A rchive Date
[ 29-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[My name is John Diefenbaker, and I am a Canadian
By LARRY CORNIES - London Free Press
May 6, 2000
After his first week of kindergarten at the end of a parched August in Kansas in 1983, I asked my oldest child what he'd learned at school so far.
He straightened his posture and proudly began his recitation, his small hand over his heart: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God with liberty and justice for all.
With the exception of a few mispronunciations, he had it down.
It was the moment I knew my hope of raising a son with a Canadian consciousness in the heart of America was doomed to fail, the residual power of daily routine being what it is. I knew then our young family would eventually return to Canada. For me and many other Ontarians, memories like this one - and those of our own morning exercises at school decades ago - flooded back with Education Minister Janet Ecker's announcement last week that, starting this September, pupils in Ontario schools will recite an oath of citizenship each day as part of a new code of conduct.
When I asked Ecker's executive assistant this week what oath they intended classrooms to use, she indicated it would be the oath used in Canadian citizenship ceremonies:
I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, and her heirs and successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.
Regular listeners to CBC Radio One's Ontario Morning know this hasn't been sitting well with some Ontarians. Listeners across the province phoned the program this week, complaining the oath amounts only to a pledge of loyalty to a British queen; it's devoid of any sense of poetry, let alone any meaningful Canadian content.
Teacher Moira Nikander-Forrester, a high school music teacher from Belleville, called Wednesday to suggest an alternate pledge, which she sang on the air. Written by John Diefenbaker, it's a much more suitable bit of verse for such a purpose, she said:
I am a Canadian, free to stand without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand up for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who will govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.
Nikander-Forrester couldn't recall where she'd learned it and wondered whether other listeners had heard it. She didn't know who wrote the tune. David Weaver, a music teacher at H. B. Beal secondary school in London, was one of the show's listeners that morning.
"I could sing along with her as she sang it," he said. Weaver remembers singing it during an education week celebration at Windsor's Cleary Auditorium in May 1972. He was a Grade 4 student at William G. Davis public school, where his music teacher was a young Susan Heward - one of the seminal figures who inspired him to teach music himself. He'd lost track of Heward, however, but suspected she may have written the music to Dief's pledge.
I tracked Heward down at Winchester public school near Cornwall, where she now teaches music and drama.
Yes, she said, she's the one who set Diefenbaker's words to music. She'd been standing in line at a Big V drug store in Riverside, near Windsor, when she saw a Big V poster on which the pledge was printed. Struck by its poetry and elegant simplicity, she persuaded a store clerk to take it off the wall and give it to her.
"I put it down beside me in the car and kept glancing at it as I drove. 'My God, I love this thing,' I kept thinking." Heward wrote a simple melody for it, then tried it out with a few of her classes. When it seemed to click, she wrote a harmony part.
It turns out Nikander-Forrester was a student teacher under Heward's direction, and it was at Davis public school, with Weaver as a student, that she learned the song.
Donna Brockmeyer-Klebaum, head of archives and research at the Diefenbaker Canada Centre in Saskatoon, says the same pledge, with some subtle differences, is on the Canadian Bill of Rights, passed by Parliament in 1960. The words were written and uttered by Diefenbaker in the House of Commons on July 1, 1960:
I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country.
This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.
Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights lacked the full weight of law because it was never entrenched in the Canadian Constitution. It was, however, a kind of forerunner to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982. Before he died in 1979, Diefenbaker preserved his pledge in his own voice on an RCA Victor vinyl recording, titled simply I Am a Canadian.
With apologies to Molson Inc. and their plaid-shirted Joe, Diefenbaker's is the original - and far superior to the frenzied pop monologue, I Am Canadian.
Memory is a powerful thing. Daily pledges, songs and oaths learned in childhood burrow their way into some cerebral storehouse. If they survive the cynicism of adolescence and early adulthood, they become significant chemical souvenirs of youth, a simpler era.
If the Tory government at Queen's Park is going to ask Ontario schoolchildren to recite a daily pledge, why not give them one with more substance than the dreary citizenship oath - one written by a great Conservative prime minister and patriot?
And if Ontario schoolkids are going to sing it, what better choice than a tune written by an Ontario teacher?
Larry Cornies is Forum editor for The London Free Press. His column appears Saturdays. He can be e-mailed at lcornies@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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