The Maple Leaf Forever: A Celebration of Canadian Symbols (review)

The Maple Leaf Forever: A Celebration of Canadian Symbols is not the sort of book one expects to find reviewed in an academic journal; I was certainly surprised when asked to write a review. It is a coffee-table book. Yet academic snobbery should not be allowed to get in the way of approaching something that is itself a cultural artefact. After all, through such books non-academics glean and reify their own sense of Canadianness, browsing their pages on the Canadiana shelf at Chapters or receiving them as gifts from some patriotic relative. What we have here, then, is an opportunity to see a selection and presentation of a national sense of self in a popular consumer good.

According to authors Donna and Nigel Hutchins, The Maple Leaf Forever is a product of the nationally insecure 1980s, the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord and the looming threat of Quebec’s political separation having prompted these two collectors of antiques and folk art to turn their focus towards items of Canadiana. So what happens when a psychotherapist and a decorator address their concerns about national unity by assembling a tremendous collection of Canadiana centred upon the ideological triumvirate of the Mountie, maple leaf, and beaver? A selection that runs the gamut from early artefacts to flea market knickknacks: a Northwest Fur Trading Company spearhead (with a beaver engraving); a 1973 Mountie calendar; and Molson Canadian beer cans bent and folded into the shape of an Avro Arrow, are examples. This is no random selection of goods, though, as is more than made clear by the nationalistic narrative running from beginning to end. The book offers not only pictures of beaver-shaped can openers and peanut tins but such items as a painting of Paul Henderson’s ‘goal heard around the world’ in the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series (141) and a quilt celebrating ‘the Mounties’ exceptional qualities: knowledge and love of nature, bravery, and fairness’ (10). Nationalistic nostalgia and celebration is blended with items chosen to address contemporary socio-political issues and reify cornerstones of national identity. A painting created in the wake of the collapse of the Meech Lake Agreement; a button encouraging consumers to shop in Ontario instead of in Buffalo; a poster advertising a Canadian-Ukrainian National Music Festival in 1939; the flag for the Association Chao Chow du Quebec Canada – there is a method behind the selection of maple leafing. It is the Canada of the now, or at least as it is commonly envisioned, carefully emplotted into a narrative streaming the past into the present. In this book it matters not that a Pringles container marking Canada Day or a Pepsi can featuring Wayne Gretzky adorned with maple leafs at the 1978 World Junior Championships is a commodity being sold by evoking nationalistic sentiments. For the authors, the fact that the items exist as part of who ‘we’ are is reason enough to celebrate them without critique.

The Maple Leaf Forever is reminiscent of at least two other collections released over the past few years but does stand apart. Charlotte Gray’s The Museum Called Canada: 25 Rooms of Wonder has an anthropological feel and shares more with the Royal Ontario Museum than the items one might find at a local flea market. Likewise, although there is some overlap with Douglas Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada, the latter is an attempt to express a sense of Canadianness through artistic montage.

That being said, The Maple Leaf Forever should not be thought of as simply the work of enthusiastic citizens keen to address their nation through kitsch. The book offers a bevy of fascinating items sure to excite Canadianists as well as providing a window into how a national project rests upon its iconography and how, quite crucially, a contemporary sense of self can be written into the past through the act of selection. At the very least, the authors offer a resoundingly pleasurable look at...