Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

Page 17 text:

, -A L 'a 4 W' -4 4 4 John W. Holmes speaks to the school on Canada. I am not arguing that we should wrap up our great figures of the past in Hollywood-style glamour - although I would putSimon Fraser up against Batman any day, or Louis Riel against Fidel Castro. We had plenty of fools and crack- pots, like other countries. It is well, however, at this time to pause and think of the fabulous miracle that we are. There was Father Brebeuf making his way to Midland without a skidoo, and all those other hearty chaps two and even three hundred years ago climbing over mountains or building railways or fighting off bears and Yankees at sixty below - before the invention of nylon or Instant Breakfast. You may think you hear too much just now about the Fathers of Confederation. They look pretty stodgy in that picture with all their shrubbery. But they were very young men by today's political standards - nearly all in their thirties and forties - and they had the crazy faith to believe that a million or so scattered colonists could establish dominion from sea to sea and make a success of it. Next time you are flying to Vancouver or Halifax or Inuvik for the week- end just look down all the way and think of it. Of course, we owe a great debt of gratitude as in so many things to our American neighbours. During the 1860's they were good enough to scare the pants off us at regular intervals and make us Thirteen

Page 16 text:

track and we all have great hope in the future of our country and this school because of your shining faces, clean, fresh minds, and short hair - sheared every September by the Headmaster, I am told, without any regard for artistic values. So now that I have given you my finale, I can get on with the speech. I have proved, I hope, that I am not anti-youth, I wouldn't dare. Still I am going to stick up for your ancestors, now that I am beginning to feel more and more like an ancestor myself. Recently The Times of London published a special supplement on Canada which began with a statement of a young Canadian from Alberta where, if you believe the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, people stay young till the age of ninety. She said she had a lot of faith in this country, and that was nice of her. She and Edmonton seemed to be doing very well, but she had a great big chip on her shoulder about everybody who had had anything to do with Canada up until about February, 1967. The only way to make progress, she seemed to sug- gest, was to kick over the traces. This isn't unusual, I shared the same view until about September, 1933, when Istarted confronting thebrute facts of life as Master in charge of the senior corridor. It was during the Depression, and as jobs were scarce, tired parents used to send their sons back to school till they were about 44. At least, I was 22, and that's how old they looked to me. Now I have aged, like a piece of old Ontario cheddar, and I have acquired more interest and affec- tion for the ingredients that went into me. We can't build a strong country unless we understand the nature of its foundations. Surely that is one of the elementary facts of construction. In our case that means going back much more than one hundred years - back to the more glamorous parts before our souls were deadened in the noble but boring struggle for responsible government. Professor Purdy may leave the room. One of the crazy ideas we must get rid of is the illusion that we are a young country. We are young in the sense that we have good teeth and our best years are ahead of us, but there has been a country called Canada for three and a half centuries. It is important right now to get our vision of this country straight by recognizing that we didn't start with Sir John A. Macdonald or even Sir Guy Carleton but with Samuel de Champlain - the man from Orillia. This is not the hundredth birthday of Canada, it's the hundredth birthday of Confederation. Even as a Confederation we are about the same age as Germany and Italy and really ancient compared with most members of the United Nations. And we are older even than Champlain because our political and cultural roots began in Britain and France and the many other countries from which our ances- tors sprang - or were sprung. For too long we have used this excuse of youth to explain away our failures - as the reason why we don't produce great plays, beautiful cities with sidewalks, or beautiful television shows like The Beverley Hillbillies - or win international tournaments. Moscow is, after all, over nine hundred years oldg so how could we expect to stand up to their hockey team with a few nice boys from Winnipeg and little Carl Brewer. As a respectable old lady of 350 - well partly respectable - it is time we got off this youth kick. Tll'L7llfC'

Page 18 text:

realize that we would have to link up of shut up. We have been lucky, of course, that although they talked pretty aggressive and were awfully noisy, they never had their hearts in being real nasty. This isn't going to be a history lesson, not in front of Professor Purdy - if he's still here. My message is simple and obvious, it is just to say to you as convincingly as I can asasurvivor ofsome of the most exciting years of Canada's history, that there is really nothing square in this hip age tif I've got my adjec- tives rightl with feeling romantic about it. There are times when the very thought of Laura Secord or Madeleine de Vercheres sends me or switches me on. That doughty Laura with the hard centre! I have a friend in Ottawa who is a direct descendant of Madeleine de Vercheres and he says that, according to all records, she was a really untamed shrew. Idon't think he would be very gentle-natured if he had been up shooting Indians all night. But our past is exciting, at least in retrospect in a well-heated hall. To be forward and with it, we don't really need, like the girl from the West, to fight our history. We might indeed make as our Centennial motto, Who's afraid of Wolfe and Montcalm? . Because, in spite of the gloom and despondency being spread by elderly Canadians we have been an undoubted success. Many of our elders must have been terribly disconcerted by the news in this morning's paper that our trade balance had improved again and that Expo was a great success with the Europeans. We are not a great power but we are a well-respected medium- sized one and that's a comfortable thing to be. We can thank our lucky stars that a lot of rock and frost have kept us from being a great power, because it is a terrible burden to be a great power in this nuclear age. You will notice that far too many of your elders are agonizing about the nature of the Canadian identity when what they ought to be doing is relaxing and enjoying what we are. Have we a soul now that we have a flag? they ask, and their sour looks suggest they don't think so. To which I would reply, if I weren't an ex-English master, Oh nuts! The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, of all people, set out several years ago to answer this 567.00 question, What is a Canadian? in a pamphlet for their own members. It began: It has been said that Canadians arejust like people, which seems a reason- able assumption. There are those also who say that Canadians are just Englishmen who don't care how cold it gets, and others who say Canadians really are just Frenchmen who know what side of the Atlantic their bread is buttered on. It goes on, Canadians are also Americans, but Canadians are not prone to over- stress that technicality . I recall also an English book explaining the world to the natives of that island which said of us. It is important to realize that Canadians do not talk like Americans, although you can't tell this from listening to them. So there we are, mysterious, undefinable, exotic, like one of those new men's toilet lotions - and just about as expensive now that the old age pension has gone up. But surely that is better than being the guy that everyone recognizes in the cartoons. With all that latent power is it any wonder that great Canadian teams like the Chicago Black Hawks do so much better than American teams like Fourteen