Our discovery of Canadaâs Celtic ancestry begins in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where in 1976, for some months, I taught French, grades three to nine, at an international school. This was decades before the digital revolution turned the world into a global village. Twice a week, my wife, Sheena, and I would walk four kilometres each way through stultifying heat to the Canadian consulate to read wire-service stories from home.
The consulate had posters on its office walls, among them three spectacular views of the Rockies, one each of Mount Rundle, Lake Louise, and Emerald Lake. Ridiculous as it sounds, these posters of Banff National Park brought tears to my eyes. But I visited the consulate to read the latest news from home, especially about the rise of the Parti Québécois, which wanted to take Quebec out of Canada. As a Canadian I was feeling homesick and threatened.
And now I came up against an African activist-intellectual, Kofi Buenor Hadjor, who insisted that Canada was not an independent country and never would be. A political exile originally from Ghana, Kofi had been a leading figure in the revolutionary government of the late Kwame Nkrumah, and would go on to write hefty books with titles like Africa in an Era of Crisis and On Transforming Africa. He knew a surprising amount about Canada because, in addition to having taken advanced degrees at Stanford and Oxford Universities, he had studied at McGill in Montreal.
This he revealed only later. First, he blindsided me, without intending malice, at the School of Journalism in front of about forty students. He was the schoolâs founding director. I had applied to teach there, and qualified because I had taken a journalism degree at Ryerson and worked as a reporter at the Toronto Star. Kofi had invited me to give a trial lecture about journalism in Canada. The classroom was sweltering hot, despite the giant fans whirring overhead. My talk went wonderfully well and the students spontaneously applauded.
But then Kofi picked up a piece of chalk and said that if I had no objection, he would provide a little context. He explained to the class that Canada was not really an independent country. First, it remained subservient to Great Britain, which retained final approval over constitutional amendments. Second, Canadaâs economy was so closely intertwined with that of the United States that it could never act independently. He drew arrows on the blackboard as he spoke, highlighting American ownership of Canadian oil and gas.
When he was done, Kofi asked if I wished to add anything. I had taken a few Canadian history courses, and poked around on my own, and I managed to respond that British approval under the Statute of Westminster was a mere formality. So Canada was essentially independent of Britain. And as for the Americans, what about the Vietnam War? Canada had refused to participate, and instead welcomed thousands of draft dodgersâsurely a gesture demonstrating that, despite our close economic ties to the United States, we could still act independently.
Heading home, I wasnât satisfied with my response. I had said nothing about how, during the American Revolution, when Benjamin Franklin visited Montreal to seek support for the insurrection, francophone Quebecers sent him packing. Thanks to the Quebec Act, they already enjoyed more freedom of language and religion than they would as Americans. I had said nothing about how, during the War of 1812, Canadians beat back an American invasion. Or how Confederation was designed specifically to defend against the American doctrine of manifest destiny.
I wasnât satisfied. But a few days later, Kofi offered me the job teaching journalism. I thought it might be more interesting than teaching French to children, and was about to accept when, back in Canada, the Parti QuĂ©bĂ©cois won the provincial election and came to power in Quebec. Having been abroad for a year, suddenly I needed to get home. I declined Kofiâs offer and, at the end of the school term, returned to Montreal.
All this came flooding back to me in Ottawa almost four decades later, in May 2012. I was visiting the capital and found myself with a free afternoon. Out for a walk, I passed the Parliament Buildings and realized that, although I was a month late, this was my chance to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Canadian independence: April 17, 1982. That was when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau patriated the Canadian constitution, and so the date when Canada became formally independent from Britain.
The House of Commons was not in session. I rode an elevator up into the Peace Tower and made my way to a window looking out over Parliament Hill. Thirty years before, tens of thousands had gathered here to watch Trudeau and Queen Elizabeth sign the Constitution Act in an outdoor ceremony. They were on a stage that had been set up directly below where I now stood watching people come and go in the sunshine.
Before witnessing the queenâs signature, Trudeau had given an incisive speech. He observed that Canada âbecame an independent country for all practical purposes in 1931, with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. But by our own choice, because of our inability to agree upon an amending formula at that time, we told the British Parliament that we were not ready to break this last colonial link.â
With the proclamation of the Constitution Act, Canada not only became independent of Britain but also gained a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that, as Trudeau noted, âdefines the kind of country in which we wish to live.â That Charter, he added, reinforces minority language rights, upholds the equality of women and the rights of disabled persons, and ârecognizes our multicultural character.â That last clause, I reflected, announcing the pluralism inherent in the Constitution Act, marked Canadaâs emergence as the worldâs first postmodern nation.
As I gazed out over Parliament Hill, I remembered that sweltering afternoon in Dar es Salaam when Kofi Hadjor had insisted that Canada was not an independent country. By now, I thought, surely he would have amended this view. Unaware that he had recently passed after a long illness, I fantasized running into him down below, out front of the Parliament Buildings. I would take him for a beer; why not? Maybe hit the patio at the DâArcy McGee Pub on Sparks Street.
I would tell him: look, see? Canadaâs evolutionary approach works. Three decades have passed since Trudeau snapped that last constitutional link with Britain. As for subservience to the United States, we not only went our own way during the Vietnam War, as I told you long ago, but we did so again more recently. In March of 2003, under Prime Minister Jean ChrĂ©tien, Canada refused to join an American-led âcoalition of the willingâ in invading Iraq. Later, looking back, ChrĂ©tien told the Huffington Post, âWeâre an independent country, and in fact it was a very good occasion to show our independence.â
Quaffing a cold one in the DâArcy McGee, I would tell Kofi, yes, Canadians go along and go along. But eventually, we reach a point. This is an independent country, I would tell him. Pushed to the wall, Canadians just say no. We try to be polite about it. But no, we wonât take orders from Britain. No, we wonât go to war against Vietnam. No, we wonât make war on Iraq. Sorry, no. Independence is a bedrock value, I would tell Kofi, maybe pounding the table a bit. A bedrock value we inherited from the Scots and the Irish, courtesy of such figures as Michael Collins, William Wallace, Theobald Wolfe Tone, and Robert the Bruce.
We got lost in the dirt roads north of Clonakilty. We were looking, Sheena and I, for the spot where Michael Collins got killed in an ambush. According to historian Tim Pat Coogan, Collins was âthe man who made Ireland.â For my purposes, he was the man who most clearly embodies Celtic independence in a Canadian mode. Collins represents one of the five bedrock values. Culturally, politically, he is one of Canadaâs ancestors. I wanted to know more about him. I wanted detail and texture. But first I needed context.
Since 1801, when the Act of Union came into effect, uniting Ireland with Great Britain, the Irish had voted repeatedly to reverse that legislation and renew their independence. But in the British Parliament at Westminster, the Irish representatives were outnumbered five to one, and could make no headway. In the nineteenth century, major rebellions were quashed in 1848 and 1867. But then, in 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood organized what would come to be called the Easter Rising. Its objective: political independence.
The First World War had been raging for almost two years. With British forces heavily engaged in Europe, among them a good many Irish troops, roughly 1,200 nationalist volunteers seized key buildings in Dublin. They set up military headquarters in the General Post Office (GPO) in the heart of the city on what is now OâConnell Street. Michael Collins, age twenty-five, had got wind of the impending insurrection in London, where he worked in financial services: white collar, blue pinstriped suit. Having wangled a transfer to join in the uprising, he ended up serving as the aide-decamp to Joseph Plunkett, one of the principal organizers.
Collins was present when, out front of the GPO, Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republicâa document now displayed in the front window of that edifice. In part, it says: âWe declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right . . . In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty . . . Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State.â
The document continues, noting that, six times in the last three centuries, the Irish had taken up arms to assert their independence. It declares that Ireland should be a republic, not a monarchy; that this republic would guarantee âreligious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizensâ; that it would be committed to universal suffrage (women could vote); and that it would treat âall the children of the nation equally.â For Collins and his fellow rebels, the reading of that proclamation was the highlight of the Easter Rising.
Initially caught off guard, the British authorities regrouped. Based at Dublin Castle on the other side of the River Liffey, they were less than one kilometre from the post office. Before long, they had more than sixteen thousand well-equipped soldiers in Dublin. The rebels fought fiercely but, partly because so many Irishmen were off fighting on the continent as part of the British army, they attracted few new followers. They inspired no general uprising. After six days of bloody fighting in the streets of the city, they surrendered. More than 450 people had died in the battle: 64 rebels, 132 government troops, and 254 civilians.
U.S. Library of Congress, cph.3b15295.
The visionary freedom fighter Michael Collins addresses a crowd in Cork on St. Patrickâs Day, March 17, 1922. Three months before, on December 6, 1921, Collins had signed an Anglo-Irish treaty promising Ireland âthe same constitutional status . . . as the Dominion of Canada.â Five months later, he was dead.
Militarily, the Easter Rising was a debacle. The British brought two thousand Irish prisoners, Michael Collins among them, to a gymnasium in Richmond Barracks. By taking advantage of a momentary lapse, Collins managed to shuffle off and blend in among those to be treated leniently. The British then made the mistake of executing sixteen of the rebel leaders, among them the Scottish-born James Connolly, so badly wounded that he had to be tied upright in a chair to be shot. This ruthlessness made martyrs of the rebels and turned many otherwise undecided Irish against the English.
Collins was one of twenty-five hundred Irish prisoners deported to Great Britain. At Frongoch internment camp in Wales, where men slept thirty to a wooden hut, he got himself elected leader of a revolutionary cell. He orchestrated an effective campaign of passive resistance. Also, having seen what happened when rebels occupied buildings, and so became sitting ducks for better-armed forces, he began conducting workshops in guerrilla tactics. Biographer Tim Pat Coogan describes Collins as âthe founder of modern guerrilla warfare.â
The Irish nationalists had lost the battle of 1916, but the underground war was just beginning. As Frank OâConnor writes in The Big Fellow, the detectives had âleft behind them the one really dangerous man, the man who in a few short years would kill off the craftiest of them and render the rest so impotent that he would be able to walk the streets of Dublin undisguised.â
Michael Collins was born in October 1890 at Samâs Cross, seven kilometres west of Clonakilty in southwestern Ireland. The youngest of eight children, he grew up on a ninety-acre farm at nearby Woodfield. When he was six, his staunchly republican father died of a heart attack. Legend has it that the man pointed at Michael from his deathbed: âHeâll be a great man yet and will do things for Ireland.â
At fifteen, Collins moved to Clonakilty to board with one of his sisters and her husband. He studied with a schoolmaster who belonged to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society dedicated to making Ireland an independent republic. From him, Collins learned to revere Theobald Wolfe Tone, the most articulate leader of Irelandâs 1798 Rebellion. Also, he worked at a local newspaper, the West Cork People, founded by his sisterâs husband. Starting i...
