Me and Canada Day

Today is Thursday, the day after Canada Day, the 142nd birthday of this country. On Tuesday, the day before Canada Day, our local CBC station ran a story about a man who has been a landed immigrant in Canada even longer than I have. As I remember from the news account, he landed in Canada some time in the spring of 1946, probably at the Pier 21 Immigration Shed (now an Immigration Museum), the same one I arrived in about a year later. He was the son of a Canadian serviceman and his Scottish war bride, and, like me, he always thought he was Canadian – a citizen of Canada, that is – until he applied for a passport and found he wasn’t.

I landed at Pier 21 on March 16, 1947 and my card indicates “ADMITTED NON-IMMIGRANT"; a month later my parents received a card dated April 15, 1947 that said “LANDED IMMIGRANT”, and that is the status I have had ever since. I believe that the man on the news has applied for his citizenship. By my reckoning he should have had it long ago since his dad was a Canadian, but perhaps he didn’t ever apply for it. My situation is a little different. It is my mother who was and is Canadian, as were her mother and maternal grandmother, and I couldn't inherit her citizenship because I was born before 1949 when that law changed. My father was British, though he himself became a Canadian some time after immigrating, and I travel on a British passport, since Bermuda, where I was born, no longer issues its own passports. Last October, after sixty-two years as a landed immigrant of Canada, I decided I should make my association with this country more permanent and official and I applied to become a Canadian citizen.

So, I am looking forward to being a real Canadian and will certainly post an account of that occasion here when it does occur (the CBC story talked about a 12 to 14 month processing period for applications, so it may not be soon!). However, I did my best to celebrate my adopted country’s birthday yesterday. I went for my first Canadian outdoor swim yesterday afternoon at Caribou Park Beach, even though the wind was pretty fierce out of the north, the air temperature was about 18 degrees, and the water felt about the same. I ate, with my Canadian wife and Canadian friends, a large and fine bowl of lobster bisque (lobsters landed at the Caribou government wharf on an inlet of Northumberland Strait) made with Canadian Carnation milk. I toasted, albeit with an Italian pinot grigio, the joys of my adopted country and thanked these fine Canadians for sharing their celebration with me. I joined them for a very Canadian driftwood bonfire on their beach and applauded the small but spectacular fireworks display. And I slept in my MEC sleeping bag, soundly and proudly Canadian.

So, Happy Canada Day – may there be many more – and maybe next July 1st I will sing O Canada, our home and native land, (you can listen here) as a legitimate citizen of this large and mostly fine young country!