My Canada Includes the St. Lawrence

The current initiative by the NDP and the “premiers” of the three territories to change the national motto infuriates me.

They want o change “From sea to sea” to “from sea to sea to sea,” to, as the Ottawa Citizen puts it, “capture the true vastness of a country bounded by three oceans.”

“It is much more reflective of this federation, of this great country of ours, Canada, to ensure that all Canadians and the global community recognize that Canada is made up of a country from sea to sea to sea," says Yukon first minister Dennis Fentie.

The whole thing strikes me as ignorant and illiterate.

Doesn’t anybody know any more where the motto comes from?

It’s a quote froim the Book of Psalms: Psalm 72, verse 8. Here it is in the venerable King James version:

“He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.”

That already clearly acknowledges Canada in two dimensions, not just east-west but north-south: from the river, the St. Lawrence, to the pole, the ends of the earth.

In fact, the proposed emasculation reduces geographical accuracy and shrinks Canada: it implies we are withdrawing our historical claim to the Arctic ice mass, and it drops the reference to our southern border. It loses the great historical significance of the St. Lawrence to our national life, while retreating from rather than adding to the significance of our north.

It also, of course, loses a beautiful cultural allusion; the new version would make the Biblical reference invisible. And there are other fine things lost in this: the reference to “dominion,” once the official name of our nation. To (if you check the Psalm as a whole) ideals of justice, peace, resistance to oppression, and care for the poor. All lost to some wrongheaded idea of political correctness.

My conclusion: we need to teach more history in our classrooms.