It is the first day of 2019, a year in which I have resolved to write more. I haven’t written anything on this blog since just before the election of 2016. No further explanation is necessary.
Some days ago, I was in a Holiday Inn in Burlington, Ontario. I was in the city to visit family and we opted to stay in a hotel to be less of a burden. We had been to this particular hotel before, and like our previous stay, we found that the hotel was filled with eight year old boys and their fathers as there was nearby hockey tournament. And this was fine. We knew not to book a room near the atrium lest the hockey dads would get too drunk and start singing through the night.
During our breakfast at the hotel, I passed a table as I made my way to the buffet table. There was middle-aged man and a small boy eating breakfast. The boy was wearing a t-shirt reading, Everyone Loves a Canadian Boy.
And I was a bit thunderstruck when I saw it.
It might be necessary for you to know that just before breakfast, I was reading the 2018 Massey Lectures, Tanya Talaga’s All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, which explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. I had just finished the third lecture, The Third Space that describes the scale and the depth of the horrific abuse that Indigenous boys and girls have endured at the hands of those who were supposed to care for them.
And so when I read the T-shirt, I thought to myself, “That’s just not true. It’s never been true.”
If you don’t think you are ever going to read the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, I strongly recommend reading All Our Relations in its stead.
I’m not entirely sure what I am going to write about in this blog in 2019. When I first conceived of The Magnetic North, I had hopes to write about technology, utopia, and the Anthropocene.
But if today’s writing is any indication, it is going to be about the Canada that we need to see. We need a Canada in which every child is loved.