Bob Rae’s book Reclaiming Canadian Sovereignty is now in stores.

“Norman Levine’s 1958 memoir Canada Made Me was published in England, it did not make it into Canada until 1979.  Norman’s famous last lines shocked me then. They shock me still. Here they are:

             “I wondered why I was so bitter about Canada. After all it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life.” 

            Norman Levine travelled the breadth of Canada looking in cheap boarding houses, lumber camps, mining towns, and a slaughterhouse. Many of the people he met were immigrants. He also visited a reservation, a border town, women “do-gooders”, churches, temples, and universities. He ended at a Montreal strip-tease joint. Somehow he found it all lacking, inauthentic.  It might have had to do with the fact that he was always down to his last dollar.

Poor Norman. He was a great writer but he is long gone and dead wrong. For one thing, resettling European “rejects” is now the least of our ambitions. In the 75 years since he wrote, we have welcomed people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in successive waves as, around the globe, their countries implode. I suppose this makes the “experiment that could not come off” even more daring.  Can peoples so different in life experience, beliefs and cultures, unknown to each other, coexist and create a home? It is time to ask the question again. None of these immigrants makes the decision easily to move to the other side of the globe where they don’t speak the language. Most had little choice; all had big hopes. Is there a second chance for them? And a chance for Canada?

Yup. Because here we are. The experiment has come off. It has succeeded. “