WHAT DO the following have in common?
- Giving the man next door a ride to work because his car has broken down.
- Establishing Medicare.
- A bumper sticker from the 1980s, saying: “Your farm neighbour is more important than your neighbour’s farm.”
- The federal government’s plan to turn its fleet of grain hopper cars over to a coalition of farm and rural organizations.
- Comments by Canada’s new ambassador to the United States about Canada-U.S. relations, particularly trade.
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All of these are related to being a good neighbour.
Being an neighbour is an attitude, a value, long before it is a set of actions. It was important in Toronto when I was growing up there just after the Second World War. It is still crucial on the Prairies, as I learned from spending more than half of my life in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Being a good neighbour was an attitude born of need. It was a recognition that people had to work together. Your neighbour, in the early days, might have been very different from you. Your family might have been Irish; your neighbour’s Polish. You were Protestant, they were Catholic.
You might not have understood much of what each said to the other but you found a way to get along.
It was live and let live. No, it was more than that. It was live and help live.
Your common survival depended on working together, even if you didn’t particularly like your neighbour. And so the attitude was born and passed on to succeeding generations.
When you saw a neighbour sell his farm so his child could have an operation, you probably felt that wasn’t right; that there had to be something better.
When your neighbour was foreclosed upon by a bank, you may have looked for ways to help.
When Ottawa started talking about getting rid of its grain hopper cars, you found a way to get involved or get your organization involved.
You did all those things because that’s part of what you thought it meant to be a neighbour.
Canadian ambassador Frank McKenna wisely observed that trade problems are poisoning our bilateral relationship with the United States, in effect saying that Canada and the U.S. need to start living as good neighbours again.
It seems that we have forgotten an important truth: the more we focus on ourselves, the more easily we are swept away individually.
We need to recover the respect and tolerance for each other that led to creative, neighbourly living. We need to remember there is enough out there to satisfy everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.
We need to recall that by being good neighbours, we can help one another fulfil our goals.
