Revanchist Review

Tolerance Deconstructed

2009-01-09T16:42:00.000-08:00

A letter to the editor recently appeared in our local newspaper. I attach it along with my response.

The Citizen
Published: Friday, January 09, 2009

Dear Editor:

The "Christ in Christmas" columns and e-mails have made the rounds. If you didn't get yours, I'll paraphrase for you: the phrase "Merry Christmas" is not a salutation, but a means test of tribal purity. If you use it, you're in the tribe; if you say "Season's Greetings" you are depriving the tribe, by not pandering to them and telling them how special they are.

Put Christ in Christmas? Who's forcing anyone not to? Nobody. The only group trying to tell others what to think, what to do, and how to do it are those demanding that everyone "Put Christ in Christmas".

Atheist author George Orwell coined the phrase "double-speak" to describe such blatant deception.

The real issue here is that state and business endorsement for one viewpoint to the exclusion of all others is waning, and the previously privileged can't accept being treated the same as everyone else.

If that sounds familiar, it is -- privileged groups reacted the same way to equality for women, non-whites, and homosexuals. Identical arguments have been used against all these movements.

Religious prejudice exists year round and is only voiced at Christmas as an appeal to tradition.

This issue is important because it is part of a much wider societal struggle.

Secular society permits people to do what they want on their own property, on their own time. However, our state (including schools) and businesses cater to everyone, not just the 55 per cent of British Columbians who self-identified as Christian in the 2001 Census.

It's discriminatory for government to privilege any one religion, or religion generally. It's bad for businesses to do so, so they don't. State and business therefore wish everyone happy holidays, not just one group.

Those who "can't abide hearing Happy Holidays" are intolerant of all non-Christian religions, and all who practice no religion.

That's 45 per cent of British Columbians, and growing. Why is this bigotry still so mainstream?

Why do we have to read, every December, columns and e-mails from the same theocratic bigots, advocating the imposition of their views upon everyone else?

Sheena Shaw, Duncan

MY RESPONSE

Tolerance Deconstructed

Sheena Shaw plays the role of this year's village scold with her broad brushed sentencing to the gulag reserved for "theocratic bigots" and the "intolerant", of all who support the rather modest proposal that a centuries old religious feast day and civic holiday season be referred to by its proper name. Were it not for her larger agenda, Ms. Shaw would be no more fussed about these emails and columns than she would be if the subject was whether to call that special day in February Groundhog Day or Rodent Day. Using Ms. Shaw's logic, those who insist on calling it the former are members of a privileged tribe who are prejudiced toward marmots, squirrels and others who are as perfectly capable of casting a shadow as the denizen of Punxsatawaney.

She has an agenda however, so with no trace of irony, she condemns as intolerant all who honour tradition, and inserts the very au courant attack on Christians who according to Ms. Shaw are engaged in year round acts of religious prejudice. The many non-Christians who favour the continued use of traditional descriptions of people, places and events will surely be surprised to be included in Ms. Shaw's round up of those who don't practice her secular religion.

Ms. Shaw is clearly offended by these traditionalists. Judging by the examples of the sins of the privileged she lists, I suspect she is a strong advocate of new traditions, spawned in our modern era of deconstructed tolerance. Perhaps the best example is Gay Pride Day. No doubt she staunchly demands that tolerance be afforded to this new tradition. Christians will never attract hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of every major North American city to watch a parade of joyful believers celebrate Corpus Christi. Ms. Shaw must know she is on the winning side and could as a result be more charitable to the remnant of what she labels the previously "privileged".

It is not only Christians who witness with some bemusement, the phenomena of bright and gaily bedecked floats sponsored by major corporations and financial institutions, populated by thong clad writhing young men and women, parading down our city streets in an annual extravaganza. It is starkly at odds with Ms. Shaw's thesis of an intolerant majority that such a spectacle is not only tolerated but also actively encouraged by all levels of government and business. I have not heard of any movement to attack the Gay Pride movement for having co-opted the words gay and pride, nor do people insist that the event should be referred to as Homosexualist Lifestyle Celebration Day.

So Ms. Shaw in the true spirit of tolerance and inclusivity, why don't you let us keep the word Christmas and you can have gay and pride. It is all in the spirit of fair trade.

Ben Buan
Mill Bay BC

How to End Our Current Parliamentary Crisis

2008-12-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

A nation requires some “machinery of social consciousness which shall ensure the selection from among the community at large of the “best” and bestowal on them of power – this is the true consummation of democracy.” – Paul Elmer More

“The problem of civilization can be solved only by the heart. By the appearance of a new type of man.” - Robert Musil

Canada is in a self-made political crisis. It was brought on by the failure of our elected representatives to act in the best interests of the people. These same representatives must demonstrate a change of heart and admit to their errors to end it. We need a new type of man in Ottawa.

If they existed, the following statements would be delivered on National television, broadcast in prime time with all speakers present.

Prime Minister Steven Harper:

My fellow Canadians. Last Thursday my government, having had its Throne
Speech passed in the House of Commons, delivered an economic summary paper as a precursor to a full budget scheduled for delivery in February 2009.

It contained a number of proposals directed toward economic stimulus in this time of worldwide financial instability. It also made note of the fact the government had already taken a number of steps to protect Canadians against further economic hardship. My government took the position that until the new administration in the US was installed on January 20th, there were a number of issues that it would be prudent not to address until the actions of the US government was made clear.

As Prime Minister I authorized the inclusion in the summary paper of two proposals that no one had anticipated and that were not essential to the stated objective of the production of the economic summary. While both have fiscal implications and we believe would be supported by the majority of Canadians, the true purpose of their inclusion was to create tension and upheaval within the opposition parties. It was a purely political decision on my part, and I admit to having let my political instincts overcome my good judgment. The inclusion of these two controversial items was inconsistent with my previously stated goal to make this parliament a more functional and bi-partisan one than its predecessor.

I apologize to the opposition and to the Canadian people for this error in judgment. Both items were removed from the motion to introduce the economic summary paper in recognition of this error.

In reaction to the inflammatory nature of my decision to include those items in the economic paper, the three opposition parties, over the past three days and apparently in furtherance of earlier conversations and meetings amongst some of them, have reached an agreement by which they intend to defeat the government on a motion of non-confidence arising out of the economic paper, and propose to the Governor General that the government be turned over to the coalition to be led by the Leader of the Opposition. The NDP will be part of the coalition and will have ¼ of the Cabinet posts. Since the combined membership of the coalition is fewer in number than that of my government, the coalition must rely on a side agreement with the Bloc Quebecois, whereby the latter agree to vote in favour of any confidence motions presented by the coalition.

We believe this proposal is not in the interests of the country, is not in the interests of the electorate that only recently voted for the five official parties. The result was the Conservative Party and its platform elected a clear plurality of members.

The government has tabled its Throne Speech which has been passed by all parties.

In our view the electorate gave us the mandate to govern at least to the point of tabling its first budget. If defeated on its budget, the appropriate outcome we believe would be to return to the voters in order that they should determine which fiscal path, that of the Conservatives in their budget or the Opposition parties in their proposed budgets, they wanted to follow during these unprecedented times.

If the opposition parties persist in seeking to defeat the government not on its budget but on its economic summary paper, we believe it is clear their motivation is purely political and vindictive, in response to the political and vindictive nature of the original summary paper, for which I have now apologized.

I can see no way in which the public interest can be served by creating this upheaval for purely political reasons, given the adverse reaction to the idea of a coalition by the majority of Canadians and of the business community both within and without Canada.

Accordingly, should the coalition proposal not be withdrawn, I will seek to prorogue the House until January 26th, and present our budget on January 27th at which time parliament can determine if the government has the confidence of the House. If the budget is defeated, I will ask the GG to call an election.

I close by reiterating my regrets for having not done my best to ensure that the interests of the citizens of Canada are always to be superior to the political interests of my party or my government whenever decisions affecting the fiscal or other interests of the country are made. It is an embarrassment to me and my government that I failed meet the standard expected of me in this instance. For this I take full responsibility.

I pledge that my government will consult closely with all the opposition parties in the weeks leading up to the tabling of the Budget, in order that we fully understand the key components that they believe such a budget should contain, and that they understand the reasons and rationale behind the fiscal decisions that ultimately we must make.

Steven Harper - PM

The Honourable Leader of the Opposition, Stephane Dion

I wish to thank the many Canadians who have written to my office and to those of all the Members of Parliament in which they have expressed their unhappiness with the performance of all politicians during this crisis.

Upon reflection, it is clear that they are right to think that as a group over the last several days we have not demonstrated the “best” of the democracy we cherish.

I thank Mr. Harper for his frank admission that his error in judgment in resorting to petty politics with the inclusion of two inflammatory items into the economic summary paper is what triggered the reaction of all the opposition parties.

I too wish to admit to the Canadian public that my reaction to Mr. Harper’s actions were political, personal and not first directed to the best interests of the people. While my reaction of anger and resolve to punish Mr. Harper in any way possible was natural in the circumstances, I do not believe Members of Parliament should allow emotions and personal agendas to supercede good judgment.

My party’s defeat in the last election and my party’s loss of confidence in my leadership was a serious blow to me personally. I will be frank and admit to the Canadian people that the opportunity presented by Mr. Harper’s error of judgment, to possibly fulfill my dream to become Prime Minister, clouded my judgment and made the pursuit of that personal goal more important than the pursuit of what would be best for the country.

Upon reflection, I see that there are too many ideological differences between the Liberal Party and the NDP to make a coalition between them one that benefits the country. I also see that it would not be in the interests of the country to have the BQ hold a veto pen to any legislation and to be in a position to pass legislation that favours the narrow interest of the separatist BQ.

The Liberal Party is embarked on a renewal and in May a new leader will be elected. I have concluded it is in the best interests of the country and of the Liberal Party that our focus should be on providing strong and constructive opposition between now and then to continue to provide critical and constructive opposition to the minority Conservative government. Should the government of Mr. Harper fail to produce a budget that satisfies the minimum requirements of the supporters of our party, and of the country as a whole, we will not hesitate to seek to defeat the budget.

If Mr. Harper is true to his word then we are about to embark on a new era of being the best examples of democracy. The Liberal Party will do its part to set such an example. If through a change of heart we can all demonstrate we are new men in the service of our citizens, I expect that we will not see any crisis and confrontations until after the new Liberal Party leader has been elected.

The people of Canada are looking to us to exercise wise leadership and to rise above petty politics. It is my pledge and that of my party to do our best to satisfy the desires of the people who have elected us and to at all times put their interests first.

Stephane Dion – Leader of the Opposition

Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe would make short statements in which they endorse the pledge of Harper and Dion to change their priorities in favour of the people over petty politics.

Oh, Canada! A Confederation of Dunces

2008-12-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

Some readers of my most recent essay may have concluded that my criticism of Mr. Harper indicates that I have forsaken the Conservative cause and place all the blame on Mr. Harper’s shoulders for the chaos that was created by his latest terrible error in judgment. This is not the case. I believe it would be a travesty if this coalition successfully executed its coup d’etat.

While Harper handed the opposition the pistol with which to shoot himself, it seems clear now that the power-lusting duo of Layton and Dion may well have been plotting with each other and Mr. Duceppe for weeks to assemble this coalition, and couldn’t believe their luck when Flaherty handed down his economic update containing the two live grenades of election funding reform and the elimination of public sector strikes.

Is there a more pathetic picture of a confederacy of dunces than that of Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, seated around a table deciding on the fiscal policies by which Canada is to weather the global recession that clearly has beset us? Dion the failed leader, by every poll during the election campaign and by the clear voice of the voters in the last election, not the man in whom Canadians placed their confidence and trust to lead a government, particularly with respect to fiscal matters, is now to become Prime Minister?

In recognition of his abysmal grasp of fiscal and economic issues, he is to be assisted by a group of non-elected “wise men” – Paul Martin the last failed Liberal leader, Frank McKenna and John Manley, former Martin cabinet ministers and the NDP representative the spendthrift Roy Romanow. Can someone slap me awake from this Kafkaesque nightmare?

Canadians are expected to accept that because such a coalition is somehow constitutionally permissible we are to stand idly by while this gang hijacks the electoral process. It was difficult for me to hold down my lunch as I watched the smug and smiling trio of Ignatieff, Rae and Leblanc emerge from the Liberal caucus, gleefully proclaiming that this was an historical moment.

Cassius, Casca and Brutus came to mind as these three extolled the virtues of and pledged their loyalty to Dion's Caesar. These plotters have all the bases covered of course. If the coalition stumbles they have the walking dead Dion to blame, and if it survives they put the pallid professor out of his misery in May and one of them dons the new toga.

The mendacity of these men is breathtaking. There is no policy issue that justifies this coalition. The foolishly inflammatory components of the economic statement issued by the Conservatives on Friday have been dropped, there are numerous economic stimulus measures in the statement, the throne speech has been approved and budget is to be tabled the day after the House resumes sitting in January. This is a craven power grab to feed the unbridled ambition of Stephane Dion to be Prime Minister if only for a matter of months, and the final proof of the complete absence of any integrity on the part of Jack Layton.

Will Canadians stand idly by as the balance of power is handed to the separatists? After all we are a nation that happily settled Lucien Bouchard into Stornoway and gave him the role of leader of the Opposition while he led the separatist Bloc.

It is as though a thick fog of mass stupidity has descended upon Ottawa. Has it overcome the entire country? We have failed – it seems doubtful we have even seriously tried – to create in this country a form of democracy that Paul Elmer More said would result from the construction of some “machinery of social consciousness which shall ensure the selection from among the community at large of the “best” and bestowal on them of power – this is the true consummation of democracy.”

As we observe this chicanery, is it not apparent how far from the best we have elected to office? What measure of social consciousness is there in the examples of leadership we are witnessing from all the parties?

We must make our voices heard in Ottawa. This coalition madness must be exposed for what it is – a craven power grab that can only damage Canada’s economy and reputation on the world stage. Every opposition Member of Parliament must be made to know that there will be a consequence for him or her if they permit this hijacking to occur. Every government Member of Parliament must be made to know that the Prime Minister must take direct responsibility for igniting this firestorm, and make a clear statement to the nation in which he admits his error and commits to focus his efforts on the economic issues that are the principal concern and the first priority of the majority of Canadians.

The economic havoc that will ensue if they do not come to their senses should frighten every Canadian. Global governments and global investors will not look kindly to the uncertainty this creates. The prospect of the strongest economy in the Western world falling under the control of a cobbled together coalition of doctrinaire socialists and doctrinaire separatists, led by a rejected leader will be too unpalatable and we can expect more days like today where our major stock index fell by just under 10%.

Start your letter writing my friends. We only have a week to make our voices heard.

Another Week in Pogoland

2008-11-30T08:28:00.000-08:00

I swear, if you put that little fedora on his head, shove a cigar in the corner of his mouth, add a bow tie, in Stephen Harper you have an eerie likeness to comic strip iconoclast Pogo. After all Mr. Harper seems intent on living out one of Pogo’s most famous aphorisms – “we have seen the enemy and he is us.” First he destroyed any hope of a majority in the last election by his gratuitous attack on the arts community in Quebec, a position from which he had to retreat only after it was too late to prevent the flood of voters back to the BQ to collect the Get Out of Jail Free Card handed out whenever the Feds propose anything that might impact on Quebec culture or a permanent stall at the pork barrel.

Seemingly having learned nothing from that experience and faced with a humbled impoverished and leaderless Liberal party resigned to a long minority role, Harper was overcome with hubris as he formulated his economic plan. Instead of focusing on the major economic issues, Harper foolishly triggered a potential constitutional crisis that has confused and angered the voters and caused the international community to scratch its head in bewilderment.

To save the taxpayers $1.95 per head, or $30 million Harper chose to risk the $300 million dollar cost of an election that would surely follow shortly upon the heels of the failure of a coalition spawned from the witches' brew of Liberal, NDP and separatist ideology.

Of course, this latest imbroglio only confirms that political leadership in Canada defaults to the panjandrums. It makes me less proud to be a Canadian as I watch Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Layton prance about like characters in a Moliere play. If only Alan McEachern weren’t dead, he could join the cabal with Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien to produce a convincing argument that would sway the vivacious but vacuous Governor General to appoint a coalition government.

But who would lead this coalition she might be prompted by an aide to ask? A mere detail, let’s get rid of Harper first and we will figure out the leadership issue quickly enough. As long as Jack Layton gets Finance he could care less which of Rosencrantz Rae or Guildenstern Ignatieff wins the coin toss for leader. As for Gilles Duceppe he will be content to prance about in the background like a crazed Mick Jagger in his Jumping Jack Flash persona, giddy with the sight of another tear appearing in the fabric of Canadian society.

The first order of business for such a coalition should be to adopt a new national emblem - the rainbow - as was proposed by Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbiniere in 1865. In support of its appropriateness as Canada's emblem he wrote: "By the endless variety of its tints the rainbow will give an excellent idea of the diversity of races, religions, sentiments and interests of the different parts of Confederation...By its lack of consistency - an image without substance - the rainbow would represent aptly the solidity of our Confederation." (First Things - Vol 188, p.64 Dec 2008)

Solidity without substance - how perfect a description of Canada in times such as this.

Robert Musil wrote, “the problem of civilization can be solved only by the heart. By the appearance of a new type of man.” Mr. Harper needs to drop the Pogo disguise if he is to be that man.

Oh, Canada! The Road to Nowhere.

2008-07-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Author Martin Amis was only 5’2” tall in his teens when for a time he dated a girl who was 6’1”. “We had an unspoken agreement,” says Amis. “We never stood upright at the same time. And we never went out. Apart from that it was a normal relationship.”

I thought of Amis' creative social compact when I heard the news of Henry Morgentaler's recommmended appointment as a member of the Order of Canada. It seemed to me that Canadian society and Henry Morgentaler, like Amis and his tall friend, had for 20 years successfully maintained as normal what was a fundamentally strange relationship. Dullness being a spice for Canadians, this relationship would likely have survived until the grim reaper beckoned home his aging acolyte.

But it came to pass that a selection committee headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Queen of Solipsism herself, chose Canada Day as the appropriate occasion on which to inform the nation that its aging millionaire abortionist had for too long been forced to suffer the fate of having his high moral stature as the protector of women's rights insufficiently honoured.

Queen Beverly and her committee of soi-disant arbiters of Canadian excellence, as all good solipsists do, threw all previous conventions aside and pompously asserted (though apparently not unanimously) it was now time to bring an end to this quaint social compact. The Governor General accepted the recommendation with unbridled glee, an other occasion upon which she might break yet another societal barrier and gush forth new regal platitudes avowing how enlightened Canadians are.

For the writers who pen the words describing the valued contributions of each of the new inductees, it brought new meaning to the creative process as they had to write about Morgentaler's accomplishments without once saying what it was he really did. If irony weren't such a foreign concept to Canadians, some of us might have found that ironic.

So without prior warning, it came as a surprise to Canadians when they headed out to their Canada Day celebrations to find on their collective arm not some fresh and winsome creature, but rather some looming Miss Havisham-like character vengefully intent on reminding them of how she has been jilted and reviled for all these years.

Letter editors' desks were soon piled high with the predictable mixture of invective and encomia. Editorials broke along expected divides with the Globe and Mail painting Morgentaler as the suffering servant, and the National Post questioning how such a polarizing figure and practitioner of a procedure that even in its most benign characterization debases life, should stand as one to be honoured as an example of the best of what it means to be a Canadian. Buzz Hargrove oozed with pride at having his name stand along side that of the good doctor, proto-feminists reminded us of all the women saved from the back alley butchers and the pro-abortionist segment that bases its acceptance of abortion on the appearance of the fetus was quick to trot out the "it looks like a mouse, so what's the big deal" argument.

Few seem willing to question whether there may be a fatal flaw in a society and culture that accepts as right and normal the termination of one in three pregnancies by abortion at the rate of 100,000 annually.

Remarkably few recipients of the Order of Canada chose to publicly renounce their award, proving once again that Canadians are either hopelessly vain, or terminally indifferent. The shrug has become our rallying salute.

It seems to have occurred to few that it is embarassing for Canadians to assert that we are a law abiding, democratic, inclusive, tolerant nation while at the same time we celebrate a twenty year absence of any law to govern the destruction of a fetus.

We Canadians are fast approaching the point where we will have forgotten how to think at all about matters that are fundamental to our humanity. In Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road a father and his son wander for years in post-apocalyptic America, the father holding stubbornly onto the hope that there will still be a future worth living for his son, while all that surrounds him suggests otherwise.

The father recounts that "there were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably, but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness, things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all."

There is much about our times that lead me to see many parallels between McCarthy's bleak, ashen, post-apocalyptic vision and our own times. Of course they bear no resemblance on the surface. I am privileged to write this while I gaze at a crystalline sky, verdant woods and a salubrious sea, and Canada continues to offer up a myriad of similar natural wonders. It is the state of our souls that elicits my grief and you don't need to be religious to relate to my concept of the soul. I believe that deep in each man and woman is the knowledge that something knows of his or her existence.

If I am right, and each of us was to focus our thoughts on the image of 100,000 fetuses being destroyed each year in this country, one in every three pregnancies terminated by abortion, how could we not sob at the loss of beauty and goodness?

How can a nation as privileged, enlightened, compassionate and purportedly inclusive as ours, have concluded that it is of no consequence to anyone but the pregnant woman what should become of that human organism within her womb? In determining whether it should live or die, how did we conclude that nothing need be considered but the present circumstances of the woman in whom society has vested the inalienable right to determine the life or death of that fetus.

That this should be a horrible proposition to some and a cause for celebration for others is evidence of the chasm that exists between the weltanschauungs of too many Canadians.

To those who have no faith in God and the saving nature of Grace, there is much to suggest that by honouring men like Morgentaler our society is headed for a destination envisioned by another of McCarthy's characters in The Road. This exchange between the father of the little boy, and an ancient sojourner may point to our future. The role of the old man seems to have been written for Morgentaler.

(Old man) Things will be better when everybody's gone.
They will?
Sure they will.
Better for who?
Everybody.
Everybody?
Sure. We'll all be better off. We'll all breathe easier.
That's good to know.
Yes it is. When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?

For those with faith and the hope of Grace, we turn to the words of Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote "evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable because it has logic and probability on its side, and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious."

More than ever it seems this is the time for us to spread tiny kernels of good in the face of growing evil. We could start by voicing our objection to the honouring of Henry Morgentaler's legacy of death.

Much Ado About Nothing

2007-01-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

Onetime Liberal MP Sarkis Assadourian says he never did a day's work after being appointed a special adviser to former Prime Minister Paul Martin. Asked if he regrets accepting Martin's job offer and giving up his seat, Assadourian said: "I regret knowing him as a person." That seems a bit harsh.

Mr. Assadourian makes no mention of the fact Mr. Martin did subsequently appoint him first to the Immigration and Refugee Board and later as a Citizenship judge. Presumably these are paid positions, and it is highly probable that he could safely do nothing in either job but still be paid. It is unclear what Mr. Assadourian’s qualifications for either job might be, save for the fact that he was born in Aleppo, Syria.

Mr. Assadourian might safely have remained in comfortable anonymity doing nothing, but for the fact that his name has been bandied about as a result of the floor crossing of former Liberal Mr. Khan. The Liberals are upset because they suggest Mr. Khan isn’t doing anything for the Conservatives as the special adviser to Mr. Harper on affairs in the Middle East. Doing nothing while a Liberal MP is all right, but doing nothing for the Conservatives puts Mr. Khan beyond the pale. The Conservatives have countered with Mr. Assadourian’s claim that he didn’t do anything for the Liberals either, suggesting a pattern when it comes to Liberals.

Mr. Khan’s credentials for being a special adviser to the Prime Minister are somewhat of a mystery. He is a former pilot in the Pakistan air force. I suppose that infers he has had many occasions to observe the Middle East from 30,000 ft. He might still have some friends in the Pakistani military, no doubt he has told Mr. Harper and Mr. MacKay that he has. I confess to being less than sanguine about the value taxpayers are getting from Mr. Khan role as special adviser, to say nothing of my assessment of Mr. Assourian’s contribution to Canada past or present.

All of this is rather confusing to a simple fellow like myself who doesn’t expect to get paid for doing nothing. I don’t even expect to take on a volunteer job where I don’t have to do anything – what’s the point of volunteering seems like the obvious question to ask.

It just goes to prove that the whole world of politics has proven to be more confusing than I could ever have imagined. More and more I see validated the proposition that my vote for the Rhinoceros candidate John Eh McDonald in 1980 in Vancouver was my most informed and gratifying act as a voter.

Dreams

2007-01-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

Dreams, they say, tell stories
To explain away our woes
And so we go on living.

D.J. Enright – Injury Time

It is intriguing to consider that as Enright suggests, our sleeping dreams may tell stories the purpose of which is to explain away our woes. Who amongst us has not experienced the surprise of waking from a particularly vivid and complex dream, amazed at the detail and sophistication of the plot line, only to have the entire story crumble and vanish before we can capture it in writing, like a pattern in the sand washed away by the tide? How many times have we been reunited in our dreams with deceased parents or grandparents as we vividly relive moments in our past?

In W.G. Sebald’s luminous novel, Austerlitz, he examines the phenomenon of memory through the eyes of his principal character, Jacques Austerlitz. Raised from the age of 5 by Welsh preacher and his wife, Austerlitz discovers in his teens that he was in fact born in Prague to Jewish parents. He spends the rest of his adult life trying to find out what happened to his parents and in so doing to discover the truth of his own reality and identity. Having found the woman who had once been his nursemaid, she shows him a photo of himself as a 5 year old just prior to his parents arranging his escape to Britain.

The photo unsettles him and that night he dreams of returning to the flat in Prague where he lived as a child. “All the furniture is in its proper place. I know that my parents will soon be back from their holiday, and there is something important I should give them. I am not aware that they have been dead for years. I simply think they must be very old, around ninety or a hundred, as indeed they would be if they were still alive. But when at last they come through the door they are in their mid-thirties at the most. They enter the flat…. they take no notice of me.”

This dream leads Austerlitz to conclude – “it does not seem to me that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.”

Perhaps our dreams take us into those spaces. There's a thought to sleep on.

Canada for Dummies

2006-12-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

A short primer to explain Canada to anyone who might be interested.

Ø Canada is a nation undivided, true north strong and free from coast to coast to coast, and;
Ø within the Nation of Canada is another nation of the Quebecois which has only one coast but lots of votes, but;
Ø that coast is claimed by First Nations who have expensive lawyers paid by the citizens of the nation of Canada to help the First Nations take back as much land and resources from Canada as they can, and;
Ø meanwhile, that nation of the Quebecois has its nationals spread throughout the rest of Canada while anyone else living in Quebec who isn’t a Quebecois is a Quebecer and a Canadian and maybe also a Lebanese or a Tamil, or a Palestinian but definitely not an American unless he is a draft dodger, but;
Ø a Quebecer can vote for the Bloc Quebecois or the Parti Quebecois if that Quebecer wants to be Quebecois and not a Canadian, and meanwhile they can enjoy all the benefits of being Canadian especially if they are caught in the crossfire in some other country where they also happen to be citizens in which case they call the Canadian consulate and Canadians send a plane to pick them up, and furthermore;
Ø the newly appointed Leader of the Opposition is a Canadian and a Quebecois and also a citizen of France (though he doesn’t like to talk about it and gets grumpy when the subject is brought up) and Canada’s Governor General (who in a tight situation would be called upon to decide who is the next Prime Minister) is a citizen of Canada and a citizen of France but not a Quebecois because she was born in Haiti but her husband is a Quebecois and they both once strongly supported the FLQ which was a small Quebecois terrorist group that blew up post boxes and killed cabinet ministers and created other nuisances, but;
Ø the Prime Minister of Canada is only a Canadian and he didn’t travel outside Canada much before he became Prime Minister and his French (the language of the Quebecois is only so-so, kind of like the Leader of the Opposition’s English) and he would look silly in a beret and he has never lived in Quebec and most university graduates who live in Canadian cities along with almost all university professors and readers of the Globe & Mail find him scary, so he likely won’t be Prime Minister for long.
Ø Welcome to Canada, a Nation of Nations united and undivided. God (if he existed) Bless Canada, Eh!

Smells, Sights, and Sounds of Liberal Leadership Convention

2006-12-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

As I watched Stephane Dion’s speech at the Liberal leadership convention I recalled one of my life’s most embarrassing moments. Watching Liberals often has that effect on me.

Dion’s bile green accent colour seemed appropriate for the occasion. Beneath the shy, slightly nerdy professorial appearance beats the heart of a Chretien acolyte. Dion didn’t disappoint with his quip that there was more culture in a bowl of yogurt than that possessed by Conservatives. Liberals just can’t help themselves when it comes to smugness and sanctimony. This is the party of Rousseau and Mill liberalism.

Dion’s decision to make the environment the core issue of his campaign along with his determination to ignore the issue of renewal in the Liberal Party – something one of Jean Chretien’s (actually it was Aline’s) handpicked subalterns must do diligently – is what transported me back to a cold and wintry doorstep in Saskatoon almost 40 years ago.

After too many beer, Ukrainian sausages and pickled eggs in the Cavalier Hotel pub I was kissing my date goodnight when the pleasant calm of the moment caused me to relax and allow some pent up flatulence to escape, shattering the silence and the mood to say nothing of its impact on greenhouse gas measurements. I reflexively broke off the kiss and began to talk incessantly about a litany of inane subjects, hoping to obliterate the aroma of the elephant on the porch.

With the exception of Gerard Kennedy’s, all the candidates’ speeches could have been delivered on the same cold and unpleasantly odorous prairie porch. The one major distinction was that unlike my date that night (yes it was my last date with Terry K) the rapturous crowd in Montreal seemed oblivious to the smell in the room.

- I was never a Montreal Canadien fan but I always admired Ken Dryden as a hockey player. He is much less endearing as a physically bloated, angry and arrogant politician, insisting that any vision of Canada that is not Liberal is not Canadian. It was almost pathetic to see him hop from losing camp to losing camp until he finally backed the winning horse for the last round of voting.

- Best line from an analyst had to be Rex Murphy’s depiction of Michael Ignatieff’s speaking style as “lethargic fluency”.

- Best television image – Dion in his acceptance speech framed in the background by the godfather Chretien over his right shoulder, arms folded in front of him, a self-satisfied grin on his face; the shadowed jutting jaw of interim leader Bill Graham in profile just behind Dion’s left ear, and the Howdy Doody joviality of the hapless Paul Martin behind his left shoulder. It reminded me of a scene from some old Woody Allen movie but with strong hints of the Grand Guignol. I kept seeing them dressed in polka dot puffy sleeved costumes with jester hats. My imagination is sometimes too vivid!

- Best political self-preservation move - Gerard Kennedy backing yet another Liberal leader from Quebec. He is counting on the pendulum swinging at some point in his political lifetime and he may get another chance at the leadership.

Trudging to Complacency

2006-10-12T00:09:00.000-07:00

I am privileged to have as a friend Dr. Will Johnston who in addition to operating a busy family practice in Vancouver, is the President of Canadian Physicians for Life (“CPL”). CPL’s goal is to educate the Canadian public on the negative side-effects and consequences to a mother who chooses abortion over childbirth in Canada. By elevating the consciousness of the public to these issues, it is the hope of CPL that fewer women will succumb to the pressures of society and the relationships around them to have an abortion.

Johnston is above all a pragmatist and he concedes that presently there is no democratic mandate in Canada to outlaw abortion. As a social and political conservative, he is also prepared to accept that the current government has no interest in revisiting the abortion issue. His experience as a family physician has been that of witnessing how much happier mothers were with their babies a year after a pregnancy crisis, compared to women who had gone ahead and had an abortion.

In a recent interview, Johnston made the powerful point about how inconsistently the liberal left has been with regard to the human rights issue, under whose banner the pro-choice movement has held sway for decades in Canada. On the one hand the left has no problem seeing it is wrong to discriminate against an entire class of people whether they be Jews or blacks, but they don’t recognize a huge class of people who happen to be very small and inside their mother’s body.

It is indeed regrettable that an environment does not yet exist in Canada where a reasoned debate about the merits of having no law whatsoever to regulate the practice of abortion in this country can take place. This is particularly of concern when the biological and medical community has long since resolved the contention that originally dominated the discussion over abortion– when does human life begin?

Informed pro-abortion advocates no longer dispute the fact that the fetus is human life. The argument in favour of abortion is predicated solely on the right of the mother to choose whether or not to allow her child to be born. The moral and political dispute is now over which human beings, at whatever rate of development or decline, possess rights that we are bound to respect.

Since 1973 over 40 million abortions have been performed in the United States. From 1970 to 2002 there were reported over 2.5 million abortions in Canada. This is a sobering statement of our society’s attitude toward the respect due to the defenceless unborn.

A group of Catholic and Protestant Evangelicals has recently issued a Statement entitled That They May Have Life. In it they make the case for a “culture of life” and to do so in a way that invites public deliberation and engages in questions of public policy. “To those who do not identify with our communities, or with any Christian community, we respectfully suggest that it is in our mutual interest that they try to understand better the reasons and convictions that have recruited so many millions of their fellow citizens to the cause of the culture of life. Greater understanding does not necessarily lead to agreement, but it at least makes possible a more civil engagement of our disagreements.”

The statement further “plead(s) with our fellow citizens who do not accept the authority of God’s commandments or the good news that is the gospel of life to consider the consequences of having created a license to kill. In the present state of our tragically disordered law (referring to the US, in Canada’s case we simply have no law), citizens are given, in the case of abortion, a private “right” to kill those who are too young, too small, too handicapped, too burdensome, or, for whatever reason, not “wanted”. When this right and the lethal logic that supports it is established in law, there is no principled reason why it should not be applied to the “unwanted” at any point along life’s way, as advocates of eugenics, euthanasia, and assisted suicide logically contend.”

These are sobering thoughts, and what does it say about the maturity of our Canadian society that we have no will to engage in a public debate over the consequences of our pursuit of happiness through the granting of rights as sinister as the death of a defenceless unborn child.

In search of a better understanding of why our fecklessness over the issue of abortion is yet another example of the complacency that seems to overwhelm us here in Canada when it comes to matters that seriously affect the state of health of our culture, I was enormously aided by these words of Irving Babbitt in Democracy and Leadership.

“No movement, indeed, illustrates more clearly than the supposed democratic movement the way in which the will of highly organized and resolute minorities may prevail over the will of the inert and unorganized masses. Even though the mass does not consent to ‘trudge’ after the minority, it is at an increasing disadvantage in its attempts to resist it.”

I am convinced that the majority of Canadians does not approve of the unfettered right of a woman to kill her unborn child, yet we continue to behave in a way that seems to lend truth to Goethe’s statement that “there is nothing more odious than a majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and subservient weaklings, and a mass of men who trudge after them without in the least knowing their own minds.”

We need to support the efforts of people like Will Johnston to better inform and educate the "mass of men" so that they might know their own minds and stand up and voice their opposition to actions of the organized and resolute minorities.

The Case for the Office of Censor

2006-10-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

My submission to then Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler several months ago in which I sought an appointment to the Supreme of Court of Canada having met with no success, I have decided to lobby for the creation of a new office in Canada, one that in all humility I am willing to fill for the initial term.

The official name of the new bureaucracy will be the Canadian Censorship Farrago (“CCF”). It seems like a winning acronym. I shall be the Commisar of the CCF. I look forward to watching Jack Layton and Libby Davies attack the CCF in question period. But I digress.

It’s not that I am bored with my life here in the Cowichan Valley. I spent about 4 hours today moving rocks from one part of the property to another. Their original resting places were farrago-like, hence the inspiration for the name of my new sinecure. With a modest amount of effort and very little skill I was able to rearrange them in a rather attractive pattern to line a small watercourse that traverses our property and which, should it ever rain here on the island, will someday soon be transformed from an inert depression in the earth to a vibrant babbling brook.

Boredom is not my enemy. Rather, it is too much time to think that leads me to conjure up these quixotic solutions to what seems to ail our contemporary life. Moving rocks allows for a considerable amount of thinking to take place. Sisyphus was most assuredly a very thoughtful fellow.

Why censorship you might ask? In answering this I imagine myself seated across from my most secular, liberal, humanist friend as she raises her eyebrows and asks with genuine love and affection if I have lost my way. There is always the possibility that she and others who share her worldview and who have been exposed to my scribblings no longer even bother to read them, while those who do share them continue to encourage me to write. I will humour myself into thinking that my audience is not overly monolithic.

The need for censorship seems to me to be self-evident to anyone exposed to television, films, newspapers and popular music. This would appear to embrace the entire spectrum of the denizens of Canada ( I avoid the word citizens, since so many of them don't even live here, except Conrad Black who lives here but isn't a citizen though wishes he were - it is so confusing). So if the size of one’s audience lends even a soupcon of legitimacy to one’s message my CCF would appear to stand on solid ground.

I imagine my friend as restless in her chair, poised to burst the bubble of my fantasy with the argument that even the most generous characterization of my offer is that I wish to be some well-intentioned philistine, one who is not qualified to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, the artistic and the obscene. My true intention she would argue is only to impose a stifling, judgmental, holier-than-thou collar upon artists and thinkers.

There is that risk of course, and I can offer nothing more than my good intentions and my reliance upon my innate gift of unconscious competence. This combined with a humble recognition of my own sinfulness constitutes the foundations of my curriculum vitae. (Sin is such a foreign word and even more foreign concept these days, that I recently sat through an entire sermon on a critical New Testament passage on the consequences of sin without ever hearing the word spoken)

So I must concede to my friend that I believe that true freedom is possible only through constraints. I see her eyes roll back as she suspects I am one of those who loves constraints as long as I get to impose them. I assure her I am willing to live by the same constraints as those my rulings as Commissar would impose on others.

My objective is that under the aegis of the CCF, Canadian society would gradually become a place where one might witness more examples of honourable behaviour. Shame would no longer be a taboo, but would become a natural reaction for most Canadians when confronted with the targets of my censorious edicts.

I believe that it is salutary for one to wish to become honourable, and that David B. Hart has it right when he says that it is “precisely through accepting freely the constraints of a larger social and moral tradition and community, one gives shape to a character that can endure from moment to moment, rather than dissolving in each instant into whichever new inclination of appetite or curiosity rises up within one. Once ceases to be governed by caprice, or to be the slave of one’s own liberty”.

I don’t expect that my term of office will be smooth, nor will I expect to rack up many qualifying years in the generous pension fund to which I would be entitled as a federal civil servant. If the Liberals win the next election I might not have time to do much except substitute the Turner Classic Movie channel for most of the television programming between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. on Friday nights. I wouldn’t mess with the Trailer Park Boys as I believe that consciously or not there is a Flannery O’Connor-like message underpinning the themes of this popular Canadian comedy. A message that Grace is a two edged sword and is often displayed in the most unlikely situations, and through the actions of the least likely characters.

To tell the truth, I expect to fail and for all my effort and competence, unconscious or otherwise, I won’t make a mark on the face of Canadian society. For I live in a society as near as my local community and as far reaching as this former dominion ranging from sea to sea ( a Canadian slogan apparently derived from Psalm 72 v.8)

I live in a country where we have come to believe that as Hart puts it “ it is the power of the arbitrary in ourselves and others that defines for us at once our dignity and political freedom” and so “we cannot really alter the course of the nation at all, or even properly imagine what kind of political or social future we should want, so long as we fail to remember (and to fashion our lives according to the knowledge) that we exist only because there is One who has called us from nothingness to be what He desires us to be, not simply what we would like to make ourselves, and that we shall truly be free – and know what freedom is – only when we have no choices left”.

Does anyone know a cheap place where I can have printed my “Bring Back the CCF” buttons?

Belinda's Blues

2006-09-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

I blame my dog for this blog. He wakened me at 5:30 this morning and I had to take him for a walk. It was glorious pre-dawn morning and I should have confined my stroll to Whiskey Pt. Road (I chose my retirement home very carefully) where I could have enjoyed the splendours of the star-filled sky away from any ambient light.

Instead I let Laddie's nose lead me the other way. Once I saw the lights of the Petro-Canada station a kilometer away I was seduced into thinking it would be good to spend an hour or two reading a Saturday morning paper. I may not like its editorial slant, but the Globe & Mail must be admired for its efficiency in getting its paper out onto the street. Faced with no choice other than the Auto Trader, I succumbed to the temptation and was towed home by Laddie to read the Globe.

There was much of interest including a feature on the Cowichan Valley's fine wines and cuisine, some of which I was able to enjoy later in the day, and the book review section offered some good suggestions for winter reading fare. Alas I read Michael Valpy's article on Belinda Stronach, back in the news as the alleged "other woman" in the Tie Domi marriage breakup. So here I sit, unable to go to sleep until I get these thoughts off my mind.

The newspaper has been put to better use since this morning (keeping the smell of crab carapace under control) so I can't go back and re-read the piece, but I was disheartened by a distinct hint of encomium in Valpy's piece. Perhaps it was too early in the morning for me to detect the irony which I have come to expect to underpin essays by Mr. Valpy. Surely he wasn't really entranced by the buffness of Belinda's sculpted frame, nor was he was genuinely unconcerned about the fact no one with whom he spoke could list any subject upon which they could recollect Belinda having ever expressed a thoughtful remark.

Is there some important sociolgical point to be scrutinized by G&M readers emerging from the fact women like Belinda apparently find men who skate sexually attractive? Belinda's second husband was Johann Koss, triple gold medalist in speed skating in the 1994 Olympics, and now she appears to be involved with Mr. Domi - he of the extra large head, bushy eyebrows and who knows what other seductive physical attributes to spin the head of former cabinet minister and $9 million per year auto executive. Poor Peter McKay, if only he had been a hockey player and not a rugby player, Belinda might yet be by his side and on the opposite side of the floor in the House of Commons. On second thought, lucky Peter Mckay and lucky Canada.

Ms. Stronach's attitude toward this entire incident - "what do you expect me to do on a Friday night, stay home and knit?" - reminds me of that of the rapist who broke off to reproach his victim: "you don't think of anybody's feelings but your own!"

Meanwhile I await a Focus piece in the Globe & Mail singing the praises of a faithful husband or wife.

Free Ride to Anywhere

2006-09-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

The hitchhiker’s sign was iconic. Alone on the shoulder of the Trans-Canada highway north of Duncan, BC, a man held up his thumb while clutching a sign that read “Anywhere”.

One could take the positive view that this was a fellow eager to meet a new challenge, certain that whatever his next destination it would bring benefits. A less sanguine interpretation might be that Duncan had been so unkind to him that anywhere would be an improvement. Or the more nihilistic view might be that it really didn’t matter one way or the other where he ended up, he just wanted to be on the move. One thing was certain he had no cause to complain no matter where his next ride deposited him. Whatever his intent, his sign brought a sardonic smile to my face and provided inspiration to break the long silence since my last essay.

More and more it has become apparent to me that Canada’s is an “anywhere” society and we live in an “anywhere” world. Anywhere, anyway, anyhow form the trilogy to describe the complacency of our times. French philosopher Chantal Delsol captures the spirit of our times in her book Icarus Fallen – The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. She writes of the modern phenomenon of the “sacralization of rights”. “Eclipsing all other values, they (rights) have come to represent a kind of absolute. No one would dare contest an existing right or a newly acquired right, for against which standard could this materialized holiness possibly be measured?”

The concept of a man or woman’s honour has been replaced by the concept of dignity. In the past honour was earned. An individual strove to achieve an image of himself that he believed to be enviable. There were objective, externally defined measures for this image such as honesty, being true to oneself, or honouring one’s commitments. These were based on a belief in the inherent dignity of man as a spiritual being. As our society abandons the spiritual and ontological in favour of the secular, the modern individual now finds both dignity and respect by claiming his rights.

As Delsol puts it “ the concrete way in which human dignity is to be expressed has gravitated from living an ethical life in conformity with an external standard, to being provided with all the rights that can be expected from a society”.

The modern phenomenon of crafting an ever-expanding list of “rights” seems endless as rights have themselves become the ultimate criteria. Marching in lock-step with the rights advocates are the promoters of the modernized version of tolerance. No longer is tolerance founded on the belief in the equal dignity of each human being, but rather on the idea that all lifestyles are of equal value. Anywhere will do as a destination for the planners of this parade so long as accomodations are made for all along the way.

The proliferation of rights is built on the chimerical belief that progress will ensure that every generation is capable of making life better for its cohort, than it was for its predecessors. One is reminded of the trenchant wisdom of Philip Larkin when asked by an interviewer, "Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?" And Larkin answered, "Not without being someone else."

I'm Cancelling My Newspaper Subscriptions

2006-05-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors. War, crime, rapine, shamelessness, torture, the crimes of princes, the crimes of nations, the crimes of individuals, a delirium of universal atrocity.

Baudelaire, Mon Coeur mis a nu, 1863

Not much has changed in just under 150 years. I read the newspaper less and less, mostly because there is no delivery service for the National Post or Globe and Mail here in RR2 land. I read the National Post online, but despite its excellent site where there is a perfect digital reproduction of each page and you can flip through it like you would the paper version it just isn't the same as getting that newsprint on your fingers. I have now concluded that the damage to my brain from reading the daily stream of dreck is something I must take seriously.

Last week's story of how a hapless British climber was left to die alone on Mt. Everest as the pursuit of the goal of standing atop the world's highest rock trumped basic human decency, started me on this course leading to the cancellation of all newspaper subscriptons. Evidence of God's sense of humour offered a temporary stay of execution, as a few days later an Australian climber believed to be dead was revived by other climbers (they were on their way down it seems). He now appears to stand a good chance of survival, though minus some fingers and some brain cells. A deficiency in the latter seems to be a prerequisite for anyone who chooses to attempt the climb in the first place.

Today's National Post ended any fence-sitting on my part as I read the front page story about the University of Saskatchewan (my alma mater) graduate student in religious studies who presented her paper to the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences on the weekend. Her thesis is that the Trailer Park Boys trio of Julian, Ricky and Bubbles represent the Holy Trinity.

“Television has become our new church and its players our new prophets,” declares Arlene Stevens, a graduate student in religious studies at the University of Saskatchewan, who is presenting her findings on religiosity in Trailer Park Boys.

The article continues: "Ricky, the stooge-like character known for his dope-growing and his eternal screw-ups, is the Christ-like figure in Ms. Stevens’ Holy Trinity. She says his character shares Jesus’s faith in people, his caring for others rather than himself and faith that things will work out. His goal in life is to love his family, be good to his friends and love life, while superficially he is vulgar, uneducated and a criminal.

“Biblically, the suffering servant is the mysterious figure who bears humanity’s transgressions (Isaiah 53:5), although he is considered lowly, marginalized and despised by the world,” Ms. Stevens says in her paper, The Gospel According to Ricky, Biblical Values in the Trailer Park Boys.

Had she seen it, I suspect Ms. Stevens would have responded to the classified ad in a California newspaper, which reads, JESUS BREAD. Authentic last supper recipe. Delicious, easy. $1.00

For solace I turn to an old favourite, D.J. Enright for the final word on newspapers.

When I was a kid the local newspaper was full of births, marriages, and an occasional death, fetes, school sports and speech days,new flower beds in the Jephson Gardens, the benign doings of the town council, and the odd petty larceny. Now my local paper is packed with muggings, murders, rapes, drugs, hit-and-run accidents, and closing of public baths and lavatories. Is this the result of improved communications?

Memories and a Ben Trovato

2006-04-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

“Only costumers may make us of the washrooms”. I was tempted to put on a fake nose and outrageous glasses and attempt to use the facilities of the little café in Duncan, B.C. but lost my courage. How many folks stop in on any given day and ask to use the washroom on this quiet street in this small Cowichan Valley town?

I am always on the lookout for a good ben trovato and today I found one as I walked through downtown Duncan. I was moderately grumpy at the time, having discovered that the Bank of Montreal closes at 4 p.m. It only opens at 9:30 for goodness sake, how do these banks make billions? Most of the years that I worked for a living, ten-hour days were normal and there was an entire decade near the end of my working life when 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. was the norm.

The window sign brought me back to the more pleasant reality that it was a lovely spring day, I had accomplished all my chores for the day and the bank could wait another day for my deposit.

I know that some people read my scribbling as I have had an occasional inquiry as to my well being, my blog site having gone silent for more than a month. I have much admiration for those who write for a living. Writing seems more a winter activity for me – those short days and long nights more befitting the task of crafting one’s thoughts into what will hopefully be an interesting and enjoyable combination of words than do the expanding days of spring.

The other problem I encounter is that if I produce too many essays, Nancy questions why I have not accomplished more of the tasks in the bottomless job jar? If I have time to write blogs and report on rugby matches why can’t I build a new shelf for the storage room or replace that ugly bare light bulb with a piece of track lighting salvaged from the old house I am tearing apart?

I have discovered new muscles and stimulated them to the point of frenzy. I have nicks and cuts and blisters on my hands, nail punctures here and there, scrapes on my forehead from hitting a 6 foot door header (cured by my neighbour with two whacks of a sledgehammer after he made the same mistake). I managed to nick a water pipe with my chainsaw and fall through two deck joists while prying at a particularly stubborn old piece of decking, but no permanent damage was caused.

When I am inclined to be nostalgic for the friends I have left behind I am comforted by the words of Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov in his speech at the stone in the novel’s final pages: “You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

Fortunately I have many more than one.

Good and Evil

2006-02-09T00:50:00.000-08:00

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned..It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

Milton - Areopagitica

John Milton, published the Areopagitica in 1644 as an appeal to Parliament to rescind their Licensing Order of June 16th, 1643. This order was designed to bring publishing under government control by creating a number of official censors to whom authors would submit their work for approval prior to having it published. Milton's argument, in brief, was that pre-censorship of authors was little more than an excuse for state control of thought. Recognizing that some means of accountability was necessary to ensure that libellous or other illegal works were kept under control, Milton felt this could be achieved by ensuring the legal responsibility of printers and authors for the content of what they published.

In 2006 a vortex of violence spreads round the world as Muslims protest the publication of a series of cartoons originating in Denmark, each of which depicts the prophet Mohammed in various and universally unflattering situations. The creators and publishers of the cartoons brandish freedom of the press as their shield against the fury of the Muslim street. Peace loving Muslims are left to deplore both the lack of judgment on the part of the press, and the violence of fanatics and the unthinking crowds they use as their weapons in the war aimed at fomenting anarchy and chaos, out of the rubble of which they hope to build a Muslim hegemony.

Christians and Jews join the peace loving Muslims in their condemnation, sadly reminding the world that their own faiths are regularly ridiculed and savaged by the same evildoers who are unable to discern the “cunning resemblances” between good and evil Milton wrote about 360 years ago.

The name of Christ is regularly used in vain on stage and screen and in every day social intercourse without any thought given to how savage it sounds to the ear of a believer. Fiction poses as historical research in popular novels like The Da Vinci Code, propagating blasphemy with merry impunity.

"I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand" says a character in one of Tom Stoppard’s plays, bitingly ironic as always. It is enough to make one weep and to wonder if Milton were alive today, whether he would have as much confidence in the ability of the press to self-regulate.

As one ages there is an ongoing struggle between apathy, impatience and rage brought about by the state of the world. D.J. Enright in Interplay, his brilliant collection of anectodes, aphorisms and literary cornucopia, cites Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India as giving a good account of the apathy and impatience of age:

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time – the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved.

Enright mused thus: "For all that is said about the sourness of old age, the malevolence, you would like the world to be a better place to leave, to leave with some sort of blessing. So, if it seems to be getting worse, you won’t want to linger."

For all his acerbic wit, Enright was a hopeful and faithful believer right up to his death, and a great inspiration and model for lovers of language and of life. My sense is he would have been able to show the stupidity and wickedness of both the decision to publish the blasphemous cartoons, and of the bloodthirsty reaction to it.

Enright is gone, but his words survive, including this poem entitled Decline of Theodicy

A God supreme and immanent
Flickers feebly among the leaves.

A God whom we cannot blame
Because he left it all to us.

A God whom we cannot praise
Since he left it to us to do.

A God who spoke through his vicars
Whose vicars speak of other things.

A God who appointed our rulers
The rulers who disappoint us

A God whom we cannot fear
Now hell has been annulled.

A God whom we cannot love
Since heaven has been shut down

A God whose name was not taken in vain
A God whose name is not taken.

A God who was a jealous God
Sees nothing to be jealous of.

A God who gave us life
Who now only buries us.

Letter to Coach Harper

2006-02-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

Dear Prime Minister,

I understand you are a hockey trivia buff. As such, you will understand why much of the country is troubled by your performance on the first shift of your first game.

To further the metaphor, it is as though you campaigned to be the player coach of Team Canada. Your daily speeches emphasized how much things would change under your leadership. The team would be disciplined and would not resemble the foul playing, undisciplined predecessor squad. You would assemble a solid team of loyal players who would make the nation proud. On the basis of your promises you were rewarded with the role of player coach.

When you assembled the squad just hours before it stepped on the ice for its first game, the players were surprised to see in their midst Brett Hull, a player who had loudly and vehemently denounced his desire ever to play for Canada and had instead played for the Americans against us in previous tournaments. You welcomed him to the squad and made him an assistant captain.

Then on the first shift of the game, you checked an opponent from behind and were given a 5-minute major penalty.

The team and its fans are understandably puzzled by the dissonance between what you said when you were competing for the position, and what you did once given the job. It wasn't that you got a penalty, those are inevitable in the game, but it was the nature and timing of the penalty that took the enthusiasm out of the crowd that had barely taken its seat.

It remains to be seen if, once you emerge from the penalty box, you play a stirring and inspirational game and stay out of any further penalty trouble. If you score some big goals and Hull has a strong series, Canadians may forget about your lack of judgment on day one and all will be forgiven if you hoist the championship trophy at the end of the tournament.

The referees and the fans now have you and Hull under close scrutiny. In fact the whole team is now under a cloud. Fans will question every line combination, and boo every missed scoring opportunity. Referees will make every close call against you for the next several shifts.

I know politics has the reputation of being a dirty game and moral victories are thought to be for losers, but how the players play the game and how they treat the fans has become increasingly more important. Please don't lose sight of the core values that got you the job in the first place. Winning isn't worth it if you have to dissemble and break the rules to do it.

You still have a lot of fan support and a strong team behind you. However, you have given the boo birds a lot to shout about, and you have made the home crowd go quiet for a stretch. You have made your task and that of all the people who worked hard to help you win the job a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Remember that the next time you are tempted to take a cheap shot at an opponent. Those chances will invariably present themselves again and you have to show leadership by turning away and playing a disciplined game.

A loyal but slightly jaded fan.

B.J. Buan
Mill Bay, BC
V0R 2P2

How Much Have Things Changed?

2006-02-06T20:54:00.000-08:00

A manure wall cannot be plastered – Confucius

I have been told that before agreeing to run for the Liberals in the election before last, David Emerson was approached by the Conservatives to be their candidate. While there were no ideological objections raised by Emerson, the clincher for him was that he had no interest in being an MP unless he could be a cabinet minister. He didn’t like his chances with the Conservatives at the time, ran for the Liberals and was rewarded with his cabinet post.

Fast forward to the January 2006 election. Emerson won his seat in a close race against NDP veteran Ian Waddell, and woke up facing the prospect of sitting in opposition, perhaps for a long while as the Liberals work through the process of rebuilding and choosing a new leader. That he would jump at the chance to join the Harper cabinet is no surprise. That Harper would agree to make the offer is.

Harper was careful during the campaign not take a hard stand against an MP crossing the floor. In his town hall session with Peter Mansbridge he was asked the question and said he had thought long and hard on the question but had not been able to come up with a solution that would work. As such he can honestly say he isn't being unprincipled. Nor is there any real comparison to be made with the wooing of Belinda Stronach with a cabinet post in exchange for a vote on a non-confidence motion.

Are the Conservatives so desperate for a cabinet minister in Vancouver that they would risk giving the 38% of Canadians who are so cynical about politics they don’t even vote the chance to say – I told you so, all politicians are the same, all they want to do is get into power. If so Confucius had it right and the walls of the corridors of political power won't easily be papered over.

The risk Mr. Harper has taken in assembling this cabinet that includes the opportunistic and principle-challenged Mr. Emerson is that "it seems to have something for everybody, but ends up appealing to nobody."

Only time will tell.

Time to Speak Up?

2006-02-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Norman Mailer.

Can you guess which country and what era the following statements describe?

The force of the state was used to implement a set of legal reforms aimed at changing the public meaning of marriage. Policies included the establishment of no-fault marriage, eliminating legal distinctions between cohabitation and marriage, reconstituting marriage as a civil union regime, universalizing abortion, establishing universal daycare.

All who guessed Canada starting in the last decade of the 20th century could be forgiven for their error. Anyone who guessed Russia in the 1920’s would be correct and collect the gold star for historical and cultural trivia knowledge. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I am feeling some of Mailer’s impotence.

Isn’t it remarkable that the objectives of Soviet feminist Aleksandra Kollantai which she implemented in the 1920’s as Commissar of Social Welfare would be replicated in Canada at the end of the 20th and into the 21st century, even embraced by a significant percentage of Canadians and by a large margin amongst the elites of Canadian society.

It is even more remarkable given the fact that by 1936 the USSR had recognized that these radical measures had destabilized family life in the USSR, divorce rates were rising, temporary cohabitation was more prevalent, birth rates were declining, and children were falling between the cracks of broken families. Even Stalinist Russia recognized it had to reverse some of its legal reforms.

Daniel Cere, director of the Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law & Culture in Montreal is the source of this fascinating historical footnote, in his essay War of the Ring.

The essay is one of several in an important book published late in 2004 entitled Divorcing Marriage. The editors Douglas Farrow and Daniel Cere hoped it might influence enough Canadians and MP’s to vote against the Liberal motion in March 2005 that put Canada on the brink of redefining marriage. It is a book that should be read by millions of Canadians if they wish to understand just how Canada got itself into its present predicament.

By predicament I mean the situation where despite the fact there has been no meaningful public debate over the issue of whether or not we should redefine marriage, and the issue has not been one put before the people in any election campaign (other than the Conservatives promising to permit a free vote in the House of Commons on the matter), Canada is now one of only 3 countries in the world that permits members of the same sex to marry. For this we call ourselves progressive.

The predicament is even graver when one considers that it appears highly likely that despite this lack of debate more Canadians favour retaining the traditional definition of marriage, than abolishing it. And still Globe & Mail columnist John Ibbitson paints those who argue for the preservation of the traditional definition as the wearers of black hats, while those who argue for the abandonment of tradition wear the white hats.

Otherwise right thinking folk accuse those of us who argue for a reasoned and measured debate in the public square in advance of any vote in parliament of being arrogant and prejudiced against homosexuals. And, for good measure those of us who confess to being Christians are labelled as extreme right fundamentalists.

Someone I thought to be a friend of over 20 years duration, excoriated me for my letter to the National Post editor – the one about the elephant in the room. We have had previous debates over the issue of same sex marriage and neither of us found the other’s arguments compelling, but from my perspective it had never gotten personal. Now it seems it has, and this friend accused me not only of being arrogant and prejudiced but of poisoning him/her against Conservatives and Anglicans (of both I stand guilty of being a member) though what that has to do with the argument that we should have an open, honest and informed debate on the subject still escapes me.

In January 2005 I wrote a humorous essay on this site. Its premise was a fictitious decision of the Supreme Court of Canada that ruled in favour of golfers who wanted the size of the hole changed to that of a manhole. What I didn’t say in the essay was that some of the dialogue in that essay was taken almost word for word from statements made by advocates of same sex marriage.

Just as the game of golf and the people who call themselves golfers would change if the hole became the size of a manhole, the institution of marriage will change if same-sex couples marry. Daniel Cere quotes Ladelle McWhorter, a gay and lesbian theorist as saying “ that if same-sex couples get legally married, the institution of marriage will change, and since marriage is one of the institutions that support heterosexuality and heterosexual identities, heterosexuality and heterosexuals will change as well.”

Despite what the liberal press and the opposition parties try to convince you, this issue crosses political party lines, and the next few months may be the last opportunity ordinary Canadians have to give this issue some serious thought and to make their views known.

D.J. Enright wrote,

“since by and large people in the West don’t face prison camps and are tolerably free to say or write what they like, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses in real content, evolving into a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything. The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street.”

There was no opportunity for Russians in the 1920’s and 30’s to openly dissent against the changes invoked by Commissar Kollantai, and still the state recognized it had erred. The advocates for destroying the definition of marriage have been shouting in the streets for decades now and polite Canadians have stood by and said nothing. Isn't it time to raise our voices and be heard?

Peace and Order - Canadian Style

2006-01-25T23:58:00.000-08:00

Two news stories caught my eye today.

In the first, two desperadoes try to outrun the cops to the border but fail in a hail of bullets. Sounds like the Wild West doesn’t it? Perhaps Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? No it was gunfight at the Peace Arch border crossing yesterday and Canadians can be thankful the Americans were equipped to do their job. The state patrol and the US customs officers combined to capture the two on US soil.

It is easy to understand why any American desperado, wanted for murder in California, would risk almost anything to get across the border into Canada. Once out of range of the US police officers, they wouldn't be troubled by Canadian border guards since our feckless government has chosen not to arm them. Canadians could only have ducked for cover and hoped that the RCMP would eventually track the killers down. And once they did, we would have put them in jail, perhaps have denied them bail, fed them well, paid for the best criminal lawyers to fight their extradition to the US for years; all at great cost to the Canadian taxpayer. Eventually they would have been turned over to the Americans, but only after extorting a promise from the US prosecutor’s office not to seek the death penalty.

I hate guns, but since criminals are going to use them, our peace officers including border guards need to be able to defend themselves. I disagree with capital punishment, but the citizens of many US states have voted to use it, and Canada should respect their choice and not act as a haven for criminals seeking protection from the consequence of laws they freely chose to break.

In the second news story, two rich Toronto teenagers are street racing in their respective parents’ cars, a Mercedes and a BMW. On the seat of one of the cars is a video game in which the players race cars through city streets crashing into each other and into other vehicles. It is apparently one of the best selling video games on the market.

Real life intervenes and the cars crash into a cab, killing the cab driver Mr. Khan. Mr. Khan was 3 days away from becoming a Canadian citizen and was looking forward to being able to sponsor his family to join him from Pakistan.
This is but another painful reminder of flaws in the glass of Canadian society and our affluent Western culture.

Too many parents don’t care enough to know what their children are doing in their rooms equipped with TV’s and computers. Too many parents don’t care enough to stop and think about the wisdom of tossing the keys to their powerful cars to their teenage children.

Neither of these young men was seriously injured in the crash. For now they are in jail, but soon they will be free on bail posted by their wealthy parents. What will the courts do with them? Will there be a sentence that might serve as a meaningful deterrent to other young men and their parents? Don't hold your breath.

All is not well in the “true North strong and free".

Post Election Reflections

2006-01-24T01:25:00.000-08:00

“Opinions have their own neighbourhoods; some despise each other across the narrowest of alleys” – Elias Canetti

If I told my neighbours, we must love one another – I would die of shame. Or else they would kill me. D.J. Enright

It has been a remarkable eight weeks. I can only hope to live another 20 years so I can look back on it with my by then middle aged sons, and reflect on what the January 23, 2006 election meant for Canada. Will this be a tipping point for Canada? Have we just taken the first step toward reversing the tide of rampant liberalism and post-modernism, or is it just rest station on the way to continued antinomianism?

I cried when I listened to Stephen Harper’s speech tonight. That should be enough for some of you to hit the delete button. Or as Canetti forecast, you might simply glare at me across the alley separating our opinions.

I cried in response to the elegance of its message and delivery. I cried in response to its acknowledgment of our history and the sacrifice of those who preceded us. I cried in response to his invocation of a collective memory, which if reflected upon, should unite us. I cried when he spoke of aspiring to a spirit of hope, and not one of fear. My tears may have had something to do with the fact I was tired after 14 hours of volunteering as a poll captain at two polling stations, all in support of a losing candidate. And you should know that I am prone to becoming stuck in the lachrymose mode after I have had a few glasses of wine. I cry at certain hymns on Sunday, and I cry when I tell jokes.

I had watched Mr. Martin bid his farewell to Canadians, dignified and gracious, in sharp contrast to his performance on the hustings, and befitting the real man once he had shed the political skin. I wasn’t moved or touched, but I was respectful of his seeming conviction. I had also watched Mr. Layton, and had grown increasingly aggravated as he droned on, hogging the stage for what seemed like 30 minutes and thus assuring that most Canadians East of the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border would have gone to bed before Mr. Harper was able to deliver his victory speech. I worked my way through the bellicose stage during Layton’s speech.

I met some lovely people over the past week as I volunteered for the local Conservative candidate. A couple with whom I shared a scrutineer’s table during the advanced polls intrigued me as they passed the time on a word game. I love word games. They were scrutineers for the NDP. We began to chat. It turns out we are neighbours. They aren’t the type to kill me, so it is more likely I would die of shame if I told them I loved them. They won’t likely read this blog so I will have to tell them the next time we meet by the post box on the corner.

Politically there exists an immense chasm between my new neighbours and me, but they seem like lovely people. Jack Layton would hold them up as ordinary working Canadians to whom he is devoted. My question of Jack is how devoted will he be to me, just as hard working and living only a stone’s throw away from his supporters? We both even drive a Subaru. I used to have an unkempt beard like my new neighbour, and I once had long hair like his, when I had hair. How will Jack reconcile the deep differences that exist between my neighbours and me on social and economic issues that seem quite incapable of living together?

It is a strange and enigmatic country in which we live. The shared values espoused by Liberal and NDP politicians remain recondite to all but pockets of homogeneous urban dwellers in Canada’s three largest cities who rallied round Liberal candidates like a musk-ox circle. (Sound of ruler slapping knuckles!!) I stand guilty as accused of my first hyperbolism. There are of course Canadians outside those great cities that voted Liberal and NDP, but it is a remarkable result to see the Conservatives shut out of the urban centre of these three great cities.

In place of the East/West divide, we now have a shadowy and potentially dangerous alleyway dividing highly concentrated cities from the rest of Canada. It is quite remarkable, given the overwhelming consensus countrywide of the need for change, that the Liberals managed to win over 100 seats. The outcome brings to mind the joke about how to make a Canadian apologize? Kick him again!

As the prelude to Shutz’s St. Matthew’s Passion takes me to a higher and more sublime place as I prepare for bed ( a more glorious 52 seconds of musical splendour I am incapable of imagining), my prayer is that we might have a period of political stability during which truthfulness might reign. A period during which politicians might acknowledge that “ordinary Canadians” are not all necessarily attracted to the political message of one political party, that Canadian values of the majority are not necessarily Liberal or liberal values - a period during which candid and intelligent discourse might occur between Canadians, at the rural mailbox, on the Go-Train, in the rugby clubhouse, and the bridge club.

Hopeless optimist and romantic that I am I look for good in this result, and as a pathway to that end, I offer the words of Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow:

For a long time then I seemed to live by a slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads and joined all the strands together, making a life. When it was complete, or nearly so, it was shapely and beautiful in the light of day.”

Chicken Little's Last Gasp

2006-01-20T14:27:00.000-08:00

Mindful of the words of Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities" that "a man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage", I have trained myself to be saddened and not angered by the maliciousness of the Liberal attempts to smear Mr. Harper and his supporters, and by the apparent gullibility of a sector of the Canadian public that fails to recognize the lies for what they are.

Led by Prime Minister Chicken Little's cries of alarm that Stephen Harper would politicize the courts, and that Canada would become an extreme right wing country under his leadership, a cacophony of chatter erupts that would be laughable were the implications not so serious for our country.

Mr. Harper did not stray off message, he merely stated the obvious that even if granted a majority, the Conservatives would be subject to the checks and balances of a judiciary, a civil service and a Senate, each of which have been populated almost exclusively by Liberal governments. He made no attack against the independence of the judiciary, but merely affirmed what any right thinking person knows, that Liberal governments appoint senior judges who more closely share their values.

Liberals like to delude themselves and others into believing that since Liberals have dominated government, their values are those of the majority of Canadians. Since Liberals have historically been elected to majorities in parliament with as little as 38% of the popular vote, this is a hollow and dangerous assumption to make.

Surely, it would be a sign of health for Canada if the next Supreme Court judicial appointment was given to a qualified jurist who saw his or her role to be one of interpreting and not making law. Such a jurist would have experience prior to appointment consisting of years of service on the bench, and not that of a quasi-bureaucrat such as the recent appointee Rosie Abella who spent more time off the bench than on it after her first appointment as a Family Court judge in Ontario.

But like so many topics in the state of our nation during these times, they cannot even be raised without the level of debate sinking to the lowest common denominator and too often the cheerleader for the gutter quality of the debate has been our own Prime Minister. The Conservative policy platform would position the party to the left of the Democrats in the US, yet P.M. Chicken Little shrieks from his perch that a Harper led Conservative party would be the most extreme right-wing government Canada has ever seen, and he approves fear-mongering ads about soldiers with guns in the streets of Canadian cities.

This is a sad spectacle of a man and a party so desperate to cling to power and privilege as to willingly spread falsehood and malicious innuendo in the hopes of frightening Canadians to cast their votes out of fear and prejudice and not out of reasoned consideration of the facts. It was sad to see him on television today, pausing, his face constricting suggesting an inner struggle of conscience, but ultimately unable to resist the temptation he spread the lie that under Stephen Harper “women would lose their right to choose.”

After a campaign in which the national press for the first time in decades displayed a relatively unbiased and even disposition toward the policies and candidates of the Conservatives, we now begin to see the rot underlying some of the attitudes of the 5th column, creep into its reporting.

Musil also wrote "the problem of civilization can be solved only by the heart." Canada needs a change and polls suggest that roughly 2/3rd of Canadians accept that premise. A change of heart must precede a change of government, and one can only hope, for the good of the country, that enough Canadians will see through the lies and fear-mongering of the frenzied last 48 hours of campaigning by the Liberals, and elect a Conservative government that has promised positive change and accountability.

To fail to do so will be a sad day for Canadians. We will have failed to prune and tend to our garden and the unsightly mess we are left to live in will not be healthy or pleasing to the senses.

Heart Breaking Stuff

2006-01-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

It takes a lot of love my friend, it takes a lot of love these days, to keep your heart from breaking, to push on to the end. David Gray, songwriter

Election campaigns are trials of the spirit, trials to test our tolerance and our love of humanity. Every day of an election campaign gives birth to countless opportunities for the demonstration of Grace, since like Flannery O’Connor, I believe that moments when you know Grace has been offered and accepted, are prepared for us by the intensity of evil that precedes them. O’Connor captures this intensity through the words and actions of her character Mr. Head in one of her short stories. “Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him.”

Mr. Head had just denied his relationship to his grandson, out of fear and embarrassment. Mr. Head had failed his grandson, momentarily abandoning him to the frightening circumstances of an angry crowd, and while he finally rescued his grandchild, he immediately felt the pain and shame of his denial. Yet his grandson forgave him and only then did Mr. Head feel the action of mercy – that freely given mercy given to us though we know ourselves to be unworthy, and which we call Grace.

Election campaigns surely produce daily examples of denial and abandonment – mostly of principles and of the truth, but occasionally of the most fundamental good sense and judgment as human beings. These are occasions for people to feel shame, at least for those who still believe in it as an emotion and a benchmark for the morality of our behaviour.

I witnessed one of those moments today as I watched a CBC afternoon public affairs program. The hosts had representatives of the three major parties on to discuss the “issue du jour”, which happened to be tax reductions. John Duffy a high-ranking Liberal advisor to Paul Martin represented the Liberals. He is the fellow who approved of the “beer and popcorn” line and minutes after it was uttered by his colleague defended him and sought to reinforce the image of the recklessness of the Conservatives in giving financial relief directly to parents of pre-school children.

Today’s debate focused on what the cost of the various tax cuts announced by the parties might be. As the Conservative spokeswoman was concluding her remarks, the hosts announced that time was short and Duffy would have the last word. It was then that a most astonishing thing occurred. Duffy pulled out what he described as a “Liberal poster drawn by my daughter”. Duffy added, displaying the squiggly lined crayon drawing, that “she is very concerned about what the outcome of this election might mean for her”. A child older than 6 years of age could not have made the crayon drawing displayed by Duffy. It most closely resembles the pre-school finger painting works of our sons, which adorn quiet contemplative corners of our house. Yet here was this senior political advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada, contending that his young daughter is concerned about the outcome of the election.

Is it possible that Mr. Duffy in the moments following this action might, like Mr. Head, have begun “to feel the depth of his denial”. Can there be a much lower standard set for political behaviour than this – to offer your child’s innocent poster as a statement of concern should her Daddy’s party lose the election?

Sadly, it seems much more likely that Mr. Duffy is one of those who don’t know what Grace is and wouldn’t recognize it when he sees it.

This is heartbreaking stuff and like David Gray I feel it takes a lot of love to push on to the end of this campaign.

Images From 2005

2005-12-31T11:20:00.000-08:00

Enough words, I close the year with some favourite images from 2005.

We live in a beautiful land and these are examples of my modest efforts to capture some of its grandeur, its history and its serenity during my travels this past year.

The peaceful simplicity of the MacDougall United Church near Cochrane, Alberta; the expansive vista from the top of the Cypress Hills; the haunting reminder of the passing of an era of human-scale grain farming; the murals of Greenwood where hundreds of Japanese Canadian internees were kept and where many chose to remain after the war; the natural beauty of the lily and the woodpecker; and the setting sun over a peaceful bay that I am blessed to have grace my front door - all these give meaning and texture and context to my life, and for each I am truly thankful.

May you all have a Peaceful, Healthy and Fulfilling New Year.

This lovely church sits in the foothills of the Alberta Rockies, between Canmore and Cochrane.

A mural on the wall of an historic building in Greenwood, BC.

The lovely Prairie lily with Brown Eyed-Susan companion, growing wild just east of Danceland at Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan.

View north from the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan, the highest point of land in Canada between the Rockies and the Lakehead.

A rare Pilliated woodpecker at work in my backyard.

The new fossils of the prairies, these examples of the once ubiquitous grain elevator, are nestled in a valley north west of Swift Current, Sk.

An October dusk settles over Mill Bay, B.C.

P.S.

If you want to see some truly outstanding photographs of the prairies accompanied by an informative,contemplative and well-written narrative, I recommend you acquire a copy of Wild Prairie -A Photographer's Personal Journey -by James R. Page, published by Greystone Books and available at most leading bookstores.

James is a friend and a gifted photographer.

Stupidity Unbundled

2005-12-30T21:17:00.000-08:00

It is true that there are animals that resemble Man in their stupidity. Yet one cannot help feeling that this stupidity of animals is not real and that, in any case, it is more innocent than ours. - Canetti

A friend took me to task for what he took to be my comparison of Maoist China to present day Canada in my last essay. He thought the comparison a spurious one. I countered that perhaps he meant specious. I averred it was neither but admitted it might have been Swiftian. While we were onto S words my friend thought I should find a better word than stupid to describe folks who vote Liberal. We ended by exchanging jokes, so friendship trumps all.

Canetti said "by their etymology shall you know them" and so I stand by my use of the word stupidity, but perhaps I need to clarify the nuances of its various definitions. The etymology is French, which perhaps counts for some of its attraction, French being my mother tongue. The Latin origin is stupidus from stupere, to be numb. Meanings include: Acting in a careless manner, dulled in feeling or sensation, marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking.

Most of us who take offence at the word do so on the basis that the user considers himself to be more intelligent than the person he characterizes as stupid. That has never been my intention - though I have been accused by other friends of that very thing. The world is filled with intelligent people who act stupidly from time to time; we all know them, I stand as guilty as the next.

The picture of careless, unreasoned thinking, dulled of sensation seems to perfectly describe the collective behaviour of those Canadians who voted Liberal in the last election, and the description will be even more apropos should they do so again on January 23rd.

Robert Musil's characterization of stupidity as having "something uncommonly endearing and natural about it" and his assertion that "there is no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses, it can move in all directions, and put on all guises of the truth" helps to unbundle my intended meaning.

It is not simply in the realm of politics where I see stupidity has insinuated its way into our lives as Canadians. Take business as an example. Robert Milton, the CEO of Air Canada for several years leading up to its bankruptcy, and who continues to lead it now after its emergence from bankruptcy, has been named Canadian CEO of the Year. Now who votes in these contests? Would the hundreds of thousands of shareholders of the bankrupt Air Canada whose shares became worthless vote for him? Would the tens of thousands of Air Canada employees whose wages have been slashed, their pensions ransacked, their stock options made worse than worthless due to our byzantine tax laws, vote for him?

Air Canada was the most profitable airline in the world you say. Well, how hard is it to show a profit as the new Air Canada has, if you can cancel all your equity obligations, convert your debt to new equity, obtain hundreds of millions of dollars of new financing to modernize your fleet, and reassume your effective monopoly position as Canada's primary air carrier?

What does it say about what Canadians value in their business leaders when we hold up Robert Milton as a model of business acumen? I argue it says we are stupid.

Numbed and dulled as we have become, we fail to recognize the signs in our society and our culture of what Paul Elmer More, early 20th century conservative thinker, called pleonexia, the perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. In the realm of politics and business, power is everything and those who wield it strive constantly to perpetuate their privileged position as wielders of power. How is it that, blessed as we are with the power of the democratic right to vote and thus terminate, even if only temporarily, the pleonexic politician or CEO, we so consistently fail to act? I say it is because we are stupid.

My Maoist China/Liberal Canada analogy offended my friend because the Chinese masses had no vote, and they lived in enforced rather than self indulgent stupidity. As for the other leaders who knew the evils of Mao, it was the fear and desire for self-preservation which for some made them fail to depose the tyrant. Canadians are free, and well informed argued my friend, so my comparison was faulty.

To the contrary, I say. Our failure to act is even more tragic, not for its outcomes - of course we do not suffer like the Chinese peasants, or those purged in the Cultural Revolution - but because we waste our democratic rights and we freely choose stupidity over wisdom. Like the prodigal son we waste our inheritance.

It has been said that the cure of democracy is more democracy, but surely our recent Canadian experience lends the lie to that aphorism. Russell Kirk counters that the real cure must be not more, but better democracy.

I wait patiently for the argument that makes the case that the re-election of a Liberal government, minority or otherwise, will bring better democracy to Canada.

Chairman Mao, Forrest Gump and the Liberal Party of Canada

2005-12-29T23:56:00.000-08:00

“We need the policy of keep people stupid.” – Chairman Mao

I am reading a fascinating new biography of Mao Tse-Tung by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Armed with previously undisclosed files from the Kremlin, the authors of this riveting book reveal how through a combination of guile, luck, and utter ruthlessness, Mao was able to achieve the power he did. Along the way the gullibility and unwillingness of so many who ought to have known better, to question some of the propaganda so skillfully woven by Mao, prevented both those within the Chinese leadership and other nations from deposing the tyrant.

Keeping the people stupid was a core tenet of Mao’s. 22 years of recent Liberal rule in Canada, combining for a total of 75 of the last 105 years suggests to me that the same mantra will apply to Liberal apparatchiks if they once again avoid defeat in the upcoming election.

How else could any student of history a century from now explain the willingness of the population of an educated and freely democratic society to repeatedly ignore the myriad of reasons why the ruling party should be deposed?

The latest government peccadillo to illustrate my point involves an RCMP investigation into possible leaks from the Department of Finance just prior to Minister Ralph Goodale’s announcement that he would not alter the tax treatment of income trusts, and would instead make the tax treatment of dividends more favourable. There is no disputing that there was an inordinate amount of trading in the shares of companies and trusts on the morning of the announcement. Some will argue it was simply astute speculators anticipating an announcement. Those folks doubtlessly also believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

Certainly there were speculators who guessed correctly. I don’t mind admitting that not only did I hold onto my income trust units after they had fallen by 25% following Goodale’s announcement of a review of the rules, but I took advantage of the depressed prices to buy some more. My reasoning was simply that I did not believe the Liberals would be so stupid as to antagonize such a large segment of their supporters going into an election campaign. I know I am not so smart as to be the only one who made that investment decision, but it would be rather remarkable for so many of us to have made the decision to buy just hours in advance of the announcement.

Do I think Ralph Goodale benefited personally from the leak? No. Do I believe he encouraged or consented to the release of information by someone from his staff? No. Do I think someone from his staff made a statement, perhaps inadvertently that signaled the decision was coming down later that day? Yes. Do I think the people who received the information were political friends of the Liberals? Yes. Do I think Ralph Goodale should resign as Finance Minister pending completion of the RCMP investigation? Yes. Do I think he will? No.

The Liberal Party of Canada has completely forgotten the meaning of ministerial responsibility, and of the age-old conventions of the British parliamentary system. Those conventions are based on a sense of honour and an understanding of how crucial it is to protect the institutions of government from falling into disrepute. That they have forgotten this may be too kind. A better argument might be that they are contemptuous of the need to be responsible, so arrogant and accustomed to power have they become. The recent incidents of tasteless ad hominem attacks against Mr. Layton and his wife provide the latest evidence of such arrogance.

Mr. Goodale should have made a straightforward statement to the effect that while he has the utmost confidence in his staff, and he neither knows of any facts to support the allegations underlying the investigation, nor is suspicious of their existence; he has the greatest respect for the institutions of government and the responsibilities of ministers of the Crown. Accordingly, he is handing in to the Prime Minister his resignation as Minister of Finance until the completion of the investigation, at which time he fully expects his department to be cleared of any intimation of wrongdoing, and he would hope the Prime Minister would see fit to reappoint him.

This would provide Mr. Martin with the opportunity to demonstrate there is some substance to his assertion that he intends to bring new accountability to government.

None of this will happen of course. Mr. Goodale has stood his ground, denying any wrongdoing, and Mr. Martin has assured us that he knows Mr. Goodale very well, that he is an honourable man of the greatest integrity and he will not resign. All of which of course misses the point. Resignation would be the irrefutable proof of his integrity.

These are but the latest reasons why even those who support the policies of the Liberals should withdraw their support in this coming election. Only through defeat does the Liberal party have any chance of experiencing true renewal.

But the people, what will they think of this? Not very much at all if recent history is any guide. Stupid is as stupid does as Forrest Gump said.

Lessons From Yonge Street

2005-12-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

The peaceful pursuit of shopping pleasure was shattered yesterday when reportedly 15 to 20 young Toronto males engaged in a gunfight in downtown Toronto. Predictably, these fools being such bad shots, only innocent bystanders suffered injuries including the death of a teenage girl.

In the immediate aftermath of incidents such as this, politicians should have the good sense to say nothing more than an expression of their heartfelt sympathy for the innocent victims and their families. To the extent the politician has some control over the delivery of necessary state controlled services to those same victims, he should ensure they are provided expeditiously and generously.

Too often the politician uses such an event as a soapbox from which to deliver a political statement. Sadly, such was the case today, in particular when Mr. Martin spoke. He said among other things that like the earlier strings of shooting deaths in Toronto, this latest one "demonstrates the consequences of exclusion" in our society. I have written on this previously, and I continue to find it astonishingly vapid for the Prime Minister of this country to attribute gang violence (does anyone doubt that this was anything else?) to Canadian society's failure to be inclusive enough to the members of these gangs. Stephen Harper had the good sense to say nothing other than to repeat that, from a protection of the public standpoint, there are already adequate enough laws governing the use of guns, but they need to be enforced.

Today's National Post features a front page story quoting at length a Toronto based rapper who goes by the stage name of Kardinal. He said: “If you look at society in general, everything is breaking down,” Jason Harrow said over the phone. “Simple things, like TV shows — certain language used to be ava i l a b l e only after 9 o’clock, now you c a n hear it in the middle of the day. Raunchy sex is on TV, content of TV shows is just crazy 24 hours a day. Music — you can have a song, I mean, something stupid like Cisco’s Thong Song or [the Black-Eyed Peas’] My Humps or whatever — you just have all this crazy material that’s on 24 hours a day.

“I think the values and morals and standards that we have as a society are just going down, period. When the standards keep going down and more and more things become the norm, eventually we lose track of values and morals and eventually it just becomes a state of chaos where anything goes.”

Kardinal goes on to talk about the absence of male role models in many of the homes of the perpetrators of these crimes. It is uncommonly sound reasoning espoused by this young Jamaican immigrant. Gun controls and filling our jails aren't the solution he says. Using his own life as an example he favours more intervention in the form of increased programs to assist young people in these high risk circumstances to get training or even to engage in activities that will take them out of the sex, drugs and MTV rut they fall into when parents, particularly fathers absent themselves from the lives of their children.

It is a reflection of our society that it takes a rapper to raise the issue of the consequences of the collapse of moral standards. Morality can't be legislated. Citizens of a nation need to establish their own moral code. Canadians have become smug. We have abandoned the goals of peace, order and good government for the goal of protecting the "rights" of every individual to determine for oneself what is best for oneself. Those rights have been extended to the right to participate in or be entertained by group sex in a club specifically designed for such purpose; the right to have an abortion even if almost to full term and even as a 14 year old without parental knowledge or consent; the right to exhibit works depicting the desecration of religious objects or the abuse of children under the pretext of artistic expression; the right to force a publisher to publish material offensive to his faith and his sense of what is morally acceptable. The concept of "community standards" has died with the death of true community. In its place has risen the Frankenstein of extreme individuality.

Our Prime Minister not only appears ignorant of how much our country has changed for the worse in the last 22 years of uninterrupted Liberal rule, but he actively seeks to further promote the role of government to further expand and protect these "rights" no matter how abhorrent they may be to many, if not most Canadians.

Mr. Martin, like most politicians, has failed to grasp the single most important underlying cause of Canada's slow slide into chaos, yet the rapper Kardinal sees it as plain as day.

Every act of crime exposes the fallen nature of the human race. All the "root cause" debates that focus on poverty, or education or exclusion miss the mark. Fundamentally, government should first establish and maintain a rule of law that clearly defines criminal behaviour and then enforce reasonable and just sanctions against those who break the law. That is the best it can do. Once it tries to do more government merely makes the problem worse, giving its people false hopes that matters which only they can solve in the deepest recesses of their souls can be solved by government.

Oh, Canada, Chapter 14 - Charter Gone Mad

2005-12-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

Canadian Charter of Rights advocates and its self proclaimed defender, Prime Minister Paul Martin, should pause and reflect on the consequences of 23 years of the interpretation of the Charter by Canadian judges. The recent British Columbia case resulting in the acquittal of Giovanni Ciliberto for the murder of Brian Paskalidis, serves as a painful and frightening reminder of the failure of the Charter to protect those who really need protection. It also serves notice of how far into the abyss of moral relativism our society has descended.

The facts of the case are that on an afternoon in October 2002, thirty five year old Brian Paskalidis was walking up the driveway of his mother’s home in Burnaby when he was shot 12 times in the chest with bullets from an attack rifle. Within days of the murder, the Paskalidis family was convinced the killer was Ciliberto, a mentally disturbed thirty five year old who had known Brian since the two of them were four years old. The family reasoned that Brian had recently grown concerned about Ciliberto’s erratic behaviour and had begun to separate himself from him. In his psychotic state, Ciliberto wreaked a terrible form of retribution against Brian for withdrawing from the friendship.

The police investigation was unable to unearth any hard evidence linking Ciliberto to the crime. The family lived in fear that if Ciliberto had killed Brian for no reason, what was to prevent him from doing the same to one of them.

In September 2003 the family learned the Ciliberto was planning to leave the country. They advised the RCMP and in an effort to try and extract a confession from Ciliberto, they arrested him.

Ciliberto was detained for 5 hours and interrogated at the Burnaby detachment. During that time he told the police 49 times that he wished to remain silent, on the advice of counsel. The police persisted in questioning him despite this.

The next day the police accepted the request of Brian’s parents to meet Ciliberto face to face and to plead with him to end their torment and to admit to his crime. During this emotional meeting, which was videotaped by the police, Ciliberto made several tearful admissions to the parents and apologized to them for having killed Brian.

Ciliberto was charged with murder and his trial was held last week before Mr. Justice Paul Williamson. The judge refused to admit into evidence the confession and the videotape. The videotape also showed a police officer making repeated emotional appeals to Ciliberto to confess with the officer at one point hugging the tearful suspect.

Mr. Justice Williamson ruled that Ciliberto’s constitutional rights had been violated and he ordered the evidence to be excluded. He ruled the police had created an atmosphere of oppression during their interviews. Without the confession the Crown had no case and Ciliberto walked out of court a free man.

The relevant sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are:

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

9. Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.

10. Everyone has the right on arrest or detention
a) to be informed promptly of the reasons therefor;
b) to retain and instruct counsel without delay and to be informed of that right; and
c) to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.

11. Any person charged with an offence has the right
a) to be informed without unreasonable delay of the specific offence;
b) to be tried within a reasonable time;
c) not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against that person in respect of the offence;
d) to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal;
e) not to be denied reasonable bail without just cause;
f) except in the case of an offence under military law tried before a military tribunal, to the benefit of trial by jury where the maximum punishment for the offence is imprisonment for five years or a more severe punishment;
g) not to be found guilty on account of any act or omission unless, at the time of the act or omission, it constituted an offence under Canadian or international law or was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations;
h) if finally acquitted of the offence, not to be tried for it again and, if finally found guilty and punished for the offence, not to be tried or punished for it again; and
i) if found guilty of the offence and if the punishment for the offence has been varied between the time of commission and the time of sentencing, to the benefit of the lesser punishment.

12. Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

24. (1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.

2) Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Section 24 (1) is the enforcement section of the Charter. If a person asserts his rights have been infringed or denied he may apply to the court for a remedy and the court has the discretion to invoke a remedy that is “appropriate and just in the circumstances”. Section 24(2) then states that once a court rules that evidence has been obtained as a result of actions which infringed or denied an accused’s rights, the defence must then establish “having regard to all the circumstances” that the admission of the evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. If so satisfied, the judge shall exclude the evidence.

In summary, Canadians have certain rights against unwarranted detention, and against forced self-incrimination. Brian Paskalidis also had the right to life and liberty and security of his person. Justice Williamson was required to look at all the circumstances surrounding Ciliberto's allegation that his rights have been infringed or denied. Surely a paramount circumstance was the patent fact of a proven and pre-existing violation of Brian's most fundamental human right, the right to life.

I make no argument against the judge's finding that Ciliberto's right to remain silent may have been infringed upon. My concern is with his conclusion as to what the consequence should be “having regard to all the circumstances”. In law the onus remained on Ciliberto to produce evidence that the use of the tainted evidence against him would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. Only upon so finding can the judge rule that the evidence should be be withheld.

How have we arrived at the point where the rights of an accused to be spared detention for several hours during which he is subjected to nothing more oppressive than persistent questioning and moral suasion, are found to trump the rights of a murder victim to life and liberty, and to the rights of society to bring to justice someone who wantonly and senselessly took a human life. To trump the rights of parents and loved ones of the victim to be spared the constant fear that having killed once, the killer might kill again?

How can it be right and just for a judge to conclude that it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute to allow a jury to see the videotape of Ciliberto's interrogation showing the investigator’s impassioned plea for the truth, a plea accompanied not by violence or threats but by hugs; to see and hear the emotional supplication of Brian's parents as they plead with Ciliberto to admit to his crime and unburden his guilty conscience; to see the murderer’s tears of remorse, to hear and see the anguish of his confession and his apology and plea for forgiveness?

Is it not patently obvious that what truly brings the administration of justice into disrepute is to permit Ciliberto to walk away a free man?

Have we gone mad? Have we become so dismissive of the rights of victims and those who loved them and so enthralled by the protection of the rights of individuals to be spared the rigours of a long interrogation, that we are content to deprive the police of the most basic tool of investigation, the use of moral suasion in an effort to induce an accused to find the moral courage to admit his wrong and to seek forgiveness?

How have we come to the point that society is content to have one judge, harnessed as he or she is by the web of legal precedent, and not a jury of twelve ordinary citizens, determine what is appropriate and just under the circumstances?

Have we become so soft as a society, so blinded by moral relativism, that we cannot see the absurdity of a decision like this one, that we cannot feel the pain and anguish of Brian’s parents. Having looked into the eyes of their son’s killer, having seen him break down in tears and admit his crime, and plead for their forgiveness; they must now endure seeing him on the street, a free man unencumbered by any societal restraint, free to perhaps kill again. Have we lost the meaning of justice?

Society cannot function without coercion which means nothing more than "to compel to an act or choice." Parents cannot teach their children how to make moral decisions without coercion. The human condition requires that there be coercion in order to enforce and uphold a rule of law, failing which we have anarchy and the rule of the jungle.

Civil libertarians will haul out the bromide about how it is better to let 10 guilty men walk free than to convict one innocent. Tell that to any parent, wife, brother or sister of a murder victim who must live with the knowledge that the killer of their loved one walks the streets a free man because his confession came about as a result of being deprived of his freedom for a few hours.

James Fitzjames Stephen the English jurist whose 1878 codification of the English Penal Code was an important template for Canada’s first criminal code would be anguished by the evolution of Canadian criminal law. In his seminal work, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, he wrote:

Men are so constructed that whatever theory as to goodness and badness we choose to adopt, there are and always will be in the world an enormous mass of bad and indifferent people—people who deliberately do all sorts of things which they ought not to do, and leave undone all sorts of things which they ought to do. Estimate the proportion of men and women who are selfish, sensual, frivolous, idle, absolutely commonplace and wrapped in the smallest of petty routines, and consider how far the freest of free discussion is likely to improve them. The only way by which it is practically possible to act upon them is by compulsion or restraint. Whether it is worthwhile to apply to them both or either I do not now inquire; I confine myself only to saying that the utmost conceivable liberty which could be bestowed upon them would not in the least degree tend to improve them.

Canada in the 21st century has long forgotten Stephen’s wise perception of the human condition. We have forgotten the inherent venality of the human spirit in our mad rush to uphold the “rights and freedoms” of fallen mankind. We have lost our appetite for the use of reasonable compulsion and restraint in order to induce correct behaviour. Instead, we permit the institutionalized perpetuation of a grotesquery such as Ciliberto’s acquittal.

Stephen also wrote that "the laws which punish murder or theft are substitutes for private vengeance, which, in the absence of law, would punish those crimes more severely, though in a less regular manner."

Consider how much poorer and unsafe our society will become if confidence is lost in the effectivess or willingness of the legal system to invoke justice.

Oh, Canada! Chapter 13 - Dumbing Down Debate

2005-12-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! – Wordsworth

I tore the tab off a beer, popped a fresh batch of popcorn and sat down for the leaders’ “debate”. Not more than five minutes into it I lamented the fact it was my last beer. I would need fortification to endure this for two hours. I could feel my brain cells atrophy and my blood pressure rise as soon as the first videotaped questioner appeared on screen.

The moderator told the leaders that the networks (this was apparently a collaborative effort on the part of the 3 major networks, typically Canadian) had reviewed more than 10,000 emails from Canadians, each posing a question for the leaders. Presumably a suitably diverse editorial panel had reviewed them all and selected those worthy of having a camera crew dispatched to various parts of Canada to film the questioner.

Now a Grade 10 drama student could tell you of the importance of the opening scene of a play. The scene creates a mood, sets a tone, and provides a glimpse into the themes thought by the playwright and director to be important. So what was the first question and who asked it? It was an earnest looking middle-aged woman from Ottawa (from where else but Ottawa would we expect the first question). She appeared to be standing on a bridge or pedestrian overpass with a city skyline in the background. She told us she had a daughter who was a recent law school graduate, eager to start her legal career. Mom wanted to know how Mr. Harper would justify discrimination against her daughter and her partner Suzie should he form the next government.

Take note class, same sex marriage is a critical issue in this election, especially for sophisticated city dwellers like this lady. According to this lady, by simply being elected, the Conservatives would start discriminating against her daughter. Ten thousand emails and the primary issue raised by those folks concerned the protection of the rights of gays and lesbians to marry? All those polls placing that issue far down the list of major concerns for Canadians must be all wrong. This woman is concerned about the rights of her daughter so a lot must ride on how the leaders answer this important question, right? Well it must as far as the networks are concerned, unaccustomed as they are to a campaign that involves one party advancing concrete policies and actions day after day. We all know the media thrives on the principle of “if it bleeds it leads” so let’s try to stir the pot right from the get go. If nothing else it will allow the networks to use the same- sex question and the imputed presumption of discrimination on the part of the Conservatives as the lead item on the National news later tonight.

We navigated through that issue for 10 minutes, during which we learned nothing new. Paul Martin will defend the rights of minorities to the death. Jack Layton’s warm and tender heart reaches out to that mother and her lawyer daughter sitting home anxious about losing her newly acquired rights. Gilles Duceppe believes no one is free until everyone is free. Steven Harper is left alone to advocate the shocking proposition that since there has never been a truly free vote on the matter, the next Parliament should start there. And, if a free vote favours legislation protecting the traditional definition of marriage, he would introduce such legislation and ask the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on it. And, in no event would he use the notwithstanding clause.

In case you missed it this wasn’t really a debate; it wasn’t even a cheap imitation of a debate. Each leader was given 1 minute to respond to the same question, and 30 seconds to answer any follow up the moderator chose to ask. The participants couldn’t ask each other questions, there was no cut and thrust, no exchange of arguments and ideas between and amongst the participants.

The next questioner was a man from Saskatchewan. He looked to be in his early 30’s and he was standing in what appeared to be either his rumpus room or a gun shop. Racks of rifles filled the background - no neutral city scenes here - certainly no book lined library, no a good ole’ dyed in the wool prairie gun lover. Can't you picture the lady on the bridge in Ottawa assuming that all prairie rumpus rooms look like gun shops. The clever network folks ensured that the image would override the substantive question on the newsclips. Oh yes, the question, gee I was focusing my attention on those guns, I almost forgot what the question was. He wanted to know why we needed more gun controls when the Liberals had already spent billions on one that had produced no results.

Mr. Martin got to answer this one first, and he picked up the timbre in his voice, his hand motions were more resolute and in his best Gary Cooper in High Noon imitation, he promised to get all handguns out of the hands of criminals. Well first he would get them out of the hands of gun collectors, because as he had been told recently one collector had 12 guns stolen from his collection, and they had been used in a variety of crimes including a murder. Cars and trucks are regularly stolen and often are involved in accidents. Sometimes these are fatal and sadly almost always the lives of innocent victims are ended or changed forever. Perhaps cars and trucks should be banned too. All three other leaders pointed out the hypocricy in Martin’s position given the existence for over 70 years of laws which effectively ban handguns, but without enforcement are useless. How many RCMP officers could you hire to enforce the laws with $2 billion?

The evening went on like this. Questions such as: Do you think poverty is the root cause of crime? Yes says Martin, it is one reason, and feeling excluded is another says Martin. Feeling excluded, huh? His source - a young man he spoke to just last week who told Mr. Martin he felt excluded. From what we aren’t told – perhaps he couldn’t get a seat at the Texas Hold Em game at the local casino, who knows. Note the Liberal code words. Exclusion along with poverty causes crime. What is the opposite of exclusion – inclusion! Well done, go to the head of the class and give someone a hug along the way. You now understand Liberal philosophy. What is the cure for poverty and thus crime? Education, more government programs and services, and that great panacea, inclusivity.

Harper accepted that social ills play a role in crime but they can’t blind us from the fact we need to be concerned about law enforcement. We need to start by getting tougher on crime and providing the resources for our police forces to enforce our laws, and we need to toughen our laws, starting with minimum sentences for offences involving the use of guns during crimes.

The next questioner was a young nurse from Calgary asking for specifics on how each leader would actually improve the delivery of health care in Canada. Duceppe made the best point here by pointing out that 10,000 civil servants work in Ottawa in the department of health, and they are not responsible for one hospital in all of Canada. 4,500 of them are charged with the job of promoting health programs. The other leaders gave answers short on specifics, knowing that Canadians are such a dim and timid lot, that they couldn't possibly handle the facts about a dysfunctioal health care system. Like an adolescent refusing to give up the tattered rag doll of her childhood, Canada clings to the lie that is our socialist national health program.

On immigration we had a new Canadian, my guess of Persian or middle eastern origins, demanding to know what the leaders would do to stop discrimination against immigrants in the form of not recognizing their foreign credentials. He ended his question by suggesting if they didn’t get the right answers these folks would just move on to another country. There was a lot of blah, blah, blah here from everyone but Duceppe who said the provinces had the responsibility concerning accreditation and there wasn’t much the Feds could do about it. I suppose it would have been churlish for someone to tell the gentleman that if he and other disaffected immigrants really thought he could find a better place than Canada to live, he was certainly free to do so.

After an hour I began to feel like I do after 45 minutes in the dentist’s chair. Whatever intellect these men possess was kept well in check thanks to the format. There were no surprise questions and each leader kept to his scripted message. Mr. Martin tried to look and sound tough as the protector of the Charter, wagging his chins and fingers at Mr. Harper; and the protector of Canada as he excoriated Mr. Duceppe for his desire to lead Quebec away from Canada. Martin possesses no sense of the ironic.

Duceppe delivered the best one liner on the topic of Western alienation. Thanks to the Liberals said Duceppe, the West wants in and Quebec wants out.

The last questioner was a woman speaking from the sea wall in White Rock. She wanted to know what each leader’s big picture vision of Canada was? What would they like Canada to look like in 50 years? One minute to express your goals and dreams for the Canada of your grandchildren gentlemen. Even Martin Luther King would have had trouble squeezing his I Have a Dream vision into a 60 second sound bite. Duceppe of course brought some perspective to the issue, when he shared his vision of the two sovereign nations of Canada and Quebec getting along well together in 50 years.

After hearing the three federalist leaders dream their dreams of economic prosperity, a strong democracy, and a clean environment, the moderator couldn’t resist asking the final question. In 30 seconds tell us what is Canada’s biggest strength? Its people they all said led by Martin. But he couldn’t help himself from uttering one last smug platitude, when he pointed to our multiculturalism and the absence of the problems that Europe is experiencing. I sure by the January debate, Martin will add Australia to his list of countries we are so superior to when it comes to harmonious multicultural relations. Layton and Harper had the good sense to speak slowly and wait for the light to go on and for his microphone to go dead, thus signaling the end to this excruciating exercise.

It was fittingly symbolic, and so Canadian that the debate was held in a theatre converted into a studio. There were no people in the seats, only the moderator at her desk and a blackened and empty theatre behind her.

Now I must brace myself for the post debate commentaries where no doubt I will question whether I watched the same program as the network talking heads.

We do lay waste our powers and we have given our hearts away if this is the best we can muster in the form of intellectual debate.

Subsidy - The Liberal Way or the Conservative Way

2005-12-05T09:09:00.000-08:00

The mendacity measurement index hit another new high today, thanks to our esteemed Prime Minister. He stood before the cameras in St. John's and said the Conservative plan to support early childhood education by paying $1200 per child under six years of age directly to the parents, proved the Conservatives don't believe in subsidizing day care.

Mr. Martin is an educated man and knows the definition of subsidize. In case he has forgotten, here it is: to furnish with a subsidy : as a : to purchase the assistance of by payment of a subsidy b : to aid or promote with public money.

So Mr. Martin knows the Conservative plan is a direct subsidy to the parents of children under the age of six. It is a subsidy that is not bloated with bureaucratic over-governance, so perhaps Mr. Martin simply no longer recognizes a subsidy when he sees one. The fact Liberal social policy has been co-opted by the leftist NDP agenda over the last several years may explain that.

Conservatives oppose the creation of another level of bureaucracy in order to administer the subsidy. Conservatives believe parents know better than politicians and bureaucrats, how to best provide for the early education of their children.

Conservatives believe parents who choose to have one of the parents stay home to care for their children are every bit as deserving of a subsidy to assist in the financial cost of that decision, as are parents who choose to place their children in day care outside the home.

Conservatives believe we must break the cycle of dependence that has overwhelmed Canada. Too many Canadians look to government for solutions to all their social concerns, partly because they believe since we pay such high taxes the government should have the funds to provide the services. Reduce our taxes and leave the money in the hands of people, and they will begin to take more responsibilty for their own well-being.

Scary thought isn't it?

I Am Going to Vote Liberal

2005-12-03T00:52:00.000-08:00

I have decided I must vote Liberal on January 23rd. In one of those epiphanic moments one has at the oddest moments (I think I was digging a trench for some drain pipe) I realized I have consistently voted either for the losing candidate or the losing party (usually both) in every Federal election but one. That was back in 1968 when I had hair and lived in Saskatoon. I voted for Otto Lang because he was the Dean of my law school. I had no better reason at the time. Stanfield looked old and scary -an Ichabod Crane kind of scariness. I didn't know any better, youth is wasted on the young.

I moved to Vancouver in 1971 and stuck with the Liberals but Bill Clarke won my riding for the Tories. In 1974 I wasn't all that excited about what Trudeau was doing to the economy, but I stuck with the Liberals because Frank Low-Beer had taught one of my articling courses in 1972 and he seemed cool, he even had beer for us in our Friday sessions. Clarke, a seemingly dull and boring accountant won again for the PC's. I tossed one back in Frank's memory and got on with trying to earn a living. I had tossed God aside by now as well. He had gotten me through law school, provided a lovely wife, a good job, a house, a sailboat, a sports car - who needed God in those circumstances.

The 1979 election presented me with my first real quandary. I was tired of Trudeau, but the geeky Joe Who didn't do anything for me. Paul Manning, the Liberal in Vancouver Quadra seemed like a nice guy, we had a wine and cheese party for him in our house, I voted for him and Clarke swept to his 3rd straight win. I was definitely on a losing streak.

Then came the watershed 1980 winter election. It wasn't the fact it was winter that put me in a bad mood, it was that Joe Who, Mr. Specificity himself apparently couldn't count and lost his non-confidence motion. Then Trudeau was raised from his Mount Royal sepulchre, this was too much to take. I began to think seriously about the importance of my vote. I had no personal connection to candidates in my own riding, though my law partner had me working hard to try and get Gordon Gibson elected in Burnaby/North Shore.

The party platform that was head and shoulders above the rest in my estimation was that of the Rhinoceros Party which was running a number of candidates including one in Quadra, Vernon John Eh. McDonald. Other Rhino candidates in the Lower Mainland and Victoria included Albert the Cad Courchene, Dandy Randy Lyttle and Rhino Kirk Higgins. Their leader was Richard The Troll as I recall.

I couldn't resist their platform that included moving the Rocky Mountains, switching driving from the right side to the left side (staging it over several weeks starting with buses and large trucks), and my favourite letting Quebec secede so the drive to Toronto would be shorter for the Newfies.

I entered the polling booth with a real sense of purpose. Then I looked at the ballot and had a crisis of conscience. There was a candidate I hadn't considered and he was very attractive to me in my present state of mind. Peter Rabbit Milne, an engineering student was running as an independent. I was torn, what should I do? Then it occurred to me, I should do what countless Canadians have done for over a hundred years, I voted for the party and not the man. So John Eh got my vote (one of 405 while Peter Rabbit gleaned only 73.) Clarke won again, Bill that is, while poor Joe with no "e" was swept away by the echo bounce of Trudeau mania!

Orwell's year 1984 was next. God was back in my life, Trudeau was at last out of it and while I was not yet 40, signs of a budding conservatism began to assert itself in my life, and my hair had begun to migrate from the top of my head to the back of my neck, headed for its retirement plot between my shoulder blades. But Mulroney was decidedly too oleaginous for my liking. I felt sorry for John Turner, a decent man left up to his neck in a pile of patronage manure after the pig had fled the pen. On election day we turned the TV on at 8 pm to see the election already over as Mulroney had swept the country. I had to keep my string intact and I gave Turner my mercy vote. He won but his party was annihilated. By this time the Rhino party had disbanded, announcing that its purpose in bringing some absurdity and levity into the political process had so effectively been co-opted by the mainstream politicians, that Rhinoism had become redundant. My loss was not complete as Turner had defeated the seemingly indestructible Bill Clarke.

In 1988 Clarke, having refused to go away, once again ran for the Conservatives; Mulroney had proven to be as craven as the Liberals, selling his soul to Quebec, so I threw my vote away in favour of Turner again and a wooden stake finally was thrust into the political heart of the irrepressible Bill Clarke.

By 1993 my once nascent Conservatism was now toddling about on wobbly legs. God was still in my life and had carried me through some very difficult years of business reversals. Preston Manning had launched the Reform Party and at last there was some hope that a thoughtful, servant driven, honest politician was on the scene to restore the lustre to the terribly tarnished vessel of parliamentary democracy in Canada. I voted for Bill McArthur an experienced and decent physician, but he lost to the patrician Professor Ted McWhinney at whose heel flocked all the university intellectuals and the beautiful people who found Manning's squeaky voice, glasses and Christian faith far too gauche for their increasingly smug taste.

1997 brought more of the same, Chretien and McWhinney steamrollered the earnest Reformer Joanne Easdown, and 2000 introduced us to the tiny perfect Stephen Owen, the Liberal cabinet's best kept secret.

No relief for me in 2004 as Owen trampled Stephen Rogers whose experience and money was no match for the latte sipping, oh so inclusive, urbane set Liberals and the frightened leather patched Harris tweed NDPers who flocked to them in the last 48 hours, their teeth chattering with fear at the prospect of Stephen Harper.

What could I do? I was Joe Bxyzflt, a cloud permanently over my head on election days; I was Linus having that ball yanked away from me every time. So I left the accursed Quadra riding and moved to Vancouver Island. Could there now be hope for the Conservative Party candidate in Quadra? Will my losing streak end in Nanaimo/Cowichan? I hope no one shows this essay to Norm Sowden the Conservative candidate, he won't let me in his riding office if he knows what a loser I am.

Maybe I will change my name to Randy the Revanchist Rhino and run as an Independent.

Anything Goes

2005-12-02T00:39:00.000-08:00

“If God is dead, anything goes” – Ivan Karamazov

I read the Globe & Mail editorial pages today. It is a part of my training to become immune to the malaise that Ulrich, Musil’s Man Without Qualities, warned against - that “one can’t be angry with your own time without causing damage to yourself”. You might say reading the Globe is like spending an hour wearing my personalized hair shirt, one with Jeffery Simpson’s initials monogrammed on the cuffs, and John Ibbitson’s on the pocket. Where I was once angered by the arrogant, self-satisfied, dismissive tone of the G & M’s commentaries, I am now merely amused. I think Stephen Harper has learned the same lesson and he has lost some of the indignation he wore like a bad rash in the previous campaign.

Today’s lead editorial is of course on the topic of gay marriage, Canadian society’s most recent oxymoron. It leads with the wagging finger question: Did Stephen Harper learn nothing from the debate on same-sex marriage? As champion of the rush to inclusivity, the G&M editor bolts into the china shop unaware of the irony-laden nature of his argument that Mr. Harper seeks to “wrench back (from gays) what the courts and parliament have given them”.

Forget about the fact that more than half the population of Canada still favours the traditional definition of marriage. Forget about the fact the wrenching was initiated by three justices of the Ontario Court of Appeal, whose reasoning, contrary to the editorialist’s bald assertion, was anything but impeccable unless you like your law bred in the petrie dish of Michel Foucault’s antinomian social experimentation. Through the legal principle of stare decisis, trios of judges in other provinces put their hands on the collar of the miscreant known as tradition, and finally dragged him bloodied but still unbowed onto the floor of parliament where, in a shameful repudiation of democracy, whipped members of parliament turned thumbs down on the definition and purpose of marriage as it has been known since the beginning of recorded history.

The Globe and its army of followers would like us to think the rascal “traditional marriage” was disposed of once and for all on that dark day in Ottawa. If pressed it will parade a line-up of like-minded law professors who will say it was so. Henry VIII too had his lawyers and experts behind him when he condemned to death Thomas More, but we know how history ultimately treated them both.

Mr. Harper is merely stating the obvious truth that a final decision has not been made because of the nature of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the reference made to it by the Federal government. Harper is saying that first he would move a motion in the House of Commons to uphold the traditional definition of marriage and allow a free vote on the matter. If such a motion were to pass he would take the next step, which the Globe assumes would be to invoke the notwithstanding clause. In fact, he would take the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada to have the matter finally determined. The Globe would have us believe the result in such case is a foregone conclusion. The Globe is not content to be the self-appointed arbiter of Canadian cultural values, but thinks itself to be the country’s paramount legal authority as well. Harper also made it clear that if the motion is defeated in parliament, the debate is over.

By bringing this matter forward at the beginning of the campaign, Harper has given every Canadian the opportunity to consider his or her position on this matter, and to question candidates on theirs – how revolutionary! The Globe’s blustering editorial suggests it and its more zealous acolytes are fearful of what might happen in such circumstances. They had no qualms about trampling over the concerns of Canadians who accepted the existence of the rights of gays to be treated equally under the law in Canada, but contended that could be accomplished without changing the meaning and purpose of marriage. Now through disingenuous editorials, they seek to conceal from the Canadian public the fact that it remains within their power and not that of the courts or browbeaten MP’s, to ultimately determine if indeed anyone’s rights are being trampled.

Decisions on matters that require one to throw some moral weights on the balance scales of judgment become more difficult if one keeps misplacing or losing those weights, each of which tends to be small and easily swept aside. Most are lost through innocent neglect, some through willful abandonment. I happen to believe the Bible has it right when it professes that “we all like sheep have gone astray, each of us turns to his own way”.

Which brings me at last to my epigram. Anti-humanist secularism, absent God, now dominates the intellectual climate in Canada and in other parts of the world. At least, in other parts of the world, leaders are honest enough to admit they have abandoned any notion of the existence of a moral arbiter beyond themselves. In Canada, we have the pathetic sight of a Prime Minister leading a disgraced and corruption-tainted government, proudly professing that Canada holds an esteemed place as a conscience to the world. Not content to bask in the false glow of that dying sun, he allows his propagandists to attack his political opponents who profess to have a faith, claiming they are “fundamentalists” whose vision for Canada is different from his and from the mainstream, and hence dangerous. Political opponents can attend the same church, as do Liberal MP Don Bell and Conservative candidate Cindy Silver in North Vancouver; but Silver is labeled a right wing Christian fundamentalist, while no mention is ever made of Bell’s faith.

Welcome to the world of anything goes.

All We Need is Love

2005-11-29T18:26:00.000-08:00

It took less than 24 hours for the press to seize upon what it thought to be a defining moment in this campaign, and for the Liberal spin-meisters to wear out their thumbs text messaging the world that Stephen Harper doesn’t love Canada.

Of course they know Paul Martin loves Canada because he tells you so on every occasion he can. And he wraps himself in the flag of Canada which Liberals conveniently adopted as their symbol, the better to convince everyone that to be Canadian is to be Liberal and vice versa. The world of journalism is a world of words and images and there is too little discernment amongst journalists and their readers. Discernment would quickly show that the Liberal Party’s love for Canada is narcissistic. It is a love for power and privilege that the reins of government give to the Liberals.

I admit Mr. Harper could have avoided all the hoopla by responding more directly to the question than he did. That he chooses his words carefully, is to many a fine quality and one much preferable to the glib rhetoric we get from most politicians in the unreal world of the 2 second sound bite.

It would have been wonderful to hear Mr. Harper respond to the question like this:

"It is interesting that you should ask me that question. I hope you are willing to listen carefully to my answer. I was brought up to believe that it is much more important to be judged by what you do than by what you say. It is easy to say you love someone or something; it is much more difficult to prove that your love is genuine. So I do not use the word love frivolously.

I believe love that does not include a sacrificial attitude, a servant attitude, toward the object of love, is not real love. True love is marked by an acceptance of responsibility and accountability toward the object of affection. True love is marked by a commitment to tell the truth and not to deceive the object of affection.

It is in that sense I love Canada. I have chosen to commit myself to the public service because I believe I have ideas and skills that can be used to the benefit of all Canadians. I want to serve Canadians and to help them make Canada an even greater nation than it already is. I want that greatness to be expressed in tangible actions, not in empty rhetoric.

I do not want to take from Canada; I want to give to Canada. But no volume of words spoken by me or any other politician professing love for country should be accepted by any Canadian as proof of that love. Proof is in the actions and attitudes we display, not in our words.

In the next two months, I will ask Canadians to listen carefully to the policies my party will be advocating during this campaign. Are those policies consistent with a desire to make Canada a better place? Do the policies contain strong measures to hold me and my government accountable to Canadians for our actions? Do the policies provide mechanisms to eliminate the culture of entitlement which has so obviously been shown to exist in Canada in these times? I believe they do, and I am asking the people of Canada to give me and the other Conservative members of parliament they elect to the House of Commons, the chance to prove our love by our actions.

One can only hope!

The Price of Living a Lie

2005-11-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

Theodore Dalrymple’s book of essays, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, contains an essay entitled, How to Read A Society. In it he references the Marquis de Custine, a Frenchman who traveled to Russia and published a series of letters in 1843 under the title, La Russie en 1839. In it, Custine did a remarkable job of shedding light on the heart of what lead to the spread of communism throughout the world.

Dalrymple writes: “Custine grasped that the propensity to deceive and to be (or pretend to be) deceived lay at the heart of Russia’s evident malaise. The maintenance of despotism depended upon this universal vocation for untruth, because without the fiction that the despotism was necessary, that it conduced to the happiness and well-being of all, and that any alternative would be disastrous, the subject population would cease to be controllable.”

As my reading of history expands, I am continuously amazed at how apropos to our circumstances today in Canada, are the observations of our predecessors. Like an old suit that has been kept locked away for decades, it still fits and is fashionable.

The reason for this timelessness can only be the unchangeableness of the heart of man. It is in our nature to deceive and to be deceived and our lives are a constant struggle against our inner nature. As Dalrymple puts it, “the need always to lie and always to avoid the truth strip(s) everyone of what Custine called ‘the two greatest gifs of God – the soul and the speech which communicates it’. If Custine were among us now, he would recognize the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.”

I urge us all to keep the words of Custine near our hearts as we listen to Paul Martin lead the chorus of Liberals into an election in which we will be told that only the Liberals can represent all Canadians, that the Liberal Way is the Canadian Way and that entrusting the leadership of government to the Conservatives would be disastrous.

Think about Custine when you listen to Ralph Goodale tell us how terrible it will be if all the tax concessions he has announced, all the support for students and aboriginals and new immigrants, are wiped away by an angry and power hungry Opposition led by the scary Stephen Harper. Think about Custine when you hear Ujjal Dosanjh tell us the Conservatives want to destroy Medicare.

That is all well and good you say, but Custine was writing about Czarist Russia and we live in a democracy. You can’t possibly argue that the hearts and souls of Canadians have devolved to that of a Russian serf? If you have trouble with the comparison (which I don’t) then consider what Custine’s contemporary, Toqueville, had to say about the risks inherent in democracy.

In his essay, Dalrymple looks to Toqueville who “described the future soul of man under a seemingly benevolent and democratic government that willingly laboured for the happiness of the people ‘but chose to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness.’ Such a government would ‘supply [the people] with their necessities, facilitate their pleasures, manage their principal concerns’. [This sounds familiar to us in 2005, does it not?] What would remain but to ‘spare them of all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?’ When this came to pass, ‘the will of man will not be shattered, but softened, bent and guided.’ Men would not be forced from acting; the government would not destroy but prevent a full human existence. It would not tyrannize but ‘enervate, extinguish and stupefy a people.’”

I urge you to consider how like the citizens of Toqueville’s essay, we Canadians have allowed ourselves to become. We have been “bent and guided”, and when it comes to making decisions that affect our culture, we too often leave it to our governments to make the decision for us. Consider that despite all the differences between Canada in 2005 and Russia or England in 1835, our society today does share with those of the past a fundamental human nature.

Ultimately, in a free democracy, our government will reflect that human nature. So consider what it says about that nature if we continue to consent to being lied to, if we do nothing to hold elected officials accountable for their lies.

If we re-elect a Liberal government we will be exactly like the Russian of 1833 who accepted the edict not to look at the palace in which the czar’s father, the emperor Paul, was murdered. The official position of the government of the day was that it was forbidden to recount the story of the death of the emperor.

Every Russian who walked past the palace and knowingly averted his eyes had to know the emperor had been killed there, had to demonstrate his public ignorance of the murder and thus not only assert a lie but also deny he knew it was a lie.

There is today a palace on the banks of the Ottawa River ruled by the modern day emperor Paul, and we know of all the misdeeds that have been perpetrated there over the decades by this Paul and his predecessor the emperor P’tit Jean.

Only you can choose whether to look at the palace with contempt, or to avert your eyes and enjoy the lovely monuments of the halcyon days of the past that grace the grounds of the palace. If you choose the latter, don’t forget to spend a moment in silence at the War Memorial and give thanks to those who died to give you the freedom to make the choice.

Judging A Man by the Company He Keeps

2005-11-02T09:02:00.000-08:00

The title of my essay came to me as I watched Mr. Martin in his news conference and again during question period on Tuesday. During his press conference Mr. Martin was flanked on the podium by the oleaginous defectors, Scott Brison and Jean Lapierre. In question period, after responding to the first couple of questions from Stephen Harper – the government never answers questions in question period by the way, ministers merely stand up and mouth some pre-packaged obfuscation – Martin turned the job over to Brison and Lapierre.

Why did Martin have Brison at his side during the news conference? Brison was mute during the entire proceeding, and merely gazed fawningly upon Mr. Martin during his prepared statement, no doubt cued by the light on the camera telling him when he was on screen. For his part Lapierre responded to a question or two from a French-speaking reporter. Is this the best of the Liberal caucus Mr. Martin could muster, or could Martin find no one else who would consent to join him?

What does it say about this “new Liberalism” that Mr. Martin brings two turncoats along as his acolytes for this important event? Why is it he turns to these two to serve as his Charlie McCarthy during question period?

I am told Stephen Owen’s brochure is appearing in mailboxes in Vancouver Quadra, and the word Liberal is nowhere to be found in his literature. Owen for the most part is nowhere to be found in Ottawa these days, which tells me this decent man may well be troubled by the cloud of corruption that surrounds his party.

The Liberal Party must transform itself from a decadent den of self-serving, self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing lightweights and opportunists, into a party of honest, servant-minded, forward-thinking public servants. The transformation will only happen when decent men like Stephen Owen and David Emerson and Ken Dryden step forward to say ‘we have had enough, we can no longer abide the mendacity that suffocates discourse and anaesthetizes the intellect’.

At present, the benches of parliament, particularly those of the Liberals are filled with the half and half men (and women) Orestes Brownson spoke of when he said: “Nothing is more nauseating than lukewarm. Give us, we say, open, energetic uncompromising enemies, or firm, staunch friends, who will take their stand for the truth, to live with it or die with it, and not your half and half men.”

Mr. Martin could find no better example of half and half men than the vain and opportunistic duo of Brison and Lapierre, one a disgruntled loser in the Conservative leadership race, the other a reclaimed separatist – strange company indeed for a recently “exonerated” Prime Minister.

Classic Chretien

2005-11-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

“His truthfulness lies in his exaggeration. Whenever he does not exaggerate, he lies.”

Elias Canetti’s aphorism perfectly captures the essence of Jean Chretien the politician. His press conference was vintage Chretien - combative, humourous, irreverent and blunt. Were it not for the seriousness of the underlying reason for his return to the Ottawa press gallery theatre, one could almost regret his absence from the political scene.

A confident Chretien first apologized for any wrongdoing that occurred while he was Prime Minister. He told us the sponsorship program was created for a good cause; unbeknownst to him some dishonest people in his administration perverted it to satisfy their greed; as soon as he learned of problems he called in the police. He had to make a lot of decisions as P.M. and he was never afraid to make them, even if there was the potential for fallout. He even claims to have received a call from a worried Pierre Trudeau concerning the Clarity Act. Are you sure about this Jean, Trudeau asked. No, but I am going to do it anyway he claims he responded. If I am wrong I can come and practice law with you.

Chretien says Justice Gomery was biased against him from the beginning as evidenced by his hiring of Brian Mulroney’s former chief of staff Bernard Roy to be counsel to the commission. And don’t forget Gomery’s daughter works for the same law firm as does M. Roy. Gomery only called witnesses who would have bad things to say about Chretien, leaving it to him to call those who would support his contention that their was no political interference in the administration of the sponsorship program, or at least interference that would reach to the PMO. This sums up Chretien’s position.

The culture of entitlement Gomery speaks to in his report is evident in M. Chretien as is the arrogance of the Liberal Party and its presumption that it is indeed the natural governing party in Canada. This culture long ago created within its members an understanding that deniability at the PMO level must always be maintained. The creation of the sponsorship program and the granting to Alfonso Gagliano of spending powers would have been a clear enough message to those below the PMO that Chretien’s only concern was in results.

Chretien feels so entitled that he is genuinely puzzled at why Gomery would hold him accountable but exonerate Martin of any responsibility beyond that borne by all members of the Chretien cabinet.

Chretien continues to have many friends in the Liberal ranks, in the press gallery and throughout the country. One is reminded of another Canetti aphorism, which says: “Friends are people whom one presents with splendid accounts of oneself, and it doesn’t matter that these accounts never come true.

Oh, Canada – Chapter 12 - Canadians As Happy Subjects of Imperialism

2005-11-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

The question of leadership is not primarily biological, but moral. Leaders may vary in quality from the man so loyal to sound standards that he inspires right conduct in others by the sheer rightness of his example, to the man who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of force, and so is…imperialistic.

One’s choice may be, not between a democracy that is properly led and a democracy that hopes to find the equivalent of standards and leadership in the appeal to a numerical majority…but between a democracy that is properly led and a decadent imperialism.

If democracy means simply the attempt to eliminate the qualitative and selective principle in favour of some general will...it may prove to be only a form of the vertigo of the abyss. Democracy and Leadership – Irving Babbitt

How fitting that Mr. Justice Gomery’s first report should be released on a dreary, rainy day (both in Ottawa and where I sit here in B.C.) and on the eve of All Soul’s Day – the Day of the Dead. If there is any remainder of morality in the collective soul of this nation we call Canada, today will mark the death of the Liberal Party as it existed.

If, as I fear, we as a nation have completely lost our way when it comes to the realm of making moral decisions, this day rather will mark the point where we tipped further into the abyss of which Irving Babbitt wrote over 80 years ago.

Canadians would do well to reflect upon what they really express when they cast a vote. Are they truly concerned about electing good leaders, in the moral sense, or do they simply assume that leadership elected by a majority of the electorate, will stumble upon a set of policies and standards of conduct, which will be satisfactory to the majority.

During Paul Martin’s press conference this morning there were two questions and answers that stood out for me. The first was whether Mr. Martin felt proud to be a Liberal as he read Mr. Justice Gomery’s report this morning. Mr. Martin pulled back his shoulders and puffed out his chest and declared that indeed he was proud to be a Liberal, since after all it was the Liberal Party he leads which has taken all the initiatives to clean up the mess.

How sad that Mr. Martin has so little sense of responsibility and remorse that he should continue to speak with pride and even self-congratulation over his role in cleaning up the mess of his own party. Instead he should have said: “I am deeply ashamed of the actions of my party, I am deeply regretful of my own lack of vigilance in allowing these activities to go on while I was the Finance Minister and the senior Cabinet Minister from Quebec, and I have this morning asked the Governor General to dissolve this parliament so that the people of Canada can determine whether I and my party are to be entrusted with the ongoing governance of the nation’s affairs.”

During Question Period Martin refused to express any sense of shame or remorse, even ducking his responsibility as a member of the Cabinet that Gomery found shared collective blame for establishing an illegitimate program, and as Vice-Chair of the Treasury Board which Gomery found did not exercise its responsibilities of oversight.

The situation might be laughable if the picture was only one of Martin as the personification of the 3 monkey triumvirate – see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. The picture is rather one of the member of a gang of thieves that had carefully planned a bank heist, and who having slept in and missed the van when it left to carry out the deed, and the gang now having been caught, emerges as head of a citizen’s coalition dedicated to the cleaning up crime.

The other question asked of Mr. Martin was this: “Mr. Martin how did you feel in your heart this morning as you read the Gomery Report?” Finally, here was a perceptive question, the answer to which could give us a glimpse into the heart of a leader. What kind of man is Mr. Martin – “a man so loyal to sound standards that he inspires right conduct in others by the sheer rightness of his example”, or “a man who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of force”.

Martin answered by saying he wished it (the scandal) had never happened. What kind of heart does this tell us beats within that chest? Is it the heart of a man who can inspire right conduct by the rightness of his example? Or is this is the heart of a man who clings to power, a man who talks but who does not act, a man who leads a party that we now know has for decades operated on the principles of entitlement and decadent self-service?

Are enough Canadians so blind to what has gone on here that they do not see the implications in Mr. Martin's responses? If as a parent you confronted your child with the fact you now knew he or she had been involved, if only marginally, with others in a scheme to steal from their schoolmates funds raised for a field trip; would you be satisfied if the child said that all it felt in its heart was regret the incident had happened? Surely you would demand that the child express some remorse and experience a sense of shame for having participated. Why would you hold your politicians to a lower standard, considering how many of your hard earned dollars you entrust to them?

Martin is the master of the art of willful blindness and if in the next election sufficient numbers of Canadians continue to vote for Liberals to re-elect them, Canada will prove itself to be a nation of the blind, deceived into believing they are governed by a democracy when in fact they are nothing more than the subjects of a “decadent imperialism.”

Unclear on the Concept – BCTF Executive Obtuseness

2005-10-21T21:19:00.000-07:00

As I watched the head of the Surrey local of the BCTF (am I the only one who grates at this union terminology used to describe the decision making units of those charged with the care and intellectual stimulation of our kids) proclaim he could not recommend acceptance of the Vince Ready brokered settlement because it did not contain any substantive benefits for teachers, I was reminded of an experience I had as the parent of small children.

My wife and I were at church one Sunday morning with our two boys, then aged 5 and 2 ½. It was a few minutes before the service was to start and the boys were full of energy and questions. The eldest, spying a woman in the pew ahead of us who was rather overweight, asked in his loudest most earnest voice – “Daddy is that lady fat?” We huddled and I explained sotto voce that it was rude to make comments about a person’s appearance. We continued the discussion on our walk back home after church and I was satisfied a life lesson had been learned.

That afternoon I took the boys to the club for a swim. We were in the men’s changing room seated on a bench between rows of lockers as we undressed and got into our bathing suits. An older man (probably my age now) walked past naked, on his way to the shower. As the man passed, my oldest son in his same booming voice turned to me and said, “Dad, look at all those spots on that man’s back! I grabbed his arm in a vice like grip and said, “What did we just talk about this morning?” He looked at me in bemusement and said, “Is he fat too?”

There is a precious innocence possessed by children as they learn about life. They are unaware of nuance and focus with a burning clarity on individual facts without reference to context. As someone once said, the attributes we find endearing in children are often disagreeable when found in adults.

Is the fact teachers spend so much time in the presence of children part of the explanation for the child-like behaviour displayed by BCTF leadership throughout this dispute, and which is often repeated by individual members during their picket duties and rallies? A friend told me her 4 year old son was watching with her a news report of the rally in front of the legislative buildings and he asked if it was a movie from the summer camp he had attended.

What is it that leads a mature and educated man to conclude, that after 14 days of illegal picketing, a $500,000 fine imposed on the body in which he exercises leadership and fiduciary responsibilities and the promise of greater penalties if the strike continues, a compromise solution brokered by the most respected mediator in British Columbia does not offer any substantive benefits? Perhaps he meant substantial and doesn’t know the difference. Whatever the cause it was a shocking display of obtuseness.

Another news item today showed picketing teachers in Victoria. A female teacher was asked what she thought of the proposed settlement. She said something to the effect that “I’m disappointed because umm I was hoping for something umm, something excellent!” Well isn’t that a good reason to engage in illegal picketing, it is all a search for excellence. No doubt her definition of excellence may be unlike that of most right thinking British Columbians.

Based on the samplings of interviewed teachers, and even allowing for the fact one is not always as articulate as one would like to be when confronted by a camera and a microphone, there is a shocking combination of vacuity and inarticulateness displayed by the sampled group. Surely all the thoughtful and articulate teachers are so appalled at the illegal actions of the union, they wouldn’t be caught within miles of a picket line - hope springs eternal. The only articulate teacher I saw interviewed on television the past two weeks was the Victoria teacher who crossed the picket line early in the first week because he believed teachers must be held to a higher standard because of the importance of their profession, and he wanted to be in class where his students needed him.

As I write the BCTF executive has yet to announce whether it will recommend the settlement to its teacher members, and reportedly at least 4 local leaders including the referenced Surrey teacher will recommend rejection.

One can only hope there are enough rank and file teachers who are clear on the concept of what it means to honour the rule of law and who are eager to show the moral and intellectual leadership which has been so noticeably absent on the part of their leaders by voting to accept this settlement.

A Debate

2005-10-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

A friend sent my wife an essay on the teachers' strike. I could not resist a response and I share with you the viewpoint of one Mary-Ellen Lang apparently published on the CBC News Viewpoint, and my response.

I apologize for the formatting of the viewpoint.

CBC News Viewpoint | October 14, 2005 |
>
When teachers strike
By Mary-Ellen Lang

When thousands of law-abiding citizens vote en masse to break a particular
law and place themselves in a position of contempt of the courts, it is a
worthwhile exercise to wonder why they would do such a thing. What
precipitates such action? What drives such resolve?
Most teachers by nature fit into "the system." Indeed it could be said
they are the system. So when they decide to directly oppose that very system,
it is an event worth noting. In B.C., the current teachers strike is the
culmination of years of what feels to teachers like battering at the hands
of an abusive "partner."

While it is certainly true that the B.C. Liberals, as is their habit,
legislated an end to bargaining and imposed by means of their creative
law-making talents a "new" (same old) contract on teachers, and while it
is therefore true that teachers are breaking that law by striking, it is also
true that Canadians in general are heir to a long history of admiration
for law-breaking of a particular sort.

Canada has consistently given refuge to fleeing Americans who have run
from "the law" of the U.S. Runaway slaves, First Nations (Sioux) refugees and
draft dodgers have sought, and been given, sanctuary here.

Canadians still debate whether or not Louis Riel was a traitor or a hero.
But they tend not to debate the relative merits of such law-breakers as
Dr. Martin Luther King, Alexander Dubcek or Nelson Mandela. Generally,
Canadians are quite clear on the morality of resisting immoral laws or situations
that are a serious affront to human rights, freedoms and dignity.

At the present time, most B.C. teachers (even those who didn't vote)
regard > Bill 12, the B.C. Liberal law that nullifies teachers' right to collective
bargaining (again), as bad enough to warrant civil disobedience.

If objecting to Bill 12 were all there was to it, it could be argued that
the teachers' stand is questionable. But Bill 12 is just the tip of the
iceberg. There has been a long buildup of actions and attitudes by B.C.
Liberals that feed the present resolve to resist them.

They unilaterally tore up legal, lawfully negotiated contracts, stripped
class size standards and many sorts of professional services from the
province's students. They orchestrated the backward slide of income (given inflation) and attempted to prevent teachers from even talking to parents about school conditions through (unsuccessful) action in the courts.

The Liberals took over the B.C. College of Teachers, fired its
democratically elected directors, appointed buddies in their place and
denied teachers any say in this government-controlled institution. Then
they threatened to cancel teachers' licences when they refused to pay dues to
this farce.

This government-controlled group sponsored media ads encouraging parents
to report on bad teachers directly to this new college and when hardly any
reports came in, escalated this campaign (still without the results they
apparently expected).

Since the Liberals have taken power in B.C. over 2,000 teachers and over
100 schools have vanished from the educational landscape. Classes of 35 to 40
students, a quarter of whom may have significant behavioural and/or
learning problems, are not uncommon.

School libraries are without librarians, while programs, services and
courses of every sort no longer exist. Teachers are getting by without
textbooks, or are keeping the ones they've got going with duct tape.

Counsellors who should be looking after the social and educational needs
of students are in overcrowded classrooms, instead. In high schools students
now have "spares" where courses used to be.

As far as I can tell, there are three equal issues that drive the current
illegal strike in B.C.

First, the actual income and buying power of teachers is diminishing.
Although teachers are getting better qualified all the time, they have
less money in hand than 10 years ago after factoring in inflation.

Secondly, teachers believe that Bill 12 is more worthy of a fascist state,
than a democratic one. Their reasons for this attitude are rooted in the
observation that the B.C. Public School Employers Association's so-called
"bargaining" behaviour could more accurately be described as stonewalling.
It brought zero to the table, had no offers or suggestions to make.

We didn't get anywhere because it had no intention of getting anywhere.
Further, the subsequent legislation, which I suppose it had hoped would
look like the solution to a teacher-caused impasse, looks instead to most
people like premeditated sledge-hammering.

Finally, the issue of class size, class composition and services to
students is a major sticking point with teachers. Imagine classes in which some
lone teacher is expected to manage the educational fortunes of 43 Grade 8 math students,35 English students, 38 Grade 5s, Industrial Ed classes of 36
(although there are only 21 tools), Grade 6 classes with four emotionally
disturbed students, three ESL kids, and a blind child packed in among the
other 20 "average" kids. (I'd like to see our esteemed minister of
education > try to teach one of those classes for a week.)

Governmental disregard for the learning conditions of students and working
conditions of teachers (the two cannot really be separated) is so
pervasive and debilitating it's only a matter of time before a class-action suit for incompetence, willful negligence and arrogant pomposity is laid at their
feet.

Teachers, as everyone says, do not like to strike. In fact, they hate it.
What they hate considerably more though, is the disrespect, abuse and
incompetence they are subjected to as they try to deliver an education to
children.

Mary-Ellen Lang delights in being a mom, grandma, writer, teacher,
gardener and equestrian, usually in about that order. She has been teaching since
1972, and writing since 1980. Two of her three (award winning, Young
Adult) > novels are published in many languages in Europe, the USA and Canada.

My Response:

I would like to respond to Mary-Ellen Lang's essay. She begins with a false assumption that the "system" into which she declares teachers to fit is one occupied by souls other than doctrinaire union supporters. It is a symptom of our times that intelligent people like Ms. Lang are unable to see the tactics of the teachers' union as a declaration that the group firmly adheres to a "system" that is in rebellion against the "system" she holds up as a foundation of society. The true "system" is one based on an unwritten social contract, which has given teachers the esteemed place they hold in the hearts and minds of the public. It is a system that believes in the rule of law and one that abhors anarchy. In contrast, the teachers advocate a system where everything is relative and if a person or group doesn't agree with a decision it simply ignores it and looks to mount public approval for its resistance - an approval based not on the rule of law and the prescriptions that serve as the glue to keep this fragile social structure together, but rather on popularity. What a sorry example that presents for our next generation of children that we entrust teachers to act toward in loco parentis.

Ms. Lang compounds her error by suggesting teachers feel like they have been battered at the hands of an abusive partner. Now employers and emloyees sometimes do enter into arrangements where they so align their interests as to be seen to be partners. This happens often in the private sector and successful models are based on some fundamental principles such as 1)accountability, 2) shared vision, 3) incentives to succeed and excel, 4) consequences of failure.

Since the reality of the relationship between teachers and their employers beginning with unionization in 1993 has been the antithesis of a partnership, and since the unionization of teachers was something they as a group fought hard for (a tenacious foot soldier being Jinny Sims, armed as she was from her experiences as an eager member of NUT in the UK) it is disingenuous of Ms. Lang as a teacher to offer up the image of a battered partner to characterize the plight of the teachers union in 2005.

If one accepted the partnership model, how would one then interpret the actions of the BCTF in spending untold amounts on advertising that directed vicious ad hominem attacks against its partner, sinking to the depths of publishing mugshot photos of the premier to be stapled to every telephone pole. Ms. Lang clearly has never had to work in a true business partnership, and sadly neither has the vast majority of teachers. Furthermore the reality is that teachers cherish the sinecure of their employment, one devoid of measurable standards of performance, devoid of meaningful sanctions for failure or incompetence and with impregnable job security for those with seniority, hardly the foundations on which to build a healthy partnership.

It is remarkable to me how easily folks like Ms. Lang gloss over the illegality of what the teachers are doing by defying an order of the Labour Relations Board and the Supreme Court of the province. It is even more remarkable that she seeks to justify this law-breaking activity by relying on a specious interpretation of Canada's history of admiration for law-breaking. She suggests that granting refuge to escaping slaves from the US should stand on equal ground to opening our borders to draft dodgers and Sioux refugees. It is a meretricious argument that proposes Canadians in general admire and condone the list of lawbreakers she advances in support of her argument.

To compare teachers' disgruntlement over the economic value of their services and the working conditions under which they provide them for 193 days of the year to the evils of segregation, apartheid or communist oppression, is odious and a reader of Ms. Lang's piece would be pefectly justified in placing her essay in the dustbin at this point.

Lang concedes that the teachers' stand is questionable if it were based only on an objection to Bill 12. This is a helpful concession since it is rather easy to demonstrate in fact that is exactly what teachers are doing and no amount of rationalization can change the reality of a democratically elected government passing legislation to confirm a policy it established in its previous mandate - namely that education is an essential service in this province.

The litany of complaints Ms. Lang lists as justification for disobedience of the law are facile and one-sided and ignores the role of the BCTF throughout the process. Even if everything she said was true, the simple fact is that despite spending millions of its members hard earned dollars on a futile attempt to defeat the Liberal government in the last two elections, the BCTF failed. The Liberal government has been democratically elected and more sophisticated labour advocates than Ms. Sims and her fellow executives have conceded that victory to them.

Faced with that result, the responsibility of the BCTF executive was to enter into negotiations with its employers with an attitude that recognized the political realities. It is clear it did not do so and while it is convenient for the BCTF to argue that the government was intrasigent, the ability of the Liberal government to successfully negotiate major contracts with other public sector unions refutes the BCTF's and Ms. Lang's arguments.

The BCTF used flawed tactics in its negotiations by bundling a number of issues together in order to attempt to paint the Liberal government as anti-teacher and anti-education. It is a risible proposition that unfortunately those who are inveterate Liberal haters, regardless of their intelligence, too readily accept without due consideration. Ms. Lang is doubtlessly an intelligent woman, but there is a chasm between intelligence and wisdom. Her suggestion that a class-action lawsuit might be launched against the government for among other sins "arrogant pomposity" merely underscores my point.

I believe most teachers do hate the thought of a strike. Regretably, the teachers in BC have displayed such lassitude in the past several years over the issue of who should represent their interests, they are now faced with the sad spectacle of having a dim panjandrum like Jinny Sims parade before the public as the face of the teaching profession in British Columbia. Right thinking teachers should be appalled at what they have allowed to occur. Their first step should be to overwhelmingly endorse Vince Ready's proposal no matter what he says. Their next step must be to find the courage to put forward to lead them, a slate of teachers who genuinely have pedagocic and not political ambitions.

Teachers have built up a huge historical reserve of goodwill capital with the public and it is a shame they wasted so much of it in this latest dispute.

Jinny Sims' Failing Grade

2005-10-19T00:42:00.000-07:00

According to her bio on the BCTF website, Jinny Sims taught English and social studies in Nanaimo after she emigrated from England in 1975. She apparently also worked as a school counselor. She came to Canada armed with union movement experience in the National Union of Teachers in Britain, a movement that proudly and with no apparent sense of irony refers to itself as NUT. Its newsletter is the NUT News.

The BCTF website says Sims “was deeply involved in the first round of local bargaining when BC teachers began the drive to unionize”. That was 1993 under the Harcourt NDP government and since then it appears that she has concentrated on union activities serving on the provincial executive of the BCTF since 1998.

In her letter to the teachers of British Columbia dated October 6, 2005 she declared that the vote to strike was “an overwhelming endorsation of the goals we have set together”. What sweet irony when the leader of the teachers union of British Columbia uses an invented word to praise her colleagues as they prepare for an illegal strike. You won’t find endorsation in the Oxford, the Cambridge or the Merriam Dictionary, but that doesn’t stop this English and social studies teacher from using it.

The word of course is endorsement and the fact you can find endorsation in the minutes and resolutions of BCTF meetings doesn’t make it a word. This means precious little to Jinny Sims and sadly most of the teachers she leads would either be ignorant of her error or too disengaged to care. Certainly those teachers I saw on television singing songs and plucking guitars on picket lines or at rallies seemed more interested in making certain their lyrics rhymed than accord with even the most rudimentary rules of English composition.

It is time for the silent majority of teachers who have a real interest in pedagogy -if indeed it exists - to stand up and be counted. If your leader thinks she is Rosa Parks and relies on invented words to communicate, perhaps it is time you find new leadership.

Teachers As Anarchists - A Study in Stupidity

2005-10-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

Teachers play an enormously important role in our lives. How many of us is unable to single out at least one teacher whose skill, care, understanding or concern played a significant role in shaping our lives or those of our children? As parents, we entrust our children to the care and supervision of teachers for some 193 days each year in British Columbia.

In my own case I hold in the highest esteem the late Elmer Lundbach, my grades 11 and 12 math teacher at Winston High in Watrous, Saskatchewan. I never saw Elmer without a jacket and tie, except when he was curling. He was from the tough love generation and when hundreds of his former students gathered to celebrate his life last fall it was clear that love had trumped toughness every time.

It would never have occurred to Mr. Lundbach to remove his jacket and tie and throw on a sandwich board so he could walk the sidewalk in front of his school to protest against what he considered to be unfair treatment by his employer. It would have appalled him to see teachers rally in front of the legislative buildings as if in preparation for the Sun Run, chant solidarity forever and urge workers in other fields to join them in a general strike.

He would have been even more appalled at the intellectual dishonesty displayed by the teachers and their leaders as they seek to spin straw into gold and paint their lawbreaking as civil disobedience, and their advocacy of anarchism as a natural offshoot of the freedoms afforded them as members of a democracy.

He would have said, “teaching is an honourable profession and teachers must rise above the fray and must not only adhere to but teach a higher standard of civility than do ordinary citizens.”

But that was then, and now is now. Now teaching is no longer a profession but a union shop. Teachers still want all the privileges of professionals but without the responsibilities and accountability. If truly a profession, mediocrity and incompetence would have consequences for teachers, other than a transfer to a different school, and excellence would be acknowledged and rewarded. If truly professional, teachers would acknowledge that there will be failures amongst their ranks and that incompetent teachers cause damage to students and bring the entire profession into disrepute if their failure carries no consequence.

As a trade union, solidarity is the motto. Rewards for excellence are restricted to tokenism, usually dispensed at a teacher’s retirement party or upon his or her departure from the rank and file to join the administration – the only method of financial advancement permitted in this socialistic environment.

As a trade, teachers have chosen to elect a union leadership steeped in the tradition of confrontational trade union bargaining. Politically teachers have permitted themselves to become toadies for the socialist political parties. Jenny Sims’ predecessor as head of the BCTF now sits as an NDP member of the legislature, a natural evolutionary result of union Darwinism.

Jenny Sims and her coterie of BCTF executives operate from a different agenda. Sims welcomes the prospect of being jailed, as it would increase her profile amongst the social activists who control the public sector unions and amongst the fawning press who would soon make her into a martyr. The BCTF has carried out its collective bargaining for the last decade with a mindset to promote confrontation with government.

I am convinced that the majority of rank and file teachers do not want to break the law. The original vote in favour of a strike was meant as a protest against what they perceived to be unwillingness on the part of government to listen to their complaints about class size and out of frustration at not receiving any wage increase. The solidarity mentality leads to fortress mentality and the government becomes the enemy, the faults of the union’s own leadership are ignored or go unrecognized.

Ultimately the crowd mentality overwhelms enough of the rank and file that we now have the remarkable sight of busloads of teachers filling a BC ferry to travel to Victoria to wave their placards and brandish their sophomoric slogans – all in defiance of a court order.

And yet they fail to see that what they are advocating is anarchy. The only consequence of persistent lawbreaking is either punishment or chaos. When those to whom we entrust the education of our children exhibit such aberrant behaviour I am reminded of Robert Musil when he said, “unfortunately, stupidity has something uncommonly endearing and natural about it. There is in short no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses. It can move in all directions, and put on all guises of the truth. The truth by comparison, has only one appearance, and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.”

If you want to see an object lesson in stupidity, walk down to your nearest school and ask a teacher to explain to you again how breaking the law is good for your kids.

Problems of the Heart

2005-10-07T01:55:00.000-07:00

The problem of civilization can be solved only by the heart - by the appearance of a new type of man. By an inner vision and a pure will.
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil.

A friend remarked that while he enjoyed my musings, he felt they were more directed toward societal issues and had less application to individuals. This meant they had less impact on him than if he could see specific applications to his own life.

That comment was made several months ago, and it has been percolating in whatever part of my brain these thoughts reside as they foment (ferment?) It is the human condition for one to pay less attention to ideas that do not have a direct personal application.

Of course, to direct my commentary to individual actions, is to risk offending those who with considerable justification would say – who are you to tell me what to do, or how to think, or how to vote?

Anyone who has read more than a couple of my essays knows I believe we have some serious problems in our society – here in Canada, and in our Western civilization generally. The more history I read the more I realize the problems I see are neither new nor unique to us.

One of the critical issues we face as Canadians is our smugness. We see ourselves as so much more fortunate than others. An air of moral and intellectual superiority with respect to our American neighbours exhibits this smugness. , With respect to poorer and less fortunate nations we pay lip service to how much we have to offer by way of assistance and expertise, but rarely do we walk the talk.

Our smugness allows us to ignore the systemic rot that has crept into our political structures and the historical foundations of our society. We stand idly by as proof upon proof is presented to us that our senior government is guilty not only of permitting but perpetuating cronyism, self-dealing, dishonesty and craven disregard for the exercise of prudence and fiscal responsibility. These are matters of the heart. There is something missing in our hearts if we refuse to take action to hold accountable those who have breached the trust we have vested them.

I have met no one who is able or willing to defend the practices and actions that formed the subject matter of the Gomery inquiry. The Dingwall affair is but another example of the lunacy into which we have descended. We are asked to believe that a political appointee who resigns in response to an investigation into $750,000 of questionable expenses should be entitled to a severance package to avoid a lawsuit. How long must the list of malefactors become before we are prepared to take individual action through the exercise of our free vote, and hold our politicians accountable?

It is as though we are caught up in a massive crowd and despite our intentions to change direction, we continue to be swept along, even though we may object to the direction in which the masses take us. Elias Canetti wrote about this phenomenon in his novel Auto-da-Fe and in his book Crowds and Power, the culmination of his life long study of the behaviour of the masses. “They act but know not what they do. They have their customs, but know not how they came by them. They wander their whole life long, but still cannot find their way; even so are the people of the masses,” wrote Canetti.

Put aside all political ideology or antipathy toward one political party or another and ask yourself – what does it say about my heart if I am willing to turn a blind eye to corruption? How can I be smug about the freedom we all enjoy as Canadians if I allow this freedom to be enjoyed by dissembling politicians? What will it take for me to see that freedom without prudence, or duty or responsibility and the other limits to freedom becomes but a parody of itself.

Consider for a moment the voters in Vancouver Centre in the next federal election. It appears they will have a choice between the incumbent Hedy Fry and the renewed and rehabilitated Svend Robinson. In Fry they have the admitted liar who invented a cross burning incident in Prince George to further her political interests, and in Robinson an admitted felon. Robinson is a parody of a parody. Like the child who killed his parents then threw himself on the mercy of the court citing his plight as an orphan; Robinson escaped a criminal record by pleading a mental condition and the fact he had suffered enough by losing his job as a member of parliament and suffering public humiliation. Now he comes forward and says his mental state is perfectly fine and he should get his job back.

I conclude with sadness not bitterness, that those who vote for Hedy Fry or Svend Robinson are neither insane nor foolish nor irrelevant. They are merely acting in accordance with the light which illumines their own inner vision.

If I am right, it would take countless individual acts of pure will and restored inner vision to begin to make even the slightest adjustment to the course charted by this massive crowd that is our nation, as it travels through time.

Much more than that, it would take a massive outpouring of grace. But since all human nature resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful, it may be a long time yet before the crowd changes course.

Charmed by Our New GG - But What Did She Really Say?

2005-09-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

The popular Canadian press fell over itself with adulation for Michaelle Jean after her installation speech on Tuesday. "Her promise is the promise of what we almost are, of what we want to be. She is the becoming Canada" wrote John Ibbitson breathlessly and somewhat incoherently on the front page of the Globe and Mail. The National Post's resident libertarian Andrew Coyne threw himself and not just his coat onto the Ottawa curbside with this paean - "Madam, I surrender. Let us forget past criticisms. Let us put aside old quarrels. Your speech has collapsed my defences. You are my Commander-in-Chief."

Now I admit I did not see the speech read nor did I see any film footage of the day's events but I did read and re-read the text of her speech. I was spared the emotionalism that appeared to have been carefully choreographed into the program (as it always is in ceremonial events such as this). Paul Martin may have regretted the gospel music bit as by most accounts he looked a bit awkward and chagrined as he tried to boogie along with Michaelle in accompaniment to the music. Pity poor Stephen Harper if it had been he who was called upon to show some rhythm, but I am sure nothing more will written of Mr. Martin's discomfort.

Much was made by these journalists about her theme of freedom. She said, "I know how precious that freedom is, I know what a legacy it is for every child, for every citizen of this country. I whose ancestors were slaves, who was born into a civilization long reduced to whispers and cries of pain, know something about its price, and I know too what a treasure it is for us all...the freedom that is ours unites us all."

Now who can argue that Canadians are blessed with freedom, particularly in contrast to the conditions in Ms Jean's native country of Haiti. But what is the nature of the freedom which Ms. Jean is holding up as the great unifying force for all Canadians? I don't know how to parse coherent meaning out of her words - "Freedom has marked our history and our territory, it has marked our summer breezes and our howling winter winds. It has helped create the spirit of adventure that I love above all in this country, this country where each and every one of us is able to participate fully in the ongoing task of building it."

It appears she is praising Canada's growing reputation for elevating individual freedoms, likening them to a freedom she observes in nature that allows the summer breezes and winter winds to do what they do without apparent constraint. It is a freedom that she believes nurtures a spirit of adventure for which she seems to think Canadians are famous.

I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, that she was merely trying to be inspirational - then I read this. "More than four centuries ago that spirit of adventure drove women and men to cross the ocean and discover a new world elsewhere. That spirit also led the First Nations to pass on to those new settlers the essence of this generous land. And it encourages people from all over the world to share in our prospects or to take refuge here and make a fresh start, safe from tyranny and violence. It inspires our artists, our scientists, our peacekeepers and our institutions as they work to spread our know-how and our message of hope. Today, we are the sum of those adventures."

These are the words of a muddled mind. Not satisfied with attributing to Canadians a spirit of adventure born of a natural abundance of individual freedom, she says this same freedom led the First Nations to do something I don't undertand in either temporal or metaphysical terms - that is to "pass on the essence of this generous land". Now if the First Nations at the time of discovery did this under the inspiration of freedom and a spirit of adventure, why is it we spend tens of millions of dollars every year paying them and their lawyers a lot of money to figure out how they can get it back from us.

By this point in her speech she had hit many hot buttons for the feel good fans and observers - she was proud to have been chosen, she hoped her story could inspire hope in others, she called Canadians adventuresome and freedom lovers, she invoked praise for naturalism and referred to a sort of wisdom on the part of First Nations folk.

But she was only warming up it seems. She went on to place her appointment neatly at the cusp of "a turning point in our civilization, and more than ever before our future rests on those who are forcing us to imagine the world of tomorrow." Who are these people I ask myself - the people who "are etching upon our memories the breadth of our aspirations." Would I recognize those people if I saw them? Would I be aware that they are fine tuning my memories? Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I can only wonder - who are those guys?

Oh yes those folks (I assume they are the same folks) are also "holding up a mirror that reveals a gap between what we are and what we aspire to be." Now this must be some sort of CBC creative writing code. When I hold up a mirror it tells me what I look like at this moment, and with every passing day cruelly reminds me of how little I resemble who I used to be. It tells me nothing about what I might look like in the future if my aspirations were to be fulfilled. Unless I was just about to have a botox injection or some hair plugs inserted.

And then it hit me. Ms. Jean is a firm believer in individual freedoms, and in a society where if individual freedoms are maximized, society will be free. Her Montesquieu quote sealed the deal for me as she interprets the Englightenment philosopher to declare that individual freedom is the paramount freedom in any civilized state.

And if she believes that, then she believes that today's heroes, the holders of the mirror - are the Liberal politicians and the activist judiciary who increasingly and without any constraints, find ways to elevate individual freedoms to the status of rights, thus forever enshrining them into the fabric of Canadian society.

As I read Ms. Jean's speech I caught a glimpse into the modern liberal mind, the ascendant mind of the Canadian elites, more Rousseau than Montesquieu I suspect. Flowery references to freedom and adventure and the noble savage and a confidence that if only everybody could be nicer and more respectful toward one another, what a wonderful world this would be.

A liberal such as Ms. Jean is star-struck by this ascendancy of individual freedoms and as such is blinded to the absence of justice in this riot of freedom.

I long for the day when a GG or a Prime Minister delivers a speech where he or she quotes Irving Babbitt instead of Montesquieu. "Civilization must be willed first of all by the individual in his own heart...barbarism is always as close to the most refined civilization as rust is to the most highly polished steel" said Babbitt.

Babbitt believed that what a civilized society needed was justice not freedom. At the individual level justice "limits desires that are in themselves insatiable and imposes upon them the law of measure".

The freedom-based society advocated by Ms. Jean and her appointer Mr. Martin, is one where the measures to be imposed on individual freedom are few.

She will be, because of her position, her physical attractiveness and her poised delivery (even if it is of incoherent thoughts) a powerful advocate of this new Canada. Note that she is proud not humbled by her appointment and she sees her elevation to this position as an opportunity to effect even more change, all in the name of freedom and self-fulfilment for each individual Canadian.

Sober reflection might lead one to ask if such a society as this is the one described by contemporary philosopher David B. Hart when he writes:

"A society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as nature, that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos, if it could be taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen."

Rediscovering Flannery O'Connor

2005-09-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge. Flannery O'Connor - In the Devil's Territory

As proof of the proposition that education is wasted on the young, it took me almost 35 years to rediscover the works of Flannery O'Connor. My wife Nancy reminded me that in our last year at university we took a Modern American Literature course together. O'Connor was one of the authors we studied though I confess to remembering very little of what I learned of her writing.

Our tenured professor's idea of a stirring lecture was to address us for about 5 minutes then turn on a 40 minute tape recording of an actor reading Mark Twain. I would walk out and go back to the law library to study something more interesting like the Sale of Goods Act or the principle of subrogation in Insurance Law. That I was able to earn a better mark in the final than Nancy did (despite missing 75% of the lectures) serves as both a tribute to her fine note taking and as proof of the inherent unfairness of life.

What I missed 35 years ago was an exposure to a remarkable mind - though I have serious doubts that this dull and lazy professor would have been much help to me in unearthing the richness of thought and belief that lies beneath her writing.

A reference to her understanding of the Christian concept of grace, delivered in a recent Sunday morning homily, led me back to her writing.I knew she was from the southern U.S., I associated her writing with that of Carson McCullers and Nathaniel West, but beyond that I knew little of her work.

O'Connor's writing is, on one level bleak and dark. Her short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" centres around a family of 6 that through bad fortune stumbles upon an escaped convict and his henchmen. There is no happy ending in the conventional sense of the fictional genre.

But one has to remember that O'Connor's writing is based on her belief that "for the last few centuries we have lived in a world which has been increasingly convinced that the reaches of reality end very close to the surface, that there is no ultimate divine source, that the things of the world do not pour forth from God in a double way or at all. For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man."

O'Connor suffered from the disease of lupus and died in 1964 at the age of 39 from complications arising from the disease. In 1956 she wrote, " I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies".

A mind and spirit that could think that way and write as beautifully as she did, is one worth learning more about.

My Application for the Supreme Court

2005-08-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

I just read on the Globe and Mail website that Canadians are invited to submit names to Justice Minister Irwin Cotler for nominations to fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court of Canada with the impending retirement of Alberta's Mr. Justice Major.

I thought I would share my application letter with you.

Dear Mr. Cotler,

I would like to put forward my name as a candidate for the Supreme Court of Canada. I thought my wife would have made a great Governor General but no one asked her to apply and she wasn't on Helen Scherrer's Christmas list so our family missed out on that opportunity. It was so kind of you to open up nominations for the Supreme Court of Canada to all Canadians. I mean talk about inclusivness and celebrating diversity. You are awesome Mr. Cotler.

I meet the basic criteria of having been a practising member of a Canadian law society for at least 10 years - 32 in fact. Well, I went on the retirement roll of the BC Law Society on December 31st, 2004, but I am certain my application for reinstatement will be processed before the deadline for applications is attained.

As for my other qualifications, I must first suspend my most prominent virtue, humility before I list them. I didn't have time to importune a friend of mine to put forward my name so I need to be my own tout. It worked for Rosie Abella so why shouldn't I try it too.

I am a Westerner and the vacant position is that of a Westerner so I assume that gives me a leg up on some of the eastern wannabes who are eager to don the ermine skins.

I was born in Saskatchewan, was married in Alberta and live in British Columbia. I spoke French before I spoke English, was a Roman Catholic for the first 25 years of my life, an agnostic for 10 years and a Christian and an Anglican since the age of 37. I am thinking of becoming a Roman Catholic again because they have a leader with the power to enforce discipline and Mr. Martin is a Roman Catholic isn't he, or has his bishop outed him. It is either that or becoming a Liberal again. Will you be sending out invitations for the next leader of the Liberal Party soon? I might throw my name in that ring if somehow I don't make the cut as a new Supreme.

I have voted for the following parties federally: Liberal, Progressive Conservative, Reform Party, Alliance Party, Rhinoceros Party and Conservative. Provincially I have voted NDP, Socred and Liberal. I think this shows I am willing to listen to different arguments and I am willing to be persuaded to change my mind. And once persuaded I am even willing to change my mind. In fact, once persuaded I can do pretty much whatever I please so I think I would be a perfect Liberal appointment to the Supremes.

I read a lot and I write passably well. I have read Carlos Castenada and Lloyd Axworthy and have drool marks on page 4 of a book by each of them to prove it.

My favourite stack in law school was the Tasmanian Law Review section. I could sleep there undisturbed for over an hour and my snoring bothered no one. Ralph Goodale once stepped on my hand while searching for some obscure reference with which to impress Otto Lang, but I forgave him - for stepping on my hand that is. When Rosie Abella uses a decision from Tasmania to support some new definition she next invents, I might not have heard of the case but at least I will know where to find it.

I am a good listener, I don't think I would fall asleep while the court was in session. My judgments would be well reasoned and even better written. I would resist the temptation to use too many big words. I know the difference between enormousness and enormity, and resist those who say there no longer is a difference. Now don't get me wrong, I can deal with change and I know how important that is in the life of a Supreme.

I have visited every Canadian province but Newfoundland. My favourite latin maxim is "ex opere operato" - the effect is in the doing. (That is why I am applying for this position and not just talking about it to my friends and my dog.) I will do a quick review course before my appointment so I can get on top of some of those other quaint phrases like, "reductio ad absurdum" and "de minimus non curat lex" or my law school favourite "nemo dat quod non habet"

I have visited Barbados, China, Chile, Cuba, but not Haiti. I have visited England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Spain, Luxembourg, Italy, Hungary, French Polynesia, New Zealand, Mexico and the United States. There must be others but I can't remember them and I put my passport in the washing machine after our last trip and...

I offer this travel itinerary as evidence I understand the human condition and would have no difficulty dealing with the multi-cultural nature of Canadian society. Also I like Thai food, though not too spicy. I once had Jamaican food, but not Haitian.

Oh yes, and I once wrote a paper in 3rd year law school for my Law and Poverty class which required me to research some aboriginal issues. I met David Ahenakew and had a beer or two with him in a bar in Prince Albert. I wouldn't let that experience prejudice me if his appeal is heard after my appointment. Come to think of it I might fall asleep during some of Doug Christie's submissions, but I will ask Rosie to lend me her notes.

So Irwin, that pretty much sums up my resume. I can only hope I catch Mr. Martin in one of his giddy little moods when the shortlisting occurs. Maybe he will like my story or my name. Pretty close to Bono isn't it? Oh, and while I haven't worked for the CBC I do listen to it and it has been neat watching football games on CBC without commentary, how radical an idea is that! And hockey last winter, all those reruns of old Stanley Cup games, I was able to make a lot of money betting against my cousin Marcel. But I digress.

Yours if you want me, I wait with anticipation, but with neither trepidation nor consternation,

B.J. Buan

P.S. Any chance of getting an advance on the sweet salary you pay the Supremes, and maybe the dental plan could kick in a little early!

P.S.S. If for some reason I don't get this appointment could you just slide this application over onto the pile of Senate nominations. Just be sure I am ahead of Gurmant Grewal and Judy Sgro.

Tom Courchene Doesn't Get It

2005-08-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

Tom Courchene grew up in Wakaw, Saskatchewan. He was already off at university when I moved there in 1961, but I remember him being around in the summers. His younger brother was a boy scout leader. My fellow scouts and I thought he was real cool when he let 6 of us keep a dozen beer we found stashed in a bale pile in the middle of a farmer's field on one of our overnight hikes. (It was even cooler when I found out later the beer belonged to my older brother, who couldn't believe his bad luck when he found his stash missing).

John Diefenbaker had his first law practice in Wakaw. His former office was next door to the hotel my dad owned. As boys we used to climb on the roof of the hotel and throw rocks on the tin roof of the old office to enrage the alcoholic old lawyer Mr. Mushinski who lived and remarkably practised law from the Chief's old digs. The sight of Mushinski standing on the street in his long underwear with a hatchet in his hand screaming into the black night seemed funny to us at the time. We can be cruel in our youth, can't we? What seemed funny at the time I now clearly recognize as having been reprehensible behaviour.

This is all background to last week's headline in the National Post, presenting Tom Courchene as an expert who recommended that Alberta should share its oil revenue windfall with the rest of Canada, failing which the Federal government should find creative ways to force Alberta to do so. Courchene proposed measures such as increasing the minimum tax levels to prevent the Alberta government from sharing its wealth exclusively with its citizens.

Tom is concerned that unless Alberta shares its wealth people will flock to Alberta from other parts of Canada, something he suggests would be bad for Canada and would damage the federation. - If Alberta spends its wealth on improving its provincial amenities such as education and health then "who would want to stay in Saskatchewan?" asks Courchene."

Now Tom is clearly a bright guy. He has an B.A. (Honours) from the University of Saskatchewan and he graduated from Princeton in 1967 with a PhD in Economics. He has written and had published two hundred and fifty books and articles on Canadian policy issues, including: a four volume series on Canadian monetary policy for the C.D. Howe Institute; In Praise of Renewed Federalism (C.D. Howe); Social Policy in the 1990s: Agenda for Reform (C.D. Howe) Equalization Payments: Past, Present and Future (Ontario Economic Council); Economic Management and the Division of Powers (Macdonald Royal Commission) and A First Nations Province (Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, Queen's)

Tom seems to have spent all his adult life living and working in the corridors of academia in Ontario and Quebec or studying in Eastern US universities. I don't know if Tom returned to Saskatchewan for the province's homecoming this summer. Perhaps if he had he might have reflected more deeply on the issue of redistribution of Alberta's wealth before he mused over what coercive methods Ottawa might use to get its hands on it.

The gap in economic wealth between Saskatchewan and Alberta does not arise from a disparity between the natural resources of the two provinces, but rather from the different choices made by the majority of voters in the two provinces over the last 50 years. Alberta has without interruption been governed by political parties who have favoured entrepreneurialism and which have seen the role of government to be to encourage the private sector to grow and expand and to reward ideas and efforts. Saskatchewan on the other hand, with but few brief exceptions, has been governed by socialist governments intent on aggressively redistributing wealth amongst its citizenry through the active intervention of the state in economic affairs. Bureaucracy rules in Saskatchewan, while private initiative reigns in Alberta.

The consequence of such decisions should have been obvious and predictable to an economist such as Mr. Courchene, though judging by his book titles he is a big fan of redistribution. Saskatchewan has vast oil and gas resources and in addition it has other resources Alberta does not have - potash, uranium, diamonds to name but a few. Saskatchewan also has more grain production and equivalent forest reserves than does Alberta. The failure of Saskatchewan citizens to benefit under our federation from the abundance of the resources they own is mostly a matter of their own choice in the provincial governments they have elected. The failure is exacerbated by the years of power of the federal Liberal Party in Ottawa and the abusive use of it in the past with policies like the National Energy Policy.

The Federation Courchene fears will be permanently damaged should Alberta not voluntarily turn over some of its wealth to the rest of Canada is, I would argue, already severely and perhaps permanently damaged by reason of the years of domination by Quebec and Ontario in the Federal arena.

My recent trip to Saskatchewan convinced me that the Saskatchewan Party will win the next provincial election. If given two terms like the BC Liberals) in which to rid the system of its more gross inefficiencies, wastefulness and lack of accountability then no matter how wealthy Alberta continues to become, many more Saskatchewanians will stay home and many who left it to find opportunity elsewhere will return.

Meanwhile, if the rest of Canada doesn't wake up and see the extent of the disaffection with Ottawa that has developed in Western Canada, and if regardless of all the reasons why the Liberals should be removed from power they are re-elected in January 2006; the cries for Western independence from this flawed Federation will become more widespread.

If Courchene truly values a united Canada and cares for the province of his birth, he should use his intellect to much better purpose than that of shilling for even more Ottawa intervention in the lives of Canadians.

By proposing solutions which are clearly seen as reprehensible to Albertans and to fiscally conservative Canadians generally, Courchene and those of his ilk throw rocks on the tin roof of Western Canadians and they aren't at all happy about it. One day they may just look up and spy the Kilroy nose and beady eyes of their tormentors peering at them over the Manitoba Ontario border and decide enough is enough.

Are There Dogs and Rowboats in Heaven?

2005-08-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

Two friends and I were discussing how important our pets were to us and the question arose as to whether there are dogs in heaven. Attributing the comment to C.S. Lewis one friend said, " I think so, but if there are none there will be a perfectly good explanation!"

I feel the same way about rowboats. There must be rowboats in heaven, and peaceful ocean bays and calm lakes upon which to row them while you feel your heart pound and your muscles strain as your eyes take in the magnificence of nature.

I went rowing today and felt incredibly blessed. Each oar stroke was an opportunity to give thanks for the privilege of being alive and of taking in the splendor of the scenery. Of course not everyone can experience the peacefulness of a rowboat. Many find the equivalent in a hike across an alpine meadow, a long swim in the ocean, a bike ride in the mountains or on the prairie, a game of chess on a verandah with a friend, a nap in a hammock.

Some of us attribute the sense of peace experienced in those circumstances to a Divine order. For others it is a more personal experience and not one related to any sense of the Immanent. I make no judgement with respect to which may be the best or the right explanation for those moments of peace. I only ask that those who don't share my sense of the Divine be open to the possibility that there is more to this world than our individual experiences.

Harvard University is embarking on a project to try and resolve the conflict between Darwinism and Creationism. Unsurprisingly the spokesperson for the project remarked that his expectation is that the project will fill some of the gaps in the Darwin theory and thus make less credible the argument in favour of a Divine role in creation, or to use the politically correct term the theory of Intelligent Design.

I don't think Darwin's theory has a place for dogs and rowboats in heaven, so I will continue to believe that life is a mystery and no amount of money granted to Harvard or Oxford or Yale or other universities will provide the answer to the puzzle.

This much I know, that David Stove got it right when he said, "If Darwin's theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation would be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species."

More on this in a later essay. For the moment I only want to share my joy in the resplendence of my 90 minutes in my rowboat, and hope each of you found the time today to be in your own equivalent.

I end with this reflection by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Celestial Railroad.

"Many passengers stop to take their pleasure or make their profit in Vanity Fair, instead of going onward to the celestial city. Indeed, such are the charms of the place that people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly contending that there is no other, that those that seek further are mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the celestial city lay but a bare mile beyond the gates of vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither".

Accidents Speak Louder Than Words

2005-08-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

Annie Lennox coined the title in one of the tracks from her Medusa album. I thought of how appropriate the line is in response to this morning's editorial in the National Post by John Duffy, Liberal party apologist and advisor. (I noted he is a volunteer advisor, perhaps to suggest he has more credibility than one who is paid to be a Liberal flack.)

After every train wreck, this Martin led Liberal government has trotted out some spokesperson, who like Baghdad Bob stands before us and tells us all is well while the ruins of his city smoulder behind him. Scott Brison has perfected the role, Jean Lapierre often gets the French speaking part. Now the new man Duffy is put forward to declare "It's Official, the GG controversy is over." Mme. Jean has spoken and she is not a separatist and has never been a member of a political party. How comforting!

And to add credibility to his bald assertion that all is well, Duffy offers that the "hyperventilating" members of English Canada who have picked up on the news that Mme. Jean once raised her glass to toast the oppressed Quebec independistes are merely allowing themselves to be pawns to the separatist agenda.

Now Mr. Duffy as the latest Charlie McCarthy for the Liberal Party is free to express his opinion, and to its credit the National Post gives him space to air his views. But please let's not buy it folks. The most charitable explanation for Martin's nomination of Mme. Jean is that the train was wrecked because someone didn't check to see if the line had been switched.

The most likely explanation is that Mr. Martin is truly a Howdy Doody who has no idea what he is doing, and he is being guided by advisors whose goal is to advance the deconstruction agenda against yet another Canadian tradition and institution, the office of Governor General.

A retired member of the Canadian Armed forces reminded me that the process of deconstruction began under the present GG, Adrienne Clarkson. All portraits of Queen Victoria were removed from the walls of Rideau Hall because they offended Mr. Raulston Saul. My friend noted also that there are no longer any portraits displayed of the Governors General of Canada who were British citizens.

Tradition and history have no place in the new Canada. We are now multi-cultural and inclusive and we don't want to offend any sensibilities. The John Ralston Sauls and the Jean-Daniel Lafonds of the new Canada lead the march to the ramparts of the present day sans-culottes, and like lemmings the press and the usual elites dance merrily along behind.

So Mr. Duffy or the Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson can reassure us all they want that Mme. Jean's appointment is but another natural evolution of the role of GG in the new Canada, but those who cherish traditional values and virtues are not fooled - accidents indeed do speak louder than words. There is nothing natural about these changes, they are part of a carefully planned attack and they will continue to succeed until enough Canadians wake up.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Paul Martin

2005-08-13T22:46:00.000-07:00

If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads. Milan Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being

In his novel the Czech author Kundera explores the idea of the eternal return, the philosophical concept that everything recurs as we once experience it.

Canada is enduring a period of the eternal return of Liberal governments. When the time comes to respond to polls or to cast ballots in federal elections sufficient numbers of us fail to recognize the signs of history repeating itself. The ravages that Liberal policies have inflicted on our country’s economics and its culture become “mere words, theories and discussions – light as feathers and frightening no one.”

Kundera writes also about how bearing burdens brings us closer to the earth and makes our lives more truthful and real. Conversely, the absence of burdens makes a man’s life light and such a life “become(s) only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

Mr. Martin has the air of one who has not borne great burdens. The latest imbroglio over his ill-considered appointment of Ms. Jean to the post of Governor-General is but another reminder of how unsuited Mr. Martin is for his role. If we are to believe the words of his own advisor Helen Scherrer (former Heritage Minister, defeated in the last election she is now on the staff of the PMO), she is the person who put Ms. Jean’s name on the list and who urged Mr. Martin to nominate her.

Scherrer’s description of Martin’s excitement over the prospect of one of his favourite French language CBC personalities becoming the GG is a chilling read as it reveals the lack of gravitas on the part of Mr. Martin. Mr. Martin's response was consistent with the scenes of him giddy with excitement at sharing the stage with rock star Bono. In these moments the image of Mr. Martin is one of unbearable lightness.

Mr. Martin seems never to have had a friend like I had in my law school classmate David. For some reason still unknown to me I was reasonably popular amongst my first year classmates and was elected as class rep on the Law Student’s Association. In my second year I was elected social director, which made me responsible to organize social functions and most agreeably to roam the campus during the first 6 weeks of the term to find suitably attractive candidates for Law Queen (there was no question about the gender of law queen in the late 60’s in Saskatoon). Understandably, these responsibilities and the perquisites that came with them had a certain self-aggrandizing effect on me that I did not immediately recognize. When someone suggested to me that I should put my name in the ring for LSA president, I gave it some serious thought and sought counsel from some friends.

My friend David offered his frank opinion - “You shouldn’t run because you would do a lousy job”. Hurt, I said, “What do you mean? I did a good job as social director and you voted for me. “You would do a lousy job because you only want the president’s job for the status it gives you. You don’t really want to do the job of president”, said David. He was right of course and I was wise enough or at least chastened enough to abandon all thoughts of a political career.

Mr. Martin only wanted the job for its status and to fulfill the legacy that eluded his father. His apparent effectiveness as Finance Minister masked his lack of credentials as a leader. Mr. Martin has risen to the top and it is now clear to many that he has not the weight with which to maintain his perch, and his unbearable lightness sees him shift and twist with every zephyr of polled opinion.

Meanwhile our national state of delusion leads us ignore all signs of how adrift we have become. What will happen should the real burdens facing our world press down on Canada? Will Mr. Martin have the courage of a Tony Blair to say, “the rules have changed”? It would take a remarkable transformation for him to do so.

Oh Canada, Chapter 11 - Our New G-G

2005-08-04T23:31:00.000-07:00

The fix is in and the labels are printed and ready to be applied to those of us with the temerity to question the wisdom of Mr. Paul Martin in today appointing Ms. Michaelle Jean as our next Governor General.

As I move along the conveyor belt toward the political correctness unit of the great Canadian cultural abattoir, I can only wonder which imprimatur will be applied to me. Which label will it be? Bigot, white male, Western Canadian, Conservative - they probably have a special one for folks like me who have chosen to hang their ideas on the laundry line for all to see. I like surprises and remain calm as I advance to meet my fate.

I confess I cringed as I watched Mr. Martin announce the appointment of Ms. Jean on CBC Newsworld this morning. Now that is no surprise to my regular readers as Mr. Martin has the uncanny ability to elicit cringes from me rather routinely. More particularly, I flinched before I cringed, noting first that he had a fresh haircut –a trustworthy tell in the world of politicians. They usually get a new haircut before venturing out to tell the biggest fibs.

The cringe came when Mr. Martin listed the qualifications which make Ms. Jean “uniquely qualified” for the position of G-G. Now let me say this by way of explanation not defence, as the labeling stamp rears its Damoclean hand over my head – based on what I know of her Ms. Jean seems an example of an honest upstanding Canadian citizen. She has persevered to obtain an excellent education, she has traveled abroad, and she has risen high in the ranks of her chosen profession of journalism. She seems bright, would be a welcomed companion at any dinner party, book club discussion, bike ride down the Kettle Valley or boat trip down the Li River from Guilin to Yanghsuo. Her husband looks to be somewhat older than she and is brave or foolish enough to compensate for his bald pate by letting the hair on the back of his head meet his collar. Come to think of it, but for the adventurous nature of her husband when it comes to hairstyles, Ms. Jean bears a striking resemblance to my wife on the basis of qualifications.

My wife should be G-G. In fact, any of the women in her two book clubs should be G-G based on most of Ms. Jean’s qualifications. But none of them was born in Haiti and they never worked for CBC you say. And they never won any prizes for documentary features on abused women or a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. I guess that disqualifies them. Wait a moment, I have a female friend who did spend her career in the CBC, and she is from an ethnic minority, but no she was born in the U.S and never lived in Montreal, oh well!

Alas, my wife is merely the daughter of a WWII veteran and Military Cross winner, he a 5th generation descendant of United Empire Loyalists and Great Lake riverboat captains, land surveyors and son of a coal and ice merchant in the dry Saskatchewan prairie. Her mother’s parents left Fraserborough Scotland at the turn of the century, a cooper father and a fish packer mother with a young daughter, all their earthly possessions in a couple trunks.

I don’t need to burden you with the rest of the details. The general outline of my wife’s antecedents and her story would be familiar to most of you based on your own experience. I have no hesitation in saying that my wife and thousands of other Canadian women are as bright, hard working, educated, well traveled and cultured, as is Ms. Jean to represent all Canadians.

This young country of Canada is a nation of immigrants. We are all descendants of people who chose to come here for a variety reasons. Some came to escape poverty, some to escape persecution; a few came from privilege and abundance to pursue even greater opportunity. Ms. Jean’s story is no more compelling than that of thousands of other Canadian women and men, in fact one could argue even less compelling than many.

So what exactly is it that makes her “uniquely qualified” to represent all Canadians in the mind of Mr. Martin, upon whom rest the sole responsibility for the appointment (subject to the Queen’s right to veto)?

Listening to Mr. Martin one can only deduce he believes, or has been told by his handlers that Canadians will believe, that in order to be the G-G one has to come from an identifiable visible minority. The concept that experience, wisdom, proven devotion to public service amongst other attributes might trump the colour of one’s skin or the province which one calls home, seems foreign to Mr. Martin.

I was reminded of Mr. Martin's obloquy to Rosie Abella when he named her to the Supreme Court of Canada. Being the daughter of Holocaust survivors gave her special qualifications to sit on the Supreme Court it seemed. What about being the daughter of survivors of the Great Depression on the prairies, or of Mennonites who escaped Russia, or the son of a father he never knew who was raised by his grandmother, or the boy who was one of thirteen who remembers waking up in bed with two or three siblings a winter morning, his hair frozen. These are all inspiring Canadian stories, but apparently they don't meet Mr. Martin's standards.

Only the most ignorant or obtuse Canadian could fail to have noted that there exists a considerable tension and division in our nation at this time both politically and culturally. The Liberal minority government clings to power with the narrowest of margins. The groans of significant social upheaval can be heard from sea to sea as we meddle with the institution of marriage. If ever there was a time for a political appointment that signaled caution, temperance, conservatism (in the non-political meaning of the much maligned word) surely it was now.

But no, our Prime Minister chooses instead to appoint another career CBC employed, foreign born, female journalist of colour as our Governor General. And, in his public comments he seeks to trumpet this appointment as another signal event to show the world what an enlightened, diverse, inclusive, God in Her wisdom is smiling upon us nation we are here in Canada.

When asked by the first journalist in the post announcement press conference, what Mr. Martin had to say to the more cynical observer who saw this appointment as an effort to bolster the Liberal party fortunes in Quebec, Mr. Martin put on his best pouty supercilious face and declared this was no time for partisan thoughts. Cringe turned to gag reflex and I had to turn off the television at that point.

I sincerely wish Ms. Jean all success in her appointment. I don’t believe it is one she sought. I pray that she might receive the wisdom she needs to fulfill the serious constitutional responsibilities her office carries, should she be called upon to exercise them. Should her tenure be one of a purely symbolic nature, I pray she will carry out her duties with grace and skill.

As for Mr. Martin I pray for an expeditious end to his tenure as Prime Minister. The longer he remains in the position, the more he demeans the office. Not in my lifetime has there been a man who served as Prime Minister who appeared less comfortable, competent and dignified in the role, than he. Mr. Clark is his nearest rival. The scapegoat Prime Ministers Mr. Turner and Ms. Campbell were recognized by all as mere propitiations for the sins of their predecessors.

Mr. Martin fought long and hard for the levers of power, and now that he has them he has proven to be even more inept than any of us could have imagined. The transparently political nature of this latest appointment serves only to highlight once again the cravenness of this Liberal government, and its almost freakish commitment to cling to power.

My long lament for Canada will only be intensified and extended if, in the weeks of debate and analysis which follow this appointment, the prevailing argument emerges that once again Canada has shown the world what an enlightened place we are by dint of this appointment.

In spite of my lamentations I live on in hope that one day soon, a majority of Canadians will fight its way clear of the web of political spin woven by our current Prime Minister and his handlers, and amass the collective will to vote for change.

For my liberal readers I point to Confucius and not Christ for inspiration (Christ being intensely politically incorrect these days as a source of inspiration and wisdom). Confucius was unable to find his philosopher king, and died without hope for the future of civilization. Subsequent history proved him wrong and showed that a philosopher ought to say what he thinks, especially at a time when no one who is anyone agrees with him. Confucianism became the official outlook of the greatest Empire that the world has known.

I am no Confucius and I am no philosopher, but it may be worth your while to give more than a moment’s thought to the reasoning our Prime Minister has used to declare the “unique qualifications” of our G-G elect.

Dog Days of Summer

2005-07-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Sirius, the bright evening star, is once again in ascendance - hence the origin of the term "dog days of summer". For this scribbler it also means time spent packing up boxes and readying for a move away from Vancouver, which has been home since 1971, to southern Vancouver Island. It is a bittersweet time, a mixture of excitement at the prospect of the complete retirement from professional and business responsibilities and a touch of melancholy due to the sons and friends and community left behind.

Business will be replaced by the busyness of varied undertakings - a massive new garden with all its attendant work, a daily row out to the prawn traps, learning the names of flora and fauna, hoping that long forgotten muscles will once again fire on command as fence posts get torn out, retaining walls get built, stubborn salal gets uprooted.

And along with the busyness, will come a renewed appreciation of the value of time spent in reading and thinking and writing. I shall hopefully renew my regular postings by the middle of August when all the boxes are unpacked and the dog days of summer are on the wane.

Prairie Perspectives

2005-07-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

…if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be…that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak? W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz

My wife Nancy and I kept some “appointments in the past” with a recent driving trip from Vancouver to Saskatchewan. Any lingering fears of a “you can’t go home again” experience were swiftly abated upon our arrival in Watrous where I lived for only two years before graduating from high school in 1965. I had been excited about this trip for many months now without really knowing why. Part of me feared I had been overcome by romantic nostalgia and the intensity of past friendships and the beauty of the landscape would, sadly, all be shown to have been the exaggerated constructs of an overly imaginative mind.

Happily, I discovered my feelings for the people and the places were even stronger than I had known or remembered - embraces and handshakes, tears both of mirth and affection, and above all laughter, abounded. And the land, the awesome beauty of the sky, the fields of green and lavender occasionally dotted with the crimson/orange glow of prairie lilies, the ribbons of highway running straight ahead for miles and disappearing into the curving horizon, simply overwhelmed me.

Sebald brilliantly describes the almost physical sensation of experiencing time. I felt it throughout the prairies but most palpably as I neared Watrous and began to recognize farm houses and landmarks and to link them to memories from my past. As we drove to Manitou Beach I told Nancy of a frightening ride 40 years ago around cemetery corner on the back of a friend’s 1954 Harley. A few hours later a number of us were sharing similar stories with the rider. Fortunately we had all survived those and other scary rides during our vainglorious youth.

Gravity and genetics had wreaked their expected havoc on the physical appearance of each of us – on some more noticeably than others – but without exception our spirits seemed to have remained indomitable. Nicknames were resurrected, old infatuations and secret attractions were confessed and welcomed, giving hugs of greeting and farewell more poignancy for some.

There we were gathered, farmers, nurses, teachers, biologists, corporate executives, lawyers, accountants – children of Saskatchewan one and all though some of us had long since been physically removed from our roots. Our past was our link to this present moment and we marveled at our good fortune to be back here sharing these memories and planning for the future when we will meet again.

Wallace Stegner’s memoirs of his childhood in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan accompanied us. In Wolf Willow he writes of a conversation he had with an English friend who had been raised in privilege, introduced to the classics of literature and art at a very early age. Stegner wondered how somehow raised in a small prairie town or farm could make up for having been deprived of the fruits of high culture. His English friend offered that “perhaps you got something else in place of all that”.

Stegner reflected and concluded, “I am not certain I would trade my childhood freedom and the outdoors and the senses for a childhood of being led by the hand past all the Turners in the National Gallery….anyone starting from deprivation is spared getting bored. You may not get a good start but you may get up a considerable head of steam.”

I agree with Stegner. Looking ahead to this trip it wasn’t clear to me why I was so eager to return. Was it simply that I missed my past, with its youthful optimism and the excitement of having most of my life ahead of me? Was it a longing to go back to a time and place where nothing seemed impossible or unattainable?

There was some of that, there is always that element in any homecoming; but I discovered there was much more which had brought me home. Only upon returning did I realize how much I missed the prairie - its redolence, the sound of the wind, the movement of the endless fields of grain and grass like waves in a vast sea, the dramatic and ever changing sky filled with majestic thunderheads – the combination producing almost a concupiscence.

I realized how much I missed the people of Saskatchewan - their optimism, their readiness to laugh and cry, their transparency, their freedom from smugness and conceit, their imagination and most of all their honesty.

Five of us sat in The Diner at Manitou Beach as our host and his wife entertained us after our dinner with You Are My Sunshine and Beautiful Brown Eyes, and other songs we each had grown up with and which our parents had sung to us. We were all moved to tears. These were not maudlin tears, but tears that honoured the genuineness of the care our hosts extended to us and that acknowledged the simplicity of our own beginnings – the ‘something else’ that we all shared.

My homecoming helped me to see the contrast between a prairie culture where the past is honoured and integrated into the present and the future, and the urbanized culture where the tendency is to break with everything which still has some living connection with the past, all in the name of progress.

This urban culture looks condescendingly at the prairie culture, which it considers to be anachronistic, perhaps even dull. Urban culture measures advancement quantitatively – how many restaurants, theatres, art galleries, cappuccino bars and beaches (nude or clothed, gay or straight) can you choose to go to on a given day.

T.S. Eliot wrote that “if we take culture seriously, we see that a people does not need merely enough to eat but a proper and particular cuisine.” We would do well as a nation to have more places like The Diner.

Oh, Canada - Chapter 10 - Flagging Faith

2005-06-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

The death of religion, the decay of commitment to a nation and its traditions, and the breakdown of families mean the removal of the most important foci of particular loyalties that in the past sustained such moral traits as duty, service, sacrifice, loyalty and fortitude. What is left is not an amoral or an immoral society but one that can make only limited moral demands on its members.

The Strange Death of Moral Britain - Christie Davies

"the best political thinkers must affirm "the universality of the Church against the particularity of the city" and display "a skepticism toward every human self–assertion that remains particular." That is, they must defend the republic, civilization, and the Church against barbarism. But at the same time, and no less urgently, they must defend the truth—and thus freedom of thought, the individual, and the Church—against the despotism toward which all nations tend when they resist the influence of the truth of revelation"

The American Republic - Orestes Brownson

I went to the Flag Shop in Vancouver yesterday. I wanted to buy a flag for the flagpole on our dock. With Canada Day approaching, I entered the shop thinking I would buy a Canadian flag. I had it in my hand but I returned it to the rack and left without buying it. I am not certain this was a watershed moment for me as I was able to purchase a BC flag, but I was struck by the rush of feelings that swept over me as I looked at the 72"x 36" red Maple Leaf.

I did not feel as I thought I ought to feel in the presence of my country's flag. I didn't feel patriotic or proud. I felt sad and disappointed and slightly melancholic, I felt a sense of loss.

As hundreds of new Canadians are sworn in as citizens this Canada Day what are the uniquely Canadian traditions and values we expect them to embrace? Are there any moral traits that we Canadians can urge upon our new citizens?

Tolerance and diversity have become the new traditions of Canadians. Politicians, police chiefs, fire chiefs and clergymen now trip over themselves to be seen front and centre in Gay Pride parades.

How many would attend if we organized a Christian Pride Day and paraded down the streets of Toronto and Vancouver on the Feast of Corpus Christi? Would it be the number one news item on CBC Newsworld? Would the major TV stations have reporters lining the streets to interview the participants and the observers? Would the mayor of Toronto proudly announce "we are the the most faithful city in Canada" or does being the Gayest City trump all comers?

More likely we would be criticized, derided and ignored. The media would find some poor misanthrope in our midst and he or she would become the media's poster person. Tolerance has become a one way street in the new Canada and a dead-end one at that.

The rhetoric directed to the new Canadian is abundant. Canada is the envy of the world because of the freedoms we enjoy here we tell them. We parade our new citizens through the streets of our own Potemkin village and point out our universal health care system (while ignoring its brokenness), our unique bilingualism ( while ignoring the rise of Quebec separatist sympathies), our rich aboriginal traditions (while ignoring the lunacy and wastefulness of our paternalistic policy toward our aboriginals), our economic strength (while ignoring our crippling taxes bureaucratic wastefulness and political corruption), our role in the world as peacekeepers (ignoring our plummet down the ranks due to a neglected military).

Christie Davies suggests a society such as ours has become neither amoral nor immoral. We have become antinomian as we have rejected our traditional socially established morality in favour of a new causalism, a society obsessed with rights while ignoring duty and service and sacrifice.

We have gone the way of the world described by Dennis Enright:

- "The world has become man's right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest...the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book, the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street. That's the way the world has gone."

I want to fly the Canadian flag, but I feel I would have to fly it at half mast. I am not ready to fly a white flag either.

So in my insignificant way I will continue to encourage thinking Canadians not to stand by and let all of our traditions die.

Letting Things Happen

2005-06-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

“The whole rotten beastliness of things today doesn’t happen because people do it, but because everyone lets it happen. Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing things.”
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil

My thoughts are directed toward Canada’s collective citizenry and the sad spectacle as enough of us stand by and let politicians indulge in all manner of “beastliness” – corruption, fiscal mismanagement, blind commitment to party policy over personal conviction, eagerness to change the definition of marriage.

I know the liberal media has characterized folks like me and (C)conservatives generally, as somehow being angry and hateful of Canada. This is nonsense but it doesn’t prevent it from being proposed by popular columnists, and endorsed by editorial staffs that choose whose letters to publish in response to the columns. I love our country but lament what it is becoming a - relativistic, smug, shrug infected, ‘what me worry’, we are the greatest, the world looks to us with envy – joke.

Canada Day is a week away. I will be back in Saskatchewan celebrating the centenary of that province and the 40th reunion of my graduating high school class. Nancy and I are driving back as there is really no better way (short of riding a bike which an industrious couple we know is doing in annual stages) to appreciate the enormousness and physical splendour of this country of ours.

Along the way we plan to stop over in little towns to better reacquaint ourselves with the mostly forgotten and utterly ignored (from a political perspective) rural Canadians; most of whom descend from immigrants who chose Canada as the place that would offer them hope and opportunity absent in their native lands.

I believe that if I kept driving all across Canada and avoided the major urban centers that the majority of people I would meet would share my concerns for how we have let things happen in Canada over the last few decades, and most alarmingly in the last 5 years.

My trip may prove me wrong. I may find that of the returning members of the 37 graduates from the Class of ’65, the percentage that shares my views is no greater than that in my urban West Side Vancouver community. Interestingly, while there are certainly more farmers in the ranks of my graduating class than one would find in an urban setting, there are doctors and lawyers and dentists and nurses and pharmacists, and teachers and property developers and senior financial and industrial executives amongst my cohorts – arguably a higher percentage of post secondary degrees than many urban schools produced 40 years ago.

Still I doubt I will be proven wrong. Letting things happen is not natural to the prairie psyche. Fields had to be cleared of trees, stumps had to be pulled, land had to be broken, fields had to be seeded, and houses had to be built. Bargains had to be kept, promises had to be honoured – the community didn’t function otherwise.

That was two generations ago. The next generation had to leave wives and children and parents and fields and businesses and prospects, to venture back to the continent from which the parents of many had left in order to fight and in many cases to die to preserve a freedom they cherished.

Now the next generation, better educated, better fed, more prosperous, more sophisticated, looks back with occasional pride at the accomplishments of its ancestors, but mostly shrugs and says aren’t we privileged not to be American!

Look how we are blessed with clean air, and magnificent geography, and fabulous skiing, and boating and golf courses and wineries and Medicare and lots of oil and fresh water. And aren’t we more tolerant, inclusive, peace-loving than those crazy Yanks. Aren't we lucky to have this freedom to do what we please?

Canada in 2005 seems to me a place that doesn’t really know how it arrived at where it is. Canada’s recent history reminds me of Ulrich’s reflection on history in Musil’s seminal novel from which I sourced my epigram:

“The course of history….was like a man sauntering through the streets – diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people, or by an unusual way one building jutted out and the next stood back from the street – finally arriving at a place that he had neither known of nor meant to reach. There was inherent in history a certain element of going off course. The present moment was always like the last house in town, which somehow no longer quite counts among the town houses.”

That absent-minded meandering image is evocative to me as the picture of Canada having gone off course. We have truly arrived at a place most of us had never known nor meant to reach.

And now we must decide whether to do something or to continue to let it happen.

It may already be too late, we may have wandered so far from the village we once knew that we can never find our way back or we would not recognize it if we did.

When we are willing to change the meaning of something as fundamental to our understanding of whom we are and where we have come from as marriage, we are lost. When in the same week we laud the granting of a Doctor of Law degree to an abortionist and raise not a whisper of protest when a court upholds the suspension of a teacher for writing a letter to the editor referencing the biblical admonitions against homosexuality, we are lost. When we permit our politicians to lie and cheat their way back into power, we are lost. When we are more concerned about how a potential Prime Minister looks than about what he really thinks and stands for and not what the media invent, we are lost. When we fight to prevent citizens from having the right to get the best medical care they can afford in order to preserve the myth of a functioning universally accessible health care system, we are lost.

We seem guaranteed to have a federal election in the next 6 months. Will we let things happen again, or will enough of us actually do something to help us find our way back on course?

The Ineluctably Unelectable Harper

2005-06-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

As summer approaches, Gomery ennui inexorably leads both discouraged Conservatives and fickle journalists to resort to scapegoating as an explanation for the survival of what even Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente concedes is the “worst government in a generation”.

Canada suffers not only from a lack of standards, but when it comes to selecting political leaders, from a confusion or inversion of standards. Mr. Martin was thought to be a great candidate for Prime Minister because of his effectiveness at balancing the budget when Finance Minister; now we know him as Mr. Dithers. Polls say that more than 60% of Canadians believe Mr. Martin would lie to preserve his place in power, yet the Liberals lead the polls in Ontario by 20 basis points over the Conservatives whose leader they believe to be more honest, but less likely to be an effective leader.

In considering what it is Canadians think they are looking for in a Prime Minister, one is reminded of the story of the French butcher who, having need of legal assistance, finally, after looking over a number of lawyers, chose the fattest one.

Recently not only journalists but friends have used the unelectable label in reference to Mr. Harper. These are thoughtful men and women who see no irony in their assertion that Mr. Harper has fallen under the shadow that afflicted Robert Stanfield and later Preston Manning. They may also be more familiar with the Eastern Canadian mindset than I am.

Unelectable – just what makes one unelectable? There surely are some solid objective reasons for someone to be unelectable. One may be unqualified by reason of birthright (not a citizen), character (a convicted felon), capacity (a certified lunatic) – there may be other reasons. These are rare impediments, so the label’s source must be subjective in nature.

The label had been used in Canada before and with prophetic accuracy. Robert Stanfield was declared unelectable the moment he fumbled that football on some airport tarmac. It mattered little that he was competing for the role of Prime Minister and not wide receiver – he looked awkward with his bald pate, his Lincolnesque gawkiness without the flowing rhetoric – and hence he was unelectable. That his opponent was a Gallic extrovert, urbane, conceited, and confident served only to exaggerate the contrast between the two.

I had two occasions upon which to experience that Trudeau charm. On one of those I was also led to make the shallow and thoughtless comparison between the charisma of Trudeau and the ordinariness of Stanfield. The first was in the spring of 1968 at the law school at the University of Saskatchewan. Trudeau, then the Justice Minister, was visiting Saskatoon and at the invitation of the Dean and later Justice Minister Otto Lang (funny how these things happen). Trudeau attended a social event the law school was holding at a local curling rink. I was in a jolly mood as I recall, having led my curling team to victory in the annual Law School bonspiel (the only trophy with my name on it you will find in the display case).

Trudeau arrived and the room was abuzz – for those of us less turned on by his brilliant mind - his date, the divine Dinah Christie, was the real head turner. That this old dude could squire a gorgeous TV star made him eminently electable no matter what his politics. I was sufficiently enthralled to help Otto Lang squeeze out his 555 vote victory in the June 1968 election. (As an aside upon which I will write more later, the ability of Saskatchewan voters generally not to fall under these charisma-induced spells is evidenced in the results of that election. While the Liberals swept to power with a majority, Saskatchewan elected 2 Liberals, 6 NDP and 5 PC).

Two years later in the winter of 1970 Nancy and I attended a rally in a large indoor arena during the Canada Winter Games. The only reason we went was because Trudeau was speaking. We arrived late and were jammed in with hundreds of others near the entrance, with Trudeau only a speck at the far end of the arena. As I looked around I spied this innocuous looking bald man scrunched into a doorway not far from me. It was Robert Stanfield! No entourage, no one paying any particular attention to him. there stood the leader of the opposition.

There was pathos in that scene which we recognized even then, but for the wrong reasons. There stood the unelectable Robert Stanfield. A political cipher who we now know was a brilliant, thoughtful, kind, respectful, fiscally and socially conservative man. A man who would not have driven our country deep into debt, who would not have invoked a repressive War Measures Act, who would not have enacted a divisive and costly National Energy Program who would not have pirouetted behind the Queen’s back or flipped the bird to disgruntled folks in Salmon Arm and told farmers to practice unsavoury eating habits.

Isn't it interesting how Trudeau's arrogance and disdain for the common man was cast as a swashbuckling, irreverent gunslinger persona - one who made milquetoast Canadians stand taller; while Harper's alleged sometimes acid tongue, even when speaking the truth, is characterized as anger and vindictiveness.

So Canada turned away from the boring unelectable Stanfield in favour of the exciting Trudeau. And after we tired of his arrogance and sent him for his walk in the snow, we welcomed him back a year later because he promised to feed our hunger for excitement in a way the plodding Joe Who could never hope to.

Today the Liberal spin apparatchiks and their 5th estate minions have convinced us we are faced with a choice between Mr. Dithers and Mr. Unelectable. Though we know Mr. Dithers and his gang will lie to us and steal from us, we have survived it for years. So enough of us will choose to stay with the proverbial devil we know rather than risk the imagined one we don’t.

And just what is so devilish about Mr. Harper, besides having that unelectable aura about him? He doesn’t smile enough it seems. He doesn’t seem comfortable around crowds and he just doesn’t have that “hail fellow well met” quality we like in our politicians. He is not much for small talk and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

I would argue this unelectable label is a completely conjured construct – a brilliant piece of Liberal prestidigitation, a shell game worthy of the most craven carney barker. Margaret Wente writes that Toronto businessmen thought Harper to have less personality than an actuary. Well we assume at least one Toronto businessman thought this and he is the one she chose to quote.

I concede it is not only Ontarians who have not warmed to Mr. Harper; many Westerners have come to the same conclusion. They felt the same way about Preston Manning, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet in my experience, anyone who has met Mr. Manning invariably finds him to be charming, bright, humorous and passionately thoughtful about the need to make Canada a better place than it is.

Harper like Manning carrries the burden of Western roots and, most problematically for this age a strong Christian faith, and an evangelical Protestant one to boot. This may by itself drive the final nail into his unelectable coffin. In this age any secular argument against changes to social policy is quickly re-characterized as religious or based on personal morality. Thus Mr. Harper’s well reasoned arguments against the re-definition of marriage – arguments supported by numerous secular authorities and arguably by half of the Canadian citizenry – are dismissed as homophobic, moralistic, self-righteous and well just downright scary.

Canada needs a good dose of prairie pragmatism, particularly the Saskatchewan variety. During my lifetime I have seen the Saskatchewan voters embrace the CCF and its successor the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives. A new party, the Saskatchewan Party, is currently the official opposition in Saskatchewan. When a political party and its leadership failed to live up to its promises, it was invariably thrown from office. If it was found that malfeasance had been committed by ministers of the crown or by senior bureaucrats, as occurred in the Devine Conservative era, it didn’t take an army of lawyers and Royal Commissioners to sort things out. Offenders were charged, convicted and sentenced to jail for crimes much less egregious than those it seems certain were committed by senior members of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Unelectable means something quite different in the 306 Area Code than it does in the 905 or the 604 code. And, if a politician’s defeat in Saskatchewan is ineluctable, it is because of what he did or didn’t do, and not because of how warmly he works a crowd or how readily he abandons his principles in exchange for power.

One can only hope the summer barbeque circuit will fatten Mr. Harper up and make him more electable!

A Mother's Love

2005-05-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

“A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition.

No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer.”

The Measure of My Days. Florida Scott-Maxwell

I came across this quote with all its simplicity and profoundness, in a little book recommended by a friend - A House by the Sea, by May Sarton.

It helps explain that unique love and devotion shown by a mother for her children. Even the most devoted father eventually loosens his grip on the weight of hope and expectation that parenthood brings. It also served to remind me of how much I miss my own mother who died at the age of 50, before she could see me become a parent and give her two grandsons she would have adored.

And it added a measure of grief to the loss of a friend in the past week. Only 65, she leaves behind a husband, two children and several grandchildren. That grief is tempered by the fact of her deep Christian faith, and her confidence and mine that she has passed to a new life and new body which are both imperishable.

Pillow Talk - Peter and Belinda

2005-05-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Belinda: Peter, sweetie-pie, strong and handsome one, would you mind doing me a favour this morning?

Peter: Of course my high cheek-boned teutonic temptress, anything you ask.

Belinda: Would you please call that horrible man Stephen Harper, that bully who insists on forcing us to work on a principled political agenda, rather than just give those Ontario folks whatever they want.

Peter: Of course munchkin, what would you like me to say to Stevie boy?

Belinda: Tell him that sweet old man Martin replied to my blackberry message last night. You know I send one out every day to my Daddy reporting on what is happening in caucus. I guess I inadvertently sent it to Mr. Martin and he responded right away.

Peter: What did you say in the email my warrior vahine, my amazing amazon?

Belinda: Oh you know, the usual stuff. "Dear Sugar Daddy, that Mr. Harper is so horrid and boring. He has no interest in preserving our non-renewable water resources. He insists on seating me next Stockwell Day who is even more straight and boring than Mr. Harper. Harper is so young Daddy, I won't ever be able to lead this party while he is around. I mean like, he has no life. All he does is read, write policy statements, spend time with his kids. He never boogies down at the clubs by the Rideau Canal with Petie and me - he is just so boring. I wish I could be over on the other side with Scott Brison who is so cool, I love his coloured shirts and those long side-burns and he has such style and he's so gay and so cuddly. I am sad, Sugar Daddy, can you cheer me up?"

Peter: What did Martin say?

Belinda: He is such a sweet man, so like Daddy and almost as rich. He said: "Sweet Belinda, cross the floor with me and I will put you in charge of the most renewable of resources, Human Resources. We have been using them to our advantage for decades now and you just never run out of them Belinda. It is amazing, we abuse them, we lie to them, we steal from them, and when they complain a bit, we just lie to them again, throw back to them some of the money we stole, and tell them we will save them from the scary Conservatives. East of the Manitoba border, they come back to us in droves. It is amazing! And, we Liberals know how to party and we know how to spend money honey, and Scott will be delighted to have your stylish pant suits next to him. He will even forgive you for shacking up with Peter.

Peter: But my dyed blonde goddess, my ticket to paradise, what did you say? What have you done?

Belinda: I said yes silly, what do you expect? I couldn't bear another minute of having to play second fiddle to that Rona Ambrose with her quick tongue, and her own boobs and her perky western enthusiasm and her ideas - God she has all these ideas, like who has time for them unless they get you into power right now. So be a good boy and tell Stevie boy that I am putting on my lavender power pant suit this morning and announcing I am joining the Liberals because, well because, let's see because, well they want me and they believe in Canada and they get it, like you know they understand Quebec, and they won't go to bed with the Bloc, and they like gays, and they like to spend money like - aw Petie, sweetie, don't make me have to think of a reason!

Peter (pulling on his rugby shorts and heading out the room): Oh my dim bimbo Belinda, what have you done? It's back to beer and burgers down at the rugby club for me.

On phone: Hi Stephen, it's Peter. You were right old buddy, money can't buy you love, but it can buy you a cabinet seat.

(Fade to black)

Lady Macbeth - aka Stronach

2005-05-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

Ms. Stronach today enters the wasteland of the political rogues who, unencumbered by intellect, have allowed the weeds of their ambition to choke the flowers of principle.

We are indeed a nation of utter rubes if we don't see the Lady Macbeth syndrome hard at work here.

Like Lady Macbeth in Act I Scene V, Stronach has called upon the spirits of crass political opportunism to "stop up the access and passage to remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose".

Mr. Martin would do well to watch his back for Lady Stronach will soon call up the "thick night, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark". Fortunately for Mr. Martin she is so dim and inept she will likely stumble over a discarded principle and stab herself first.

It is a dark time in Canadian political history and I suspect there are more tempests to be endured before this tragedy reaches its climax.

Ms. Stronach can now make her impassioned pleas to the Liberal caucus to support pet projects of hers such as "preserving our precious non-renewable resource of fresh water".

The Liberal Cabinet has just dumbed down another notch with her addition, and the Conservatives should be relieved she has gone.

Paul Martin - The Black Knight

2005-05-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

Oh, oh, I see, running away then. You yellow
bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite
your legs off! - BLACK KNIGHT to King Arthur - Scene 4 - In Search of the Holy Grail

In yet another stark example of life imitating art, our Prime Minister today stood before the nation, announced that he now would send $170 million of aid to Darfur, and assured us that his government is in control and functioning as it ought.

I could not help but be taken back to the Black Knight scene in Monty Python's "In Search of the Holy Grail". (Here is the link to the scene's script for those of you unfamiliar with it -http://www.rit.edu/~smo4215/monty.htm#Scene%204)

King Arthur comes upon the Black Knight who appears to be a worthy knight. He invites him to join the crusade, but the knight repudiates the King and challenges him to a fight. Arthur systematically whacks away the knight's extremeties one at a time, at each juncture offering him the chance to yield with grace. The graceless, stubborn knight refuses and becomes more aggressive with the loss of each limb. The scene ends with the armless and legless torso of the Black Knight spitting invective at King Arthur.

There is much that is Pythonesque about what is happening in Ottawa and Mr. Martin as the Black Knight is the most pathetic figure of all. Feckless and desperately hoping that enough Canadians will be gormless enough to swallow the Liberal propaganda that will paint them as victim of a power hungry Conservative/Bloc alliance, Mr. Martin clings to power and offers tax payer money as bribes to the NDP, to Ontarians and to the push-me-pull-me member from Edmonton Mr. Kilgour.

Is there an ounce of self-respect left in Mr. Martin and the Liberal party or are they so utterly soaked in the slime of sycophancy and malfeasance that has emerged from the Gomery inquiry, that there is no hope of lighting even the faintest flicker of a flame of conscience amongst them?

But then conscience appears to be a word bereft of any real meaning in the lexicon of politicians who have not been humbled by electoral defeat. George Cardinal Pell says, "We think well when we understand moral principles and apply them in clear and reasonable ways; we think badly when we ignore or reinvent moral principles, or apply them in ambiguous and unreasonable ways. 'Good conscience' in this way of understanding, means a grasp and good application of moral truth - for it is the truth that remains primary, the truth that is grapsed and applied by the practical mind."

Should Paul Martin and the Liberals be re-elected when the election comes as it inevitably must, it will mean that conscience for a sufficient number of Canadians has come to mean nothing more than a personal freedom to judge by our own resources and to act as we each think best for ourselves. The corruption, mendacity, avarice for power and generally dissolute nature of the Liberal party and the core of its leadership will have been ignored. The opportunity for the many decent, honest, thoughtful Liberals to clean house, regroup and emerge in 4 or 5 years out from under the rotten carcass that now covers them, will have been lost.

The re-election of the federal Liberals will mean Canada will have lost even more of its lustre as a nation. The little stump of a man and the ragtag band of moral cripples whom he protects will indeed have won another battle. He will have bitten off the legs of the latest crusader for truth and justice and accountability and all Canadians will be tarnished by his victory.

Pilgrim Thoughts

2005-05-10T21:24:00.000-07:00

“Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.” Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry

It is with a mixture of excitement and anxiety that I look forward to my return to Saskatchewan for my 40th high school reunion Homecoming celebration.

The flood of memories that comes with anticipating a 40 year reunion is rather daunting. What will those girls I was madly in love with in Grade 12 look like now? Will I even be able to hit the green on that 140 yard par 3 where I made my one and only hole in one? How will I match up against those old friends on the “who has best resisted the ravages of time?” measure? Will we have anything to talk about except old times? Will it matter if we don’t? Will some of them even remember me?

This looking back is captured so poignantly by Wendell Berry in his novel Jayber Crow. In the passage Crow looks back on his life after he has returned to the small Kentucky town where he spent a few years of his youth as an orphan in the care of his elderly aunt and uncle. He has just visited the graves of his parents, his aunt and uncle and others who were the links to his past.

As he stood over their graves he thought,

“I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world. I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone…This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost.

I saw that for me this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences and absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.”

It occurs to me that too often I forget about the world that was and the world that is to come. And I fail to pause and find the time to give life to that feeling that I too have been led. We all could benefit from moments of reflection on our lives as ignorant pilgrims.

Oh, Canada - Chapter 9 -

2005-05-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

Dreams, they say, tell stories
To explain away our woes
And so we go on living.

If we didn’t do such dreadful things, we would have a better opinion of ourselves. If we had a better opinion of ourselves we wouldn’t do such dreadful things.

D.J. Enright – Injury Time

I have had to recuse myself for several weeks now from producing any critical commentary on the sad state of affairs in our “home and native land”. My therapy was to escape to a quiet spot by the sea and labour in my garden, avoid newspapers, television and radio and take time to observe the natural world around me.

I saw a hummingbird wander into my cottage, hover about for a few moments and somehow discern the open patio door through which it fled apace. I followed the ripples on the surface of the bay in those moments before sunset as grebes, wood ducks and seals glided on or near the surface and marveled at how the gulls all let out their loud squawks just as the last rays of sunlight hit the top of the pier piling.

Then I returned to the city, and the newspapers and CBC Newsworld and the Gomery Inquiry and Minister Volpe calling Conservatives Ku Klux Klaners, and I felt the need to share a few thoughts with you.

What does Mr. Martin dream about I wonder? Is he able to sleep at all? How does a fundamentally decent man deal with the reality that he has been caught out to be a hollow man, a shallow man, a man bereft of vision, a man whose dominant reason for becoming Prime Minister was to avenge the failure of his father to survive the juggernaut of Trudeau-mania and eventually suffer the ignominy of banishment from the front benches at the hand of getaway driver M. Chretien.

Is he able to sleep and dream and explain away his woes and waken ready to face another day of specious argumentation and bold faced mendacity? Or does he toss and turn and wrestle with his conscience? How is it he cannot muster the courage to do the right thing and step down?

Enright’s tautology on self concept struck a chord with me as I read it again today. He brilliantly captures the human condition. The Anglican liturgy does the same with its General Confession where the souls in the pews confess that “we have left undone those things we ought to have done, and we have done those things we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us”. What an unpopular message in today's culture.

As individual Canadians, even the most obtuse and disinterested amongst us must by now be aware there is something rotten in the corridors of power in our smug nation. Many of us seem to find various effective ways to explain away our nation's woes - the skill to do so seemingly more prevalent East of the Manitoba/Ontario border.

“All politicians are crooked, everybody does it, Harper is scary, wait till Gomery completes his investigation” – pick your palliative, but for goodness sake don’t make me stop and think about what my tolerance of systemic graft and corruption at the highest levels of government says about the opinion I have of myself as a Canadian and of my country.

As I brace myself for another federal election I am more and more attracted to another Enright witticism – “Used to read the newspaper…. Used to read the headlines…. Used to read the first two or three words of the headlines…Have given up reading.”

In Denial

2005-03-11T16:47:00.000-08:00

When asked if he thought that a woman should have been escorting a male defendant, Mr. Howard said, "Yes. Women are capable of doing anything men are capable are doing."

Mr. Howard is the Atlanta Georgia District Attorney. A male prisoner had just overpowered his female deputy, seized her gun, shot her then entered the court room where he was to appear to face a rape charge and killed the judge and court reporter. He killed another deputy as he fled the courthouse.

The power of politically correct indoctrination knows no limits. Even in these circumstances, the District Attorney could not allow himself to question the wisdom of allowing individual female police officers to escort dangerous male prisoners.

The irrefutable fact that a woman is not capable of doing anything a man can do is no longer politically acceptable and hence a collective denial occurs. Deny the reality, deny the consequences – our society is in a state of denial.

Women are now being asked to do things they should not be doing and sometimes they and others die as a result. The differences between the sexes are no longer even admitted by society, much less honoured and respected. Chivalry is dead, chastity is dead, demureness is dead, even fatherhood and being a husband are dead – first embarrassed then demeaned then beaten down and ultimately declared obsolete, these markers of the essential otherness that distinguish male from female will soon be lost even from memory.

A generation is being taught to forget the errors of the past. By believing everything we will believe in nothing and the world will become a sad and dreary and loveless place. And at the funerals of innocents, in the place of hymns with soaring lyrics like “O death where is thy sting” we will hear sung with absolutely no irony, treacly paeans like “we wish you all the luck in the world”.

Marriage Debates - When Ideas Lose Their Fragrance

2005-02-17T21:00:00.000-08:00

A professional politician has too much to do to have leisure for serious reading, even on politics. He has far too little time for exchange of ideas and information with men of distinction in other walks of life.

It is unlikely, in all the mass of letterpress, that the proufoundest and most original works will reach the eye or command the attention of a large public, or even a good number of readers who are qualified to appreciate them. The ideas which flatter a current tendency or emotional attitude will go farthest and some others will be distorted to fit in with what is already accepted; the residuum in the public mind is hardly likely to be the distillation of the best and the wisest.

In this way are formed the idees recu which because of their emotional influence upon that part of the public which is influenced by printed matters, have to be taken into account by the professional politician and treated with respect in public utterances. It is unnecessary that these ideas should be consistent among themselves and, however they contradict each other the practical politician must handle them with as much deference as if they were the constructive informed sagacity, the intuitions of genius or the accumulate wisdom of ages. He has not as a rule, inhaled any fragrance they may have had when they were fresh he only noses them when they have already begun to stink. T.S. Eliot – Notes Toward the Definition of Culture

Forgive me for the length of the epigram. After reading today’s major Canadian newspaper accounts of Wednesday's opening debates on the Civil Marriage Act, and reviewing the actual texts in Hansard of the speeches of Mr. Martin, Mr. Harper, Mr. Doucette and Mr. Siskay on behalf of the four political parties; I could not help but be drawn back to wise Mr. Eliot.

The Globe & Mail, Canada’s self proclaimed national newspaper emphasized Mr. Martin’s staunch defence of fundamental human rights as the “Canadian way” and quoted out of context Mr. Harper’s reference to historical evidence of the Liberal party’s past failures at protecting what all would agree are human rights (less than subtly inferring Mr. Harper’s comments were out of time and out of tune with the more highly evolved society we now live in).

Mr. Siskay’s sexuality as a gay man seemed more important to the writer than what he had to say, though given the intensely emotional and personal tenor of his speech, this was hardly a surprise. Mr. Doucette was simply over the top, though perhaps predictably so. He practically leaped to the ramparts waving the fleur de lis and singing the Marseillaise. Need I do more than reference his opening paragraph: “Despite its tragedies, the French Revolution represents an important milestone in the long history of democracy and law. The expression Liberty, fraternity, equality is an integral part of this debate. All human beings are born free and equal under the law.”

None of the newspaper reports addressed the substance of what was said; in particular Mr. Harper’s speech was described as legalistic and pedantic, when erudite would have been a more accurate adjective. Rather these publications offer up ideas “which flatter a current tendency or emotional attitude”.

When I read the actual speeches I was struck by Mr. Martin’s dependence on broad brush generalities many of which were illogical, self-contradictory or in some cases simply incomprehensible.

Let me cite a few examples:

I believe in and I will fight for a Canada that respects the foresight and the vision of those who created and entrenched the charter.

The creators of the Charter purposefully made no mention of sexual orientation when they drafted the Charter, and the notwithstanding clause that Mr. Martin currently claims to abhor was a critical safeguard built into the Charter to protect parliament and its citizens from overzealous judicial activism.

There are few nations whose citizens cannot look to Canada and see their own reflection. For generations, men, women and families from the four corners of the globe have made the decision to choose Canada as their home. Many have come here seeking freedom of thought, religion and belief, seeking the freedom simply to be.

I am reluctant to try and interpret just what Mr. Martin means by his first sentence. Is he praising Canada’s exaltation of the individual? What does it mean to say a citizen of another nation looks at Canada and sees himself? Is Canada a mere reflecting pool, a shallow one at that? Is there nothing distinctive and attractive, indeed lovely about Canada in and of itself to attract more than the narcissist for an immigrant? And is there a more vacuous way to describe the motivation for immigration to Canada than to seek the freedom “to simply be”?

It was here that T.S. Eliot’s words began to ring in my brain. How does Mr. Martin form his ideas? To what sources does he go to when he seeks to shape his thoughts into words that will clarify, inspire, convince or persuade those who listen to him? The product hardly seems to be “the distillation of the best and the wisest”.

Mr. Martin’s political theory seems to fit the description of Eliot’s when he said that out of the process described in the epigram “comes a political theory which is less concerned with human nature, which it is inclined to treat as something which can always be re-fashioned to fit whatever political form is regarded as most desirable.”

Mr. Harper by contrast chose to eschew rhetoric and methodically reveal the inconsistencies and contradictions in the government’s position. Mr. Harper quoted from debates in the House when Parliament last debated the definition of marriage in 1999 where the existing and historical definition was vigorously defended by the Liberals. He concluded by showing the hypocrisy of the Liberals when he said:

“Today, for making statements that are identical and for identical reasons, members of the government side resort to terms like bigot, reactionary and human rights violators. The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the government and some of its members at this point is frankly staggering.”

Mr. Harper quoted from Supreme Court decisions and referenced extensively the opinions of Canadian academics to refute the contention that the definition of marriage has to be changed in order to provide the rights and protections being sought by homosexuals. He met head on the contention that the right to same sex marriage is a human right by noting it has expressly been considered not to be such by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, most explicitly in its rejection of an appeal from a New Zealand court of appeal decision interpreting the New Zealand Bill of Rights not to provide the foundation for opening marriage to members of the same sex.

Harper’s reference to the historical abuses of human rights by previous Liberal administrations was made in the context of emphatically pricking the sanctimony balloon which the Liberals float up with their rhetorical accusations that the Conservatives seek to take away the rights of citizens.

Harper concluded by asking three important questions:

Will this society be one which respects the longstanding basic social institution of marriage or will it be one that believes even our most basic structures can be reinvented overnight for the sake of political correctness?

Will this society be one which respects and honours the religious and cultural minorities or one which gradually whittles away their freedoms and their ability to practise their beliefs?

Will this be a country in which Parliament will rule on behalf of the people or one where a self-selected group of lawyers or experts will define the parameters of right and wrong?

The Liberal position emanates from the faulty belief that human nature can be refashioned to fit whatever political form is regarded as most desirable. It emanates from an emotional rather than a thoughtful and reasoned response to the cry for recognition from a minority group in society which can point to a history of prejudice. The result is intellectual dishonesty and a clear disregard for the opinions of a majority of Canadian men and women of good will.

I encourage all of you not to rely on newspaper accounts of what is being said in parliamentary debates when it is so easy to go to the source. Here is the link to Hansard's site. http://canadaonline.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=canadaonline&zu=http://www.parl.gc.ca/common/Chamber_House_Debates.asp?Language=E&Parl=38&Ses=1

I fear the truth has already begun to decay by the time it passes through the hands of most mainstream editors, and the fragrance of the ideas they have distilled will not be pleasant.

Oh, Canada - Chapter 8 - Dancing and Dining

2005-02-15T13:18:00.000-08:00

“Where appetite seizes the reins of the soul of the city, it drives the chariot toward ruin; so it is the very art of good governance to seek to perfect the intricate and delicate choreography of moral and legal custom that will best promote the sway of reverent reason in city and soul alike.” David B. Hart

The image of the art of good governance as likened to the role of choreographer is helpful to me. The choreographer seeks to fuse the rhythm of the music with the movements of the dancers, the successful union being a pleasing experience for the participants and the observers alike. If appetite seizes any one of the choreographer, the musician or the dancer – by appetite I mean the self centred desire to satisfy one’s own needs, without concern for those of others – the result will rarely be pleasing.

From this observer’s perspective what is being played out on the Canadian dance floor resembles a St. Vitas dance and the governing committee of choreographers whether political, cultural, academic, journalistic or even religious have badly lost their syncopation. I fear the majority of Canadians have chosen to stand in the shadows and observe with a mixture of sadness, bemusement and anger at this perplexing display.

Moving to the second metaphor in my epigram, it seems we live in a society and a culture where appetite has indeed “seized the reins” as David Hart puts it. It is an insatiable appetite for the freedom to exercise limitless choice and uninhibited self expression. This triumph of the appetite has dulled our collective palate such that those who now question the wisdom of some of the entrees on the menu of choice and self expression are variously labeled as unimaginative (tastes are always evolving), patronizing (how dare you tell me how to satisfy my appetite), or sanctimonious (what makes your taste superior to mine).

The label is usually the first and often the only response from the one about to sample the latest freedom delicacy. Little attempt is made to examine the reasoning behind the cautionary advice to give a sober second thought before biting into the flavour du jour - this despite evidence that the new meal might well make you sick. So what if it makes me sick says the prospective nibbler, nobody says you have to eat this new concoction, so why do you care? Well, believe it or not I care because I care about you, and I care about what my community and country will look like if I am right and you and the fellow gourmands indeed come down with a serious ailment. There will be a lot of remedial and palliative work to be done.

There are many signs that Canada today is in a state of anomie, a word first used by French philosopher Emile Durkheim to diagnose the state of modern rootlessness he observed in late 19th and early 20th century France. Anomie is defined as social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values; also : personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals.

Anomie may well be what Hart describes as the “ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos (which) if taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember why we should want to choose good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen”.

It seems I have offended some friends with my insistence that the purpose of all my essays is to encourage people to think more carefully and intently about some of the social issues we currently face in Canada. They bristle at the suggestion they have not thought about these issues, or that if they have thought about them and still disagree with me, they perceive it arrogant of me to continue my efforts to convince them they are mistaken.

To this I can only say I find much wisdom in Orestes Brownson’s words: “Nothing is more nauseating than lukewarm. Give us, we say, open, energetic uncompromising enemies, or firm, staunch friends, who will take their stand for the truth, to live with it or die with it, and not your half and half men.”

Oh, Canada - Chapter 7 - Tongs for Tweezers

2005-02-08T19:36:00.000-08:00

“There is a sphere, nonetheless real because it is impossible to define its limits, within which law and public opinion are intruders likely to do more harm than good. To try to regulate the internal affairs of a family, the relations of love or friendship, or many other things of the same sort, by law or the coercion of public opinion, is like trying to pull an eyelash out of a man’s eye with a pair of tongs. They may put out the eye, but they will never get hold of the eyelash.

James Fitzjames Stephen – Liberty Equality and Fraternity

More than one friend has commented, “Why put so much intellectual energy and effort into this redefining marriage and other socio-political issues”? Each seems genuinely interested in my well being, whether they agree with my position or not – and I have many friends who don’t share my viewpoint.

Quite simply, for the first time in 40 years I have the time to do the reading and reflecting necessary to inform myself on a variety of subjects unrelated to my education or my professional life. This newly accessible reservoir of time has allowed me to pursue a goal I have had for many years. This is to better understand what are the mores, ideals, philosophies we possess as Canadians which distinguish us from other nations. How did we acquire them, how have they evolved and why? What does it mean to be Canadian?

When I look at Canadian society I see many alarming signs of decay and its suppurative qualities seem to be in ascendancy. The latest controversy over redefining marriage to be something which easily 80% of Canadians would have rejected only 5 years ago is but the latest symptom of this collective malaise. We now have the spectacle of a bill being tabled in the House of Commons which contains extensive language aimed at reassuring religious authorities that they will not be compelled to perform same sex marriages. Would the thought that the Canadian state could ever contemplate such a thing have crossed one’s mind only a few short years ago? Now we need to be reassured! Why not add a clause to reassure those of us who oppose the redefinition of marriage, that we won't be sent to a Gulag in Iqaluit, or we won't have our taxes audited for next 5 years. The needle of Canada’s moral compass looks like a propeller.

I draw a harsh image I know, and some will be offended but we need to rediscover our Canadian frankness and boldness and abandon the obsequious nature we have taken on. The joke – “How do you make a Canadian apologize? Kick him again!” – seems all too true. We have become the “whatever” society, where no matter how intuitively wrong an idea or behaviour seems to us, if it doesn’t impact directly upon my well being, I simply shrug and say “whatever”.

James Fitzjames Stephen wrote: “If people neither formed nor expressed any opinions on their neighbours’ conduct except in so far as that conduct affected them personally, one of the principal motives to do well and one of the principal restraints from doing ill would be withdrawn from the world.”

Where are we now in Canada? What courses of conduct are of concern to us, and what can we do to change them?

As a nation we are living on the fumes of past glories. We pride ourselves on being honest international brokers and peace-keepers, yet we have no real influence on international affairs and our peace-keeping capabilities rank us somewhere around 40th in the world. When we do have peace-keepers available to serve we need to hitch a ride to the troubled spot with some other country. When we finally arrive it is usually too late to make a real difference. How smugly we deride the instability of Italian politics with the yearly changes of government, yet they managed to get their specialty relief team into Sri Lanka in two days. It took Canada almost three weeks.

Canada is no longer able to walk the talk when it comes to international responsibilities despite the fact as a nation we emerged from WWII as one of the strongest western nations economically, and were blessed with an enormous reserve of goodwill capital based on the heroic actions of our armed forces in both great wars.

In the domestic political realm many branches of our federal government are known to have been fiscally corrupt for perhaps decades. Abuses of power for the benefit of politicians, bureaucrats and their supporters are admitted, the only question is how high up the chain of command will the evidence lead.

Our vaunted pillars of social benefits, health and education are vastly underfunded and burdened with bureaucracy and internal conflict between provincial and federal branches of government. We have serious regional conflicts and one of our founding provinces continues to be represented overwhelmingly at the federal level by a party whose sole objective is to separate Quebec from confederation.

In place of honest intellectual discourse aimed at resolving this conflict, our governments have chosen to fawn over and attempt to appease the separatist elements through financial incentives and by handing over important levers of government and industrial power.

In the social and moral realm Canada has rapidly moved toward secularism and immodest liberalism. Strong arguments can be made that large segments of Canadian society now embrace the new state religion of secularism. Traditional religions are on the wane as measured by attendance and the influence they bring to bear on the daily lives of ordinary Canadians; yet opinion polls show a majority of Canadians consider themselves Christians and an even greater percentage believe in a supreme transcendent being.

Since 1982 and the enshrinement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a greater and greater responsibility for establishing the boundaries of freedom and tolerance and the extent to which the aspirations of special interest groups to achieve what they deem to be equality, has devolved from the legislative branch to the judicial branch of our liberal state.

The Trudeau years brought the first “slight inner adjustments of which we were barely conscious” which led to decisive changes in our perception of what should be the bedrock of our Canadianism. Fundamental human rights, government having no place in the bedrooms of our nation, these became catch phrases that resonated with Canadians. We strove to become a kinder and gentler nation. We did not adequately think through the consequences of moving toward an unthinking acceptance of every conceivable “right”. As philosopher David B. Hart sees it: “the history of modern political and social doctrine is, to a large degree, the history of Western culture’s long, laborious departure from Jewish, classical, and Christian models of freedom, and the history in consequence of the ascendancy of the language of “rights” over every other possible grammar of the good. ”

The move out of the bedrooms of the nation manifested itself most prominently in the removal of criminal sanctions against people participating in homosexual acts. Seemingly unable to recognize the difference between tolerance and approbation, Canadian society adopted the attitude that not only should homosexual activity be tolerated but now it should be celebrated.

Overwhelmingly Canadians have shown themselves to be tolerant of homosexuals, though persons of faith continue to believe homosexual activity to be sinful. The acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle has advanced to the point where judging by popular culture it is far less outré to be homosexual than it is to be an evangelical Christian. A Christian Pride parade would draw fewer observers and far greater obloquy from the popular press than any Gay Pride parade even in its earliest incarnation. “A Christian Eye for The Straight Guy” would not be a hit television program.

As a group, homosexuals have advanced to the point where they dominate if not in pure numbers then certainly in influence, more than a few significant bastions of popular culture. Theatre, visual arts, the CBC, and many branches of the academy all resonate with advocacy,not just tolerance for the homosexual lifestyle. Not infrequently, heterosexuals today recount stories of feeling marginalized in workplaces where the culture has become one dominated by homosexuals and their supporters. And yet those who resist this disproportionate influence are accused of trying to impose the will of the majority on a minority. Few seem to be troubled by the tyranny of the minority.

The homosexual agenda is firmly entrenched in our universities. Here is an introduction to a paper presented by two Canadian law professors at a Seattle University Law School conference – Assimilation and Resistance. The emphasis in mine.

Moving from the Back to the Front of the Classroom:
Queer Pedagogy in Law
Kim Brooks (Queen's University Faculty of Law)
Debra Parkes (University of Manitoba Faculty of Law)

"We intend two meanings in choosing our proposed title. First, as recent graduates of LL.B. and then LL.M. programs, and recent appointees to Canadian law faculties, we intend to draw in our paper on our experiences of "queer pedagogy"¹ while moving, at least symbolically, from the back to the front of the classroom. Second, the paper raises questions about whether and how a queer pedagogy might operate as a situs of resistance both in the classroom, but also (possibly) by extension in the practice of law.

Borrowing from the work on pedagogy undertaken by queer and feminist legal academics, as well as by theorists in other disciplines such as economics, we hope to raise questions about how queer theory, broadly understood, can assist in developing legal education that resists assimilation. In writing and presenting the paper itself, we hope to examine and employ some of the pedagogical methods and theories advanced in the literature on critical pedagogy surveyed, in an effort to shed light on their possibilities and challenges. We also suggest that by imagining ways to move beyond the boundaries of inclusion alone in legal education, we may go at least some way toward transforming law itself."

There is no subtlety about their purpose. Inclusion and acceptance is not enough, they wish to transform the law itself to suit the desires and objectives of “queer theory.” What else does one find growing in the social petrie dish at the Faculties of Law at Queens and University of Manitoba and surely most other Canadian law schools?

Surely this helps explain why the homosexual lobbyists are not content to merely aquire all the civil benefits accruing to married couples. They will not be content until they have transformed the law and the social structures which they perceive to deprive them of their rights to be truly "equal". Different but equal won't do - an unusual demand from a group that identifies itself and claims to take pride in its difference, in its queerness!

Any political organizer could not help but admire what a fine job these queer theorists have accomplished to date in Canada. Having first successfully co-opted the courts, they have now succeeded in convincing our Prime Minister and our Justice Minister to lead the charge to redefine marriage and thus in Mr. Cotler’s infamous rhetoric this week, “define who we are as Canadians.”

Who are we as Canadians? We are the master franchisor for the North American social laboratory for experiments in unbounded muddle-headedness. We think tolerate means advocate, we think if the sky hasn't fallen since gay marriages have been approved by the courts, we can safely carry on in our Alfred E. Neuman naive innocence. We will worry later about how parents will answer their school aged children's questions about sex education classes which compare the relative merits of vaginal versus anal intercourse. We will give due consideration later, probably appoint a Royal Commission to examine the impact of the dramatical decline in the birth rate n Canada.

But that is all for later. For now we lament the loss of NHL hockey, but could care less if tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were siphoned into the hands of Liberal party hacks in Quebec. After all it saved the country didn't it, and as Mr. Chretien proudly pointed out in his testimony today it even made Mr. Gomery and Mr. Roy richer by increasing the value of their Montreal real estate.

We are a nation of rubes! The tongs are nearer to our eyeball than ever. Will we just blink and hope for the best, or should you leap out of your comfortable chair and question the qualifications of the hovering social beautician? The choice is yours.

Oh, Canada - Chapter 6 - Pretension or Piety

2005-01-28T10:21:00.000-08:00

Pretension or Piety

“Now the family is an institution of which nearly everyone speaks well; but it is advisable to remember that this is a term that may vary in extension. In the present age it means little more than the living members. Even of living members, it is a rare exception when an advertisement depicts a large family or three generations; the usual family on the hoardings consists of two parents and one or two young children. What is held up for admiration is not devotion to family, but personal affection between the members of it; and the smaller the family, the more easily can this personal affection be sentimentalized.

But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this; a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote. Unless this reverence for the past and future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than a verbal convention in the community. Such an interest in the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different from that of the builder of social programmes.” - Notes Toward the Definition of Culture p.44-45, T.S. Eliot

Proponents of same sex marriage express shock that defenders of traditional marriage should fear anything bad could possibly result from permitting same sex persons to be married. Hundreds of same sex marriages have been performed since the courts ruled in favour of such unions and the “sky hasn’t fallen” is the standard response.

It is a matter of fundamental human rights says our Prime Minister. Objectors are labeled as narrow-minded, intolerant or excessively religious.

Since there are so many supporters of same sex marriage who in every respect seem to be honest, decent, thoughtful people; it occurred to me there must be something much deeper than intellectual disagreement at work here.

I found some important clues in T.S. Eliot’s work from which I selected the epigram. Defenders of traditional marriage are talking about the need to preserve the family in the sense of that word used by Eliot – as an enduring bond linking past, present and future; while the supporters of same sex marriage are focused on the “vanities and pretensions” of the personal affections contained within families.

If family has become no more than a verbal convention to describe a level of love and commitment between two persons, then surely anyone should be able to marry. In such a society marriage and family are merely social programmes administered and regulated by governments. The fact children of same sex parents in many instances will be unable to trace their origins back even one generation will be of no concern to a society focused on the immediacy of affection.

The rights being sought by gays and lesbians are not for access to the institution of marriage and its link to family, but rather the right to fundamentally change the definition of marriage and thus strip it of is inherent value and worth.

A society which abandons a fundamental link between its past and future seems doomed to take on continually increasing risk of not learning from its mistakes.

Oh Canada, Chapter 5 - Lawyers Lead Deconstruction

2005-01-28T01:14:00.000-08:00

This may seem like Chinese water torture to some of you, but like the little pink energizer bunny, I intend to continue to march forward with some facts and opinions that regrettably you won’t be reading or hearing about in our mainstream media outlets.

A significant impetus for me in persisting in my opposition to the movement to change the definition of marriage is the role which the legal system – academic and judicial- has played in the deconstruction of marriage. I have personal knowledge of the workings of our legal system having practiced law for 33 years. I know personally some of the judges whose reasons have led us to the brink or the threshold depending on your perspective of a new social paradigm in Canada – same sex marriage. I am utterly convinced they have no special insights into what our society wants or needs by way of a new definition of marriage. I am also convinced based on my reading of legal literature, court decisions and conversations with members of the profession that the legal academy is overwhelmingly liberal in its orientation.

The Charter of Rights has been in force since 1982. In 1999 the Parliament of Canada voted 216-55 to reaffirm the historic definition of marriage. In 2001 the Supreme Court of B.C. rejected a petition to approve a same-sex marriage, arguing that the common-law definition of marriage could not be changed without an amendment to the country’s Constitution. Yet in July 2002, the Ontario Court of Appeal concluded that the existing legal framework of marriage in Canada was discriminatory since it failed to provide fair recognition of gay and lesbian unions. BC and Quebec appellate courts soon followed suit and here we are.

What happened? Did Canadian society really change so dramatically in less than 5 years? Did we suddenly discover how wrong we had been in retaining a historical definition of marriage as an institution reserved for a man and woman?

Rather what has occurred is a militant and extremely well funded lobby group advocating the “rights” of gays and lesbians began to reap the rewards of years of propaganda in our universities and amongst our media and politicians. They are well funded because all the legal expenses of the law suits challenging the restrictiveness of marriage are financed by tax payer dollars. It is so Canadian to use our own tax dollars to finance the efforts of interest groups to tear down the fabric of our culture. In a country where a political party, whose only purpose is to destroy Confederation, can wear the mantle of Official Opposition what more should we expect.

The lobbyists also benefited from the fecklessness of a tired and corrupt Liberal government under Jean Chretien. Eager to deflect attention from the brewing scandals onto a topic where polling showed it could gain traction in urban Canada, the Chretien Liberals rolled over like a cowering mongrel and refused to appeal the provincial court decisions and disbanded the parliamentary committee that was systematically gathering information from a broad spectrum of Canadian society on this issue. Instead it turned the keys of the highjacked car back to the joyriders.

These well funded legal academics had succeeded in convincing the Ontario Appellate Court to accept the findings of the Law Commission of Canada in its 2001 report: Beyond Conjugality: Recognizing and Supporting Close Personal Adult Relationships. It was from this fever swamp of academic deconstructionism that emerged the concept of marriage being no more than a form of close personal relationship. More on this later.

Ordinary Canadians must stop to consider that the majority of appeal court and certainly Supreme Court of Canada judges enter the judiciary from the ranks of academia and politics. Lawyers are hardly representative of the broad cross section of society, and judges are an even thinner slice of the universe of lawyers.

So people whose adult professional lives have primarily been spent thinking about the law rather than practicing and applying it to real life circumstances; or who have leveraged their political positions or connections into the sinecure of a judicial appointment (Roy McMurtry and Rosie Abella two prominent examples on the Ontario Court of Appeal) are now vested with the ultimate power of deciding the constitutionality of the laws of our country. It is no exaggeration to liken this to the inmates running the prison.

I will stop here to let you ponder how comfortable you feel about such folks determining matters of culture, morality and the welfare of our children; and doing so without any accountability to the citizens of Canada.

Marriage Redefined - Golf is Next

2005-01-25T22:18:00.000-08:00

ASYNIEN* OBTAINS BREAKTHROUGH RULING
(*Association of Sufferers of Yips Needing Immediate Equality Now")

- Supreme Court of Canada orders golf courses to install 3 ft. diameter holes on all greens

Ottawa – June 15th, 2006

Litigia L’Amour, counsel to ASYNIEN met with reporters on the steps of the Supreme Court Building to celebrate the historical ruling. The majority judgment written by Madam Justice Rosie Abella found that the rule of golf limiting the diameter of the hole on a green to a mere 4 1/4 inches “was repugnant, and violated the human rights of her clients to enjoy the thrill of shooting sub-par scores and regularly sinking 10 foot putts.”

“It is our view that the dignity of persons suffering from the yips , the existence of which makes it virtually impossible for one to post consistently low scores in golf, is violated by the severe limitation of the size of the hole on the greens of golf courses” pronounced Madam Justice Abella. “The humiliation and discrimination felt by golfers afflicted with the yips as they fail to make putts regularly sunk by yipless golfers constitutes an affront to their human dignity. Accordingly, we conclude that the definition of “hole” found in the Rules of Golf be declared invalid to the extent it states that the hole ‘must be 4 1/4 inches (108 mm) in diameter’.” The court accepted the petitioner’s argument that the size should be increased to up to 36 inches in diameter.

Counsel for the Royal and Ancient Golf Association unsuccessfully argued that the Rules of Golf are steeped in history and tradition and have formed the framework within which men and women have played the game for centuries. The discriminatory nature of the game against which the petitioners have launched their attack, is based not on a violation of human rights but rather on the natural differences in ability, effort, co-ordination and aptitude amongst those who choose to play the game. As a sport, golf by definition creates conditions of inequality by declaring that there are winners and losers. This is the nature of sport argued the R&A counsel.

Changing the definition of the size of the hole, changes the nature of the game of golf, argued counsel for the R&A. “This one change in definition means the game that will be played using manhole size holes may resemble golf in many respects, but it won’t be golf”, said R&A spokesman Angus MacDonald.

This entire line of argument was rejected by the Supreme Court justices who ruled that under the “living tree” concept of the Canadian Charter of Rights, the post-modern enlightened recognition of the damage to human dignity caused by persistent failure demands that society be willing to change old prescriptions and definitions established by less discerning early lawmakers.

The court drew on its experience in the same-sex marriage debate and the resulting court ordered redefinition of marriage, and found the true nature of golf to be one of “close personal relationships”, not that of a sport of skill and competition. The court took judicial notice of the many social indicia of the game which support this new characterization. It is almost always played by groups of individuals, often as part of an outing specially planned for the participants focused on close personal interaction including conversation, eating, drinking, and carousing together. “Accordingly, the Charter of Rights and its goals of creating equal opportunity for all Canadians and of eradicating discrimination clearly applies to the governance of such close personal relationships” said Madam Justice Abella, a 33 handicapper.

The court did rule that so long as a golf club installed a 3 ft. diameter hole on each of its greens, it could retain the traditional size hole for yipless players and golf association officials would not be forced to demand that all players use the larger hole. However, they must ensure that players declaring themselves to be ASYNIEN members are free to avail themselves of the larger hole, and have their score recognized as valid and of equal value to that of traditional players.

Asked to comment on the fact that most Canadians would find the news that the rule prescribing the size of the hole in golf was inherently discriminatory, Prime Minister Paul Martin said he supported the SCC decision. “It is all about human rights and you can’t choose your rights willy-nilly. These yip sufferers deserve to have their self worth and dignity preserved, and if redefining the rules of golf to increase the size of the hole is what it takes, I am all for it.”

At a celebratory party in a popular Ottawa nightclub, where ASYNIEN members and their counsel were joined by a number of Supreme Court justices in a show of solidarity and support, one particularly forthright member of ASYNIEN volunteered that if its members are “allowed to participate as regular golfers in the clubs and institutions that traditional golfers claim as theirs, our presence will change those institutions and practices enough to undermine their preferred version of golf, and in turn they themselves will not be the same. Traditional golfers are right, for example, that if ASYNIEN golfers participate in golf tournaments, the game of golf will change, and since the game of golf is one of the institutions that support traditional golfers’ identities, golf and traditional golfers will change as well.”

Oh, Canada - Part IV - Supreme Court Endorses Gay Marriage

2004-12-09T23:11:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court Weighs in Oh So Lightly

As a surprise to no one, the Supreme Court of Canada today endorsed same-sex marriages in its response to the questions posed by the Liberal government in its referral. The judgment is remarkable for the swiftness of its delivery following the submissions, and for its paucity of intellectual content.

Interveners argued that “the institution of marriage escapes legislative redefinition. Existing in its present basic form since time immemorial, it is not a legal construct, but rather a supra-legal construct subject to legal incidents.”

This argument is born from the belief of many and arguably (if given the chance to express their views on the matter) a majority of Canadians, that marriage is inextricably linked to family and these two institutions are rooted in human nature. No amount of judicial creativity can change our underlying human nature and the uniqueness of the difference between male and female.

This argument was dismissed by the Supreme Court on the gossamer thread of judicial reasoning which linked the arguments of Lord Sankey of the House of Lords in the Persons case involving the rights of women to sit as senators, to the same-sex marriage issue.

The justices said: “In addressing whether the fact that women never had occupied public office was relevant to whether they could be considered ‘persons’ for the purposes of being eligible for appointment to the Senate, Lord Sankey said at p. 134:

The fact that no woman had served or has claimed to serve such an office is not of great weight when it is remembered that custom would have prevented the claim being made or the point being contested.

To this the SCC could not resist adding its own churlish comment that “customs are apt to develop into traditions which are stronger than law and remain unchallenged long after the reason for them has disappeared.”

In one sentence the self-evidently true distinction between male and female and the covenant relationship of marriage as an institution designed for members of the opposite sex, is dismissed as mere “custom”. The “reason” for marriage has obviously disappeared says the Supreme Court because judges in 6 Canadian provinces and 2 European countries have said so.

The SCC also dismissed the second intervener argument that there are natural limits to the concept of our constitution as a “living tree”.

The court said: "The natural limits argument can succeed only if its proponents can identify an objective core of meaning which defines what is "natural" in relation to marriage. Absent this, the argument is merely tautological. The only objective core which the interveners before us agree is "natural" to marriage is that it is the voluntary union of two people to the exclusion of all others. Beyond this, views diverge. We are faced with competing opinions on what the natural limits of marriage may be".

Behind the façade of this judicial Potemkin village lies classic Enlightenment liberalism thinking, which proclaims as superstitious and unwarranted any public policy or construct based on an understanding that mankind inescapably shares a common destiny, and which instead embraces a voluntarist definition of human relationships.

Christopher Lasch believed this way of thinking led to “an unquestioning faith in the capacity of the rational intelligence to solve the mysteries of human existence…and the desire to engage in the conquest of necessity and the substitution of human choice for the blind workings of nature.”

Two men or two women want to be married, and no one can muster the courage to say, that is not natural. Objectively, in the light of moral truth which transcends any man made laws, two men or two women don’t belong together in a covenantal sexually active union.

So the result is, let them be married. It is as simple as that in the moral vacuum of our inclusive Canadian society, if we are to believe the elites.

The proponents of same sex marriage do not want to conform to the “blind workings of nature” which created male and female and which lead naturally wherever possible to procreation and family and to the covenantal institution of marriage as a cohesive foundation to our human need for community. Mostly, these proponents object to the alienation that naturally follows from the exclusiveness of that covenant. The exclusiveness offends liberals and others who seem incapable of accepting the reality of alienation as part of our human condition.

Meanwhile, the defenders of the traditional and natural definition of marriage are unable or unwilling to direct the minds of our judges to the religious beliefs which support the traditional definition, for as Patrick Deneen points out:

“persistent religious belief offends the cultural, intellectual and economic elite....because it flies in the face of the Enlightenment creed that religious faith would be overcome with the advent of scientific progress, economic development and political liberalization. Seen by elites as superstitious and unwarranted, religious belief is derided as intellectual pabulum and false emotional security, while public policies that arise from religious traditionalism (including limits upon divorce, abortion, and efforts to protect the cohesion of local communities) are viewed as irrational, inegalitarian, illiberal, arbitrary and oppressive."

So this battle has been lost, but the resistance must continue. Czeslaw Milosz said “Evil grows and bears fruit, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually. One can draw momentous conclusions from this.”

Our challenge is to persevere and seek to continuously produce those “tiny kernels of good” in the face of what seems like overwhelming odds against us.

Naomi Klein's Latest Cause

2004-11-30T18:47:00.000-08:00

In today's Globe and Mail essay Naomi Klein, doyenne of the left, is perched high on her soap-box megaphone in hand and calling for Canada to declare the U.S. guilty of war crimes for its pursuit of the war in Iraq. She contends this is how Canada could assert real power and “strut upon the world stage” along with France and Germany. That she sees herself at the forefront of the sans-culotters who would strut victorious should such a result be forthcoming, is obvious to anyone who reads Ms. Klein's anti-American screed.

The apparatus by which Ms. Klein claims Canada should assert its power is our Immigration and Refugee Board. According to its website the IRB's mission is "to make well-reasoned decisions on immigration and refugee matters, efficiently, fairly, and in accordance with the law." Thankfully, the government intervened and reminded the IRB of its mission, resulting in a ruling that the legality or illegality of the Iraqi war was not relevant to the case before it.

The case is that of U.S. army deserter Jeremy Hinzman who seeks refugee status to avoid his forced return to the U.S. to face a court martial. He now asserts in the alternative that he is entitled to refugee status because the U.S. is guilty of “systemic” violations of International law. Ms. Klein enthusiastically supports his cause and claims that Mr. Hinzman's star witness, a former Marine Sergeant named Jimmy Massey and the New York Times coverage of Abu Ghraib will present ample proof of U.S. guilt in these war crimes.

She laments the fact these “crimes” may never be tried because the U.S. refuses to subject itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. She seeks to further bolster Mr. Hinzman’s case for refugee status by endorsing his argument that the Iraq war is illegal because it did not have U.N. sanction. Apparently no fan of the presumption of innocence with respect to anything to do with the American administration or its policies, Ms. Klein's article throughout assumes the proof of these crimes and even accuses Canada of moral duplicity for not taking a stronger stand on this "illegal war".

To augment the rebarbative nature of Ms. Klein’s commentary (she knows no other style of commentary when it comes to the Americans), the editors of the Globe and Mail chose to accompany the text with a cartoon by Jenkins of a colony of beavers surrounding a flagpole upon which is flying the Stars and Stripes. Two are chewing on the flag and one is chomping on the flagpole. How clever, how neighbourly!

The New York Times or Washington Post would be forgiven if tomorrow they displayed a cartoon of the American Eagle gleefully landing in her nest with a plaintive pleading beaver in her talons, her hungry chicks eagerly awaiting the feast. Thankfully, the American administration and its supporters will pay as little attention to Ms. Klein is does the elephant to a gnat. The same can't be said for Ms. Klein's many followers in the U.S. media and the self-professed intelligentsia of the American and Canadian left.

Ms. Klein’s stated goal is to end the war in Iraq, but it is obvious she has a much bigger agenda. In her sub-text she adjures her followers to seek the humiliation and utter defeat of the U.S. in Iraq where she claims so indelicately it is already “hemorrhaging (coalition) members”. She remains, as always, mute with regard to what semblance of order would fill the vacuum should the U.S. pull out tomorrow, and offers no insight into how the Iraqi people would be better off if Saddam loyalists returned to power (or better still Saddam, since if the war was illegal surely his arrest and confinement is illegal and he should be returned to power and given access to the billions he and his U.N. friends stole from Canada and all the other contributors to the Oil for Food Program).

Her hope is that a desperate attempt by a cowardly deserter to avoid the consequences of his cowardice (he did after all volunteer for the Army, and armies are known to have to fight from time to time),by pleading for refugee status before a Canadian tribunal made up of Liberal political appointees, might open the floodgates to other cowardly U.S. soldiers who don’t want to fight to seek refuge in Canada.

She ends with the vision of Canada once again becoming a “haven for war resisters” and thus doing something major to help end the war.Too young to have jostled through the picket lines of Vietnam protests, Ms. Klein is eager to make Iraq its doppelganger and to bring the U.S. to its well deserved Gotterdammerung.

Ms. Klein may have hit on something here. A cursory review of Canadian Immigration Appeal Board rulings would reveal much more bizarre decisions than the finding Ms. Klein hopes for. Is there a more confused department of government than Immigration, as the recent and spreading revelations of our official policy toward the urgent need to fill the many stripper bars of Canada with poor Rumanian women surely attest?

Is there a country that reveres the role of the U.N. more than Canada despite overwhelming evidence of the corruption and amorality which grips that body? This same UN “whose very raison d'etre rises from the ruins of Auschwitz and Belsen, and has never produced a single resolution dedicated to combating anti-Semitism or a report devoted to this devastating global phenomenon.” Should any of us be surprised if the Board ruled in Hinzman’s favour?

To the left, Ms. Klein is a bright and shining star. She was proudly marching today alongside folks sporting placards of great erudition such as: Bush/Hitler and a swastika, Fuck Bush, and Bush – War Criminal. She and her followers would revel at the sight of George Bush in the docket alongside Saddam Hussein and Milosevic, an earnest Louise Arbour as the prosecutor.

To this Canadian, Ms. Klein and her comrades are an embarrassment we must tolerate as proof of our belief in democracy and the freedom of speech. The lamentable reality is that any American who watches Canadian television or reads Canadian newspapers with the occasional exception of the National Post, will conclude that the vast majority of Canadians must agree with Ms.Klein. The even more depressing possibility is that they may be right!

Meanwhile the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, and the beheadings continue. The small band of heavily armed and fanatical terrorists persists in their assault on the Iraqis who seek to create a stable environment in which to hold elections. In the face of these realities Ms. Klein and her followers stand like the three monkeys. Instead they don their ballaclavas and dance around their jungle fire of protest chanting incantations against the evil American empire, while their favoured arbiter of international justice, the U.N., fulminates against the U.S. and Israel, and obfuscates in response to efforts of investigators to uncover the identity of the beneficiaries of the Oil-For-Food scam.

This all reminds me David Stove's theory that "after the 2nd World War, any possibility of resistance to communist expansion rested almost entirely upon America: no other country possessed both the requisite military capacity and the willingness to use it. But the outcome of the Vietnam war showed that, while America's capacity for such resistance remained intact, her willingness did not. For that war was lost, not through defeat of American soldiers in the field, nor yet through treachery among them, but through a massive sedition at home."

The Bin-Ladens, Zarqawhi's and Iranian mullahs are counting on history repeating itself with Iraq, and Naomi Klein is one of their greatest allies.

Greatest Canadian - CBC Style

2004-11-29T22:51:00.000-08:00

I tripped across the beginning of the end of the finale to announce the Greatest Canadian. It was too treacly for my taste and classically CBC in its amateurishness. Deborah Grey swooped onto the stage like a gigantic red comet trailing fabric tails, and cheering wildly for the man she was touting and who finished dead last in the top 10 list – Wayne Gretzky. Wendy Mesley forgot the name of the Alexander Graham Bell cheerleader and that was enough for me. (It was the squeaky voiced Evan something or other who took over from Avi Lewis when the latter went off to save the world from corporatists, riding tandem on her broomstick with wife Naomi Klein).

I later read that Tommy Douglas garnered the most votes and Terry Fox finished second ahead of Trudeau and Frederick Banting. I was encouraged that the viewers who could stand to watch this trifle, actually came up with two out of four good selections. Brave men who did not seek the spotlight, but instead soldiered on against heavy odds; in one case to raise money for research to fight the disease that killed him, and the other to discover insulin which has saved millions of lives all over the world.

There is a deep irony in the other two when compared to Fox and Banting. Tommy Douglas the bantam rooster prairie socialist and his arrogant and cerebral acolyte, Pierre Trudeau each represents much of what is wrong with this country. Douglas foisted medicare upon the province of Saskatchewan, causing great social upheaval and the exodus of many health professionals from that province. The fiscal question of just how Saskatchewan and later the entire country could afford a universal health care program was not one Douglas had any interest in addressing. His legacy is a sick, bloated, inefficient system that is failing its users and abusing the care and commitment of the many health care professionals and support workers who deliver the services. Worse still Douglas’ socialism continues to plague the system and the country, encouraging those who can afford to pay for the prompt delivery of services, and the physicians who want to treat patients and not sit idly by waiting for operating rooms to be made available, to be treated like queue-jumpers and greedy pariahs.

Trudeau made us all think we were special because he did flips off diving boards, pirouetted behind the queen, wore capes and married a woman 30 years his junior. His arrogance we excused as impatience. His dismissive shrugs as Gallic charm. He brought us the Charter of Rights and the War Measures Act, both evidence of the true radical and reactionary who lived beneath the surface of the cerebral Jesuitic intellectual. We even excused his canoe trips to Cuba and his helmeted motorcycle protest parades during WW II.

He plundered our treasury, created regional rifts between East and West that still divide us, and fueled not only the separatist movement, but the pork barrel politics of appeasement which continue to this day despite Royal Commissions and Auditor General reports. And when it was time to leave the political scene, he hopped into his gull-wing Mercedes roadster and rode off to our cheers!

Contrast these two politicians and their love of the limelight with Fox and Banting. Terry Fox endured the pain of hopping across half of Canada to raise money for a broken and bankrupt national medicare system. He ran through rain and sleet and heat, a tribute to man's independence and will to survive and to produce something out his own sweat and tears, never asking for a handout or looking to someone else to fight his fight or bear his burden. Banting laboured long and hard for little financial reward and even today the government of Ontario can’t find the will to properly preserve his homestead as a tribute to this great Canadian.

Two great men and two poseurs. The challenge for Canadians continues to be to know how to tell them apart.

Sgro Must Go

2004-11-25T20:50:00.000-08:00

"Ministers' staff also have an obligation to meet with people when they are asked to do so. That is exactly what the staff member was doing," she replied to hoots of laughter from the opposition benches. – Immigration Minister Judy Sgro.

According to government records, more than 550 exotic dancers from Rumania were granted temporary work visas last year. It seems exotic dancing is one of those essential Canadian vocations whose many positions are very difficult to fill with local talent. This is classically Canadian isn’t it? 550 spots in our immigration queue taken up by desperate young women, most of whom will be drawn into the sex and drug trade.

It is unclear how many of them were recruited by Minister Sgro’s sublimely named chief of staff, the donkey-headed Ihor Wons; or how many of them stuffed envelopes or worked phone banks for Minister Sgro during her re-election campaign.

There is this quaint principle British parliamentarians have, one which Canada long ago abandoned, perhaps as part of shedding its colonial ties. It is the principle of Ministerial responsibility. In practice, when the action of a Minister or her staff is so scandalous or inappropriate that it brings the department and the government into disrepute, the Minister immediately resigns. If it later proves that the Minister should bear no responsibility for the scandal she is often reinstated to Cabinet, if not always to the same portfolio.

So fearful are Canadian ministers of being relegated to the gulag of the back bench, and of the loss of the perquisites of office, that they act like desperate cats scratching and spitting in a vain attempt to avoid being pitched into the pool of political oblivion. And once finally pried from their perch, the more wicked ones still land on their feet with some ambassadorship or taxpayer funded sinecure.

Meanwhile, that shepherd of cats, Mr. Paul Martin, slouches through Africa cursing his fate, his incompetence as a leader more apparent every day. Perhaps he is hoping to find support for his silent campaign to be recruited as successor to the failed statesman Koffi Annan.

I think I will invite Mr. Wons to our next book club when we discuss the madness of another regime in Bulgakov’s, The Master and Margarita. He can’t refuse once asked, remember.

The Virtue of Chores

2004-11-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

Choring About

I have spent the last four days in self-imposed solitude away from the city and beside the sea. Freed from the distractions of radio and television, and faced with numerous physical chores on my work list, I have experienced a certain soothing of the soul.

My Dad died two weeks ago. “Chored about today” was the most common phrase in his 18-month diary from January 1, 1941 to early July 1942. I doubt he gave much thought to the fact he had created a new verb. He didn’t list all the chores but as anyone who has grown up or spent an extended period of time on a farm knows, they were many and they were mundane. Picking rocks, sharpening fence posts, stuking grain, shoveling snow, chopping wood – the list is long. What does one have to do except think when one is choring? I suppose a truly modern chore-person would have his MP3 player and headset on, effectively anaesthetizing the brain, but I went purely retro with my choring and it was good.

I thought about good things for the most part. I thought about my Dad and how hard he worked as a farmer for so little monetary reward. I thought of my Mom, married two weeks before her 18th birthday and 18 months later back with her parents with her new-born son, my brother, praying for Dad’s return from active duty. I thought of what it must have been like for them as they built their first house with their own hands, and as they endured the uncertainty of weather throughout each growing season.

I remembered how excited I was by prairie thunder storms with their spectacular lightning displays and the ferocity of golf ball sized hail stones as they bounced off the roof and put little dimples in the ashphalt shingles. And I thought how differently my parents must have viewed those displays of nature’s power with its consequence of cows killed by lightning and fields of wheat and barley flattened by hailstones. Yet through it all I can’t remember ever being really unhappy as a farm kid and though my parents must often have been stressed and anxious, they rarely showed it.

Each new day brought unlimited opportunity for the exercise of one’s imagination. Bale piles became rugged battlefields, and death spirals off imaginary cliffs ended with a soft thud in a pile of straw. Like Fearless Fosdick, enemy bullets could pierce one’s heart or brain but we always lived.

Picking rocks and roots produced some grumbles but throwing the smaller stones at my brother while ducking his return missile helped pass the time. Playing fox and geese and making angels in the snow, made up for the occasional face wash as punishment from my older brother for my too sharp tongue.

These and many more thoughts scudded across my mind like prairie clouds as I cleared drainage ditches, raked leaves, pruned fruit trees and bushwhacked blackberry brambles and underbrush.

And tonight I will go down to the dock, lie on my back and gaze at the starlit sky and marvel at the universe out there and the God who made it and give thanks for my parents and for my life.

Marriage Debate

2004-11-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

Resisting Judge Made Law

The post Charter of Rights period in Canada has seen the ascendancy of judicial activism. Much of the blame for this rests with the governing federal political parties since 1982 and their unwillingness to take leadership by allowing citizens, through their MP’s, to determine what and whose fundamental rights the Charter should protect.

The knee jerk default position of governments and elites has been to resist the imposition of moral or cultural values by a majority on a minority. The result has been a tyranny of the minority as seen by the successful campaign of the same sex marriage lobbyists to convince the Supreme Court of Ontario to declare the right of same sex couples to marry to be a right protected by the Charter.

Like dominoes the superior courts of 6 other provinces and 1 territory have fallen over in response, while the potentially steadying hands of federal and provincial Attorneys General remain stuffed deep in their pockets. No legal opposition has been mounted to this judicial sortie into the political realm.

Where is the public debate on this issue? Why is it left to New Brunswick Conservative MP Rob Moore to introduce a private members bill in the House as the only means to put the issue of same sex marriage on the political agenda? Where are the reasoned commentaries in our national newspapers putting forward the argument in favour of maintaining marriage as the preserve of a man and woman – not for religious reasons or for homophobic reasons but for the best reason of all – that it just makes plain sense to do so.

This assertion that one can determine the rightness or wrongness of something by feeling is much maligned by today’s intellectuals. They deny us this essential truth about our humanity. I find philosopher Lesley Kolakowski’s view on this matter to be persuasive. “We do not assent to our moral beliefs by admitting ‘this is true’, but by feeling guilty if we fail to comply with them. This involves not an intellectual act but “an act of questioning one’s own status in the cosmic order…an anxiety following a transgression not of a law but of a taboo.”

The debunking of the received wisdom of many of our society’s taboos, and the deracination of our natural feelings of shame and disgust has left many lost and confused by the many changes to our cultural landscape in the last 20 years.

The opponents of same sex marriage propose that parliament pass a law declaring that marriage is the sole preserve of a man and woman. That there is a moral component to this legislation is a given. Such legislation would be a step to retake territory lost in the latest skirmish in the culture war.

There are two coercive instruments at work in a stable democratic nation – 1) Parliament and its law-making power and 2) the moral coercion of public opinion. It is naïve to pretend that conflict between people can be avoided when it comes to setting standards of morality and virtue within a society.

James Fitzjames Stephen illustrates this when he says:

“There is only one illustration of the general truth that the intimate sympathy and innumerable bonds of all kinds by which men are united, and the differences of character and opinions by which they are distinguished, produce and must forever produce continual struggles between them. They are like a pack of hounds all coupled together and all wanting to go different ways. J.S. Mill would like each to take his own way. The advice is most attractive, and so long as the differences are not very apparent it may appear to be taken, but all the voting in the world will not get the couples off, or prevent the stronger dogs from having their way in the long run and making the others follow them. We are thus brought to the conclusion that in morals as well as in religion there is and must be a war and conflict between men.”

Stephen goes on to make the point that “the influences which tend to unite men and which give them an interest in each other’s welfare are both more numerous and more powerful than those which throw them into collision. The effect of this is not to prevent collisions, but to surround them with acts of friendship and goodwill which confine them within limits and prevent people from going to extremities.”

He concludes “complete moral tolerance is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other – that is to say, when society is at an end. If, on the other hand, every struggle is treated as a war of extermination, society will come to an end in a shorter and more exciting manner, but not more decisively. A healthy state of things will be a compromise between the two.”

It seems the voice of those who oppose same-sex marriages in the secular arena has too often been shrill and judgmental, antagonistic not only to the judicial change to the definition of marriage but to the gay and lesbian individuals who wish to avail themselves of the institution. Lost are the voices of friendship and goodwill. The voices that say to the extent committed same-sex couples are discriminated against with respect to certain legal benefits of succession, social assistance and the like, the tolerance of Canadians will extend those benefits to them.

Same-sex couples have with but few exceptions won all those battles and the conflict has been resolved in their favour. Where further concessions short of granting them the keys to the institution of marriage are required, they could readily be attained.

It is time for the spirit of compromise to be rekindled in the hearts of the same sex marriage advocates who are pushing the battle to the ramparts of the marriage redoubt. The risk of this struggle becoming a war that exterminates society is a real one. This assumes of course Canada has not already reached the stage of complete moral tolerance through utter indifference – a very real possibility particularly in our large cities.

If one were to measure the state of Canadian society by the willingness of elected officials to take principled stands and to encourage a broad public debate, one would regrettably conclude that the war indeed has been lost.

However, if every Canadian paused and thoughtfully considered this issue and its implications for our society, and upon concluding it was a matter of importance, took a moment to write to his or her MP with a copy to the Prime Minister; we might just spark a revival of conscience and duty on the part of enough of our parliamentarians to permit this matter to be resolved through broad public debate and not by the fiat of a majority of 9 Supreme Court judges.

Political Correctness 101

2004-11-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

Recently I read the advisers to Her Majesty in their wisdom, recommended that the Waterloo Room in Buckingham Palace, undergo a name change for a day while it served as the locus for a state visit by Mr. Chirac of France. It seems the reminder of Napoleon’s defeat would prove to be too much for Monsieur Chirac to bear, weakened as he is from his recent prostration at the bier of his dear friend Yasser Arafat.

The room will be given a suitably neutral name, one I have already forgotten – this thanks to some vestigial defence mechanism my brain triggers to combat the virus of political correctness.

How long will it take for some Quebec politician to find an opportunity to press for the same sensitivity to be shown to government officials from Quebec when they venture into the provinces of the ROC? Wolfville could become Montcalmville for a day the next time it hosts a meeting attended by Quebec delegates. The mind boggles.

Headline Gazing November 16th

2004-11-19T20:04:00.000-08:00

A Page Flip Through Today’s National Post – November 16, 2004

The main headline covers the murder of Margaret Hassan in Iraq. It seems even al-Zarqawi recognized the lunacy of kidnapping and killing a woman whose life and organization was dedicated to the provision of care to the Iraqi people, regardless of their politics or beliefs. His group said they would release her if she were turned over to them. Still, we can expect the usual suspects amongst the editorialists and commentators to point to this latest crime as a reason for the US and its supporters to leave Iraq. Predictably some talking head will say the blood of Mrs. Hassan is on the US' hands, for without the US invasion none of this terrorism would have happened. It is painful to endure.

George Bush plans to visit Canada and would like to speak to the combined House of Commons and Senate. It will be a test for people like Carolyn Parrish to constrain herself. Personally, I hope she reveals herself to be the panjandrum she really is, but that is my dark side speaking. No doubt the CBC’s Neil McDonald, now recovered from the shock and consternation of seeing his man Kerry lose the election, will be on hand to spin gold into lead as he covers the event.

A former stripper is suing an Ontario game park for $3 million for damages she suffered when a lion attacked her through an open window in the vehicle she shared with her then boyfriend as they drove through the game farm. It seems the scars on her scalp and hip prevented her from moving up the career fire pole of exotic dancing to “featured exotic dancer” from the more lowly “freelance” lap dancer. She claims now to have abandoned her former career and is studying to be a geriatric nurse. There must be a joke here somewhere.

And finally a Florida woman is trying to sell a 10 year old partly eaten grilled cheese sandwich that she claims bears an image of the Virgin Mary. It seems more than 100,000 eBay users had viewed the holy toast and bids had reached $22,000. Ebay pulled the item but a persistent Diana Duyser re-submitted it and bidding has now reached $17,000. What does the Virgin Mary look like anyway? I suppose one can make out a face, though I see a hyena when I rotate the page 90 degrees. A pile of rice and chow mein at the foot of my then two year old son’s high chair once resembled Mt. Rushmore. Where was eBay when I needed it?

Tribute to My Dad

2004-11-08T21:35:00.000-08:00

My Dad died last week, peacefully and prepared. I wrote this piece and submitted a shortened version to the Globe and Mail for consideration as a Lives Lived column.

LIVES LIVED

Emmanuel (Manny) Paul Leandre Buan – June 1,1921- November 4, 2004

Survived by his sons Alan (Marilyn) granddaughter Alanna, and Ben (Nancy) grandsons Caley, Aidan and brother Remy.

Farmer, soldier, husband, father, entrepreneur – a small thread in the tapestry of Canadian life and culture.

Saul Bellow wrote that "death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything". So much becomes clearer when one looks back on the life of a loved one.

Emmanuel Buan was the youngest of six children born on a farm near St. Brieux, Saskatchewan. His parents emigrated from Brittany as part of the turn of century wave which populated the prairies. His father had previously spent 10 years at sea in the French merchant marine and navy and was at anchor in Shanghai harbour during the Boxer rebellion. His first week in Grade 9, Manny had a disagreement with his teacher. His dad needed help on the farm and told him he could quit school so long as he stayed and worked the farm. The choice was easy for a 15 year old. He quit school in 1936.

For the next 6 years he laboured at the subsistence living which was the sentence served by every small prairie farmer. His diary entries recount the daily routines of cutting wood, picking stones, building and mending fences and milking cows. Yet through it all he experienced a fulfilling sense of community. Small farming communities engendered a spirit of independence enhanced by a sense of responsibility for the well being of one’s neighbour.

His diary is filled with entries of visits to neighbours for meals, even if it meant a 2 hour walk in summer or sleigh ride in winter. He thought nothing of hitching his horses to a little caboose on sled rails, lighting the wood stove inside, and packing his wife and sons off for a 90 minute ride – all to go curling!

Manny tried to enlist in the Army in 1940, but his family doctor classified him C3 because of an earlier bout of septicemia. He argued with the doctor and eventually convinced him to reclassify him as A1. In one eventful week in July 1942 he proposed to his sweetheart, got his parents’ permission to marry, and received his call up for service. He was granted a brief extension to get his dad through harvest season.

On September 30th he married Therese Rudulier, followed immediately by 30 straight days working on a threshing crew before reporting for basic training at the end of November. He shipped out overseas at the end of April 1944, a week after his first son was born. He served as a corporal and saw action in the Italian campaign and in the liberation of Holland. His life of hard work had prepared him for the cold and muddy ditches of Italy serving with the 2nd Field Regiment, 1st Canadian Army.

After the war he built his house with his own hands and moved in with his wife and two sons late in the fall of 1947. After thirteen years of hard work and a decade of CCF government, farming began to take its toll. Manny once went to a T.C. Douglas rally and had the temerity to call out a question for the preacher/politician. He was met with a typical Douglas riposte – “There stands a Liberal, naked and unashamed.” Laughter, the politician’s friend, saved Douglas from explaining how it was he knew better than Manny how to spend his hard earned and meagre farmer’s income.

In 1960 he sold the farm and bought a hotel in Wakaw, Saskatchewan. Always the entrepreneur, but not always successful, Manny later acquired a retail store franchise in Watrous which failed, moved to Saskatoon and was one of the Principal Group’s first Saskatchewan sales representatives. He spent 7 years in Winnipeg where he built up and eventually sold a building maintenance business.

Unashamed of and undaunted by his Grade 8 education this self-educated man won several sales awards during his two stints with Principal, the last of which ended with the firm’s collapse in 1987. The emotional burden of having to counsel clients who had lost their life savings and his sense of having been betrayed by the management of the Principal Group took their toll on his health.

Those who knew Manny only in the last 10 years of his life did not see the humour, and vigour and vitality of his earlier years. He had a lovely singing voice and was always whistling and humming tunes while he worked. He had beautiful handwriting and an artistic streak which produced a few paintings to hand down to his three grandchildren.

He suffered the grief of outliving three wives. His beloved Therese died in 1975 of cancer, his second wife Margaret in 1979 of cancer, and his third wife Joan in 1999 after 17 years of marriage, the last several of which saw her struggle with Alzheimer’s.

Fifty years of smoking wreaked havoc on his lungs, artillery guns and un-muffled farm machinery ravaged his hearing, and his eyesight was failing; yet he never complained. He never asked anyone to help him end his life, and he did not waver from his Christian faith. He knew that his Redeemer lives, and that through Him, he too would have eternal life. He died peacefully with his youngest son at his side.

D.J. Enright wrote that “we might not really object to death if it were not preceded by dying.” Manny knew all too well that dying is part of life and there was nothing to be gained from railing against it. In these days of the cult of the rich, famous or the outrageous, Manny’s life offers little of interest to the headline seekers. However, he does represent a generation and a segment of Canadian society whose spirit, sacrifice and basic decency should not be forgotten.

Uncommon Wisdom From the Bench

2004-10-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

It seems to be less and less frequently that I find occasion to praise the pronouncements of a judge. An exception arose this week. BC Provincial Court Judge Judy Gedye, while sentencing a West Vancouver male teacher to prison for his sexual abuse of a 15 year old student, made passing reference to the "possibly provocative dress and behaviour" of the female victim. Judge Gedye did not say these characteristics of the victim in any way excused the offender or mitigated the seriousness of the offence. Rather it appears she was raising an issue which she thought important for our community, our society and our culture to ponder - there are terrible consequences for a culture that refuses to let its children be children.

An analogy that comes to mind is a comment a judge might make while giving a damage award against the manufacturer of faulty sun tanning beds in favour of the customers who developed skin cancer as a result. It would be understandable and important for a judge in those circumstances to question what it says about our society that so many people are willing to expose themselves to harmful and potentially dangerous radiation, in order to look good. This provides no excuse for the faulty manufacturer, but surely it would be ignorant for society to ignore the causal connection between the harmful rays and the desire to look good.

Sexual predators like the teacher Timothy Foley are a dangerous reality in our society. Sadly, the published responses to Judge Gedye’s comments seem to miss the point. Rather than thoughtfully consider the issue Judge Gedye raised, some readers focused instead on the supposed victimhood of young girls desperate to avoid the peer pressure to dress like streetwalkers. Rejection or ridicule seem to be the inevitable consequences of having a mind of your own if you are a teenage girl according to one letter writer.

If the letters to the Vancouver Sun editor are an accurate measure of the reaction to Judge Gedye's comments, it seems we live in a community where parents are more concerned with ensuring their children “fit in” than they are to help them gain the self confidence and positive self image necessary to resist popular MTV culture.

One letter writer said "concerned parents of teens these days are assured by parenting experts that their daughter's clothing choices are worn as a form of fitting in with their female friends, not as an act of seeking sexual attention from men". I would love to meet some of those so called "parenting experts". To be consistent the same experts no doubt advise the parents of teenage boys that "their sons' choices to drive their cars at high speeds, often while under the influence of alcohol or drugs are forms of fitting in with their male friends, not as an act of endangering their lives and those of others".

What better measure of the depths into which our society has sunk, that parents of teenagers lack the common sense to see the foolishness of the advice of such self-proclaimed parenting experts.

But then I read that in Disraeli's 1847 novel Tancred he delivered the message that the modern world was sunk in materialism and moral relativism, and that it lacked soul as well as faith

The French, always better at saying it well than doing it well, capture the malaise of our human condition with the saying - La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose

Oh, Canada - Chapter Three

2004-09-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

“You can’t be angry with your own time without damage to yourself”
- Ulrich in Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil

“Culture may be described as that which makes life worth living. It is what justifies other people and other generations in saying, when they contemplate the remains and influence of an extinct civilization, that it was worthwhile for that civilization to have existed” – T.S. Eliot, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture

I have a confession to make. Increasingly I find it difficult not to be angry with our own time. Musil’s advice along with a frequent repetition of Phillipians 4:6[1] have become keys to my ability to maintain an emotional equilibrium in the face of what I see happening to our civilization.

Even a cursory glance through our national and local newspapers or 10 minutes of CBC Newsworld is enough to make me ask the same question posed by Smollett’s Matthew Bramble in the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) – “whether the world was always as contemptible, as it appears to me at present?”

I am troubled not so much by the constant reminder of the evil that exists in the world, as by the smug and complacent attitude our Western civilization displays in the face of the daily reminders. The use of language is revealing of what lies in the heart of the speaker. Has anyone noticed how our Canadian press (Globe & Mail, CBC) have slipped into language of appeasement if not outright approval of the barbaric actions of the terrorists in Iraq.

Kidnapping and murder have been replaced by detention and execution. Our press reports on these events in language suggesting these victims have been first inconvenienced (detained) and then dispatched through some legitimate process (executed – definition: 2 : a putting to death especially as a legal penalty.)

It is inconceivable to me that any right thinking person can think it is possible to negotiate with despicably evil men who abduct innocent civilians, terrorize them and force them to appear before cameras pleading for their lives, and ultimately butcher them alive by cutting off their heads with a hand knife.

How many Canadians, particularly our youth who spend so much time surfing the internet, have logged on to the websites to view these atrocities? Are they sickened by the sight? Are they so desensitized to death and violence and brutality from all the movies and video games that they are able to avoid the natural human reaction of revulsion? What does it say about our civilization that cable providers have not prevented these images from being distributed throughout the internet – in Canada no doubt because of the fear of the Civil Liberties Union attacking them for breach of someone’s fundamental human rights!

Most nations have stood firm against this evil while some have bent their knee such as Spain and the Philippines. In the face of a close election in Australia, Prime Minister Howard has shown leadership and courage by denouncing the barbarism and vowing that Australia will never submit to this terrorist blackmail. His opponent vows to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas. In the United States, the Democrats and their push-me-pull-me candidate Mr. Kerry, seek to gain votes with the promise of an early disengagement.

Meanwhile, our Prime Minister makes a speech before a mostly empty United Nations General Assembly parading his usual list of platitudes and days later Canada and the UN demonstrate their ongoing incompetence by failing to provide Haitians with any meaningful relief from the devastation of flooding. Well, we did apparently approve a $50,000 expenditure by the Red Cross to “study how best to respond”.

Perhaps Professor Katherine Binhammer of the University of Alberta might agree to divert to Haiti the proceeds of her $62,566 research grant to study “Carnal knowledge: women, desire and seduction narratives in Britain, 1740-1800” or University of Ottawa professors Colette Parent and Christine Bruckert, their $90,806 grant to study “Sex work and intimacy; escorts and their clients”’ or Professor Ryan Rhodes and his U Vic group his $94,616 grant for a study called “Developing a theory-based leisure time walking program”. (National Post September 24, 2004 p. A4) Whatever happened to round numbers? Is it GST that gives us all the 6’s?

Matthew Bramble, it seems little has changed in 233 years!
[1] Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayers and petitions present your requests to God. And the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

The Sad Tale of M.M. and J.H.

2004-09-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

Another of my series of unpublished letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail.

What struck me while reading Kirk Makin’s article (Globe & Mail – September 21,2004) on the precedent setting divorce of the lesbians J.H. and M.M., was the role the legal system has played in transforming these two “ordinary” women into unwilling celebrities (accepting as true their claim to that effect).

First, we must remember the Halpern decision introduced the judicial invention of same-sex marriage, under the pretext that to do otherwise would deprive same sex couples of another judicially invented “right” under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is a favourite bootstrapping technique of revisionist judges, a fiction built on a fiction.

To Ms. Hannaford, lawyer for J.H. and provider of the convenient eponym for her client, are attributed two statements which are revealing of the direction in which some in our legal system have drifted since entering the fog bank of antinomian hyper-liberalism.

Marriage is nothing more than the result of “our cultural fixation on ‘pairing up’” according to Ms. Hannaford. Armed with this bleak view of the institution that forms the bedrock of our civilization, it is not surprising that Ms. Hannaford’s cynicism has blossomed to the stage where she predicts that in 50% of marriages one spouse would admit that it knew the marriage was over within two days of the ceremony.

Ms. Hannaford is free to hold those views and to express them. We who think her views are patently B.S. need to speak up and be heard, and to hope Ms. Hannaford doesn’t have aspirations for the Bench.

B.J. Buan
B.A, LL.B
Vancouver, BC

Debunking Chomsky

2004-09-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

I attach a review by Keith Windschuttle in New Criterion of the Anti-Chomsky Reader. We could use more of these books to show what feet of clay so many of the liberal intellectual elitists prop themselves up on.

A disgraceful career by Keith Windschuttle

Click to buy the book.

One of the main reasons Noam Chomsky’s political views are taken seriously in universities and the media is because he has an awesome reputation for scientific accomplishment in the field of linguistics. He is among the ten most cited authors in the humanities—trailing only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, the Bible, Aristotle, Plato, and Freud—and the only living member of the top ten. Last year The New Yorker called him “one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.”
Were it not for this status, many of his obsessive and outlandish political ideas would by now have disqualified him from reasoned debate. He thinks every president of the United States since Franklin Roosevelt should have been impeached because “they’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.” He claims the United States actively collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviet Union in the latter stages of World War II. He once supported the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, claiming the genocidal evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1976 was due to a failed rice crop and “may actually have saved many lives.” He describes Israel as a terror state with “points of similarity” to the Third Reich. And he has defended an anti-Semitic French academic who claims the Holocaust was a “historical lie.” Chomsky describes him as nothing more than an “apolitical liberal” whose work is based on “extensive historical research.”

The most devastating articles in the Anti-Chomsky Reader are not those that expose the ideological prejudices, factual misrepresentations, and distorted logic of his political writings but the two at the end of the book that tear up his reputation as one of the towering intellects of our time. Two essays about linguistics reveal Chomsky’s output in that field to be not the work of a rare, great mind but the product of a very familiar kind of academic hack. His reputation turns out not to have been earned by any significant contribution to human understanding but to be the product of a combination of self-promotion, abuse of detractors, and the fudging of his findings.

John Williamson points out that fifty years after the announcement of the “Chomskyan revolution” in linguistics, immense progress has been made in almost every field of science. “We have been to the moon several times,” he writes. “Our way of life depends upon the computer chip.” The work of Einstein, to whom some of Chomsky’s fans compare him, has been confirmed many times and can explain many physical phenomena. But in linguistics, Williamson shows, the results are comparatively trivial. All that Chomskyan grammar can explain is language which is transparent and easily labelled: “first-order” sentences such as The keeper fed the bananas to the monkey. Grammatical formulations of the “second order of difficulty,” such as For there to be a snowstorm would be nice, still remain a mystery.
Moreover, Chomsky has not established a grand new paradigm for his field, and then spent the rest of his life building upon its foundations and encouraging other researchers to do the same, as would have happened had his project been genuinely important. Instead, his work has resembled a pattern all too familiar in the humanities and social sciences of one overblown speculation following another. Williamson writes:

The history of Chomskyan theory is a study in cycles. He announces a new and exciting idea, which adherents to the faith then use and begin to make all kinds of headway. But this progress is invariably followed by complications, then by contradictions, then by a flurry of patchwork fixes, then by a slow unravelling, and finally by stagnation. Eventually the master announces a new approach and the cycle starts anew.

Over Chomsky’s career, these cycles have gone from “transformational grammar and deep structure,” to “universal grammar,” then to “principles and parameters.” The most recent approach, launched in 1995, is called “minimalism.” And what has all this accomplished? Chomskyan theory has not even developed a rational means of explaining why the sentence John was decided to leave early is ungrammatical. If this had been real science, the project would have lost its funding years ago for lack of results.

Robert E. Levine and Paul M. Postal, in an essay appropriately entitled “A Corrupted Linguistics,” are equally critical of Chomsky’s puffed-up promises. They write:
Much of the lavish praise heaped on his work is, we believe, driven by uncritical acceptance (often by nonlinguists) of claims and promises made during the early years of his academic activity; the claims have by now largely proved to be wrong or without real content, and the promises have gone unfulfilled.

Commentators who are not linguists often discern a fundamental contrast between Chomsky’s academic work on linguistics and his non-academic writings about politics. They take the former to be brilliant, revolutionary, and widely accepted, but recognize the latter as radical and controversial.

Levine and Postal, however, both academic linguists, don’t see it this way. Rather than a great divide between his scholarly and popular writings, they find both share the same key properties: “a deep disregard and contempt for the truth, a monumental disdain for standards of enquiry, a relentless strain of self-promotion, remarkable descents into incoherence, and a penchant for verbally abusing those who disagree with him.” They provide four revealing examples: In his earliest and most celebrated book, Syntactic Structures (1957) Chomsky covered up an inconsistency in his theory by publishing a statement about the grammatical rule for passive voice, even though he knew from other work of his own that the statement was untrue. After a dissertation by one of his own doctoral students, John Ross, had shown that one of Chomsky’s purported “universal principles” of grammar was not actually universal, Chomsky refused to give up the principle and simply avoided mentioning Ross’s critique. “The worst aspect of this subterfuge,” Levine and Postal write, “is his touting of a failed principle as a genuine discovery to nonlinguist audiences unprepared to recognize the dishonesty involved.” He cited it in an interview with one credulous reporter and repeated the claim in a much more prominent interview in The New Yorker last year. Levine and Postal record that Chomsky has sometimes rejected proposals made by other linguists, often in the strongest terms, but then later adopted those very proposals himself, without attribution or credit. This occurred with the concept of “deep structure,” which is one of the ideas by which Chomsky is best known to lay audiences. In the 1970s, other linguists showed that “deep structure” was untenable. Chomsky at first defended his idea and ferociously opposed his detractors. He eventually gave away the concept himself in the early 1990s. But in abandoning it, he made no open announcement that he had done so, nor acknowledged the critique whose alternative thesis he adopted. In an effort to disguise his own failures, Chomsky has denigrated the results of scientific research in general. In his 2002 book Nature and Language, he was questioned by two interviewers who, despite being long-time enthusiasts, asked the big and by then embarrassing question about what he considered the “established results” of his work. Instead of producing some actual results, Chomsky chose to scorn the very idea of scientific results. “My own view is that everything is subject to question,” he answered. “Even in the advanced sciences, everything is questionable.” Levine and Postal point out that anyone with the slightest acquaintance with modern physical sciences would recognize this as a grotesque misrepresentation of science’s true nature and its findings. Chomsky was deliberately distorting the status of the numerous genuine discoveries science has made in order to cover up his own inability to produce any. Chomsky’s stance here is particularly hypocritical, given a further point Williamson makes about his recent work. He has lately been attributing physical properties to the elements of language, applying terms used by hard sciences such as physics and chemistry. Chomsky and his followers now employ descriptions such as “light” and “heavy” phrases or “weak” and “strong” attraction between words in an attempt to explain the behavior of verbs and adjectives in the same terms as subatomic particles. Williamson also notes that Chomsky has presented transformational grammar as similar to the chemical sequencing of biochemistry, and appropriated the phrase “principles and parameters” from computer science.

Williamson’s essay is a very amusing read. He recounts exchanges of emails he has had with Chomsky over a range of issues from the American role in World War II to technical aspects of linguistic theory. One exchange was about the role of transitive and intransitive verbs. Chomsky’s thesis is that the rarity of one type of usage of intransitive verbs is such that it provides evidence the human brain has a preference for certain grammatical structures. This, in turn, is evidence for Chomsky’s well-known claim (popularized by his loyal follower Steven Pinker) that grammar is innate and that humans are biologically “hard-wired” for grammar. In one of his emails, Williamson challenged this thesis with a list of ten examples of transitive and intransitive verbs that clearly failed to obey these hard-wired rules. In a footnote, Williamson reveals how intellectually taxing he found this task: “I would like to thank the girls of Hooters at the Jefferson Davis Turnpike location south of Richmond for helping me to compile this list.”
Collier, Horowitz, and their six other authors have produced a book that has long been needed. It provides a penetrating coverage of the disgraceful career of a disgraceful but very influential man, who has so far avoided a criticism as thoroughgoing as this. Steven Morris, Thomas Nichols, and Eli Lehrer provide powerful critical analyses of Chomsky’s writings about Vietnam, Cambodia, the Cold War, and the news media. Two essays by Paul Bogdanor and Werner Cohn examine Chomsky’s compulsive hatred for the state of Israel and his support for neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers.

These days, Chomsky’s denunciations of Israel dispense with the once-familiar distinction between Zionists and Jews. He has become a proponent of outright anti-Semitism. The prospect of Chomsky’s legion of adolescent and academic followers adopting the same stance makes Bogdanor’s and Cohn’s articles particularly depressing. David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh analyze his long career of denouncing the United States, the country that has sustained him for his seventy-four years and given him all that he has.

Anyone who likes seeing such a celebrated leftist being skewered by his own words and arguments will enjoy much of this book hugely, but its overall effect is actually very sobering. What is it about Western intellectual culture, and American academic culture in particular, that has led so many potentially talented people to turn into such blind and hate-filled critics? There is no answer in this book, but it sure makes you wonder.

Keith Windschuttle’s latest book is The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (Macleay Press).

Vapours in an Ottawa Train Station

2004-09-14T16:26:00.000-07:00

I forced myself to watch some of the tragi-comedy posing as governance going on in the old Ottawa train station.

The vacuity of Mr. Martin's statements is best summed up with the quote below, reported on cbc.ca today. There is no platitude Mr. Martin has heard and not fallen in love with.

"There are going to be times when an added injection of funding is required," he said at the televised meeting. "...I have been told by a number of the leading medical professionals that if what you're going to do is attack wait times, you've really got to attack wait times. You've got to break the back of the problem, and once you've broken the back of the problem, then in fact it becomes much more [manageable]."

Dare we guess how much of our money the government paid to those "leading medical professionals"? I would gladly have given Mr. Martin the same advice for free - at least he would have gotten his money's worth. I would have gladly added some extra advice .

How about: "if you want to make the first step to reach a negotiation Mr. Martin, you need to make the first step to reach a negotiation." Or perhaps something more profound like: "If you want to make a fool of yourself Mr. Martin, just be yourself."

Is there some profundity in Mr. Martin's words that I am missing? Sadly it seems our PM is way over his head. Yesterday he was frequently required to confer sotto voce with his advisors, perhaps trying to understand the numbers in his own proposal to the provinces.

His Health Minister the reclaimed socialist Mr. Dosanjh needed no such counselling, he simply refused to talk about the numbers in his proposal - "I never talk numbers" he said. How NDP of him. Those of us in BC know all too well the NDP's aversion to numbers, unless they measure the funds paid out to their union friends.

A humourous visual aside was the sight of a grossly overweight aide to one of the premier's filling the TV screen scene behind him as she attempted to squeeze back into her chair with a coffee cup in hand, probably returning from her smoke break, while her boss droned on about the need for government to provide better health care.

Surely the muzak is playing Bring On the Clowns on a continuous loop in the background.

Aren't we glad we didn't elect that scary Stephen Harper?

Ben Buan

Injury Time - D.J. Enright - A Recommended Read

2004-09-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

I have just finished an intriguing book, Injury Time by D.J. Enright. It is a difficult book to categorize. Enright called it a memoir. Robert Conquest says it is, “Enright at his best in the most arresting and commonplace book for years. His gentle manner makes his occasional sharp judgements all the more devastating.”

He covers many topics - morals, manners, people and especially the English language. It is a witty, acerbic, moving and poignant piece, written while being treated for terminal cancer from which he died at the age of 82, shortly after he completed the book.

Through Enright I was introduced to the literary adjective, ben trovato, meaning "characteristic or appropriate even if untrue". Among his favourite examples was the computer spell check program that refused to accept the opening line of Moby Dick (Call me Ishmael) and offered up in its place – Call me Fishmeal! Another was the advertisement in the West Briton for: “Competent chef required by quality restaurant…No time wasters or pre-Madonnas.”

A poet himself, Enright weaves numerous verses of his work and that of other poets into his meandering look at life and death, including my favourite, a verse by Fergus Allen from his

poem, To Be Read Before Being Born:

No time is allowed for practice or rehearsal
There are no retakes and there isn’t a prompter.
There’s only moving water, dimpled by turbulence
And no clambering out on to the bank
To think things over, as there is no bank.

The book is filled with witty quotes. Enright quotes Thomas Nagel in Mortal Questions, “I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death”. To this Enright adds his own mordant observation by saying, “others might not really object to death if it were not preceded by dying.”

Here is a typical vignette Enright shares with his readers. They combine his love of the English language, and his concern for how it is being lost through ignorant usage.

A reader of the Times, describing himself as being of a generation for whom grass was for cutting, coke was kept in the coal-shed, and a gay person was the life and soul of the party, tells how relieved he was to find in a certificate of insurance issued by Lloyds that some things hadn’t changed. Under the heading “Words with special meanings, came the gloss: ‘Death means loss of life’

The book is not preoccupied with death, but it is a major theme and Enright’s ability to find humour in almost every facet of his journey is remarkable. He follows the advice of Ulrich in Robert Musil’s, The Man Without Qualities who warned that “you cannot be angry with your own time without harming yourself”. He takes on most of the major issues concerning the demise of our culture, but he does not rail nor rage.

There is a sweetness and gentleness in him as well, illustrated by his description of the cab ride home from hospital following one of his treatments, accompanied by his wife who herself had just undergone an endoscopy. Imagine the mood of these two octogenarians as they enter the cab, yet Enright describes the scene thus:

“Then something happened that almost made it, some of it, worthwhile. The young black cabbie allocated to us was sweet-natured and kind-hearted, above and beyond the call of duty or of any conceivable tip. (He didn’t want one). Every cloud has its silver lining? But this was an avatar, as if some aspect of deity had chosen that moment and place to descend among us. And this would be a good note to end on. On the brink of sudden and happy tears.”

Injury Time, a book to make you laugh and cry.