Yuan Yi Zhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford.
In February, a Canadian singer changed a word to the English-language version of O Canada, the country’s national anthem, during a performance at a basketball game in the United States.
Instead of “our home and native land”, the usual second line of the anthem, she sang “our home on native land”, in reference to Canada’s indigenous peoples and the idea that Canada was built on land stolen from them.
A few months later, 41 per cent of English-speaking Canadians are in favour of enacting this new and slightly blood-and-soil lyric into law, while 44 per cent oppose it. If the change does occur, it will be the second modification to the anthem’s English lyrics in five years: in 2018, “in all thy sons command”, crowds now sing the gender-neutral “in all of us command”.
Meanwhile, Canada’s francophones stand in happy ignorance of this debate, because the French version of O Canada is an entirely different song, whose lyrics have never been modified since they were composed in 1880. It shares the first line (“O Canada”) with the English-language version, but just about nothing else.
Instead of bland, uncontroversial patriotic invocations such as “True patriot love in all of us command” and “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee”, the French version speaks of a Canada whose “arm knows how to carry the cross” and whose “valour soaked in faith / Will protect our homes and our rights” – sentiments which will make any self-respecting Canadian Anglophone liberal glow as red as the maple leaf flag.
Or to put it more bluntly, the French version of O Canada is a nineteenth-century Catholic nationalist battle hymn; the English version is that of an increasingly post-national state.
In practice, this discrepancy matters less than one would think: many French-speaking Canadians would not be caught dead singing “O Canada” which, despite its impeccably French Canadian origins, is viewed among Quebec nationalists as a soapy imposition from English Canada.
(There is also a bilingual version of the anthem, which is awkwardly sung in Montreal and Ottawa, the country’s two only bilingual cities, and essentially nowhere else.)
Instead, to many Quebeckers, their de facto national hymn is “Gens du pays”, an even soapier tune from 1975 whose chorus runs “Folks of the land, it is your turn / to let yourselves speak of love”, and which most English Canadians have never heard of.
Even if Quebeckers (who comprise the majority of Canada’s Francophones) cared about O Canada, it is dubious that the sentiments expressed by the new lyrics – that all non-indigenous Canadians are merely guests of the territory’s original inhabitants – will be found acceptable, since most Quebeckers view themselves as an indigenous group who were victims of (British) colonialism, rather than as descendants of colonisers themselves.
The fact that Canada effectively has two national anthems, sung in parallel with increasingly different lyrics, is a small manifestation of how Canadian national unity, a national obsession among Canadian elites for the country’s entire history, is often only achieved through English and French Canada ignoring what is happening on the other side of the linguistic and national divide.
Thus, Justin Trudeau will enthusiastically praise Canada’s multiculturalism and openness to different cultures in English, while remaining carefully noncommittal when asked about Quebec’s ban on headscarves and turbans on government workers.
Provincial defiance of federal law is condemned robustly when it emanates from, say, Alberta; but when Quebec recently unilaterally and illegally amended the Constitution of Canada to abolish the oath of allegiance, nothing could be heard from Ottawa.
And while bilingualism is promoted by the federal government across Canada, no federal political party will dare discuss Quebec’s language laws, which have been recently restricted even further to crush whatever remains of the province’s English-speaking minority (visit any Quebec government website in English and you will be warned that you are only allowed to read the page if you have a legal entitlement to use government services in English.)
A generation ago, many Canadians thought that the country’s breakup was inevitable. Today, Quebec separatism is, if not a fringe cause, certainly not one which is likely to be realised any time soon. But true national unity, not in form but in spirit, remains as elusive as ever.