Time to change

Unbelievable!
Hopefully people misread the question. Otherwise it’s hard to fathom how almost 80 percent of the 330-plus respondents to the Fort Frances Times’ web poll this past week don’t think “O Canada” should be gender-neutral.
Really? This is our national anthem—one of the most iconic symbols of our collective identity as a country—yet it infers only men are patriotic. By singing “in all thy sons command,” we’re excluding women. For those not good with math, that translates into half of Canadians.
Veteran Liberal MP Mauril Belanger wants the line replaced by “in all of us command,” which he says actually would make the lyrics closer to a version from the early 1900s: “True patriot love thou dost in us command.”
A rather innocuous change—just two words—and a no-brainer, right? Apparently not. Mr. Belanger’s first attempt was defeated at second reading last April when the Conservatives were in power. And it seems, based on the Times’ poll, a vast majority still think tweaking our anthem is off-limits.
“O Canada” is not sacrosanct. The English lyrics have been changed before—the last time in 1980 when it officially was adopted as our national anthem.
Ironically, renewed debate over updating “O Canada” came the same week that marked the 100th anniversary of women earning the right to vote (starting in Manitoba and eventually spreading to the rest of the country). Yet clearly, a century later, we remain steadfast in enshrining the exclusion of women in the national anthem.
With women still fighting for equal pay for work of equal value, and still having not completely smashed the “glass ceiling” in the boardroom and in politics, making “O Canada” gender-neutral may ring somewhat hollow and frivolous.
But women have fought and died in defence of Canada and our values. The symbolism of somehow ignoring that sacrifice in our national anthem is just too insulting to allow to continue.
The bottom line is simple. To paraphrase Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “Because it’s 2016.”