A little while ago, government was proposing to change the lyrics of the Canadian National Anthem. The change? “In all thy sons command” would be changed to “Thou dost in us command,”. It’s a little clumsy, but it’s more inclusive. I think also people were batting around the idea of removing God from it as well or something.

At first, I was agin’it, it seemed like more revisionist crap that gave us ET with people running around aggressively pointing walkie-talkies at people, but then I looked it up. The change was to change it BACK to the way it was in the 1908 version. That affected my opinion significantly. I didn’t know it had undergone changes, so what I don’t understand is why there was apparently no (or at least less) resistance to changing it the other times, but now we shouldn’t. If it was changed to reflect our values of the day, should it not continue to do so? The cynic in me thinks it’s because it pandered to the religious and gender dominated section in power. If they wanted to change it to add more religious and male-celebrating bits, maybe it would go through. Maybe not. Somehow I think that in the States if they wanted to add more religious references to their pledge, that it would be easier than attempting (as they have) to remove them. And just as our anthem, removing them would have reverted it to the way it was before.

Honestly, whenever I sung the anthem, I obviously misunderstood that section anyways. I thought it was “In all thy Son’s command”, as in, a reference to Jesus, and not “sons” as in the males of the country. But before that, when I was younger, I sung it as “In all thy Sun’s command”, cause man, the Sun is big, and apparently I’m a pagan or something. When I was older and wanted to keep religion out of it, I didn’t try to sign the “God keep our land” in another way to avoid the god reference, I just make it an exclamation like “God! Keep our land,”, it always amused me.

I think a lot of people were outraged at the change because they didn’t think it had been changed before, but to me, knowing that it had, it should lessen the resistence to changing it again. But that would rely on people being sensible, alas. Another aspect to the whole thing is that it was put out there to distract people in a Wag The Dog sort of way, which I wouldn’t put past this administration.

I think it would be amusing to suggest that the english version of Oh Canada be eliminated, since it was originally in French anyway, so we should only sing that version. Sacré bleu