Opinion: The current passport has images of a past that’s increasingly irrelevant; the new design shifts to imagery that’s meaningless If we want history in it, we’ll have to talk honestly about our past and what we value from it, writes TaylorNoakes
The passport is changing. Worse, it’s not going to have as much history as the last one.
All sarcasm aside, there is a meaningful conversation to be had about Canadian history and how to commemorate it. Historians are engaged in that conversation daily. But the latest outrage is a tempest in a teapot, an argument for the sake of argument, undertaken largely in bad faith. The current government’s lack of leadership on national symbols, as shown in the new passport, is as problematic as the last government’s excessive focus on a narrow set of overused European-Canadian-centric symbols.
What needs to happen is a national conversation led by historians and other academics that asks us what history we value and want to commemorate, what are the shared values we believe are representative of our history, and how do we integrate history into public and daily life. It is telling that those feigning indignation over the apparent loss of history aren’t also equally angered by how little of contemporary Canada was represented in the previous passport, or that seemingly no effort was made to address this problem in the new version.
Vimy was a great victory that meant a lot to Canadians from a century ago, but Canadians today might wonder what Canada was doing fighting an imperial war on European soil in the first place. This doesn’t mean Vimy or the poppy as a national symbol has to go, just thatThe fury so far expressed so by politicians and pundits aghast at the new passport hasn’t shown a solid command — nor even appreciation of — history, just rote memorization .
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