Celebrating Canadian Heritage at the Empire Club of Canadaildings and leads to discussions on our heritage
One hundred years ago this week, on a particularly cold early February day, a fire started in the Reading Room of the House of Commons, probably the result of careless cigar smoker, and led to the Centre Block of our Parliament buildings burning to the ground. The Library of Parliament would have also been lost had a very quick-thinking employee not shut the heavy doors separating it from Centre Block, thereby preserving an enormous component of our written history, including all the early speeches given at Toronto’s Empire Club of Canada. Since the Centre Block housed both the Senate and the Commons, and Canada was in the middle of World War 1, it was imperative that an immediate solution be found for accommodating the meetings of government, and without missing a heartbeat our parliamentarians began meeting down the block at the newly opened national museum, today known as the Museum of Nature.
This was a seminal moment in our young nation’s history as it led to numerous discussions across the country on the importance of preserving our past, our history…something that we began referring to as our “heritage”. As a result, the Empire Club began to invite speakers to address this topic of heritage on a fairly regular basis. Years later, one of the Empire Club’s most popular guest speakers, the incomparable Pierre Berton, reflected on how important this topic is in reflecting the values and aspirations of a nation. This quote is taken from the speech he delivered at the Club on February 11th, 1982:
“By preserving a mix of streetscapes, areas and views from the past we tell our children and their children something that is very important. We tell them we are not brand new. We tell them that we do have a history, that we have been around for a while. We tell them that we have got our roots down; that we have a common heritage; and that because we have been around a while we are going to stay around for a while. So at the Foundation, we think of ourselves as being more than in the preservation business. We believe we are in the continuity business, which means we are also in the national unity business, and that’s not a bad goal for the 1980s.”
Here is a link to that speech:
http://speeches.empireclub.org/61578/data?n=2
Most Canadians would fully concur that a huge part of our national identity comes from our past, our heritage and that it has led us to where we are today as a country, as a people, and as one of the most socially progressive states in the world today. That history is preserved in Ottawa, to be sure, but also in the thousands of speeches delivered over the decades at the Empire Club of Canada. Did the importance of these issues occur because of a fire at the House of Commons a century ago this week? Not exclusively, to be sure, but people tend to realize the true importance of things when they are in danger of disappearing, and that 1916 fire made everyone realize how important it is to preserve our past. As Pierre Berton said, it shows us who we are and helps forge a national identity and a more unified nation.
