To My Late Father, Mel Hurtig: We Need You Now

It’s a disorienting thing to feel awkward about the casual greetings I’ve become used to doling out. There’s the polite opening line in my professional correspondences: “I hope this email finds you well.” Or, to the neighbour I see while sorting the recycling, the wave and a “How are you doing?”

I’m guessing that most people I communicate with on a regular basis are not, in fact, doing well.

Those who are paying attention to the news are at a loss to put into words what is happening. It’s been a mind-numbing month, and we seem to be stunned immobile.

I keep reaching for the phone. There is one person I want to talk to right now, but he’s not here. My dad, the former politician, bookseller, publisher and activist Mel Hurtig, was often called “Captain Canada” by the press.

My dad made a career of caring for this country and acknowledging its flaws. For as much as he sought to educate Canadians on our great potential, when he became agitated by problems such as inequity, foreign control, militarization or increasing poverty, he immediately set out to problem-solve.

He did this by writing, speaking and gathering Canadians together; by forming the Council of Canadians, by writing about poverty in Canada, by organizing a conference on the dangers of a nuclear arms race, and by starting a political party that would tackle all the issues which, in his view, held Canada back from becoming the best it could be.

He epitomized the phrase “Don’t just complain, do something about it!” He was tireless, bold and fearless.

I grew up waving the Canadian flag. I guess you’d have called my parents nationalists, although that word is problematic. It has a connotation that doesn’t capture the love, and critical eye, my dad instilled in us.

Because as much as he called himself a nationalist, he was also a fierce protector of Canada’s sovereignty — and he dedicated his intellectual and public life to its defence.

A voracious learner, and a believer in Canada’s potential

Mel was a voracious learner, on his own terms; he was never one for classrooms and formal teaching, but something made him want to surround himself with knowledge.

He began noticing Canada’s inequities, and the wealth and promise it held as well. He saw the flaws and sought solutions through economic sovereignty and national pride.

He saw the differences between our mammoth neighbour to the south and the country his parents had fled to. He listened to academic activists like George Grant, and young journalists and writers like Peter C. Newman and Margaret Atwood, who saw the value of a country like Canada protecting its cultural sovereignty in the face of an American behemoth.

Mel’s fierce Canadian pride was there from the time he opened his first bookstore, Hurtig Books in Edmonton, at the age of 24. He read through the entire economics section of his store, then turned to philosophy, art and fiction.

He lamented, in his bookstores, how the vast number of titles available were American, and how the schools his children attended taught from textbooks that provided false or no information on our country.

In the early 1970s, he sold his stores to open a publishing company that would try to right some of these issues. He published books on Canada, by Canadians, and didn’t shy away from subjects that were critical of the government.

The first book he published was The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., which included critical essays on the relationship between Canada and the United States. Contributors included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy and many others.

That book went on to be a No. 1 bestseller, and was followed the next year by another bestseller, The Unjust Society by Cree leader, lawyer and teacher Harold Cardinal.

Mel saw the flaws in this nation and sought to solve them by shining a light on them. In 1985, he published the first edition of The Canadian Encyclopedia in 1985. He knew there was a thirst for Canadians to learn about themselves from text that was created by Canadians, for Canadians. And he was right: 154,000 copies were sold in the first four days.

He did this work, tirelessly, for years. Throughout the course of his career, Mel did not veer from his beliefs — that this country had the potential to be a great and wealthy nation that cared for all of its citizens. He saw the natural resources we had; the excellent schools and passionate citizens; the vast and beautiful space from coast to coast to coast, and the capacity to thrive under a social welfare model that would ensure that every person in Canada would have the opportunity to live well.

He believed in a country that would invest in itself through research and development, and the manufacturing of our natural resources here in Canada.

Mel was the chair of the Committee for an Independent Canada. The organization was conceived of in the late 1960s to encourage then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to establish the Foreign Investment Review Agency to stop the buyout of Canadian companies by American corporations.

The group had success incorporating into law controls over land acquisition by non-residents and tougher rules over foreign takeovers, which ultimately led to the creation of Petro-Canada, as well as tougher rules regarding Canadian content on radio and television.

In the 1980s, when free trade came along, Mel started the Council of Canadians, a national organization founded in response to fears of the erosion of Canadian sovereignty under the leadership of the newly elected Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Mel wrote extensively about the ways in which Canada was failing its citizens, and the ways in which it could be stronger. His books landed on the bestseller lists each time he released a new one.

Right up until his death at the age of 84, he studied academic reports, journals, newspapers and Statistics Canada reports daily, and was more convinced than ever that the great number of foreign corporate takeovers of our companies and resource sectors posed an almost insurmountable threat to our sovereignty and our ability to govern ourselves.

But within all of those books, he also provided answers.

Among a long list of rallying cries, he saw the importance of democratic reform that would usher in modified proportional representation, and an end to political patronage.

He wrote about economic strength by ending the growth of foreign ownership and foreign control in Canada (some of the highest in the OECD nations) and the creation of a true common market within Canada.

He sought tax changes that would reduce taxes for individuals and families while increasing taxes for large corporations and the richest one per cent.

He argued for the importance of attacking poverty in Canada by creating better employment opportunities (by investing in industry here instead of selling opportunities away), by decreasing the cost of post-secondary, and student loans, and by providing more assistance to children, seniors, single parents and families living in poverty.

He argued for long overdue economic and social justice for First Nations and meaningful environmental assessments of government policies and new projects including private sector developments.

He called for an end to NAFTA, so Canadians could conserve and control their own resources.

An unimaginable new reality

My father died in August 2016. He died believing that America was about to elect its first woman president. He couldn’t imagine that Donald Trump would win the election that fall. He thought, surely, that Americans would see through his lies and his bravado.

He died on the same day the Liberals announced an Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. He said, even that morning, he was “cautiously optimistic” about the new Trudeau government that led Canada.

Over the past eight years, there are aspects of my nationalism that have rightly eroded as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation process.

What I have learned made it difficult for me to proudly fly the Canadian flag and sing the national anthem at events. It’s been years since I’ve celebrated July 1.

Many Canadians might argue with me about the usefulness of my boycott, but I wasn’t holding back just in protest, I was holding back because it no longer felt relevant to wave a flag that represented a painful truth about the land we live upon. The promise of a utopic government that would follow all of Sen. Murray Sinclair’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations was too good to be true.

But now, there is a new Canadian surge of pride rising. We are talking about buying Canadian, boycotting travel to the States, and asking ourselves how we became so reliant on America in the first place. Journalists and pundits have been discussing economic solutions to the dependence we’ve built up over the past 40 years.

I want to find every copy of The Betrayal of Canada, The Vanishing Country and A New and Better Canada, my father’s books, to place in the hands of Canadians who are asking, what can we do? It’s all there. The stats might need updating, but the plans are there.

We must shake ourselves out of this frozen state we’re in and organize. Over the past eight years, I have mumbled more times than I can count, I’m glad my dad is not alive to see this.

But oh, we need him now. Mel did not shy away from Canada’s flaws. He waved the flag proudly because he saw our potential.

This is not about Canada being the best country in the world. It’s not about ignoring our flaws and flying the flag with blind bravado.

It’s about embracing the promise of what we could be. It’s about recognizing what we stand to lose if we let our sovereignty slip away.