So I was googling the lyrics to O Canada.  Purely out of laziness, so I could just copy-paste and print instead of typing them out myself.  I’m not hyper-patriotic or anything… in fact I think the recent hubbub about the New Brunswick elementary school that decided to stop singing the anthem every single day is just ridiculous.  I mean, do we as adults sing the anthem every single day in our workplaces?  Forcing kids to sing it in school every single day is not going to instill patriotism.  At best, it produces boredom and annoyance, it stops having meaning and becomes a pointless ritual.  At worst, it’s propaganda and indoctrination, pure and simple.

We should want to sing the anthem because we love our country, because we feel it to be a country worth being proud of.  The cause and effect goes in that direction, not the other way around.  We don’t come to love our country by singing the anthem!

Anyway, I still think it’s important that my kids know the anthem, and can sing it.  So we’re going to start singing it together… maybe once a week.  Maybe not that often.  Whatever, just so that we learn it.  And the history of it is quite  interesting, so we’ll take a look at that too.

For instance, there’s the whole changing-of-the-lyrics thing.  I found this great clip on youtube, which is a wax cylinder recording of a performance of the 1908 lyrics.  These were not the first english lyrics, but they are the ones from which our current version eventually evolved.

Then I visited the official government heritage website detailing the history of the anthem.  It was fascinating, except…

According to the listed history, a committee formed in 1967 recommended a version of the lyrics which are the ones we use today, adding “from far and wide” and “God keep our land” to replace two of the “we stand on guard” phrases.

But that did not match my memory.

I distinctly remember having to learn the new lyrics in elementary school, in the early 80s.   I wasn’t even alive in 1967.  What’s more, the lyrics that I remember having learnt first did not match the previous version as listed on the official website.

Leave it to wikipedia to clear it up for me.

In 1980, the song was (finally) officially adopted as our national anthem, with a revised set of lyrics.

The original 1908 lyrics went, from just before the ‘chorus’:

And stand on guard, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee,
O Canada, O Canada,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

The lyrics used until 1980 were:

And stand on guard, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee,
O Canada, glorious and free
We stand on guard, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

Ahh… THAT’s what I remember.  And THAT is not mentioned anywhere on the official heritage website!  How confusing must our anthem’s history be, that even the government’s own history website does not get it right?

And of course, here is the version officially adopted in 1980 that we use today:

From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee,
God keep our land glorious and free
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

Even our modern version is not without controversy.  Many Canadians object to the religious aspect of “God keep our land” — interestingly, that was one of the lines added later, and was never in the original.

There is also objection to the “In all thy sons command” line, as it is gender-exclusive.  Before you go thinking “oh that’s just overly PC, we should keep it the way it is for history and tradition’s sake” — you should know that this was also not part of the original.  The original line, as you can hear in the youtube clip, was “Thou dost in us command,” which was changed to the “sons” line in a 1914 revision.   Considering that at that time in our history, bills proposing women’s suffrage and property rights were still being defeated in some parts of the country, it is not unreasonable to interpret this as a sexist sentiment, that women are not capable of “true patriot love.”

A proposed modern alternative is “In all of us command.”   I could live with that.

The other line that raises hackles is “Our home and native land,” and this one has always bothered me.  The issue is simply that this is not the ‘native land’ of all Canadian citizens.  Not only is it not true for more recent immigrants, but the vast majority of the Canadian population is descended from immigrants.   This is only truly “native land” for the aboriginal populations, and it’s quite offensive IMO for us white folk to loudly proclaim that this is OUR native land, after everything we’ve done to the aboriginal peoples.

In fact, when I sing this line, I make a subtle change in my head.  I don’t change the words, just the meaning.  This is “our home”, but we are living on “native land.”

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