All I Want for Thanksgiving

IF SANTA CAME AT THANKSGIVING

Dear Mr. Claus,

I have been a very good boy this year. I look forward to your imminent arrival. Please ensure that you stock the following for me, in reward for my stellar behaviour. In other words, all I want for Thanksgiving is:

1.       Government by ethical people who place the common good above their own interests and ideologies.

2.     Government by people who are principled but not dogmatic; who are able to listen and to consult and to keep all channels of communication open even when they are ‘getting an earful.’

3.       A coalition government that includes Justin Trudeau, Thomas Mulcair and Elizabeth May in senior cabinet positions. The Prime Minister is irrelevant to me; I will be happy with any of these three. I would also make room for a Tory or two in cabinet, but there is slim pickings there if quality is what we are looking for (refer to items 1 and 2 above). Perhaps Peter McKay’s wife might be encouraged to stand and run. She seems to be made of the right stuff for leadership. And while we are at it, 50% of parliament represented by women.

4.       A government committed to work with civil society and the private sector on building a diversified green economy.

5.       A government that puts peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding ahead of bomb dropping and fear-mongering.

6.       A government that governs as if the poor matter most.

7.       A government that builds water delivery systems, not prisons.

8.       A government that recognizes that ‘Canada’ is more than a geographic space occupied by self-centred consumers and profit-oriented free market capitalists; that being ‘open for business’ must be balanced by the complex business of building and supporting a strong Canadian identity. This means significant support for the arts, and for organizations such as the Canada Council and the CBC.

9.       A government that recognizes that education is the foundation of economic, social and ultimately ecological stability. Quality education should be affordable to all. The choices are there for spending Canadians’ tax money: spending on the software of teaching, training and research and on the hardware of buildings is money better spent than that which goes toward prisons and pensions for corrupt politicians.

10.   A government that is unafraid of the information its own scientists collect, and of the knowledge scientists everywhere generate. Knowledge is power, and therefore dangerous, but a government who follows 1-9 has nothing to fear or lose and everything to gain.

11.   A government committed to the Sustainable Development Goals, both in word and deed.

12.   A government that works with all parties in parliament, with the provincial Premiers, and with the Mayors of our major and secondary cities.

13.    A government free of bullies.

Kind regards. Enjoy the milk and cookies,

Larry

Boyden's THE ORENDA: A testosterone laden cycle of tit for tat

‘THOSE CRAZY INDIANS … or do I mean “humans”?’

Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda won the 2014 Canada Reads exercise hosted by CBC. This year’s theme and challenge was to identify one book that had the most potential to change Canada, which I interpret to mean to change the way Canadians think about and act in relation to some key issue. The Orenda was deemed to be that book. In my view, however, The Orenda fails miserably. Don’t get me wrong. The Orenda is a great read, chock full of interesting insights into 17^th Century life in and around the North American Great Lakes, including a sustained peek inside the heads of the men and women there, primarily a Jesuit priest named Christophe whom the natives call ‘crow’ or ‘charcoal’, and two others: a kidnapped Iroquois woman named Snow Falls who becomes the ‘daughter’ of a Huron leader named Bird, and that adoptive father. The book is also beautifully written, with many a cracking good sentence. The plot is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the discerning reader may pick up on the specifics of the effects of chicken pox and influenza, brought to the so-called ‘new world’ by Europeans. There’s interesting bits about engineering innovations. And plenty about diet and clothing and so on. But, the general narrative reads no differently than any ‘quest’ story, from The Hobbit to the Hunger Games. In other words, it is a timeless story where good and evil face off against each other, there is a clash of world views, some romance, a handsome protagonist, young love that starts off as anything but, and lots and lots and lots (did I say lots?) of violence.

It is the last bit where, in my view, The Orenda fails mightily as a ‘book that can change Canada’. What it does, unfortunately, is reinforce stereotypes that ‘the average Canadian’ holds about native people: i.e. they are beautiful, at one with the earth, backward in their thinking, and blood thirsty savages, or  sauvages as Boyden terms them en Français throughout the book. There is a video clip on cbc.ca of the book’s promoter, Wab Kinew, debating Stephen Lewis on the merits of what Lewis calls ‘torture pornography’. In Lewis’s view, the violence only plays into the dominant narrative regarding natives, so setting back the need to build consensus around issues such as native land claims. Mr. Kinew counters with claims of his own that the torture is a sort of ritualized respect – termed, in some instances, ‘caressing’ – for one’s captives. In his view, and in Boyden’s narrative, torture is a means of showing your antagonist respect. What a load of rubbish. Torture as respect? Let’s get this straight: torture is never ever ever justified ever. EVER. In some ways this book reads like a warped male fantasy nurtured by ultra-violent millenarian video games. And whether or not it is true to life, all that violence really put me off. At one level, the entire book reads as a testosterone laden cycle of tit for tat.

Did The Orenda, then, change me, as a Canadian, in any fundamental way? No. But it did reinforce something I’ve always said: people are people. Want evidence? Well, let’s just say Abu Ghraib. 400 years later and we are still engaged in the same stupid human tricks. What an underachieving species humans are, if there ever was one. The fact of Abu Ghraib should give pause, then, to the average Canadian’s perspective on native peoples. It should be replaced with, ‘Well, hey, look at that … we are all just the same!’ Goodbye misguided notion of the ‘noble savage’, hello joe you’re just an average schmo suffering the 7 deadly sins like me!

Along that line, there is the lovely tension between wanting to maintain one’s way of life versus all the bling that the old world brings. While knowing that this will alter their ways of life forever, the Huron welcome the charcoal into their villages hoping that it will help cement trade relations with the ‘iron people’. But as Boyden shows quite nicely, along with guns and pots comes smallpox, influenza and other infectious disease (not to mention Christianity! But I’m getting to that). Remind you of anything? I’ll give you a clue: can you say ‘Climate Change’?

The Orenda makes an interesting point at the very end: be careful what you think is dead and buried, for it may come to live again. Idle No More, indeed! An odd point to make, however, it seems to me, in a book where the intentions of French missionaries, through Christophe’s ruminations, are cast in quite a sympathetic light. What is missing? In my view what is buried beneath the avalanche of page after page after page of inter-tribal violence is the truly horrific but subtle and ultimately structural violence that is the coming of Christianity through the ‘good intentions’ of Pere Christophe Crow. But what is the crow really asking of the natives? He is asking them to admit that the way they live is wrong and must be abandoned or they will burn in hell forever. Today we call this ‘development’. While the reader is flinching at yet another passage of torture pornography, s/he is subtly buying into Christophe’s view that erasing native culture really is the right thing to do; after all, what’s to be lost besides their savage ways? Christophe Crow condemns bad behavior all around – drinking, whoring, rape, torture – but he never questions his own creation story. And while it is amusing to see each group through the naïve eyes of ‘the other’, there is never a moment presented where the non-native reader is asked to challenge his or her own belief system. How ultimately disappointing. 

Mandela is dead but the struggle (for the spotlight) continues

Am I the only one who feels a little bit put out by the plane-load of Canadian 'leaders' flying down to Johannesburg to attend the wake for Nelson Mandela? Brian Mulroney... OK. Allison Redford... really? I mean there are many many many others who helped in an equal or more central way that you, Madame Premier. And the rest? What did Stephen Harper do to help end apartheid? Kim Campbell? This all looks like a sad photo-op to me. I can think of a much more creative and relevant list of people to be on that plane and it would include, along with Mr Mulroney, representatives from the following groups: (i) civil society organizations such as the Churches, university clubs, labour unions, and NGOs who fought so hard to change government policy, approaches and tactics regarding white minority rule in South Africa; (ii) the countless members of the Canadian civil service who quietly pressed for change irrespective of the official policy of the government of the day (hey! even some good friends from CIDA should be there); (iii) an incredibly vocal Canadian media who kept us all informed about the progress and setbacks along the road to liberation, not just in South Africa, but across the African continent; (iv) individual Canadian citizens who donated money, raised funds, wrote position papers and op-eds, hosted students and refugees from across the region and South Africa itself; (v) the African (not just South African) diaspora in Canada, including its Caribbean, Central and Latin American offshoots, who made sure the fires of liberation never went out; (vi) members of the Canadian political opposition who held the ruling party's feet to the fire at key moments when all looked to be lost; and (vii) representatives of municipal governments who were often first to take the lead in boycotts of South African goods long before central government got on board. I am sure there are a few other groups that I should be mentioning, but lest we forget, the struggle to end apartheid had no politicians in the frontline. It was fought first and foremost within South Africa by South Africans themselves; second, across Africa by South African exiles and their comrades in neighboring states, many of whom paid a very heavy toll; and third, by civil society groups, social movements and key government allies in the rest of the world. As with the climate change issue, heads of state and government save for a progressive few were late to the party, some arriving just in time to claim credit where little of it was in fact due. And let's not talk about the private sector's role here shall we.

One of the greatest things about Nelson Mandela is that he never put himself ahead of the movement. He was always at pains to speak of 'we' not 'me'. How unusual in the contemporary global context of 'I, me, mine'. I do not mean to discount any of those characteristics for which he is most revered. We are right to celebrate his life, his achievements, his character and legacy. But it is a bit embarrassing, and not a little ironic, to see all this jockeying for an invitation by a political class, the combined integrity of which, if it were sand, would not fill Mandela's left shoe.

Reasons for Optimism on Climate Action

The COP 18 Doha climate talks are over. Like COP 17 at Durban, very little was achieved. There is an agreement to discuss a way to possibly finance ‘loss and damage’ induced by climate change in the poorest parts of the world. The Kyoto Protocol, due to expire this year, has been extended to 2020, with agreement to have a post-Kyoto ‘road map’ ready by 2015. However, since Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Russia and the US have opted out of Kyoto, and since parties to the Kyoto Protocol constitute only 15 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is difficult to feel optimistic about these agreements.  On the other hand, the many so-called ‘side events’ revealed a wealth of people from civil society, the private sector, and some governments committed to pushing for meaningful action on climate change despite the unwillingness of the world’s most powerful actors to do the same.

These actions at Doha reveal some hard truths about ourselves – both positive and negative – in relation to climate change. While the forces in support of the status quo often appear immutable, I argue here that, on balance, there are more reasons for hope than we often realize.

First, let’s look at ten reasons for indifference. Standing at the heart of inaction on climate change is apathy. We are a lazy lot: give us our essentials – sugar, salt and fat – in quantities enough to stupefy and we are lazier still. Second, whether we are sitting stupefied on the couch, or struggling for survival as one of the bottom billion, we are too preoccupied with our own individual lives to think collectively. Third, we all suffer from attention deficit disorder, and as a result are easily distracted by the next ‘shiny thing’. Fourth, as Marie Antoinette knew only too well, we are drawn to ‘shiny things’ that appeal to our baser instincts. Give us ‘bread and circuses’, increasingly of our own choosing via personal devices such as smartphones, and we can easily ignore those things that are much more difficult and painful to think about. Fifth, given that Western consumerist lifestyles are at the heart of the problem, being told that ‘we must change’ is primarily met with a ‘say what?’ amid the din of buy, buy, buy. Sixth, rather than change we hope to invent our way out of ‘the problem’. Plus, geo-engineering is so cool!

Seventh, climate change does not affect us all in the same way. The poor will be most seriously affected, but, hey, out of sight, out of mind, right? Others will benefit economically: longer growing seasons, more arable land, access to natural resources such as oil and gas. If I had a penny for every time a Canadian said to me, ‘Global warming? Bring it on!’, well, the penny would still be relevant. Eighth, state and corporate power derives from a carbon-based economy, so global leaders must control the language around climate change: we can adapt; it’s a result of sunspot activity; it’s part of a natural cycle. This, by the way, is a message that we all like to hear. Ninth, the most powerful people in the most vulnerable places – the one-percent amid the bottom billion – have options not available to others resident in their part of the world. At worst, when the heat hits the fan, they can move to another country. Tenth, as the Canada-China oil sands deal shows us, in the face of global financial crisis we are only too willing to sacrifice the planet for promises of ‘net benefits to Canada’: short term gain for long term pain.

As the climate science shows, change is upon us. We are heading for a world that will be 2 degrees warmer by 2050; 4 degrees warmer by the end of this century. A recent World Bank study has outlined the havoc such temperature change will wreak. Do we have a critical mass of committed individuals out there ready to act? To want less? To put down their shiny things, and carefully consider the hard questions? Clearly, not yet. But here are a few reasons why we shouldn’t give in to the forces of apathy, complacence and narrow self-interest.

First, humans show time and again the will and capacity to rally around discreet events: earthquake in Haiti; floods in Pakistan; drought in the Horn of Africa. Second, our apathy is balanced with an equal measure of empathy: as we are increasingly connected through social media, and as our families are flung far and wide around the world, the discreet and remote is suddenly commonly felt and local. Third, a global cohort of young people care about their common future. They have no time for the cynicism of their elders. The average age of Canadian Cabinet Ministers is 54. If all 38 of them live to be 80 years old, only six will be around in 2050. In contrast, most of our university and college students will survive to 2075. Pushing for positive change must focus on our youth. Fourth, humans can take instruction and follow direction: once a specific action is identified people respond well (e.g. cease the use of aerosols because ozone depletion is caused by chlorofluorocarbons). Fifth, we also show a willingness to change if there is proof that our actions have positive effect. Recycling programs are now accepted as obviously beneficial around the world.

Sixth, because climate change affects us all in a wide-variety of ways, we need not wait for ‘The Big Event’.  We can act incrementally. Seventh, the climate action coalition is multi-generational, multi-lingual, and multi-ethnic. There is no way to cast it as a ‘special interest group’. Lastly, in the absence of an overarching unifying event, the differential impacts of climate change means we can be motivated for highly individual reasons (even if just to appease our own worried children), while we take personal and/or collective action at whatever level of society we wish. Are you listening, Minister Kent? Your grandchildren are counting on you. Do the positives outweight the negatives? Despite the disappointments at Doha, I believe that they do.