Politics and Press

Oh Canada, where did you dig up these leaders?

It used to be that Canada punched above its weight in foreign affairs, an honest broker that could be counted on to consider options carefully before dedicating itself to finding a just solution to a difficult situation, even if it meant sending in its troops. Thus Canada entered the Second World War within a week of the Nazi invasion of Poland, more than two years before the United States did and had already suffered many thousand casualties in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and the skies over Europe by the time the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour forced the US hand. After that awful war, nowhere captured more dramatically than in the on-the-spot sketches by Canuck war artists A.Y. Jackson and Alex Colville, Canadian Prime Minister Mike Pearson got a Nobel Peace Prize that was actually deserved, for his tenacious negotiations leading to an end to the Suez crisis.

Now that hard-earned reputation risks being eradicated by a government intent on doing nothing contrary to its economic interests which is more than satisfied to follow the dictates of the super heavyweights on matters like climate change, border controls and diplomatic independence. At the Copenhagen climate change conference Canada has received the fossil of the year award, on the Afghan file, it has received a letter signed by almost 100 of its former ambassadors protesting the treatment of one of its middle-level diplomats in Kabul, who was called before parliament and publicly demeaned by the Minister of Defence for having sent a number of reports to Ottawa warning them of something that was public knowledge – that prisoners passed on to the Afghan army by Canada and other western powers were routinely tortured by the Afghans – and which Canada for a lengthy period denied before its memory improved. In China Prime Minister Harper was publicly rebuked by the Chinese president for insulting Chinese sensibilities by taking too long to come and visit, for hosting the Dalai Lama and for not having attended the Beijing Olympics. Harper also had no plans to attend the Copenhagen Climate Conference until President Obama said he would be there. It is a long way from Pearson to Harper, and it seems safe to predict that it will take a long time for Canada to repair its international image so that it can begin punching, if not as a heavyweight, at least above the flyweight class it now occupies.

Lament for a great university

Though it has not gone unnoticed, there has been too little written about the disastrous decline that must inevitably occur in one of the world’s great universities, arguably the finest state university in existence, the University of California at Berkeley. Compared to the cultivated mustiness of the elite UK universities, or the inborn snootiness of the French écoles superieurs, not to mention the artificiality and class structure of such ridiculously rich private US outposts such as “America’s McGill”, Harvard, or the somewhat seedy centres of German knowledge such as LMU München, Berkeley has long offered an almost unique mixture of intellectual intercourse and natural beauty mixed in with a splendid library and a revolutionary streak that keeps the place jumping. And that at a price normal people can afford with some belt-tightening, unlike those with tuitions of $50,00 a year, who have also coincidentally come under great financial pressure as their hedge-funded endowments have collapsed in the last year. Poor Harvard has seen its endowment sink from 40 billion Dollars to either 30 or 22 billion, depending on who you believe, a sum that does not lead to displays of sympathy at working-class Berkeley
But unless something completely unexpected happens, the budget of the University of California system will face a shortfall of 600 million dollars next year, an 8% cut from last year’s budget and by law the system cannot run in a deficit. So this staggering sum of money must be taken out of the hide of the universities themselves, and it seems that the board of Governors has decided to simply pass the pain on to everyone equally. Chico State University and many others like it will thus have the same problem as Berkeley, to somehow cut 8% of the budget. The disaster at Berkeley can only lead to a sudden serious decline in the quality of the library, the closing of small non-profitable departments, the loss of elite faculty members as they search for greener pastures at expanding Canadian universities, which are largely unaffected by the economic crisis since hedge fund betting is illegal there, as well as the loss of the youngest and the brightest since there will be a hiring freeze. The only hope is that the injury time will be relatively short and the recovery from a potentially debilitating attack can still be attained.

Why Europe doesn’t work

At the very moment while most of the world leaders were in New York to spout wisdom – are some of them for real or was this an audition for a B horror film? – and wax on about climate change,etc – only the Prime Minister of the Maldive Islands was convincing – over in Europe the lackeys of three of the supposed major enlightened states plus a few minnows were busy casting a vote that showed what farcical members of the so-called united nations they are. It was a rather small matter unless you take saving the ecology of the world to be something other than some sort of hippy conspiracy, but it underlined how hopelessly anti-social and greedy some extremely prosperous European powers are.

It only had to do with one of those fish species that are going to disappear in European waters if maritime nations continue to allow their fisherfolk to wipe out every living thing they can get their nets around. But it is a big fish – the bluefin tuna – that is noticeable by its presence as well as its absence. And the bluefins are returning in numbers to the waters of the Canadian maritime provinces where last year only one-fifth of the catch was allowed compared to that taken in European waters. Fish biologists all agree – if the Europeans continue to savage their bluefin population, it will be gone within a decade at the latest, so the European Union had an easy choice in its recent vote on the matter – stop all bluefin tuna fishing immediately. And so the vote went for the great majority of the EU members. But not for all, and the EU constitution demands unanimity.

One could perhaps understand why Cyprus and Malta voted to put the immediate livelihood of their fishermen over that of their future, though their vetoes certainly underline the absurdity of the EU constitution. But the small island nations didn’t have to worry about the reaction of that part of the world that is actually worried about the environment to their nihilistic votes. For in New York, the governments of super-prosperous France, Spain and Italy no doubt spouted on about their dedication to saving the world, but in Brussels they also vetoed the bluefin resolution, thus condemning one of the premier fish just hanging on in European waters. Shameful isn’t the word we’re looking for, but what is?

Tales of the Real Wild West

Remember the old Monty Python skit where Michael Palin and the boys dressed up in checkered shirts and Mounty uniforms and sang about their desire to be tough British Columbians until Michael began waxing on about his desire to dress up as a girlie while at it. Those were the good old days of satire before Mike started rambling around the world in his career as a travel raconteur. That skit gave British Columbia a kind of pseudo-tough comic veneer where tough guys in a harsh environment turned out to be anything but that.

But there were a series of adventures of young lads and lassies this summer which brought home just how tough this magnificent place can really be. Take the 3-year old kid who was camping with his parents in June near the banks of the mighty Peace River way up in the north and decided to drive his toy truck into the river. His panicked parents had no idea what happened to him but three hours later and 20 kilometers downstream a fisherman saw what he thought was a bald-headed eagle (the kid was a towhead) floating down the river on a log. It turned out to be our lad sitting on his overturned truck, and in good shape, other than a mild case of hypothermia, after the fisherman swam out and got him, .

Next came the 2-year old lad camping with his parents on the Yukon border who wandered away into the bush, causing an all-out search and rescue mission which found nothing for 3 days. On the fourth day a heat-seeking helicopter located him, and searchers found him asleep under a bush, encircled by what turned out to be a stray dog who had found him before the helicopter. He too had only mild hypothermia. The parents adopted the dog.

Then there was the 6-year old girl who was sitting near her fisherman father on a dock in Vancouver when a seal leaped up, grabbed her arm and dragged her under the water. The father managed to beat the seal off in an underwater struggle and the daughter emerged with some bites, scratches and mild hypothermia. Finally there was the 10-year old girl hiking with her mother a couple of hundred meters behind the men in the family when a cougar jumped on her and dragged her off the trail, only to be driven off by an irate Mom. Scratches, puncture wounds, no hypothermia.

It can still be mighty tough out there as today’s papers confirmed with their report of the bow hunter up north who was hoping to bag a black bear with his bow and arrow and instead got jumped from behind by a silently attacking grizzly with three cubs in tow. Pinned under the great beast he did the only thing he could imagine doing. He pulled out an arrow from his quiver, and stabbed the grizzly, who then retreated, in the throat. No word on the state of the bear; the archer suffered puncture wounds, cuts and extreme nervousness, but is back on the trail today.

So take that Michael Palin.

A Tale of Two Immigrants

As Canada becomes more and more the place where immigrants can make their way financially with little interest paid to their backgrounds, a German and an Austrian have hogged the headlines of late, and for diametrically opposed reasons. It used to be that “the American dream” was an understood concept that suggested that anyone entering US society had the chance to reach any goal, even to become president, and the election of Barack Obama suggested that that dream is still alive. However the way he is being treated by what seems to be a significant (majority?) part of the population as he attempts to make his dreams a reality, suggest that this assumption might be seriously misplaced.
Meanwhile, north of the border, where a health care system is in place that is being attacked in the US parliament in extraordinarily ignorant ways, an Austrian immigrant, who arrived in Canada with $200 in his pocket, has just bought a well-known car brand , Opel, the European version of GM cars, as he tries to fulfill his long dream of manufacturing his own cars in Canada. Frank Stronach, who transformed his tiny savings into a multi-billion dollar car-parts business and whose daughter came close to becoming Prime Minister, is given a good chance of actually doing this by economists, thugh he has been hamstrung by having sales to the US and China blocked. By and large, Canadians wish him well.
The deportation two weeks ago of Karl-Heinz Schreiber, on the other hand, an immigrant from Germany, was met with a collective sigh of relief. He managed to lead Canadian legal experts, law enforcement folks and immigration officials on a decade-long merry chase through the sleaze left by carefully-leaked documents that left a former prime minister as well as an apparently grotesquely incompetent legal system flailing in hopeless panic. He apparently was having a good time for a whole decade as the country squirmed uncomfortably and could not figure out how to get rid of him. His absence is as welcome as is the presence of Frank Stronach.

Whiting out the USA

According to last week’s New York Times, the US Homeland Security folks have ordered the guards at their new border station in Massena, New York – across from Cornwall, Ontario – to whitewash – erase -the name United States from the side of their building, as they consider the name itself to make it a security threat. The Montreal Gazette then wrote that the word “paranoid” no longer suffices to describe the US border policy, “surreal” is the right word.

Can it really be that such a great and powerful country whose own border it is supposedly defending is afraid to name itself? Can anyone imagine Romania or Bulgaria, both of which are now easier for Canadians to enter than the USA is, giving out such an order to their border guards? Is the lady who not long ago announced that the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada still in charge of Homeland Security?
Please, Barack, put some people who live on this planet in charge of your borders before it is too late.

where you want to live

The Economist has just published its annual ranking of 140 major cities for their livability. It’s no surprise that Vancouver, Canada’s urban showpiece on the Pacific with a matchless setting, is once again ranked first as a place to live, but it is the absence of cities – and countries – that would have been favourites not long ago which says something about how the judgment of quality of urban life has changed. Three of the first six cities are in Canada (#1 Vancouver, #4 Toronto, #6 Calgary) and 6 of the first ten are in Australia (Sidney, Melbourne and Perth) and Canada. The other four in the first ten are capital cities of middle-size European powers (#2 Vienna, Zurich, Helsinki) plus UN-centre Geneva.

Former stars like Paris (#17), Berlin (#22) or Rome (#51) no longer cut the mustard for quality of life. Countries without a history of military colonialization trump countries who came to prominence by invading neighbours and even far-off lands, and now have to live with the consequences. Countries with a current atmosphere of tolerance and with middle-power armed forces run a steadier, friendlier ship in the modern world than those with atomic weapons and nervously-guarded borders.

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The Coronation of Csar Michael

As predicted two years ago by my brother, Canada’s prodigal son, Michael Ignatieff, has returned from half a lifetime of exile in London (where he taught at Cambridge and Oxford) and Boston (where he headed an institute at Harvard) to become a politician in Toronto (where he taught at the University of Toronto) and is about to be crowned leader of the Liberal Party of Canada this weekend in Vancouver, (where he taught at the University of British Columbia).

The location of the coronation is yet another stroke of luck for the neophyte politician, as he will be far from his centre of power in still wintry Ontario, where he is already showing he can win back voters lost to Conservatives in the last election – a miserable loss for the Liberals – and instead can bask in the splendid atmosphere of the world’s most beautiful city, particularly in May as it suns itself before splendid deeply snow-covered mountains and ignores its social problems of homelessness and drug-addiction as its hockey team continues its march towards a potential Stanley Cup. My brother and I, driving home from Leonard Cohen’s recent towering performance at the hockey stadium, were stopped by a chap pushing a shopping cart full of assembled collected goods, who had no intention of drawing attention to his sad economic state compared to ours, as we assumed he had, but rather just wanted to give us the thumbs up sign as he noted the same Canuck flag hanging from our window as he had flapping from his cart. Here in Vancouver hockey is the great equalizer and when that’s going well and the weather has lost its winter bluster, then everything seems better.

And so it will be with the man who will be Prime Minister within a year. Many Canadians hope he will have the international clout to finally allow Canada to punch at or above its weight in crucial global matters, like water, energy, economics and also military interventions, where it has played a far bigger role than has been demonstrated under its long string of boring, anti-charismatic prime ministers since Pierre Trudeau. Armed with his 17 books – one deals with his father’s line, that included the last minister of education of csarist Russia, and the most recent with his mother’s, that included the man who plotted the trans-Canada railway – and with extensive experience and publications (and films) on conflicts like the war in ex-Yugoslavia, Ignatieff cannot be dismissed as yet another career politician of no particular note. He has strong opinions that even turn off some of his admirers, but there is no question that figures like Presidents Obama and Medvedev will have a different reaction when they meet the next Prime Minister of Canada than they did when they met any other since Trudeau.

Interview with The Homeland Security Secretary

As if poor President Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about, as he considers whether it is the chaps who ordered torture in the name of homeland security or the chaps who carried out the orders – or neither or both – who should be brought to trial. And then, as a side show, his choice for protector of that same border gives an interview on Canadian national television outlining her concerns. Coming as it did upon the conclusion of a Canuck hockey game and first round sweep, the talk with an unknown woman appeared to be a perhaps somewhat heavy-handed satire about the former guardians of the US side of the Canadian border. Here was a comedienne portraying a US diplomat who was announcing that the US-Canada border must be made more impenetrable – just like the Mexican one – because the 9/11 terrorists had entered the US that way and that the currently informal border controls would have to be made much more stringent so it didn’t happen again. Well, you could walk down the street and ask almost anyone and they would know that no 9/11 terrorists entered from Canada, so this part of this routine was too nutty to really be cutting satire. The four-hour waits at the border on the last long weekend also made the second part too obvious since it was just meant to show the supposed US diplomat hadn’t crossed that border in years, if ever.

And then her name flashed on screen – Janet Napolitano, apparently a Canadian comedienne my brother and I had never heard of, though we have great connections in that field. And then her title popped up – Homeland Security Secretary of the USA. Well, that was a good one, if a bit of a cheap shot, until it turned out to be true. This birdbrain – apparently the former governor of Arizona – is in charge of US border security, and is going to cost both countries billions of dollars in lost trade, more if she builds a wall like the one on the Mexican border in the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, and she doesn’t know what country the guys came from who attacked New York. Sometimes satire just doesn’t pay.

The Song of Leonard Cohen

The ice has been scraped off the floor of the building, where just yesterday my brother and I witnessed (tickets from friends in high places) the relentless march of the Canucks to the inevitable series with Detroit for the real Stanley Cup (everyone picks the winner of the western division to roll over whoever wins in the anemic eastern division), and the stage is set for tonight’s performance by the most remarkable performer/author of the last half century. Fifty years ago, the young Leonard Cohen won Canada’s highest literary prize for the second of his only two novels, Beautiful Losers, which sold 3,000 copies, thus convincing Leonard to try another field, like poetry and singing.

And what a career that has been. He has also won the GG for poetry – Flowers for Hitler – and made (and lost) a fortune by setting many of his lyrics to music. The quality of his writing and his musical transcriptions is so high that a pure poet of the highest order, Germany’s greatest and most difficult contemporary writer and youngest winner of its highest literary prize, Durs Grünbein, once confided to my brother and me that Cohen was at the top of his list of colleagues worth admiring (and the only Canadian on it), a troubadour who had lived off the public performance of poetry for a lifetime. Durs wanted only one souvenir of his Canadian visit, not maple syrup or Yukon air, but Donald Brittain’s National Film Board documentary about the very young Leonard Cohen before he had even started to sing, not the easiest document to get ahold of at the time, though we managed to eventually get it delivered to Berlin. And now, at 74, Cohen is well into the most triumphant tour of his life, in March playing the 99th concert on the tour in his first performance in the United States (in New York) in 15 years. Though he’s from Montréal, he’ll be on home turf in Vancouver, just like the Canucks in the same building, and the long sold-out house is expecting a similar triumph.