Image Credit: CFJC Today

By James Peters

Two & Out

PETERS: For the future of Canada’s sake, we must overcome our fear of change

Jun 4, 2021 | 10:50 AM

A FEW WEEKS AGO, our newsroom took a phone call from a gentleman who was hopping mad.

The object of his ire? The Real Canadian Superstore.

The man was complaining that Superstore had changed its layout, and was dead-set on convincing a reporter to do a story.

Never mind there may have been perfectly rational and understandable reasons for the changes; things were different in his grocery store and that’s bad.

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The word ‘Canada’ literally derives from a misunderstanding that settlers just decided to pretend was correct because we said it was.

It meant ‘village’ in Iroquoian, but after we had a name, we didn’t want to change it.

Nothing may be more germane to the privileged in our society than reflexively believing change is to be feared.

Faced with the question of what needs to be done in the wake of the findings at the former Kamloops residential school, we are presented only with options that require real changes – changes in the way we view history, changes in the way we treat each other in the present and changes in the way we act in the future.

If those changes are made, they will make Canada literally unrecognizable to us.

Is that so bad? Would it be so bad if our Canadian existence was given a good shakeup?

After all, the past few days have shown us with heart-wrenching clarity how much of what we know as Canada is built on violence and on racism and on lies.

Maybe changing around the grocery store of our society isn’t such a bad idea.

Maybe tearing it down past the foundation and starting over isn’t a bad idea, either.

It’s scary. We fear change.

And it’s premature to talk about specific changes before we acknowledge we have the capacity to accept and the desire to make big changes.

So when we asked, ‘Will Canada ever be the same again?’ we also have to ask, ‘Who would want it to be?’

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.