As for Farley Mowat, he was definitely flirting at least with “fellow traveler” status. I’m not sure if it was just curmudgeonly desire to be “opposite”, or if it was sincere, or if he was a “useful idiot”/dupe. In his WWII memoirs, he was fervently against, but if you read SIBIR, he was either taken in by the “Potemkin village”, or he was a “fellow traveler”. He was also part of the Pugwash Group and a couple of fair-play-for-cuba groups.

I personally suspect that he was just an old curmudgeon who didn’t care much for politics, just the environment, but in a sincere way, not the current quasi-religious way of environmentalists today.

I have pretty much all of his books, and cherish them, and would still do so even if he were a commie.

I always did and still do think of Dyer as a LWPS. If he’s now banging on about patriarchy I’d like to think someone told him to “put a feminist lens” on it. And he had to ask WTF is that. But I doubt it.

But I also always had a somewhat similar reaction to him as yours.

He served in the navy, he always was a Canadian and very much also a Newfoundland patriot. You could see that his concern in DoC was that Canada not waste Canadian lives in non Canadian wars. I might have disagreed with him then or now about which wars those might be, but I can’t argue with the instinct on some level. I often share it.

His dry wit and manner were appealing, and his writing style shows that through to some extent.

And his leftism is much older school and more eccentric than your average Canadian progressive of my lifetime. I have a hard time imagining him sincerely spouting all the lumpenMarxist slogans about diversity, inclusion, and so on with which I am daily bombarded. Even if he agreed with it all, that wouldn’t be his mode of speaking or thinking.

Even at that, I think we in Canada can have a similar tradition to what the English sometimes have had- one can be an eccentric and a radical, even a doctrinaire Marxist, and still be quintessentially a Canadian type, “one of ours”.

I suppose the English could have been a bit more practically suspicious of their communists, come to think.

Of course, I decreasingly find the left willing to extend that courtesy.

Anyway, the other Canadian figure I often think of in the same breath as Dyer is Farley Mowat. Pretty far left, undoubtedly was a Canadian patriot and a Canadian archetype at that, and a crazy eccentric old coot toward the end. I find that personality type strangely heroic.

It’s the central problem of Canada in the realms of diplomacy, economics, strategy, culture and identity.

We could do worse than have you as neighbours. The analogy I generally think of for sheer dependence and cultural similarity is Ukraine and Russia. We have a much better deal. You guys last invaded us in 1813 and it was last very plausible in the 1860s. And you last sent little green men in to destabilize us in 1867.

Just a little joke there. It was the Irish Fenians. I have no idea what their gear really looked like, but in the Canadian iconography of the time they are usually drawn with green uniform shirts and green kepis of the Civil War/French Empire slope design. Kind of like a green version of Garibaldi’s Italian Redshirts. Google Image the Battle of Ridgeway for the main visual example.

Not a very big battle, and it was a Fenian tactical win. But there might be at least one Canadian reserve regiment with a battle honour for having had an ancestral unit represented.

Also, one of the RCMP’s predecessors, the Dominion Police, was mainly charged with border constabulary and secret service work looking for Fenians in southern Ontario. Behind every bush, doubtless.

We had some good times, Canada and the US.

Due to this set of facts, Canada is pretty much welded at the hip to the fate of the US, no matter what it might want as a sovereign nation. The US could probably get by without taking Canada into account, but the Canadians can’t get by without taking the US into their calculations and actions.

The training Major at BOTC absolutely loathed him, but I rather like Gwynne Dyer. His current affairs column is always worth the read. I don’t always agree with him, and as time goes on I find myself disagreeing with him more and more. But he usually has something interesting and thought provoking to say.

I particularly like the way he can distill a complex geopolitical issue into a single column that makes it accessible, yet not dumbed down.

He is also, despite that some think his a left wing pinko stooge, a Canadian patriot in his own way. He has contributed a bunch of scholaship to WWI documentaries, especially about the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

He also did a very good documentary series on Canadian troops in Bosnia, and the realities of modern “peacekeeping”. Being NFB again, it is hard to get, but worth the watch if you can find it. I can’t remember the title, but I found it on DVD at the library.

He also did a documentary series called IIRC, simply CIVILIZATION. Also worth the watch. I think it is also on youtube. Interestingly, despite going on about patriarchy and environmentalism, he defends globalization and Wallmart. He made a very interesting point about developing third world countries like India, and how Britain in the industrial revlution/Victorian era were much the same. Quite balanced on the whole.

That is what I like about him, his opinions are not always predictable, which to me is the sign of a genuine thinker. That and the dry, sardonic,snarky British humour that is his signature style..

If I ever find them after my next upcoming move, I’ll try to find equipment on which to test their viability.

I did wonder at the time, in addition to the above, what neutrality even if workable would have accomplished. Canadian forces might not have been killed in a few days in Germany, and less likely might not have been sunk on the Atlantic. But we’d still have had to defend our airspace and if the US got nuked, so would we. So, really, how much difference, unless one thought a short conventional, non-nuclear war in Europe was a real possibility?

The funny thing about Defense of Canada, is that he pretty much refuted his whole thesis, as far as I could tell. He looked at Switzerland, looked at Finland, etc. He advocated robust neutrality, but admitted that; a) there was no national will in Canada for a vastly expanded army with National Service. b) A long proud history of participating in multi-lateral alliances, and c) We were strategic territory in a way Finland and Sweden were not, and armed neutrality might not save us anyway.

I could be mis-remembering, but that is how I recall it.