Loading ...Raymond J. de Souza: Canada is systematically erasing its national heroes
Can a nation exist without heroes? Canada seems to be attempting just that.
Under the current federal government, the targets have been Conservative figures from the past, Sir John A. Macdonald principal among them. But soon the wheel will turn and grind up Liberals, too — beginning with Wilfrid Laurier and ending, perhaps, with Jean Chrétien, the last of the Indian Affairs ministers of the assimilationist school.
A nation without heroes quickly becomes a country without stories, or without inspiring ones. The absence of stories is the erasure of history. Just as not every house is a home, so too not every land can be a nation. It takes devoted residents to make a house a home; it takes heroes to make a land a nation.