Politics and Press

The Great White North celebrates

It’s July 1, Canada Day, and my brother Doug and I have decided to finally give into the many annual requests from around the globe and, in our role of Canadian idols and icons, help the world celebrate the event. Canada Day, as many will now realize, takes place exactly four days before rival US Day, documenting the speed of the Great White North’s fathers and mothers of confederation - loyalists, Quebecois and First Nations working together - in establishing the globe’s largest nation (at the time, Russia not having yet expanded eastward) exactly four days before the rebel USers followed suit. It is a tale told by an idol, full of sound and fury and signifying the birth of a nation reaching from sea to sea to suddenly unfrozen sea. As my brother Bob put it in a moment caught by one of Youtube’s most revered sites, this land is great because it is great, white and north. In addition, as other sites will testify, it is the only nation which will pass along crucial tips on how to roll your owns while wearing mittens and how to get a mouse in the Molson bottle so you get a free 12 pack.

An apology that might mean something

My brother Doug and I are suspicious of official apologies by governments who are convinced by election polls that they might win some ethnic votes if they recall how miserably a specific ethnic group was treated a century ago. But this week the Canadian government made an official apology that might actually have been meant and which might have a meaningul impact. Prime Minister Stephen Harper read off an unambiguous apology to the assembled First Nations Chiefs in the House of Parliament regarding the way native peoples have been treated since Canada existed and in particular with regard to what happened during the lengthy period when residential schools were used to “take the Indian out of the Indians” as Harper put it. Children were removed from their families and their homes and transported to remote live-in schools where they were punished for using their native languiage, taught the ways of the white man and untaught the ways of their parents. Even worse, if that can be imagined, is that these children in far too many cases, were also sexually exploited by the people who were supposed to be teaching them.

It was a miserable cultural performance of the highest order, and its abject failure can still be felt a generation after the last residential school was closed. Not only have many of the former students never really recoverd from their ordeal, in many cases they have passed on their existential disillusionment to their own children. The results can be seen in many of the poverty-stricken reserves, particularly in the north, that remain Canada’s darkest secret, though it is no secret to any alert Canadian living today. For the problems are also sadly present in the drug-dominated sections of too many Canadian cities. where the attempt at enforced assimilation has led only to despair. Some natives were not interested in Harper’s belated apology, but many more seemed to be genuinely attentive, no doubt in the hope that a page is finally turning and that the native peoples can soon regain their rightful place on their home turf. Let’s hope they are right.

Shipping Up to Ontario

Our pals the MacKenzies have for some time tried to lure us north of the border but rumors of walrus blubber meals, national curling championships, screech cocktails, dollars called “loonies” and an insufficient number of liquor stores kept us for the most part happily ensconced well south of the 49th parallel. But seven years of George W. Bush, the tediousness of the Democratic primaries, and the lure of the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen conspired to get us on the road – headed north.

Leonard brought his “golden voice” to the concert in Hamilton, Ontario and his lyrics were as darkly powerful as ever. While the current tour includes only dates in Canada and Europe, he did dedicate “Democracy” to his “friends in the United States” and the implicit irony was not lost on the mostly Canadian audience. At 73 some worried that Cohen would not be up to a full concert but 3 hours after the concert’s start he was going at full strength. He began the concert with a gracious thank you to the crowd for coming out “on a school night” and ended it with another gracious thank you for allowing him to sing to them. The Canadian press often refers to him as “our Bob Dylan” but to this friendly neighbor from the South it might really be vice versa.

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left nor right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

L. Cohen in “Democracy”

Michaelle Jean makes a visit to France

My brother and I are afraid that our headline may not mean much to our wide readership outside of Canada and Bavaria. Therefore some background information. Michaelle Jean is the splendidly photogenic Governor-General of Canada, whom the separatist Parti Quebecois likes to identify as “the Queen of England’s representative in Canada”. But Michaelle Jean is no easy target for that once revolutionary party that is beginning to look more than a little frumpy and is losing support because of it. She is currently representing Canada in Paris at celebrations jointly celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the end of the Second World War and France’s national Day on Saturday marking the end of slavery in 1848. Michaelle Jean causes the separatistes great problems. She is an immigrant from Haiti, speaks French natively and English with Gaulic charm, and she is a very articulate and intelligent commentator in both national languages on cultural matters. In a luncheon speech before the French Senate, given of course in French, she identified herself in a way that few (no?) other western leaders could do: “The great-great-granddaughter of slaves, I cannot remain indifferent to the legacy of racism and intolerance left behind by decades of slavery and that continues to be felt in our communities, at times openly, at times more insidiously.” Eat your heart out, Senator Obama.

She also happens to be the best-looking First Lady in the world, a fair distance ahead of the second-place French First Lady, something that seems to have stunned the French so deeply that photos prove that Nicolas Sarkozy could not have bent over more deeply while kissing her hand. Le Monde wrote that Canada’s titular head of state was “La presque reine du Canada” - “the enlightened face of humanity, intelligence and beauty’. Holy moley! Michaelle Jean has done more to foster French/Canada relations in one week of public appearances than decades of those boring old kind of Canuck politicians, including the endlessly whining separatisten that France used to love to coddle. As for M. Sarkozy, he not only accompanied Mme Jean to the Normandy D-Day landing sites, but also asked if he could join her at the Canadian military cemetery at Beny-Riviers near Juno Beach where 2000 Canadians died in the D-Day invasion. When was the last time that a French prime Minister knew it was good politics to be seen with the Governor-General of Canada? A word of advice to M. Obama. As far as Canadians can tell, he has only made one reference to Canada in his career as a politician, saying that he would love to meet the (non-existent) President of Canada when he becomes President of the US. This was taken as a bad omen for the future of US foreign policy given the last 8 years, but perhaps Obama can do a little research about his neighbours in the next months. If he doesn’t he is in for a monumental surprise when he meets the Governor-General of stodgy old Canada.

Sports and Politics, Cont.

As outlined by Jeff in a number of perceptive articles, the US primary system has fallen on hard times, if it is meant to display to the world the wonders of democracy. Not only have the so-called debates been at high-school level, most observers agree that the actual candidates might have something useful to say, if only asked or allowed to do so. Instead two intelligent and informed people are treated by questioners as fools, and do a pretty good job of confirming that with their answers. At the same time one of the areas of potential dramatic interest in US politics is sorely missing - sports. In this field Big George W. could finally show his prowess, and actually knew what he was talking about when baseball or football came up. But in the spring there is really nothing going on down below the border, and audiences can only be treated with ancient shots of Barack playing high school basketball and then promising to build a basketball court in the White House. So far we haven’t even seen Hillary in her field hockey duds, though she must have played it, or something, at some point or other.

This is Canada’s season and governments are wary of calling an election up north while the Stanley Cup playoffs are on, since the whole country can switch allegiances in a flash depending on which team(s) are still in the hunt. This year only one Canadian team has made it into the quarter final, but lots of sports lovers, like New Yorker star writer Adam Gopnik, would be glad to tell you it’s the grandest team of them all - the Montréal Canadiens - and the surprising march of them towards the Stanley Cup has any Quebec separatiste begging for no election in the next weeks. For as Gopnik (joining the late lamented Mordecai Richler) has argued convincingly, les habs are as good a force as there is for explaining why Canada functions so well despite all its apparent contradictions. (John Ibbitson’s recent statement that, without anybody paying much attention, Canada has suddenly become the most successful country on earth, fits nicely into this framework).

Playing out of the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, les canadiéns ice a team with a larger percentage of French-speaking players, and of course coaches, than anyone else, have a name which sticks in the gut of Quebec separatistes, who tried with no success to get it changed, and have hired several key Russian players this year who have flourished in North America’s most European city. They also have no hesitation to replace a French player with a better Anglo one if it will help the team. At a crucial moment in this year’s race they shipped their French goalie to Washington, gave the job to Carey Price, a 20 year old kid from Anahim Lake, British Columbia whose mother is the chief of a remote First Nations band on the edge of the spectacular true wild west Chilcotin Plateau, and ended up winning the race in the east. It’s that kind of mixture which makes the separatistes head for cover, because there isn’t anyone in Montréal wh o is not cheering for the native kid who had to fly with his bush pilot father to the metropolis of Williams Lake, 300 kilometers away, to play hockey. And there’s no Canadian who wasn’t cheering for the Habs as they opened their series today against Philadelphia. This is awful news for the enemies of Canadian federalism and they will lay low for the next months.

Oh yes, the Canadians were losing tonight 3-2 with 45 seconds to go, when one of the Russians scored, sending the game into overtime. They won it 28 seconds into the overtime period when another Russian scored. The crowd from Tuktayuktuk to Newfoundland went into a frenzy.

Canada and Kosovo

It took Canada more than a month to recognize Kosovo as an independent state, a clear display of reluctance to follow the lead taken by its closest NATO allies, Germany, France, the UK and the Unites States, almost immediately upon Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Canada is not the only significant power to not follow this lead with any enthusiasm, and the list of those who have declared they will not do so is long and daunting - Russia, China, India, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Cuba, both Koreas, almost all of Africa, Central Asia and most of Kosovo’s neighbours - Serbia, of course, but also Bosnia-Herzogovina, Greece, Macedonia, and Cyprus. Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria all took longer than Canada to decide and near-neighbours Slovakia, Czech Republic and Ukraine have not recognized Kosovo. Albania, on the other hand, was the first to recognize and remains one of only 3 countries to actually establish an embassy in Pristina, the others being the UK and Germany.
Canada’s reluctance to recognize Kosovo as an independent state is closely related to the absolute refusal of Russia, China, Spain, India, Mexico and Indonesia to do so, a group of politically completely unrelated countries that make up the majority of the world’s population. They have one thing in common; they all have minority ethnic or religious populations striving for independent status. Most dramatically this is now playing out in China, but all these countries have separatist movements which often use violence as a political weapon. As long as there are Basques in Spain, Sikhs in india and Uigurs in China, Spain, India and China will not be recognizing unilaterally-declared separatist states. Quebec was Canada’s problem in this context and, as predictably as the sun will rise, the separatist Bloc Quebecois immediately congratulated the Ottawa federal government for recognizing Kosovo, saying that it had given a separatist government in Quebec the precedent it needed to do something similar. China, India and Spain will not be following that lead.

Whose war is this, anyway?

Who knows? Maybe Senator McCain will overcome all odds and become the next president of the United States, in which case the war in Iraq, which has become a forlorn US war as the few original allies head for the hills, may not be over. But the war in Afghanistan, supposedly a NATO war with some help from Australian special forces, is anything but over. But for most of the NATO countries, it has never started.

In a scenario that nobody could have imagined even five years ago, Canadian Minister of Defence Peter MacKay knocked on the doors of all of his colleagues at the meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Lithuania this week, and asked a simple question. “Are you willing to order your soldiers to actually fight in Afghanistan, or do you plan to keep them in safe havens under orders to not engage in combat while Canadian, British, and US troops do all the dangerous work, with some limited help from the Netherlands and Denmark?” For the Canadian government has announced that it has had enough of this charade of a NATO army and will pull its 3000 troops out of dangerous Kandahar, where 78 Canadian soldiers have been killed, if other NATO countries don’t contribute at least 1000 actual fighting soldiers by next year. The US Secretary of Defence inadvertently added his salt to this wound by stating that while US soldiers knew how to fight Taliban forces, other NATO soldiers didn’t. Later he admitted he hadn’t meant to include Canada, the UK and the Netherlands in this condemnation, but by then it was too late.

MacKay met with lots of encouragement but little success, though the US promised marines on a temporary basis, and France seemed to vaguely suggest it might send 700 fighters. The real disgrace is that supposed leading powers in NATO like Germany, Italy and Spain have ordered their armies to not engage in combat, while their Canadian, US and British colleagues, all supposedly part of the same army, are suffering heavy casualties. Can such a supposed political union really survive such a breech of loyalty?

A tale of two journeys

If you live in Iceland and wish to travel to Estonia or Bulgaria, or Malta, you can now take a short plane ride and rent a car or take a train and in a couple of days you will arrive at your desired destination without having crossed a single controlled border. But if you get in your car in Vancouver and drive 45 minutes south to Point Roberts, Washington, you will reach a border control very reminiscent of the old European borders between the Soviet-bloc nations and western Europe, but with enough sophisticated and expensive electronic detection equipment to convince even the most sophisticated terrorist to try another route.
if you are lucky and hit this border at a time when there is not a hour-long lineup (or more) and then manage to pass muster at the guard station, by displaying a valid passport and a believable story about why you want to go to Point Roberts (usually to go to the post office as the US postal system is much cheaper and more reliable than the Canadian one), and then drive another 15 minutes in any direction, you will hit salt water since Point Roberts is US territory accessible by land only through Canada. Kids who live there have to be bussed out to US schools in the main part of the US by passing across this border, making the misery of school bus journeys four times as trying as it is for any other US kids, since they now must cross heavily guarded borders 4 times a day.
OK this is the most absurd of all the East German-like US border crossings, but it is not at all funny at places like the Peace Arch Crossing between Seattle and Vancouver, the highway between Winnipeg and Minneapolis, the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor or the bridge at Niagara Falls. In these places, and in many lesser ones all along what used to be an unguarded border, normal travel regularly comes to a complete standstill as cars wait for hours in lineups that, among other things, make any talk about an interest in cutting down pollution from idling cars ridiculous. Does anyone out there know of a single terrorist who has been captured at a Canada/US border crossing?

What ever happened to the US election system?

It’s not so long ago that the US caucus system designed to choose nominees for the presidential candidates of the only two parties that count came up with figures like Eisenhower, Stevenson, Kennedy, Reagan, McGovern, Nixon. Now it is certainly true that not all of these chaps proved to be such worthy leaders, but all of them were at least experienced politicians or, in the case of Eisenhower, an important historical personality and father figure. You could despair of Reagan and Nixon’s California view of the world or McGovern’s innocence, but their campaigns were veritable Socratic dialogues compared to the reports reaching foreign ears of the level of discussion in the current round of presidential candidate debates.

Recently on what many thought were satirical comedies, European and Canadian television has been running selections from Youtube or CNN debates in which grown men striving to lead a very powerful nation struggled over who was the best Christian or indeed if one of them was a Christian at all. This takes place in a country that is supposed to separate church and state. The Scopes trial was revisited and nobody seemed willing to really defend the idea of evolution. Questions were thrown at the man who was once the leading candidate about whether he wore secret underwear, and the beast that raised questions about real Roman Catholic beliefs, who seemed to have left the stage forever with the Kennedy election, once again raised its weird head. Fortunately Joe Liebermann isn’t in the mix.

What is going on? It is impossible to imagine any of these debaters would be taken seriously as a contender for any important position in any other leading western country with arguments like these. Certainly it is true that at least a couple of these people might have something to offer on some important topics, like health care for the US society or the Middle East for the global one. But they don’t seem to be able to find a forum or get much of a chance to discuss anything of consequence when the only topic that wins you votes is whether your Christianity is better than the next guy’s. Isn’t anybody down there working on a way of changing the electoral system?

Belgium - Canada’s Nightmare

Belgium is a country that seems to be incapable of functioning. It has had no government for 6 months and on Dec.1 the leader of the largest party after the last election, Yves Leterme, gave up in his attempt to form a minority centre-right coalition government. This attempt did not break down on political or idealistic grounds, but on linguistic ones, as the Dutch-speaking (Flemish) Christian Democrats could not convince their French-speaking (Walloon) party colleagues to work with them. Recent polls show that there is a great deal of support among the Flemish-speakers of the north for the proposal that they should join their linguistic brethren in The Netherlands where they would surely immediately become a significant force in a larger Greater Netherlands. The Walloons, on the other hand, have no great desire to destroy Belgium, which has existed for 177 years, suspecting that they would become nothing more than a provincial backwater in a slightly larger France. And neither side probably wants to split up into tiny two independent countries, both of which would disappear onto the fringes of an increasingly fragmented Europe. Anyone who doubts that with regard to the supposedly ever-more united Europe of the European Union merely has to look at the unmanageable list of countries who send out national squads for European and World Cup soccer tournaments. In a further ironic twist, Brussels, the Belgian capital and its only truly bilingual place, is also the headquarters of the European Union and Nato, and its dismissal as the capital of an independent country would certainly make a mess of that status.

But there is an increasing suspicion that such subtleties may not actually matter any more and that the decades-long feuding between two linguistic groups that simply cannot get along in a national sense has already become more than a national government can tolerate. In fact there are very few western nations that successfully maintain bilingual societies and two national languages. In Europe, it’s hard to think of any other than quirky Switzerland, which does not govern itself like any other country, and Finland, with an ever-decreasing but still well-served Swedish population, and possibly Italy with its surprisingly successful solution to the once serious problem of the German minority in South Tyrol. Certainly France doesn’t rate, as it has suppressed the rights of any native language other than French. Ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish about the UK, the Catalans and the Basques about Spain, the Spanish-speakers about the US. And then there’s Canada, the world’s second largest country but with only slightly more than three times the population of Belgium. Like Belgium, Canada also has a bilingual national capital, Ottawa, and large sections of the country that are mainly French-speaking. In many ways its national linguistic demographic is much like Belgium’s, but with English taking the place of Dutch. So far, Canada has managed to survive the surge of pressure for the independence of a French-speaking Quebec, and for the moment it seems like the independistes of Quebec are in retreat, or perhaps hiding. But nobody should count them out and the fate of Belgium could have a serious impact in a country whose global and economic importance dwarfs that of the little country that apparently couldn’t.