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Happy Canada Day! In honour of the occasion, I'm wearing my red and white "I Read Canadian" T-shirt.

I Read Canadian Day will not actually happen until November 6. You can learn more at ireadcanadian.com

While the I Read Canadian initiative is devoted specifically to getting Canadian books into the hands of young people in Canada, I believe it is equally important for the adults who live here to include Canadian content in their literary diets.

With that in mind, I'll suggest a few Canadian books I've read recently, and which I definitely think are worth a read.


1. Laughing on the Outside: The Life of John Candy, by Martin Knelman

If you enjoyed SCTV - the TV show or the comedy club; if you watched any of the John Candy movies, like Trains, Planes and Automobiles, or Uncle Buck; if you're a fan of the Toronto Argonauts... you'll like this book. I was fairly familiar with a lot of his work, but knew nothing about who he was as a person, and this gave me some new insights. It's also a sad story, of course; like far too many people in the entertainment industry, he died much too early, at the age of 43.


2. Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog, by Linwood Barclay, with illustrations by Steve Nease

A hilarious send-up of life in Ontario while Mike Harris was the Premier. Perhaps a little too true-to-life for those of us who lived through those days. And in many ways depressingly similar to conditions in Ontario now. As an example, he provides a list of 10 things you can do while waiting in the hospital Emergency room, beginning with:

1. Read War and Peace
2. Move on to Moby Dick
3. Bring along a copy of The Common Sense Revolution and look for the place where they promised the week-long emergency room wait

and ending with:

9. Start making flyers for the Liberal or NDP candidate in your riding
10. Bleed


3. Tough on Crime: The Novel, by David Holdsworth

And this one is a hilarious send-up of life under a federal Conservative régime bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Stephen Harper days. Unlike the book I cited above, this one doesn't use real names. The Prime Minister is named Lawrence J Chamberlain. The story is set in Ottawa, Gatineau and the fictional Quebec town of Riverdale-Trois Moufettes. Cannabis has not yet been legalized. The Government is determined to get tough on crime and to that end proposes to build a new Megaprison - in Gatineau Park. Naturally there's a certain amount of resistance to this idea... well, just read the book. I promise you, it has a happy ending!

4. Health for All: A Doctor's Prescription for a Healthier Canada, by Jane Philpott

After all the uproarious satire, I thought I'd include a serious title here. This is a wonderfully well-written and well-organized book about health care and health equity. And it's much more than is suggested by its subtitle! The most prescriptive aspect, I suppose, would be the notion of enshrining in law universal access to primary care (a family doctor) as a fundamental human right. Just as kids have a right to public education up to grade 12. But the book is much more than that. It's at once philosophical and practical. At times it's intensely, painfully personal. She describes the years she worked with Médecins sans frontieres in Niger, the loss of one of her daughters to meningococcemia, and other personal tragedies and how they have shaped her life. She talks about her time in politics, her time as a family doctor and her role as Professor of Family Medicine and Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen's University in Kingston.


5. The Vampire Cat & Poems by Robert Thomas Payne (a collection by marty smith, 2023 gsmp)

I bought this one direct from the author, on Queen Street West in Toronto. I was drawn to the booklet by its cover, which sports a vignette of a black cat. We had a brief conversation, during which I learned he was living in a tent with his cat. He autographed it for me and added the words "Keep calm and mew on, eh?" and a little cat-face.

Later, I looked him up online and learned some more of his story:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12244354/


Anyway, the above recommendations are just some things I've enjoyed reading lately and should in no way be construed as an exhaustive survey ofCanadian literature!

Today is Canada Day and I don't think I'd be guilty of hyperbole if I were to say it was a Canada Day like no other. I remember quite a bit about Centennial year, Canada 125 and of course the fiasco that was Canada 150. Today will perhaps go down in history as Virtual Reality Canada Day. In the ABC of Canada, Zed is for Zoom and the Zeddy Bear has gone into permanent hibernation.

July also marks the beginning of summer camp season - usually. This year, things are a little different. Anyone for Corona Gymnastics Camp? The nearby Girl Guide Camp, Camp Woolsey, is no longer operating. Perhaps the Dunrobin tornado spelled its death knell. But it does still have an online presence of sorts:

https://dragon.sleepdeprived.ca/songbook/songs5/S5_53.htm

And I want to pay tribute here to yet another camp I support on a regular basis. This one is still very much alive and well, although I don't think they're holding any sleepover camps this year. But they do have online activities as well as ongoing in-person activities in the Ottawa area, subject to any public health restrictions in place:

http://www.tenoaksproject.org/camp-ten-oaks/

On the home front, we recently got a new barbecue, our old one having been raked over the coals for the last time. The package describes it as a "Kettle Barbecue" in English and a "Barbecue Australien" in French. Hmmm.

Happy Canada Day everyone!

As mentioned before in this space, I was the youngest of four children. So understandably, I tended to be the last to achieve the various landmarks in life - finishing school, getting my first job, and so on. But there was one significant landmark I reached before any of my siblings (or even my parents), at the moment of my birth. I was born here, so I have always been Canadian.

I remember when I was about six, being picked up from school and heading downtown so that the others in my family could "get" their citizenship. I don't remember anything about what citizenship ceremonies involved in those days, or what people had to know about their adopted country to pass the citizenship test (if there was one), or much of anything else about the whole process. If they distributed flags back then, it would have been the red ensign, not our current maple leaf flag. I don't know when the red ensign supplanted the plain old union jack as the usual flag of Canada (in older pictures of post-Confederation Canada, it does seem to be that the union jack was the usual occupant of the flagpole), but I do vividly remember the spirited debate over the "Pearson pennant" in the 1960s - which was originally going to have blue bars at the sides and three red maple leaves rather than one in the middle.

I grew up in a time of burgeoning Canadian nationalism. Quebec nationalism too, but that probably should have been a topic for last weekend, when the province celebrated St-Jean Baptiste Day. I remember the Bilingualism and Biculturalism (B&B) Commission, the growth of Canadian content regulations in the mass media, the growth of bilingualism in the federal public service. I remember going to Expo '67 with my class and again in the summer with my mother. That period from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies was an era of optimism, nationalism and prosperity. Then came the first wave of oil-price shocks (with the threat that we would all be "freezing in the dark") and stagflation followed by the recession of the early 1980s.

In an open economy, an era of free trade and common currencies, is there still a legitimate role for national pride? I hope so.

One thing I have noticed over the past few years is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to buy Canadian. It used to be, for example, that if you bought a pair of jeans, whether its label was Howick, Levi, Wrangler or Lee, the garment itself was almost ALWAYS marked "Made in Canada" and often had the union label. Nowadays, most jeans sold in Canada seem to be made in China, or occasionally Vietnam or Bangladesh. I now gravitate towards the Lois label because most (though not all) of their jeans are made in Canada.

I get particularly annoyed when I see products with labels I think of as Canadian icons - like Roots - only to scrounge inside for the fine print and find that they were made in China. That's not true of all Roots products, mind you, but you have to be careful. There's also a popular line of camera bags which sports a maple leaf on the outside - implying, no doubt intentionally, that they are made in Canada - but inside, most have labels indicating that they are in fact made in China.

What's a poor Canadian patriot to do?