Ideas - Loving Your Country in the 21st Century (Step Two)

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

As Canadians once again find themselves explaining why their country deserves to exist, a group of proud Quebecers brave the winter in Sherbrooke to raise their nation’s largest-ever flag. IDEAS' Tom Howell joins in, as he continues his series on where the patriotic spirit belongs in people’s lives today.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Eyed. Flag Day is January 21st in Quebec, and the flag they celebrate is the Fleur de l'Isée, representing Quebec since the 21st of January 1948. What we're hearing is a flag day celebration in Sherbrooke. 140 proud Quebecers gathering outdoors in the snow. The temperature is minus 12 officially, but on the feels like index it's minus 20. These patriots have gathered to raise a giant blue and white flag, the largest fleur-de-lisée

in existence, at 24.5 meters long. You're going to be able to tell your children and grandchildren about this day, says the speaker. Then he introduces the leader of the Saint-Jean Baptiste Society, a long-standing Sovereignty's group. With the U.S. president wanting to add a 51st star to the American flag, she's saying. More than ever, it's time to fly our Fleur de Lisée high. We have collectively the duty to remember, year after year, day after day, the meaning of our magnificent Fleur de Lisée. Standing among the patriots, applauding and mittens, is Ideas producer Tom Howell. Tom's continuing his series, Loving Your Country in the 21st Century.

Episode 1 was called, Step 1, Choosing Your Country. Today, Tom brings us Step 2, Doing Your Duty. We're standing in what was a soccer field before the snow buried it on the shore of the Lake of Nations. The name pays tribute to the time that Sherbrooke hosted an international water skiing competition. Right now we're all holding up our massive Quebec flag. Now once you've lifted a flag this large and the brave 140 of you, some who've travelled hours to be here, are standing around it on each side gripping the fabric at shoulder height so the image can face the heavens and the drone that's taking pictures of us.

You just can't put the thing down again. You've got to do something. Whoa! We could have tried running with it through the snow, but everyone would have fallen over. So the organizers were smart and had a different idea. We'll sing our national song. Last little point, everybody, OK?

On the bar. Jean du Pays, the unofficial anthem of Quebec. Quebecers have of course written two national anthems, the other is Oh Canada, but Jean DuPays is the one for Quebec Patriots. After we've sung the song, we put the flag down and some volunteers roll it up. I walk back across the field to the parking lot to catch the bus home to Montreal, when suddenly I find myself a few steps away from a famous Quebec politician. Ruba Gazal.

In French? In English? OK, so yeah. It's short, go ahead. Rouba was born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees. She's now the co-leader of Quebec Solidaires, the province's most left-wing nationalist party. And it's important for me to be here in the name of Quebec Solidaires because the flag is a symbol of our Quebecer nation, but it's also the symbol of our values. For example, to have equality between women and men,

as we see what's happening in United States. So it's important to be proud of it and to reaffirm more and more our values. Do you remember when you first started feeling patriotic towards Quebec in particular? Yes, I arrived here in Quebec, I was 10 years old, I didn't speak any word of French. So in the public school, with others, with the teachers, I learned to speak French, but not only. I learned also the Quebecer culture and I learned to love to be a Kibbaker. So a small, small construction of my Kibbaker identity

have been done when I was a children and also teenager. And when I became an adult, I felt 100% Kibbaker. I speak to some people who say, hmm, me, I consider myself a citizen of the world or me I connect with people who believe the same things as me but the nation state, meh, not so much you know. What do you think about the nation state as a thing to feel love for? Yeah well for me it's very important not only to have individual way of thinking or values, it's important to have more collective values as solidarity to be able to...

How do you say... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to be able to embody collective values for me. Now, I'll let you in on what I was trying to hide from Ruba Gazal and everyone at this Sovereign Just event. I don't exactly speak French, at least not proficiently. So to have conversations with my francophone compatriots, I record them while nodding and smiling, and then later I play it back to my wife, Linda. Um, sure.

She speaks French so she can tell me what they were saying. To incarnate the collective values, for me one of the ways to do this is to have a country. We're not just individuals next to each other, but also a people who live together. This is, I think, something positive. If we're just individuals, it creates solitude. It removes much of what's important about collective human life.

And to have a country as well, it's a way to protect diversity of the world. We're very much under the hegemony of American culture. So to protect different cultures, especially for Quebec, it's helpful to be a country. Here I'm attempting to ask if Roubaix thinks nationalism and patriotism are an easier fit with right-wing politics. So worldwide, especially in Europe, when we say to be nationalist, that's like the right. But here in Quebec, that's not our history. In the 60s, with the liberation, the national liberation of Quebec, the consciousness that we're not just French Canadians, we're a nation of Quebecers.

We have a social safety net, free public schools, public health care, nationalization of electricity, all these kinds of projects were left-leaning. So you have to make reference to this history of Quebec to say today, to be nationalist, you can be a left-leaning person. This is our history. You need to reappropriate this nationalism for the left, this inclusive nationalism that opens the arms to everybody from the world.

Like me, I came to Quebec at 10, and I'm a Quebecer. Okay, well thank you so much for speaking to me as a new Quebecer myself now, just this year. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Hi Tom. We're going to leave a little earlier so I'm going to take some time off. We're going to go in a bit so I'm going to take attendance. Daniel, is Jean-Gras here? Ok, you can stop. We're going to go in a bit, so I'm going to take attendance. Is Daniel Gingras here? OK, you can stop.

We're on the bus for the Montreal chapter of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, who are here in Sherbrooke on a day trip. They're letting me join them and share their sandwiches. On the return journey, I get to sit beside the president. Hello, my name is Marianne Alpin. I am the President-General of the Society Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, which celebrates its 190th birthday this year. It's the 190th birthday of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, and Marianne is its 81st president and only the second woman. She's also the first president with grandparents from Syria.

What is the Society? The Society Saint-Jean-Baptiste, The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, its reason for living is the National Party. Linda? Its reason for living is the National Party. It has been following what's happening over the decades. Over the course of the decades, it's been here to protect the French parliament. We are non-partisan. We are non-partisan. We're out for different

commemorations, for protests, we're there. We're like lovers of country from 190 years. When the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society was only three years old, in 1837, a small war broke out in Quebec, the Patriots' War, also known as the Lower Canada Rebellion. It was an uprising against the British government that ended with several Montreal Patriots getting hanged. 58 more were deported. This story fires up Marianne's sense of duty to her Quebec nation.

The history of the patriots hasn't been taught that much. It is starting to be so more. So 58 patriots were sent to Australia. Those patriots were saved from being hanged by being sent far away from their families. I think often about this voyage is like a six months in the lower deck of a boat, like chained up. So it's important to share our love for our culture and our language, but also respect people who fought for us. We're fine here, with like a silver spoon in our mouths. We're not cold, we're not hot, we're not hungry. Well, it can happen, but this is voluntary. We work too much, we forgot to eat. But those patriots fought for what we enjoy today.

They died in a horrible discomfort. I think I'm asking Mary-Anne what she hopes to see change in Quebec's future. change your dreams. It's a difficult question to answer because I have a lot of things. I wish a lot of things. This is a question that's hard to answer because I have so many things that I wish. What I wish for the future for things like Flag Day, it's to make this more central in our lives. This starts in schools,

like our grandparents used to celebrate more. There were drawing contests, different kinds of activities in the 50s and 60s. I want for us to return to this kind of thing. We don't even have a choice with what's happening in the South. You would never see an American flag tattered. American flags with huge flags are always placed very prominently high up. But we too, it's a habit we've lost. This is a habit we've lost. So me, I hope that we can bring back this kind of habit. There's nothing partisan about it.

We're not for one party. The Quebec flag belongs to everyone. There are Anglophones who are here with us for Fête Nationale. It's important for them too. They also make part of our history in Quebec. For me, what I want, that we all be united under the fleur de lis, like a free human, liberal, progressive values. Merci. Merci, ça fait plaisir.

Thank you, that was fun. Good morning, I'm Peter Zosky. This is Morningside. I wasn't in Canada yet when the country almost lost Quebec in 1995, but one can sense the spirit of the times by listening to CBC Radio's archived broadcast from the morning after. I wonder if our office, our as in morning site, is typical. People came to work early today, I guess that isn't typical is it, unless you have to say I have say three hours of radio to put together. And amid their work in between some extra cups of coffee,

couldn't stop talking about last night, about the television coverage of so many people ever stared so long at a blue and red bar graph, about the phone calls they'd exchanged with friends, about moments and statements that stood out in their minds, a screen split between waving flags and sagging spirits, Jacques Perrezo's intemperate at best remark.

He is referring here to the sovereignist leader blaming their narrow loss on L'argent, vider vote ethnique. Money and the ethnic vote. We have, as I hope you heard me say before the news, many voices to hear from this morning, from premiers to pundits to poets, but we thought we'd start with a brief comment from Quebec. Guy Laforet is in our Quebec City studio, political scientist at Laval University and a Sovereignist. We thought we would start with him. Guy, good morning. Good morning, Peter.

What are your emotional reactions this morning? The major feeling is one of pensive-ness. People are pensive and they're not happy. Even those who triumphed last night were not that happy. Maybe I'll start with an anecdote. This morning, buying papers, I met two people from Toronto, and I won't name them. One is Francophone and the other is Anglophone, and the two are Quebecers. They voted last night. One is a former social democrat, and he voted yes, and the other one is an Anglophone, and she voted yes, too. one is an anglophone and she voted yes too. She voted yes because she believes that there's something going on in Quebec which is the

possibility of conciliation between liberalism and nationalism. The idea that that Quebec is not a ethnic tribe. The idea that Quebec is an autonomous political community. A pluralistic distinct society. So Guy Laforet kicks the discussion off with the claim that despite anything Jacques Parizeau said, Quebec is a pluralistic community bonding over liberal values. It's a claim Canadians sometimes make about Canada too. A few minutes later on the same show, Peter Zofsky speaks with the Manitoban poet Patrick Friesen. Gloria called Canada the great country of the 20th century and in a way it's true. We're the country of immigration. We're not a nation, although Quebec feels it's a nation.

And that's a problem, I think. I distrust nationalism or regionalism of any kind. I come from a background that doesn't believe particularly in flags and national anthems, but rather in a very considered and judicious sort of working out of a system that works for everyone. The dream of a state united by reasonableness and grown-up stuff, not simplistic imagery and rhyming verse. This more cerebral version of loving one's country is what some would call post-nationalist. The idea has endured a long time in Canadian politics, but it can sound, to some minds,

a bit weak. Oh Canada, come join us. This article is by Ross Douthat and read by an automated voice. With Donald Trump calling Canada America's 51st state, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote a provocative opinion piece in support of making that true. Writing in the New York Times, Douthat argued our post-national Canada has essentially become pointless and should now join the Americans in order to

"...participate in the great drama rather than watch from across the border." James, did you read this New York Times column by Ross Douthat? Yes. The sudden upsurge of Canada shouldn't exist as a mainstream idea among American conservatives is forcing Canadians of all stripes to explain why they think it's wrong and to ask rather hopefully if it's a joke.

It's not funny. Here's former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore speaking to podcaster Jesse Brown on the show Shortcuts from Canada land. We're a serious and independent country. We also, by the way, lost lives on 9-11. We fought alongside you on D-Day. We've got water bombers and Canadians risking lives from Quebec and British Columbia down in California right now trying to put out fires on your west coast. That's what friends do. You have each other's back. And to sort of joke about us as though we're not that big a deal, we're kind of just big Alaska with some big cities and a little bit of

French. It's not funny. Frankly, with respect, don't talk about us that way. It's not cool. Patriotism is always sat uncomfortably with me, but I tend to agree with what you say. It's not funny, A, because it's just not that funny. It's also not funny because the casual suggestion of imperialistic aggression to the greatest

ally America has, the casual suggestion that maybe rules-based order and like the nation-state doesn't matter, like borders don't matter, and the concept of allies doesn't matter. That's what's not funny. What makes this really not funny is that if push came to shove, they could do it. ["The New World"] Not so long ago, in the 1700s, the United States was going to be a new sort of country, bound together with reasonable ideas

and sensible democratic values. A contrast to ancient monarchies like that of the United Kingdom. Among the visionaries shaping the plans for this new nation was a Welshman, the radical dissenting preacher, Richard Price. He's the subject of a play called The Price of Change. It's the work of a small but patriotic Welsh theatre company. My name is Vic Mills. I'm a playwright based in Wales. I run a theatre company called Contemporary Ancient Theatre and we look at creating work linking the history of Wales and its communities with the present time.

Do you want to tell me about the play called The Price of Change? The Price of Change attempts to tell the story and introduce the world to Dr Richard Price, who I came to feel was somebody of enormous significance historically and had something valuable to say today, a philosopher, moral philosopher. And we tied that in in the play with the story of Wales today, looking perhaps a little bit at the possibility of an independent Wales politically from the UK

and used the works of Richard Price, perhaps to inspire that kind of future for the Welsh people. There's been an effort to boost Richard Price's reputation in recent years. A new biography, a new plaque at the home where he used to live. In 2023 there were exhibitions marking 300 years since his birth. Vic's play is part of this revival movement. He was a friend of the first feminists fought for the universal ballot, fought for education for people, for freedom, for American independence, for the French Revolutionary War,

and really fought on the side of, and argued the case for, freedom, for the vote, for financial security across classes and across genders, all sorts of things which weren't very popular at the time and are very well worth admiring now when you think we're talking about a man who died in the 1790s. One of Richard Price's best known sermons was was his discourse on the love of one's country. My design is to explain the duty we owe to our country and the nature, foundation, and proper expressions of that love to it, which we ought to cultivate. Did he have a particular insight, do you think, on the topic of how to love one's country? I think he did. I think he saw the love of one's country as being a very much a

kind of critical thing. He didn't see it as being some kind of patriotic fervor. He didn't see it as being my country first and last to hell with everybody else. His view was that people within their own country should want to work for the betterment of their country and that was how you demonstrated your love of it. He didn't see institutions as being the country, which is where he fell into kind of dispute with Parliament and with his peers. He saw country as being the people of the country. He saw the monarch as being the servant of the people, parliament as being the servants of the people. And that wasn't

a rhetorical term for him, it was a literal term. He believed that they were there to work for, and when they didn't deliver what the people needed in terms of freedom, then they should be removed. On Ideas, you're listening to episode two in our series on loving your country in the 21st century. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio One in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca.ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayaed. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is.

I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Tom, I just want to know what prompted you to do this series this year on loving your country in the first place? I moved to Quebec this year, and Quebec is kind of an interesting place to be in terms of questions of what country you think you're in. If you live on the east side of Montreal, as I do, it's very common to see Quebec flags on everyone's balconies and so on. To put a Canadian flag

on your balcony here, I think, would be extremely rude. Did you want to put a flag on your balcony? No. However, is there some expectation that one should? I certainly hear that from some of my friends who are a bit more conservative is that there is a problem with people lacking patriotism. That sort of results in a weakness of a country, a sort of moral flaw. But then other people, I guess, see patriotism itself as morally flawed. What's the question that you're trying to answer in this series? I suppose I want to hear what people come up with when they try to have a healthy love of country.

So they don't abandon patriotism. They're not going to say mean things about their country particularly and say this country is rubbish and should be got rid of. They're going to try and make it a healthy patriotism that accounts for the country's past, the things that you might find unethical about the country. So I'm interested in how people hold the two things together. And I mean, this is something that, you know, another sort of inciting incident, I suppose, was that I came across this thinker, Richard Price, a couple of years

ago, he had his 300th birthday. He defined country in a way that maybe sounds banal now I'm not sure if it sounds as interesting as it did at the time but the the idea that it is not loyalty to head of state. Which is the origin of countries was usually. Swearing an oath to a king or a warrior leader or something like that this idea that it is loyalty to the people who just happen to be there with you too, not to an ethnic group. That was very progressive. In pursuing particularly the interest of our country, we ought to carry our views beyond it. We should love it ardently, but not exclusively.

We ought to consider ourselves as citizens of the world and take care to maintain a just regard to the rights of the United States. He became a kind of consultant to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and so on, exchanging many letters and advising them on how to set their new democracy up. Unfortunately, some of his advice wasn't taken. For instance, he told them it would be crucial not to have slavery. He spoke out a great deal against slavery. Slavery was one of the things

that he was most concerned about. And interestingly, I mean, on a very personal note, he was, his closest friend in the world was Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin kept slaves personally, which was something that they discussed repeatedly. Price refused for Franklin to bring a slave with him when he came to his house in London as a servant. He wasn't going to have a slave in the house. I think Price was always somebody who didn't cut himself off from the people with whom he argued.

He understood that he was coming at a particular place in history and that he was the one arguing for change. And that the views of many people around him were the established views. And that didn't make him cut those people off. It made him engage in argument with them and always patiently. Vic Mills believes Price was right on all the big issues, except one, because Price was not a Welsh nationalist. He loved his Welshness and loved the area that he originally came from. But when he was talking about country, he was without exception talking about what

is now the United Kingdom and Ireland. On this point, Vic Mills' own love of country is sharply different. He's come to believe Wales should break off from Britain and become its own independent country. If you were to ask Welsh people what their nationality was, then very, very few of them would tell you that they were British. They would tell you that they were Welsh. I think if you were to ask English people, you would probably get quite a split between people who told you they were British and people who told you that they were English. I think the Celtic nations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are very aware that their identity is something different from that of the UK as a whole.

Wales is a country of three and a half million people and I think I've come to believe looking at the examples of, you know, say for instance a country like Lithuania, say for instance a country like Lithuania, which is considerably smaller than Wales and since its independence has worked very very successfully, you know as a member of Europe, but you know flourished and one of the things I think that is a that's a huge challenge to convince the people of Wales that they could survive independently. If you've got a large neighbor with a population of, you know, 65 million immediately next to you, where every element of your lives is tied in with theirs, then to believe that it's a good thing to separate yourself when all of the kind of political machinery,

all the power, all the media would tell you, oh no, Wales would never be able to be independent. I think I've come to believe that it's something that should be worked towards. Was there any connection between you coming to feel that way and the work you did on Richard Price? Yeah, very much so, yeah. I think I would have gone, described myself as somebody

who was kind of indie curious, as we say in Wales previously. The way it affected it for me, obviously price, it wouldn't have been an agenda item if you like. I don't think it would have been on anybody's kind of radar as a possibility. I think what Price saw was, felt an enormous excitement at the possibility of starting a nation with a clean slate. A sense that so many of the things that were preventing equality, preventing fairness in Britain at the time, were to do with its kind of class system to do with this monarchy, to do with the vested interests in this parliament. I think Price felt incredible excitement at the thought of what a blank page in a new nation where you could write your own constitution from scratch and that you didn't have to kind of have to remove hundreds if not thousands of years of history of privilege

and I think when I think about Wales that's what I think about in terms of price I think about the opportunity to to write a constitution for for a new country. Now when you put it like that I start to worry it's a mirage the idea that you could start with a clean slate I mean why well Wales is at least 1500 depending where you count the origins of Wales it's got a arguably two thousand years of history. Yeah no that's absolutely true and it is in some senses it is a kind of fantasy you know because people don't have emotional clean slates they don't have personal clean slates and there would be a kind of fantasy, you know, because people don't have emotional clean slates, they don't have personal clean slates, and there would be a group of people who would be given the task of doing that, and they all have their own histories to bring to that. There isn't any such thing in that

sense as a clean slate, but there's an opportunity, I think, to start. I think the other thing that we feel in Wales to some extent is that we don't have the weight of colonial guilt that England has. We don't have any sense of our kind of our glorious place in the world either. We don't think of ourselves in the way that I think many people with an English background and a sense of English history do. They do kind of glory in the past and feel there was a time when they ruled the world and wouldn't it be good if they did again, you know. Whereas I don't think there is any residue of that in Wales at all. There's a great national love, but there's also a kind of national humility. I think Wales would start from a point of not thinking that they were desperately important.

Vic, thank you so much for speaking with me. You're very welcome. Let us learn by such reflections to correct and purify this passion and to make it a just and rational principle of action. In the second paragraph of Richard Price's Discourse on the Love of One's Country, he makes the big claim that runs through everything else. Here it is. All our attachments should be accompanied, as far as possible, with right opinions. Love of country without the right opinions produces something very wicked, like the spirit

that drives empires to expand. What was the love of their country among the old Romans? It was, in general, no better than a principle holding together a band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own. That's the wrong kind of patriotism, according to Price. So how to cultivate the right sort, the one that's accompanied, as far as possible, with right opinions? I guess that means there's a point where it's impossible. Sorting this out takes a subtle and serious mind, so I called up one of my old colleagues from the CBC's comedy quiz, Because News.

Hi, I am Marta Chavez. I was born in Nicaragua, but I have been living in Canada a long, long time since 1980 something. When Martha was growing up in Nicaragua, her country was led by a dictator, Anastasio Somoza, later to be overthrown by the Marxist Sandinistas. to be overthrown by the Marxist Sandinistas. The dictatorship in those days lasted 40 years and they were basically puppets of the United States. Nationalism in Nicaragua I understood. The big bully was taking all of our resources, the dictator was giving away, you know, the chiquita banana, the minerals, everything, as long as they kept him in power.

We were there for their usage and their pleasure. I understand nationalism in that sense. I don't understand that in the United States sense, that for them, nationalism means that you have the right because you love your country to go invade whatever country you please. I don't understand it that way. Now we are going through the crisis of the United States talking that they want to invade,

I mean that they want to annex Canada. And I tell you, when I was young, I never participated in the revolution. I didn't. Like a lot of people my age were getting involved through the Catholic schools that we were attending. But now, even with my bad foot, if they tell me it's a revolution, even with my bad foot, I'm going to go defend Canada's sovereignty. Are you a patriot?

Canadian patriot? I hate that word patriot. I hate because first of all, it comes from patriarchy. It's how would I say, I find it xenophobic, as I have felt in my own skin by people who have told me, you are not from Canada, and consider themselves patriots. I find it chauvinist, chauvinistic you say? Chauvinistic and racist in a way. Because patriotism not only points to theism not only is it points to the father

But also it points to the genetic line. Is that what you mean when you say it's racist? Yes That's what I mean as I guess when I hear the American patriots We're patriots, so they mean they are defending their borders from us the authority people Coming to work almost for free in their fields. We are patriots. And then they completely ignoring what their patriotism involved, which was robbing the indigenous people from their lands.

That does bring up, of course, some people do feel a very strong attachment to where their ancestors lived. Do you have any sense of that? Do you know where your great, great, great grandparents lived and do you feel any attachment to that land? I still feel attached to Nicaragua because that's where I was born.

It was my grandparents were born, my ancestors were born. My ancestors, they came in the 1920s. They came from, they were Sephardic Jews. So one side of my family, according to 23andMe. I didn't know that when I was in Nicaragua, only a rumor in the family, because people that went to Nicaragua became Catholics right away to adapt. There was not even a synagogue. So you know, I don't share like a lot of people are they are nostalgic about, oh, there is nothing better than the Nicaraguan gallo pinto, which is the Gallo Pinto is rice and beans. You know, there is.

There is better food than the Nicaraguan Gallo. What are you talking about? You know, you know, I don't feel that romanticism. The reason Martha is in Canada is complicated. The story involves relatives getting in trouble with both the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinistas. It also involves Martha's mother reading her diary and discovering she was a lesbian.

The upshot is Martha came to Canada to study and then found she couldn't go back home. So she stayed here and became a standup comedian. I'm not from here, I'm not from there. I am from the country of women and the country of LGBTQ, LMP plus people, that's the flag that I completely embrace. And in Canada is where I could flourish as that person. In Nicaragua I would have never.

In Nicaragua I would have had maybe in those days to marry somebody that I didn't like and make a lot of people unhappy or become a nun, which was another alternative. I would have never been able to do this that I do to be a standup comedian. I would have never been able to do a lot of things. Do I miss my roots? Sometimes I feel this melancholy.

Do you feel melancholic about England sometimes? Wales. About Wales sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I feel this, I see like a picture of the volcanoes and then I cry and I don't know why I'm crying. Hmm.

You said that in a way your national belonging or whatever is to women and to the LGBTQ community but does love of country mean much to you then? Yeah well I love this country with all my heart. I love Canada with all my heart and I think it's a selfish love probably because I could flourish that in another country, maybe it wouldn't have been as easy. And I like the Canadian idiosyncrasies. And I lived in Quebec. I live in Quebec.

I feel nostalgic about Quebec sometimes. And I understood their nationalism in the way that maybe English Canadians didn't understand that they didn't want their culture to be completely erased. And you said you go out with your bad foot and fight the Americans if you have to? If I have to, because now I don't have estrogen. That's why. Now I am ready to invade a country and I have rage, Tom. I have every day.

I wake up with this rage. Like I won't be listening to the news anymore for the four years, although we should. But listen, but it's just so it's just, it's just like the I saw people and things that I didn't see in my country, in my country to get the for the poor people to get rights had to kill other people. Here in Canada, I realized that you do it by writing letters, by assisting these, by writing to your MPP, by doing this, by doing that. And now I'm seeing rights that people fought for millennia, like a right for a woman to

choose to be just taken away like that. I'm seeing the, soon they're coming for gay marriage in the United States, you will see. And all of these fights for human rights of people can get erased by the whim of that monster. And if they come for Canada, that's gonna happen to us too. Plus, you know, do you think I'm going to be able to go see my bad

foot without free healthcare? No! Martha's wholehearted love of Canada has taken a few hits. I went as a delegate of the Nobel Women's Initiative in 2012 to Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. And I found things about Canada that I was not aware of. I went to hear the testimony of the victims of the Canadian mining company. And my heart got broken, because I was so naive that I thought that only the gringos,

only the Americans were the ones like Pelagin and then I find the Canadians. Why did that bother you? I'm not, why did that bother you that bad things were happening, but why did it bother you that it was Canadians too? Because I have been saying that Canada is the best country in the world. And I like to prove it.

And then come the residential schools. Another heartbreak. Another heartbreak to the point that I felt about should I really celebrate Canada Day. But then I thought, well, I will celebrate for what Canada is good, for what Canada has been to me as a person, acknowledging that there is these problems. I think that in order to move from a horrendous things that have happened, you have to acknowledge and educate yourself

and not have like this, I, I, I, no. Because I don't think that in the, I, I, I have a lot, I have indigenous friends, I'm gonna ask them, what do you think about this thing about, about annexing Canada to the United States? Because that would be interesting to know their thought because since they have always felt that this is a country that failed them interesting to know their thought because since they have always felt that this is a country that failed them, you know, but for selfish reasons, I do love Canada.

Well, thanks so much for speaking to me, Martha. Thank you, honey. Let me know when it's on and I'm gonna hear it, okay? The duty to physically fight for one's country, even when you have a bad foot, is an abstract concept for most citizens during peacetime. Abstract enough we can speak of it jokingly. But the joke only lasts for as long as it isn't really a duty in the immediate sense. A sobering moment arrives for members of the chattering class when events cause them to take this question seriously. Would I be among the first to sign up? I mean, this is such an interesting question and honest to God one that I have in recent days asked myself. David Moskrop is a political commentator, which I think by definition means he's a member of the chattering classes.

He's also the author of a book called Too Dumb for Democracy, Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones. I asked myself, would I do it? it. And I think there are moments where I think that I would if your country gets invaded. And the point of the invasion is to change the country. But you think there's something valuable about the country and the way things are done. I think there's potentially an impetus there to say, okay, well, then I I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is, my life on the line to go and protect that if I truly deeply believe that. Do you have any other citizenships, David?

No, no, I don't. My family is half American, half Canadian. And I feel a lot of kinship with the United States, with people there, both family and friends there, and American culture, much of which I really enjoy, American sports, much of which I really enjoy, the beauty of the country. And yet I could imagine being in a position where if troops crossed the border, all that would be torn apart.

And it's so fascinating to think about because in many ways that's such a mundane historical and global phenomenon for us would be extraordinary to even think and even say these words it's extraordinary and six months ago you might have even said it was unthinkable for many many parts of the rest of the world today and throughout history that's sort of like oh no that's just Tuesday. Oh no, that's just Tuesday. David points out that joining the patriotic fight on the side of your beloved country against a wicked invader is a relatively simple matter compared to what can happen in the real world when order breaks down and alliances become stressed. Okay, well maybe I would fight to defend Canada

against a foreign invader because I think there's something valuable about what we're doing as deeply flawed as I think it is. But what if it was an internal struggle and you loved your country? You can imagine a nationalism that expressed itself in a struggle against people in your own country. And if you go back to 1995, 94, 95 in the

Quebec Referendum, afterwards there was speculation that the feds were ready to send tanks into the province to protect federal property if the yes side had won. I also remember reading about the federalists previously saying in the 1980s, well, if Quebec wants to leave Canada, that's one thing, but perhaps the Cree, you want to leave Quebec. And what do you do from there? And just considering that and considering nationalism, it just made me think of the layers to these things, because you can imagine standing up for a country, we call that patriotism and pride and nationalism.

And then what happens when you're asked to subdivide that a little bit, whether it's regionally or provincially or culturally or even ideologically across factions? Yeah, I mean, I am very willing to actually say yes, I tried to apply my skills in a way that maybe wasn't going to get me killed on day one, but I would certainly want to join the fight against an invading US force. Now what happens if Alberta decides to ally with the invading forces? Am I going to go and, you know, apply that same patriotic violence against people in Lethbridge? I don't, I'm, it gets pretty tricky. Well, it's, it it, that's it.

And again, I don't wanna reduce it, these complicated things too much, but at the risk of doing just that, I mean, we know of studies where, you know, the classic one of teachers dividing the students into brown eyes and blue eyes, and you all of a sudden feel an affinity towards team blue eyes or brown eyes,

or you take a hockey team and you all of a sudden feel an affinity towards team blue eyes or brown eyes. Or you take a hockey team and you give one side a red penny and a side of blue penny and all of a sudden teammates actually feel divided against one another into red and blue just because you give them different colored shirts, even though they've been previously united. And that's why I find patriotism nationalism so, so fascinating because it is a strong force to unite people, but it is inherently itself capable of being divided along arbitrary lines too, or substantive lines. It just becomes an ever cascading series of questions about what you want to stand up for and why.

And sometimes the answer is a substantive, like I truly believe in this ideology or this way of living, this way of being, or it's, well no, this is just the group I'm in and I'm going to stand up for my group because this is what we've been doing through eons of human psychology and we're kind of wired to do that. And this is just the sort of thing that David warns about in his book. Feelings that seem the most important and the most deep can also be the ones that are dangerously easy to manipulate. To come back to the question that prompted all of this was, you know, in the coming weeks and months there's a very real risk that patriotism, nationalism, love and concern of country will

be weaponized by people, foreign and domestic, for their own interests and I think people ought to be very very careful because politicians for sure are going to be using this to try to court people, to try to move them towards their movement, towards their party. It's very very easy to get swept up in that but sometimes worth taking a step back and asking yourself I'm moving along with this right now, but why am I moving along with it? Why am I here? Why do I wanna defend this or that?

What is it about this that is important to me? You know, what am I willing to give up for it? What am I not willing to give up for it? And because otherwise you become a tool of someone else's political aims. David, thank you. My pleasure. This is absolutely wonderful. You were listening to Loving Your Country in the 21st Century, Step 2 by Ideas producer Tom Howell.

Thanks to Nicholas Decarry from the CBC Archives Department. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes, including Step 1 from this series on loving your country. You can show your support for ideas by giving us a good rating or review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. You can also send your reactions directly to us at ideas at cbc.ca. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso.

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