A Canadian story

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This article was published 12/01/2017 (3510 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What makes a Canadian a Canadian? And what makes an immigrant an immigrant? And while it’s possible, and very common, to be both, is there an emotional process that makes a person feel more like one than the other?

For Canadian actor Peter Keleghan, these are vexing questions — not because he’s unsure about where his heart’s loyalty lies, but because he’s spent a lifetime trying to understand why his parents think and feel the way they do.

Keleghan, one of this country’s most recognizable and constantly employed actors with credits that range from The Newsroom, The Red Green Show and Made in Canada to Murdoch Mysteries and Workin’ Moms, steps out of the scripted-TV realm this week to engage in a documentary exploration of his family’s roots and motivations.

Once an Immigrant, which airs Thursday, Jan. 12, at 9 p.m on CBC’s Firsthand, follows the Quebec-born performer as he seeks a deeper understanding of his parents’ very different immigrant experiences in order to more fully appreciate the way they view the country they call home.

The film is divided into two distinct chapters, since his “amicably separated” parents live far from one another and have very different stories. The first half focuses on Keleghan’s mother, Rita, who was born in Ireland and hasn’t been back there since Peter and his sister were young children. Rita has lived in Canada for more than half a century but has rebuffed the notion of becoming a citizen; as a gift for her 90th birthday, Peter and sister Tecky take her across the pond for one last visit to the Emerald Isle.

It’s a lovely, wistful journey, filled with picturesque meanderings and sometimes-unexpected reunions with friends and relations. During one dinner party with long-lost family members, Rita offers an observation: “Once an immigrant, always an immigrant, if you’re coming out of Ireland. It’s something you hold in your heart always… at least, for me.”

Still, Rita talks proudly of her adopted Canadian home, and offers, at best, mixed feelings at the notion of returning to Ireland. Peter’s conversational explorations reveal a simple truth about his mother’s refusal to fully adopt Canada through citizenship: as a staunch Irish Catholic, she simply can’t wrap her head around the idea of pledging allegiance to England’s monarch. “If you put a Canadian instead of the Queen on the ($20) bill, I’m in there,” she offers.

The second half of Keleghan’s journey involves visiting his father, Stanislaw Krakus (who encouraged Peter to take his mother’s last name when embarking on an acting career), in rural Quebec. A Polish immigrant who was 10 years old when the Nazis invaded his homeland — resulting in several horrific years spent shuttling through a series of forced-labour camps — Stan ended up in England, alone, after the Second World War. He eventually became an engineer; after meeting Rita, who was vacationing in England, and a two-year courtship, the couple married and travelled to Canada for their honeymoon.

They never left.

Unlike Rita, however, Stan became a Canadian citizen at the earliest opportunity. What perplexes his son, however, is why someone who’s so joyfully Canadian chooses to live way out in the country, so far away from other Canadians. The answer, again, turns out to be simple: after his childhood and young-adult ordeal, Stan has no interest in living in an overcrowded urban environment filled with people who might be inclined to discriminate against an immigrant.

“Do you want to live in a ghetto?” he says, answering his son’s question with a question.

Once an Immigrant doesn’t offer anything in the way of universal truths about the Canadian experience, but that isn’t the point. Keleghan — ably assisted here by co-writer Steve Lucas and director Michael McNamara — is a gifted storyteller with a couple of captivating yarns to share. Which, of course, is a quintessentially Canadian thing to do.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @BradOswald