Canada, as a nation of immigrants (many of them recently arrived), is constantly reinventing itself. Part of this is an ongoing effort to reinvent the past, so as to make it fit with a desired present and a hoped-for future. Our current government is doing this, at least in English Canada, around a 1950s ideal of deference to the monarchy and to a military legacy that most Canadians do not know much about.
While this may not be to everyone's taste, there is nothing inherently Conservative in trying to manipulate the past for political purposes. The Liberals spent many years trying to create an image of Canada that revolved around supposedly historic attachments to concepts of multiculturalism and “peacekeeping,” both of them frequently misunderstood ideas that had little to do with Canadian history until relatively recently.
It is in this light, then, that we should examine the government's attempts to get us excited about the War of 1812. Battles are to be re-enacted and forts refurbished. All Canadians are encouraged, in the words of the official website, to “take pride in our traditions, and our shared history.” And that nice Christopher Plummer is on TV hawking coins for the mint and telling us that 1812 was when “we fought on sea and on land,” “we faced relentless American fire and stood our ground” and “Canadians came together as never before to shape our future.”
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