Politics and Press

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.

US grabs for Canadian water

As November ends, the Canadian dollar (the loony) is worth $1.05 US, the highest value it has reached since Canadian troops overwhelmed Washington in 1812. And there is no end in sight as oil prices continue to rise - Canada’s economic trump card as its immense oil reserves become more and more desirable and profitable - and the US economy continues to fall. Impossible super-low mortgage rates in the US, unknown in Canada, have now sent the housing market down south crashing as rates suddenly doubled, and the war in iraq keeps growing as an economic disaster, as well as a moral and military one. The MacKenzie clan had been expecting the US to counter-attack in an attempt to regain some of the prestige that has been lost to a neighbouring economy that had a currency worth $.62 US cents a couple of years ago that has since risen by more than 40%.
But when the attack came it had an unexpected goal, not a grab for oil, but for water. That in itself is unsurprising as Canada’s massive reserves of fresh water must look extraordinarily tempting to the residents of places like southern California, doomed to be threatened by drought and fire. But it was not the fire departments of Orange County that acted but the Disney corporation, attempting to buck up the spirits of the reeling superpower. In its just released video about the wonders of America - which means the United states in Disneytalk - it included that great US icon, Niagara Falls, but avoided the drab US side and showed Horseshoe Falls, or Canadian Falls as it is also known, in all its thunderous glory. Unfortunately this wonder is entirely on Canadian territory, and the Disneyfolk had to apologize, saying it had used mislabeled archival footage, which the MacKenzie clan took with a large gulp of maple syrup. In any case, the Disney Empire promised to correct this misinformation as soon as it had finished having its desired effect

The Greatest (Show) Place on Earth

British Columbia has recently begun replacing its old licence plates that modestly proclaimed to be “Beautiful British Columbia” with the not so modest claim that it is “The Greatest Place on Earth”. While it may be true that there are few places on earth that could get away with such a motto on its cars without becoming global laughing stocks, these licence plates, and the ads that go with them preceding the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler, do not exactly indicate the kind of modesty citizens would have expected not so long ago from a rather conservative ruling class.

The British Columbia Ferry System does indeed traverse one of the most spectacular series of waterways in existence, rivaled only be the Hurtig ferries along the Norwegian coast and perhaps the Alaska State Ferry lines, though they both have much fewer routes. But now British Columbians are beginning to wonder whether the official self-satisfaction might not benefit from a bit of a modest rest period. About a year ago, one of these beautiful northern ships failed to make a required turn in the middle of the night on the run from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy and plowed straight into an inland passage island, sinking within an hour. Two passengers were never found as the rescued passengers and crew found hospitality in the nearby native village of Hartley Bay. My brother and I know some old navy men who immediately told us that there was no way that could have happened if the bridge had been properly manned (personned?), and ongoing investigations have shown that to be the case. While rumours have been rampant about everything from sex trysts to alcohol consumption among the responsible bridge personnel, as the ship failed to turn, one thing became clear this week when B.C. Ferries announced mandatory drug testing of its personnel, just as the Olympics demands of its athletes. Interviews with ship personnel convinced investigators that pot spoking was common place among the crew and that there was good reason to think that not everyone was as alert as one might have expected as the ship ran aground. Since marijuana growing is one of BC.s largest money makers (if not the government’s, as no taxes are collected on this), and pot smoking is pretty much tolerated, it is perhaps no surprise that this is practiced by a cross-section of the population that works on a ship. However BC Ferries would like to think that the Queen of the North was the last ship of its fleet that will sink because somebody wasn’t paying attention on the bridge.

The loony brings down the eagle

For the first time in more than thirty years, the Canadian dollar is worth as much as the US dollar, and many economists predict that Canada’s booming economy, particularly in the energy and commodities area, will now cause a surge that leaves the greenback in its dust. Any economist who suggested this half a dozen years go, when the loony was worth $.62, would have been considered a loony in reality, and it’s hard to remember a more startling reversal of economic fortune in such a short time in the western world. The reasons are easy enough to see in retrospect, although the speed of change stuns everyone, and should cause the Yanks to consider carefully the financial implications of the seemingly bottomless debts that George Bush’s military follies will leave for whoever is unlucky enough to have to deal with the consequences.
Meanwhile Canada has during the same period managed to beef up its military presence to the point that it is now being courted, even begged, by such supposed powers as France and Germany to continue, along with the Dutch, to do the real fighting in Afghanistan, since the European heavyweights prefer to cheerlead from the sidelines. Six years go it would have seemed as loony to predict that the Canadian dollar would surpass the greenback in value in 2008 as it would have been to suggest that the European military bigwigs would soon be pleading with Canada to do their fighting for them. But then who could possibly have imagined that at the end of the same period, thousands of Mexican emigrants to the US would stream across the border in places like Windsor, Ontario and claim refugee status in Canada. Wonder what will have happened six years from now.

Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen

The rankings for most livable city on earth have been led by the usual suspects, in differing order, for the last decade: Vancouver, Zürich, Geneva. This year a couple of other European cities began to make inroads, not old favourites Paris or London – too expensive, too overdeveloped and too prone to violence – including Copenhagen, the beautiful Danish capital immortalized by Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen in the most absurd film biography ever made. Hans Christian Andersen had as many dark sides to his ultra-neurotic personality as anyone you could imagine and it is precisely these descents into a threatening and dangerous underworld that characterize his greatest works, apparently simple fairy tales that are full of deadly threats to any kind of attempt to discover a kitschy Disney paradise in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen.

On the weekend wonderful Copenhagen erupted into the kind of social violence that you could never imagine happening in other leading European pretenders to the most livable city throne, Stockholm and Munich, cities that my brother and I would be happy to place in competition with Vancouver. They would certainly lose due to the unmatchable splendour of the wilderness within easy reach of Vancouver, not to mention its own waterfront, but they have plenty to offer before they fall behind, one of those things being the relative serenity of their societies. Citizens of Stockholm and München do not find it necessary to challenge the police in ritualistic semi-warfare, as do the citizens of Berlin or Paris, but increasingly such events are becoming established in Copenhagen. On the weekend it was 1000 youths once again engaging the undermanned Copenhagen police force in a running battle featuring tear gas and non-lethal weapons. And once again, the Danish police could not really control crowds looking for trouble. This time it was once again demonstrations recalling the anniversary of the tearing down of a youth centre. Previously it had been violent, even fatal, bouts with the motorcycle gangs or neo-Nazis, and then there are the ongoing semi-violent confrontations concerning the somewhat off-limits alternate settlement of Christania. Copenhagen’s most unruly group may in the long run however turn out to be its large Muslim minority, which is feeling increasingly alienated in a way that is not the case in neighbouring Sweden. If this nasty uneasy relationship continues to sour, Copenhagen will end up light years away from the Danny Kaye version of it.

The Great White North looks at the Map

Colleague Jeff has supplied a convincing overview of Canada’s difficult role in the Arctic. Canada likes to mythologize its great open spaces in the wild north, creating emblems ranging from lines in the national anthem - “the true north strong and free” - to films like “Nanook of the North” to art like the sandstone sculptures and Baker Lake prints that southerners pay plenty of loonies to own to Stan Roger’s great song “The Northwest Passage” to the Edmonton Eskimos football team. Norm Kwong, one of their legendary players and perhaps the only major (ethnically) Chinese football player in history, recalls once hearing an Edmonton matron in the audience for one of his interviews tell her neighbour, “See I told you they were real Eskimos”.

But what Canada, the world’s second largest country, hasn’t done is provide military support for its mythology, making it vulnerable to the aggressiveness of the first and third largest countries, which face it in the Arctic. Instead it has slugged it out with tiny Denmark (controlling gigantic Greenland) in a farcical struggle over miniscule Hans Island. The excuse for lack of muscle in the Arctic has been strictly economic in the past, but this may be changing because the tide of Canadian public opinion has swung for the Arctic, and that has the politicians’ ears. Almost twenty years ago Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney cancelled Liberal plans for ice breakers for the navy, something which both Norway and Denmark manage to finance, and the US and Russia have both ice breakers and nuclear submarines out on Arctic patrol. In its lead editorial today, the conservative Vancouver Province advised the government to lease ice breakers if they are too cheap to build them, but to get them before it is too late to the newly announced far north military base with deep water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island, and to the beefed-up existing bases. Canadians will soon see whether their government is serious when it says it will provide protection for Canadian values from sea to sea to sea.

Canada Takes on Russia: Cold War II?

Bob and Doug McKenzie are on assignment in the Arctic, traveling with Prime Minister Harper who visited the Arctic to plant the Maple Leaf to lay claim to its rich mineral deposits for Canada. This trip was in response to Russian President Putin’s sneak attack last week with two miniature submarines planting the Russian flag somewhere beneath the North Pole. These moves are partially in response to global warming which is melting the Arctic ice cap in direct defiance to U.S. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma who claims global warming is a fraudulent tool manufactured by the infidels (e.g. Democrats and non-Christians).

As described in the NY Times, the race for mineral rights in the Arctic looms as a possible Worldwide Cold War as the Danes race to the region to map their own claims that the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range, is attached to the Danish territory of Greenland, making it a geological extension of the Arctic island.

Norway and the U.S. also make claims to rights in the area but the U.S. is apparently banking on winning the Iraq War sometime in the next century and stealing all of their oil to power the next generation of Hummers. Talk of moving Vice President Cheney’s office to the Arctic was squelched by White House sources, as “wishful thinking by the American people”.

The world watches these developments with anxious concern mixed with admiration for the audacity of Canada as it takes on the Russian Bear while the U.S. waits to move in after the dirty work is done.

In other news President George W. Bush refused to add 5 cents to the federal tax on gasoline saying it “would be premature”, and that “ we will cross that bridge when we have the funds to fix it.”

Canada goes to war

Sixty-six Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. The death of each one of them has received front-page coverage in leading Canadian papers, and the CBC runs the risk of becoming repetitive with its films of funerals and returning coffins. Sixty times as many US soldiers have died in Iraq, but in total their stories have probably not been told as prominently, movingly and dramatically as have those of the dead Canadian soldiers in their home media.
The US effort in Iraq now surely seems doomed to catastrophic failure, at least partly because, as Senator Joe Biden recently put it, Americans have lost any desire to keep sending their kids to their deaths in the meat grinder of Iraq. At the same time the Canadian armed forces are having no trouble finding record numbers of recruits, despite the daily scenes of violence and death in Afghanistan. There is certainly some opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The socialist NDP Party wants the troops brought home immediately, the opposition Liberal Party wants a withdrawal at the end of the current mandate in 2009. But in general there is a perhaps surprising amount of general public support for the sudden display of Canadian military strength in what is considered a just cause.
Prime Minister Harper announced this week that Canada would design and build, at a cost of 3-4 billion dollars, 6-8 frigates with moderate ice-breaking capabilities to patrol Canada’s increasingly threatened Arctic water routes, particularly the Northwest Passage. For the first time, a Canadian submarine will be present in the Arctic this summer and Harper has promised to build a deepwater port in the Arctic. Critics of Harper’s announcements demanded more not less for the Arctic, including the 3 full icebreakers he had claimed he would build. These are enormous expenses for the world’s second-largest country, with one-tenth the US population, caught in the Arctic between the first and third largest, both of whom have shown they can afford nuclear ice breakers. But it seems to be an expense that Canadian citizens are willing to pay and that’s at least partly because the Canadian military has managed to begin to regain something of the stature it once enjoyed as a result of its powerful presence in both the First and Second World Wars. It may not yet be punching above its weight, as it did back then, but it seems at least to be returning to the weight class to which it rightfully belongs

The War on Drugs: Nonsense and Insensibilities

A short item in the NY Times today tells of a Canadian psychotherapist who was stopped at the border by U.S. immigration officials who searched his name on the Internet and learned that he had written in an academic journal about his experiences with psychedelic drugs in the  1960’s. The article continues:

He was asked by a border guard whether he was the author of the article and whether it was true. Yes, he replied. And yes.

Mr. Feldmar was held for four hours, fingerprinted and, after signing a statement conceding the long-ago drug use, sent home.

Mike Milne, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection agency in Seattle, said he could not discuss individual cases for reasons of privacy. But the law is clear, Mr. Milne said. People who have used drugs are not welcome here.

“If you are or have been a drug user,” he said, “that’s one of the many things that can make you inadmissible to the United States.”

Since the psychotherapist gave up drugs in 1974 he could hardly be deemed any more of a threat than – oh let’s say, the border guard who did a random and arbitrary internet search and added one more nail in the twin coffins of a sane immigration policy and an effective war on terror.

The good news is that this raises the possibility of extraditing known cocaine user George W. Bush to whoever would take him – maybe Iraq? Not Canada certainly.