Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With all of the hubbub surrounding the federal government's history agenda, I thought it was worth noting that one of the things that has been occupying me lately is the early phases of an edited collection about the practice and politics of crafting national identity in Canada's past.  If you're an academic who reads this blog, this collection might be of interest to you.


Call for Abstracts – Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics

With the 150th anniversary of Confederation coming up in 2017, it seems appropriate to reflect on the political, social and cultural forces which have shaped Canada over the course of its history.  National holidays and commemorative events provide an intriguing window into how these processes have affected, and continue to shape nationalism, culture and identity politics.  With this in mind, we invite interested authors to submit proposals for an edited collection that we are developing.  Tentatively entitled "Celebrating Canada: National Holidays, Commemoration and Identity Politics", our objective is to pull together scholarship related to national holidays and major commemorative anniversaries in Canadian history.  While our launching point for this collection is the celebration and observance of Dominion Day / Canada Day, we are taking a broad approach to the book's theme, and would like to include contributions that deal with major anniversary years like the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, the Centennial of 1967, Canada 125 and other related – or competing! - national holidays such as Victoria Day, la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste/Fête Nationale, and Empire Day. We welcome contributions that situate Canadian holidays in a broader international context. 

We have already been in discussions with University of Toronto Press, where there is keen interest in this project. Interested authors are asked to submit proposals to Matthew Hayday [mhayday@uoguelph.ca] by 2 July 2013 (the day after the Canada Day holiday!) including a 250-500 word abstract and the author's institutional affiliation and contact information.  Our planned schedule is to contact authors regarding their proposals by the end of July, and have first completed drafts due in late spring 2014.  We are planning to apply for a SSHRC Connection Grant, with an eye to having participants come together for a workshop in the summer of 2014 to discuss each other's work.  This should provide ample time for revisions and the peer review process to allow the collection to be in print no later than 2017.

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Matthew Hayday
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Guelph
mhayday@uoguelph.ca

Raymond Blake
Professor, Department of History, University of Regina
Raymond.Blake@uregina.ca

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Happy 30th Birthday, Canada Day!

Sunday, July 1st, 2012 will officially be the 30th Canada Day.  How is this possible, you ask, my gentle readers, when 2012 is the 145th anniversary of Confederation?  Is it because it's the 30th Canada Day since the passage of the revised constitution in 1982, along with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?  It's not a bad guess, but you'd be wrong.

The legislation to change the official name of the national holiday celebrated on the first of July appeared in the form of a private member's bill sponsored by Liberal MP Hal Herbert.  Herbert's bill (C-201 - submitted to the House on 6 May 1980) was bumped way up in the sequence of parliamentary business and brought forth for debate in the House of Commons on the hot afternoon of Friday, 9 July 1982, when most MPs were out of Ottawa.  It rapidly passed through the House that afternoon, with the consent of all of the MPs that were then sitting in the House.  It wasn't until early the next week that ardent partisans of the original name for the day - Dominion Day - caught wind of what had occured.  The story might well have ended here.  As my colleague Raymond Blake at the University of Regina has noted in a number of conference presentations, there had been many attempts since the 1940s to change the name of the holiday.  Some were government bills, others private member's bills, but for some reason or another, none had managed to pass through both houses.  This might well have been the fate of Herbert's bill.

Determined opponents of the name change, urged on by retired Senator Eugene Forsey and others, attempted to make a final stand in the Senate, where more detailed hearings were held on Herbert's bill.  This time, however, the legislation was not blocked, and the Senate gave its assent on 25 October 1982.  1983 was thus the first time that "Canada Day" was officially observed - although the name itself had been popularly used by many Canadians and media outlets over the previous decades.

As many of you doubtless know, the name change was far from uncontroversial, and many still use the original term of Dominion Day.  Whatever you call July 1st, I wish you a most enjoyable long weekend, and hope you spare a thought or two for our country which has done pretty well in holding together for the past 145 years.  For my part, this year I'll be staying home for July 1st, putting out my flag (courtesy of Sheila Copps' flag initative of the mid-1990s), barbecuing Canadian-themed sausages for our friends, and perhaps catching a bit of the Parliament Hill show (the subject of my past research) on TV.

Happy Canada Day!

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ETA: In case you've missed it over the past couple of years, here's a link to my article in the Canadian Historical Review about Dominion Day and Canada Day celebrations.  My other published work on this tends to be in edited collections, and so is a little harder to come by online. 

Updated yet again with a new link to the description and recipe for my husband's awesome Canada Day sausages!

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Canada Day and the War of 1812

In a story in today's Toronto Star and CBC from Canadian Press, the federal government has hired a consultant to inject a War of 1812 theme into the noonday and evening Canada Day shows on Parliament Hill. The article implies that this might represent a major shift in crafting politicized Canada Day celebrations, and that this is part of a larger heritage direction on the part of the federal government. The author is right about the latter, but I'd contest his implied interpretation that this is something dramatically new.

As someone who has dedicated far too many years of my life to researching the history of July 1st celebrations (my most recent article from the Canadian Historical Review can be found here, I could not be less surprised by this development, and I don't see this as anything new. Indeed, there is a long and illustrious history of both Conservative and Liberal governments of the past turning the national Canada Day (or pre-1983, Dominion Day) celebrations to political purposes. If we go back to 1958, Dominion Day ceremonies on Parliament Hill were established by Secretary of State Ellen Fairclough with an eye to promoting aspects of Canada's British and military heritage. In the late-1970s, government mandarin Bernard Ostry was seconded to put together a multi-hour coast-to-coast celebration, organized in part to combat separatism after the 1976 election of the Parti Quebecois. In the early-to-mid-1980s, Secretary of State officials began developing explicit annual themes, some of them linked to historical anniversaries (like the 1984 celebrations, which were tied to the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier's arrival in Canada). This year's decision by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore to incorporate a War of 1812 theme is really nothing new, but simply the exploitation of an existing tradition to reinforce particular government messaging about Canadian identity.

And to answer the question posed by Dean Beeby, the Canadian Press author of the story, the degree of control over the noonday and evening shows has gone back and forth over the past several decades. Some years, the NCC has had a free hand with the evening show. In other years, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, the Secretary of State Department (now Canadian Heritage) played a much more active role in determining the themes and content of the evening broadcast. This was often connected to whether or not the show was to be televised (which also meant that CBC and Radio-Canada were involved in the process).

What I'm still waiting to see is whether an MP introduces a bill to return to the old moniker of Dominion Day.

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143 years of Canada

Happy Canada Day everyone!

After years of researching and publishing about the history of Canada Day, I'm really pleased that my article Fireworks, Folk-dancing, and Fostering a National Identity: The Politics of Canada Day has appeared in the latest volume of the Canadian Historical Review. This is also a special day for me, because my promotion to associate professor becomes official today! (My legal wedding anniversary is on St-Jean-Baptiste Day. Perhaps I should lay off having major events in my life tied to politically-charged holidays.)

The article itself is by subscription only, but as I've done in past years, I'll share some fun facts from the history of the day. Fifty years ago, in 1960, the CBC put together a special documentary to air on July 1st. Entitled "Dominion Day: A Day to Remember", it traced the stories of six new Canadians, who would be receiving their citizenship at a special ceremony on Parliament Hill. This ceremony kicked off the events taking place on the Hill that day. Somewhat ironically, this also re-launched official Dominion Day observances in Ottawa. The Diefenbaker government had tried to start this annual tradition of celebrating Dominion Day in 1958, but the visit of the Queen, which would take her out of Ottawa on the 1st, led to changes of plans for 1959. For those who are interested, she was helping out at the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Attaching citizenship ceremonies to the events of July 1st rapidly became a popular aspect of both national and local events. Indeed, this was the only official event organized by the federal government in Ottawa in 1976, after the rest of the budget for the "Show on the Hill" was cancelled as part of wide-ranging budget cuts.

Enjoy your Canada Day, however you may be celebrating it!

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Canada Day - Looking back on 50 years of government-sponsored celebrations

Tomorrow will be Canada Day, the 141st anniversary of Confederation. It will also mark the 50th anniversary of an annual tradition of federal government-sponsored celebrations on July 1st, a tradition begun in 1958 by the Progressive Conservative government of John Diefenbaker to honour what was then known as Dominion Day (the name was changed in 1982, but some die-hards persist in using the original nomenclature). Tomorrow, top Canadian artists such as Blue Rodeo, Hawksley Workman, Paul Brandt, Kevin Parent and Diane Dufrense will perform on Parliament Hill.

In honour of the occasion, here is a brief glimpse back on celebrations over the past half-century:

1958: A small-scale, formal event was organized for Ottawa under the auspices of Secretary of State Ellen Fairclough. Military pageantry predominated, in addition to a carillion concert from the Peace Tower. Governor General Vincent Massey delivered the first-ever simulcast television message across the country.

1968: The mid-60s featured a series of multicultural variety shows from Parliament Hill, building up to the Centennial of 1967. 1968, in contrast, was a bit of a let-down. Amateur performing artists were flown in from across the country, but the CBC declined to televise the events, citing budget constraints. Ottawa residents were treated to a very bourgeois flotilla of personal watercraft on the Rideau Canal.

1978: In the panic of the pre-1980 referendum era, a massive Canada's Birthday Celebration was organized, under the theme of "Canada - it's you and me/Canada - c'est toi et moi". About a million dollars was spent on a national television spectacular featuring satellite hook-ups to stages across the country featuring performers such as Tom Jackson, the Irish Rovers, Tommy Hunter, Rene Simard and Maureen Forrester. Millions were also distributed as seed money to local communities that wanted to hold events. The same pattern was repeated the following year, with the addition of a concert to be held on June 30th in Montreal. Notably, several Quebec separatist artists insisted that their contracts contain a clause stating that no mention would be made of Canada Day during the concert. One of those artists was Diane Dufresne, who will be performing tomorrow at the noon and evening shows on Parliament Hill.

1988: After a series of fairly low-key Canada Days in Ottawa, but a sustained period of community sponsorship, federal organizers returned to the Ottawa-based TV special, kicked off by the "Canada Gold Ensemble". The program also featured singer Paul Janz, athletes Rick Hansen and Elizabeth Manley, comedian Andre-Phillipe Gagnon, and a special performance by David Foster of "Winter Games" the theme song for the Calgary Olympics.

1998: Paul Gross (yes, the actor) and Lara Fabian sang at the formal noonday show. The evening gala, hosted by Elvis Stojko and Sonia Benezra, included performances by Paul Brandt, the Philosopher Kings, Leahy, Michel Pagliaro, Lara Fabian, and Buffy Ste-Marie.

Happy Canada Day!

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