One 'thee' too many? Bill Richardson has a little fun with the national anthem

On Sunday, July 16, 1967, when the hundred candles on Canada's centennial cake were still smouldering, Joni Mitchell met Leonard Cohen at the Newport Music Festival. Thus commenced the brief, but sparky, intersection of their two solitudes. Joni Mitchell, memorializing the fling in the haunting Rainy Night House, writes, "I sat up all the night and watched thee to see who in the world you might be."

"Thee?" It has the grasping clunkiness you'd expect from a high-school yearbook versifier. Joni had no need to grab at such low-hanging fruit. Her purpose was allusive; she referenced, no doubt, Bird on the Wire, where Leonard, assuming the persona of a chivalrous knight, writes, "I have saved all my ribbons for thee."

Feh. It doesn't matter how liberally you slather it with nuance, "thee," in any contemporary, non-ironic application, makes the butt clench and the lips pucker, or vice-versa; likewise, the nominative "thou" and the possessive "thy / thine." At least, that should be so. But I posit that most English-speaking Canadians, owing to a steady, school-enforced exposure to our anthem during our formative years, have developed an unlikely tolerance for the aberrant "thee," and its case variants.

For Joni, growing up in Saskatoon, and for Leonard, in Montreal, just as for all the rest of us, O Canada was part of the unexamined quotidian. Day after day, they, like us, would have sung "we see thee rise," "thy sons command," "on guard for thee." Such ritualized repetition is bound to be indoctrinatory; one might as well endure daily screenings of Friendly Persuasion.

Can we firmly grasp the reins of post-colonial nationhood and guide this buggy through the 21st century while hobbled by the Tennysonian "thee?" I think not. Happily, the Senate has approved amending "in all thy sons command" to the lumpen, but inclusive, "in all of us command." Assuming that parliamentary approval is forthcoming, this alteration will have the incidental effect of deep-sixing one instance of anachronistic usage (thy).

• UPDATE (June 28, 2017): Tory senators succeed in stalling gender-neutral O Canada

Will this whet the appetite for deeper decalcifying? Here's hoping! To pacify the traditionalists and heritage nuts who are so devoted to the unity of baby and bathwater, I suggest we preserve "with glowing hearts we see thee rise," and the first occurrence of "O Canada, we stand on guard for thee."

However, remember that this last line cited, as things now stand, is repeated THREE TIMES over the course of a ten-line ditty. This is not only an insult to contemporary diction, but a failure of the imagination.

I hear you cry, "What can we do to make things better, Bill? Tell us!"

Okay. I will. A national song, as with anything specifically and successfully Canadian, must allow us to differentiate ourselves from the NAFTA deniers down south. We need an anthem that, when keeping company with The Star-Spangled Banner at sporting events or AMWAY conventions or whatever, will say forcefully, yet politely, who we are and who we aren't. It won't take much tinkering to bring this off. I suggest:

God keep our land glorious and free,
O Canada, we welcome ref-u-gees,
O Canada, where we say Zed not Zee.

Catchy, n'est-ce pas? And a total boon to those spawns of Millennials, the little Leonards and the little Jonis who are just now beginning to paddle in the streams of patriotic influence. They're the ones who will shape the country's bicentennial notions of itself. They are our future. We stand on guard for them.