Our Magnificent Polar Bear!
The Land of Blue and White…
What is Canada’s National Animal? The Polar Bear! A Patriot’s Rant…
“The polar bear, with its strength, courage, resourcefulness, and dignity is perfect for the part,” Nicole Eaton said recently in a speech to the Canadian Senate. She was suggesting a rebranding of Canada’s national animal from “our furry friend, the beaver.”
Referring to the polar bear’s “strength, courage, resourcefulness and dignity,” she called it “Canada’s most majestic and splendid mammal, holding reign over the Arctic for thousands of years. The polar bear has been and continues to be a powerful figure in the material, spiritual and cultural life of the indigenous people of the Arctic.”
I’m with Nicole on this one.
She’s drawn some unfriendly fire for referring to the industrious beaver as a “rat — a big rat, that doesn’t reflect our new values…
“A dentally defective rat. A nuisance that wreaks havoc on farmlands, roads, lakes, streams and tree plantations.” But this just reflects her mischievous sense of humour.
Nicole Eaton is well aware of the critical role the beaver plays in the ecology of green lands.
She’s well aware that the eager beaver faced annihilation in the middle of the last century. (“By the mid-1900s, when fickle fashion trendsetters abandoned fur for silk, the Canadian beaver was close to extinction.”)
A tragedy averted in large part by the popular writings of Grey Owl.
We have beavers — and their dams — at the lower corner of our property and across the road. And love to watch them swimming and playing. If you’ve ever heard a beaver kit calling out with its comical, human babylike cry, you couldn’t help but respond with a warm laugh. [1]
Beavers, of course, build dams.
And those dams create wetlands. The first Europeans to enter our vast ocean-side forests described huge beaver-built dams. And vast stretches of wetlands.
Maybe 25% of our nation-wide Northwoods were such wetlands. Which provided a rich home for species of fish, amphibians, mammals, waterfowl and songbirds mostly gone today. And made the disastrous wildfires we’re seeing today almost impossible!
But, for all that, you must remember that Canadians didn’t pick the beaver as our national symbol in the first place. The Hudson’s Bay Company did.
The London-based HBC made its fortune on the furs and skins harvested in colonial Canada. Including the rich beaver pelts that were shipped to England to be made into those fashionable beaver felt hats for the well-heeled gentlemen of the age.
Beavers weren’t cute, industrious and ecologically essential creatures to the company managers and shareholders of the day. They were raw material. As an image, the Beaver was really a symbol of foreign corporate greed.
But the Polar Bear…
“The polar bear is the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore and Canada’s most majestic and splendid mammal,” Nicole explained. Adding that it “survives in the harshest climate and terrain in the world.”
Right on!
We need a new National Totem.
An animal that reflects the Canadian soul.
What’s more Canadian than the lonely sound of a loon’s call across a forest-rimmed lake? Just as that loon can be thought of as our national bird, and the lone red-coated Mountie as our national Hero, so the mighty Polar Bear reflects our strength and beauty.
And perhaps our own endangerment as a culture.
Just as the Polar Bear struggles for its very existence in a warming world, a melting habitat, so the failed Free Trade agreement allows more and more replacement of our own glorious culture and history. Replaced with amoral multinational megacorp messaging that has little meaning to us — and no soul. If it wasn’t for the sacred Game of Hockey (Go Team Canada!) and for CBC programming, we’d have no popular culture left at all.
I can remember a time when, as a kid, bookshelves of the older folks we used to visit were filled with volumes of Canadian stories. [2] Flags hung on walls. Photos and paintings displayed clearly Canadian images, including young men in uniform. Those folk spoke knowingly of our own history. My father once gave me a reader he had used in his own schoolboy days. It was called THE VOICE OF CANADA: Canadian Prose & Poetry. The first section was called “Love of Country.” I still treasure it.
And now?
As I’ve said elsewhere, “Ask any Canadian who Wyatt Earp was. Now ask them who Sam Steele was.”
Or — “Ask any Canadian who Mark Twain was. Now ask them who Charles G D Roberts was.” (To answer the second question, both were popular writers published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine during the late 1890’s. Roberts was the New Brunswick writer who became our first major poet and short story writer. He created the uniquely Canadian literary form, the Realistic Animal Story. In 1935, Charles G D Roberts received a knighthood from King George V who called him the “Father of Canadian Literature.”)
Of course, you know who Wyatt Earp and Mark Twain were. How many Canadians know and love the sagas of Superintendent Sam Steele of the North-West Mounted Police? And Sir Charles G D Roberts, Father of Canadian Literature? Never been a major motion picture made about either of them, eh? [3]
Here’s how it’s going to play out, my friend. If we continue to be little industrious beavers, we’ll be taken over — or, more precisely, sold out — and hung up by the tail in a fur shed to be skinned. But if we call the Polar Bear our Sacred Totem and draw on it’s magnificent power…
As Nicole concluded: “A country’s symbols are not constant and can change over time as long as they reflect the ethos of the people and the spirit of the nation.” [4]
Where’s your Petition, Nicole? I’m signing it!
Live Free, Mon Ami! – Brian Alan Burhoe
NOTE: Artwork on this page by Charles Livingston Bull, illustrating the wonder-filled wildlife writing of our Sir Charles G D Roberts.
UPDATE, July 1st, 2022:
[1] A couple years after I wrote this, those beaver dams on the edge of our farmstead were smashed. And the beaver families themselves just plum disappeared. Replaced by a noisy government-money-sponsored ATV/Side-By-Side Vehicle Trail where the old CN train right-of-way had passed through the woods. Redecked with new gravel. And graded by local construction contractors. By the time we sold our country home to move and finally retire, a lot of the local wildlife that used to visit us was gone. “Progress!” grunted the f#*%@ Boujees.
[2] “… bookshelves filled with volumes of Canadian stories.” Don’t know what I’m talking about? See GREATEST WRITERS OF MOUNTIE FICTION: Storytellers of the Canadian Mounted Police
[3] How was Canada’s once-thriving Movie industry of the 1920’s killed by outside powers? See CANUCK MOVIES: Mounties, Nell Shipman & the Canadian Spirit
[4] Conservative Nicole Eaton was appointed to the Canadian Senate by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, starting her service on January 2, 2009. She left the Senate on January 21, 2020, after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75. She was a patriotic Canadian who spoke her truth.
Although the Canadian Senate has since taken down the link to Nicole’s controversial “Beaver Speech,” you can get a good sense of it at Nunatsiaq News – Polar Bear Should Replace Beaver as Canada’s Emblem: Senator.
But it’s not too late to pick up Nicole’s “Polar Bear for Canadian National Animal” Challenge. In fact it’s time to renew it.
