In the early morning hours of August, 2011, Port Colborne, Ontario resident and firearms instructor, Ian Thomson pulled his Smith and Wesson revolver from his gun safe, ran outside and fired six warning shots into the air. Three masked men armed with Molotov cocktails fled but not before burning down his dog house and injuring his German Shepherd. It was the culmination of an ongoing dispute with his neighbour that had been simmering for the last six-years. Close to an hour after the shots were fired, the police arrived and charged Thomson with pointing a firearm and careless storage of a firearm. The Crown attorney pushed for jail time..There is no clear-cut right to self-defence in Canada. No castle doctrine and no-stand-your-ground law. There is no enshrined protection of private property. And of course, no second amendment. When Canadians face down mortal danger, they retain only the right to run away. If the American constitution is the apex of enlightenment ideals, then the cumbersome titled, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an exercise in painful bureaucratese. And unlike Americans who learn their rights almost from birth, most Canadians have only the vaguest idea of where the coercion of the government ends and the rights of a citizen begins. When a convoy protester was mocked for referring to his non-existent first amendment right to free assembly, he may have been right for the wrong reasons..For a few weeks this past winter, in the wake of Trudeau’s panicked response to the protest none of us had the right to free expression, much less free assembly. Before this February, none of this really mattered. Canadians when they considered their government at all, had few feelings about it, beyond the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm..That is, until recently..Normally restrained Canadians reached their breaking point and what started as a convoy protest on the nation’s capital has spread across the Western world, appearing in Washington, and France and most recently, the Netherlands. This movement isn’t an aberration, or an expression of an outraged minority, much less a basket of deplorables as the Canadian prime minister intimated. It is the instinctive and historical response from a class of people that our PM has never rubbed shoulders with. These are the folks that have to wash their hands at the end of a long day. They are the people who plough each other’s driveways in the winter, quietly passing the hat when a neighbour falls on hard times and when Canada has gone to war, it is these people who have answered the call, turning their plowshares back into swords..I have a strange job description. I am a Canadian who teaches American history to Canadians and international students. My job is more complicated than it used to be. Aside from teaching students that, while there are numerous overlaps between Canadian and American history and that throughout the last 250 years, we have had the propensity to get involved in each other’s wars, occasionally against each other; there are stark differences between American and Canadian history. My main task, however, is to separate fact from myth..Canadians are destined to be misunderstood both by themselves and others. Despite popular belief to the contrary, we are not a country that thanks bank machines, no do we always apologize when slighted by others and the vast majority of us don’t live out on the tundra but within 100 miles of the American border. Most Canadians reside in places that are far more temperate than either Minneapolis or North Dakota. In real life Canadians are not the self-effacing and goofy caricatures portrayed in the few times we appear in film. But we have been forged in conflict..Canada is not a peace-keeping nation and never has been. Canada has thousands of young men buried all over Europe because they felt that it was worth dying so that people, they had never met, in faraway places might be free. Canada fought both world wars from start to finish. When the French broke the lines and fled, our soldiers stopped the German assault at the second battle of Ypres, holding urine-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces to stop the Great War’s first gas attack. Our boys flew bombing missions to Berlin, Hamburg and yes, Dresden, when the odds of coming back alive made it the closest thing to a suicide mission that the Second World War offered. We sent troops to bolster the defense of South Korea in 1950 dying on numbered hills and, during the Vietnam war, a conflict our government officially wanted no part of, 12,000 Canadians felt differently, crossing the border, to enlist and fight, mostly in marine units. Canada doesn’t celebrate or talk about it much but the truth is Canadians like to fight and will travel thousands of miles out of our way to do so. We have fought all comers, sometimes even turning against ourselves, removing indigenous children to residential schools, and interning Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. In the major conflicts of the blood-spattered 20th Century, Canadians have been the first to fight and the last to lay down their arms. Often in noble causes. Sometimes not..When thousands of truckers descended on Ottawa, and shut down the city, this past February, it wasn’t an aberration from our history, it was a continuation. This was never a protest about draconian COVID-19 restrictions but the inevitable expression of ordinary people fed up with footing the bill for failed, short-sighted and magical policy. John Dryden once warned of the fury of a patient man. What is unfolding across the Western World is just that..Rory Gilfillan is an Albertan Educator
