Being Canadian is something we should be proud of.
However, people tend to focus more on the negatives than the positives, and in doing so, manage to blind themselves to the more important ‘big’ picture.
Take, for example, our current fiscal woes.
Most people see headlines in the paper or online that use phrasing like budget cuts, currency devaluation, and financial ruin, together with words such as inflation and unemployment, and they run for the hills.
Why wouldn’t they?
Those are some scary words, especially when you have children.
Even if they don’t – in my personal opinion the vast majority of commentators online share this problem , and some of these affected people have more than one mortgage and a few extra bills that maybe the rest of us don’t, so before we start hurling disparaging commentary at them over poor choices or making woulda-shoulda statements, maybe we ought to remind ourselves that this isn’t the era of pre-confederation.
We are all in this struggle together.
Whether it is oil or manufacturing or some other industry, the effects of its failings can be and are felt all across our nation.
Pointing the finger at one Prime Minister or another and playing the blame-game is ludicrous, because we are just wasting our time and energy.
The truth is, our country should have used all of the time it spent talking about diversification actually diversifying, but we didn’t and so here we are instead.
We’re fighting over yesturday’s spilled milk.
While we are doing so, our society is wasting valuable time and losing ground as the situation goes from bad to worse.
I don’t have any solutions, I’m not an economist. I would suggest however that we all stop focusing so much on provincial identity, and instead highlight our national one, sharing in a kumbayah moment of solidarity with each other, and then let’s get some serious thinking done.
We won’t be fixing this mess on our own, after all. Not this time.
We need to pull up our socks and ditch the elitist mentality, whether we are from here, from out-of-province, or from another country entirely.
None of us are those people any more, and we haven’t been them since our economy went bust.
We are simply Canadian now and that is all that matters.
It probably doesn’t seem like it right now, but we ought to be proud of that fact.
We need to remember that we’ve faced recessions before.
We survived then and we’ll survive now.
The point I’m trying to make is that it works better for all of us if we work together, supporting and encouraging one another, rather than facing these times with the I’m-from-
We are better than that.
