BROOKS: Be proud of Canada's story — not because it's good or bad, but because it's ours

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her." — G.K. Chesterton

Monuments — those towering hulks of bronze and stone — are a physical link between a people and their past. Their founding, their ancestry, their story; distilled into an imposing figure that children and adults can look upon and remember the foundations of this place we call home.

Canada has a story, and we should be proud of that story. We should be proud not because it's good, and not because it's bad — but because it's ours.

Canadians from every region and every background love Canada and its story, and we celebrate that each July 1st, the anniversary of Confederation. Of course, British Columbia was not one of the original provinces to form Canada — our chapter started three years later, when the Governor of the Colony of British Columbia, Sir James Douglas, negotiated the terms on which BC would enter Confederation in 1871.

Douglas' own history is fascinating in its own right. Born in British Guiana to a Scottish merchant and a free Creole woman, he rose through the ranks of the Hudson's Bay Company through sheer competence, eventually founding Fort Victoria and governing a colony that, by the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, was flooded with tens of thousands of American prospectors.

It was Douglas who moved decisively to assert British sovereignty over the mainland before that wave of migration could turn into a claim of annexation. He is remembered as the Father of British Columbia.

A nation is only as strong as the ties between its citizens, and today those ties have worn thin. At a time when we need to stand united as a country, we are too often divided. We are encouraged to see ourselves first as members of competing camps, rather than as participants in — and inheritors of — a common civilizational story. The love for Canada is still there, but without a physical manifestation, it remains a private or ephemeral feeling.

We have gotten the causality backwards. We assume a people's love for their home is downstream of that home's greatness — its wealth, its comfort, its accomplishments. But Chesterton saw it the other way around, when speaking of Rome: greatness is what love produces, not what produces love.

Rome was not loved because she was great; she became great because generations of Romans had already loved her, had already told her story to their children, and had already built the monuments that made her memory impossible to forget.

If we want a Canada — and a British Columbia — that its citizens love enough to build something great out of, we cannot wait for greatness to arrive first. We have to start with the love. That means recovering and retelling the story: in bronze, in stone, in plaques on the buildings where it actually happened, in the names we choose to remember.

That is the purpose of the James Douglas Society. We are a BC heritage advocacy group founded to restore the physical, public memory of this province.

More to come, soon...

Passionate about history and preservation, Corey is the founder and president of the James Douglas Society, a non-profit group advocating for the commissioning and preservation of historical monuments.