dagos), Polish (polacks). There are, of course, numerous references to the First Nations.

We can’t have it both ways: either we used to have this nice country that accepted all cultures and religions equally or we have a sketchy history as quite an intolerant nation.

Which is it?

I grew up in northern New Brunswick. There was nary a Muslim in sight but there were the French and the Indians (sic) and to say they were second-class citizens is an understatement.

We had neighbours who were French. Their kids were smart in school and their house and yard were clean and tidy but in the neighbourhood, they were considered to be some kind of unusual French exception. We were still warned to stay away from the French we didn’t know. Head lice, or worse.

Bad feeling still exists. I have French friends who, if they weren’t going to visit family, would never set foot in New Brunswick.

I was scared of the Indians when I was a little girl. Most of the kids I knew were. Our family used to go for a Sunday drive and we’d often go through Burnt Church, an Indian reserve and one of the most beautiful regions on the Miramichi Bay. I just held my breath until we got through there safely.

In Nova Scotia, the history of the oldest indigenous black community in Canada is well-known: black loyalists who came after the American Revolution and were located to rocky lands where nothing could grow; blacks who came after the Civil War and after slaves were freed but who continued to be held in slavery in Nova Scotia; a tight-knit black community, Africville, who saw their homes bull-dozed in the spirit of urban renewal and integration but which led, in fact, to further isolation and alienation. African Nova Scotians continue to live, generations later, in a racially divided and racially-hostile society.

These examples are just in my little corner of Atlantic Canada. There are examples all over the country of the dominant cultural group making life less-than-comfortable for each generation’s designated “Other.”

Canada’s record of intolerance is not as bad as many countries and it may be among the better ones. The wistful longing to go back to when things were better, however, is just sentimental idealistic reminiscing.

We have to stop looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses and try looking ahead to the Canada we really want to be in the future. That has to start in the present.