A response to fellow blogger, Sandy Crux
February 18, 2011
Rodcros here. First, a bit of background. Yes, I am or was a fifth generation Progressive Conservative until Mike Harris made a reluctant Liberal out of me. I deeply admired John Robarts, Bill Davis, John Crosbie, Joe Clark, and my personal favourite, Flora McDonald. John Matheson was the one Liberal in my early years who won and held my admiration. Frankly, I never thought much of the others, but there was nowhere else to turn when Harris and his acolytes took over in Ontario, and then remnants of his crew formed up around Harper in Ottawa. After Harris left to grow fat on Bay Street.
Why am I so angry at Stephen Harper? He’s a plagiarist, for starters. I learned early on in my career as an educator that a plagiarist must be stopped early and firmly, or he or she will come to no good. The culture of the Harper Government in fact has come to no good. The fundamental decencies which make up Western-style democracy don’t seem to mean anything to these guys. The PMO rules the country. Harper prorogues and leaves Dimitri Soudas in charge?
A prime minister should bring a people together, not split them into warring factions, but Harper has made a practice of this. I see the current neo-con government as a barbarian invasion, and all I want is for them to be gone, so that we can find our way back to some sort of balance in a civil parliamentary democracy. With a census. With signatures that mean something. With respect for one’s colleagues and one’s department, not contempt for underlings. Where blind loyalty is not the only admirable trait.
The Bev Oda situation was the last straw for me because it was so inelegant, so classless. This group of legislators write laws, but they lack the ability to follow them. This should not be. Where is the discussion of policy? In the last five years it’s all been political games and omnibus legislation rammed through without discussion.
This summer I interviewed Michael Ignatieff and he stuck me as a man I could live with as a leader. He’s not overly cunning. He shows a good reverence for Canadian democratic tradition. I wrote in my newspaper column at the time that he is a better conservative than Stephen Harper, and I’ll stand by that.
Thank your for your attention and consideration. Parliamentary democracy evolved at the same time as the watch: both depended upon the opposing spring principle. Balance and a certain delicacy are essential to the maintenance of both, and we need to work hard through vigorous and well-intended dialogue, to allow our Canadian democracy to flourish, rather than to dwindle and wilt under oppression.
Rod Croskery, M.Ed.
Dump Bev Oda petition link
February 17, 2011
Enough is enough! It’s one thing to sit back and make occasional sarcastic comments about the totalitarian nature of the Harper regime; it’s another matter to have one’s face rubbed in this muck. Truth is no longer an absolute in Harperland — Hell, truth isn’t even a value, apparently. Harper’s performance in Question Period Wednesday was as obscene as Bill Clinton’s when faced with the Monica Lewinsky accusation.
These guys are not my grandmother’s Conservatives, and the sooner they’re out of Ottawa, the better for Canada.
http://petition.liberal.ca/bevodamustresign
http://stuffoccurs.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/minister-oda-and-not-why-i-agree-with-the-minister/
Marjory Loveys worked in the PMO for ten years before becoming the Leeds-Grenville Liberal Candidate. I suggested that the comment above passes my personal sniff test, and asked her for further comment on it.
Beware the departing politician
February 6, 2011
While researching this column I ran across something which doesn’t make any sense at all: Ontario provincial members of parliament have no pension plan. Mike Harris eliminated it in 1996. Since then there has been the problem of MPPs hanging onto their seats because they have nowhere to go. This is not right.
When elected Conservative leader, John Tory couldn’t get anyone to resign to let him run in a by-election, not out of spite, but because no one could afford to give up his livelihood without any real hope of finding a comparable job (Hokan 2009). “MPP Norm Sterling has a vivid recollection of the tragic suicide of a Liberal member who lost his seat and experienced a deep depression that was partially due to his inability to re-integrate into the workforce despite holding a PhD in theology. At the time former Premier Bob Rae observed that this tragedy ‘causes all of us to really reflect on some of the challenges and difficulties of public life as well as the difficult transitions that are involved in coming in and coming out of politics.’ Former Speaker of the Assembly, David Warner, recalls that a colleague of his, who served for fourteen years, was unable to find work for years and narrowly avoided destitution because of the pension he received”(Hokan 2009).
Over the last nine years we have managed to undo some of the damage Mike Harris and his cronies inflicted upon Ontario’s social safety net with eight years of slash-and-burn neo-conservatism. But the plight of our MPPs remains a problem there will likely be no political will to solve.
But why should a capable young man with a family like our MPP Steve Clark have to take an insecure job with lousy re-employment prospects and no pension other than a small RRSP when if he held an equivalent position with a crown corporation like Ontario Power Generation or the Ontario Lottery Corporation, he would be in line for ridiculously high severance packages?
The lack of fair compensation and security for MPPs leaves the door open for corruption, for the legislators to find their own ways to feather their nests. Here we have to look again to the legacy of Mike Harris.
When I think of Mike Harris the image which comes to mind is of the gruff premier seated at a kitchen table with a typical family around him while he tries to stuff loonies into a pickle jar. This folksy style worked well for Harris, propelling him to two majority governments. What’s interesting about the man’s career, though, is how quickly he ditched the common touch upon leaving office. For Mike Harris the pickle-jar loonie saver became Mike Harris the Bay Street tycoon as soon as he had put in his time at Queen’s Park and began to collect his reward from grateful corporations on Bay Street.
Toronto Star reporter Tony Van Alphen wrote in 2010 that Harris now makes well over a $1 million a year from a string of corporate directorships. While Harris never earned a university degree, he is an advisor to a prominent Bay Street law firm, Cassels Brock and Blackwell. Magna Auto Parts pays Harris about $600,000 per year. Small wonder he supported Belinda Stronach’s candidacy for the Conservative leadership in 2004. Some of the other directorships are less demanding of Harris’s time and principle: Augen Capital, Charwell Seniors Housing Real Estate Investment Trust, EnGlobe Corp., Canaccord Capital, Routel Inc. and FirstService Corp. all help Harris supplement his meager Queen’s Park RRSP. Harris did away with his own pension, after all, so has to make a living some way.
Here’s the unedited press release: “We will end sweet deals politicians have created for themselves…M.P.P.s’ pensions will be abolished and replaced with an RRSP program similar to those used by professionals in Ontario. The tax-free benefits paid to politicians will also be abolished they will be paid a straight salary, just like ordinary Ontarians.” (Government Gets Rid Of Gold Plated Pensions, April 10, 1996) Well, Mike, I don’t know if most Ontarians without a degree can hold a job at a Bay Street law firm, or as a director of Magna. So the question is, how did you land those jobs?
Mike Harris’s prosperous life after his time at Queen’s Park is what causes me concern about the Harper government’s plan to cut corporate taxes in Canada. Harris earned his nest egg through two terms of gleefully hacking away at Ontario’s social safety net to the benefit of the business community.
What better way to provide a cozy retirement for Stephen Harper and his inner circle than to cut taxes for corporations on their way out the door and rake in the directorships later? Look how well it worked for Harris. Do you think Harris cronies Jim Flaherty, Tony Clemens and John Baird aren’t aware of that?
Last week the PMO spent $6.5 million on ads to promote corporate tax cuts. Before you buy what the ads offer, keep in mind that Harper and company won’t remain in Ottawa forever, and providing for their own retirement seems to be the first priority of neo-conservative minds.
References:
-Kimlan Hokan “The Compensation Conundrum: Does M.P.P. Compensation Determine the Composition of the Ontario Legislature?” http://www.olip.ontla.on.ca
-Tony Van Alphen “Director positions pay off for ex-Ontario premier” Toronto Star, April 6, 2010
Afterword: Elizabeth May may come up short in some areas of public life, but no one can say she can’t write. Check this one out:
http://www.straight.com/article-373665/vancouver/elizabeth-may-emperor-stephen-harper-wearing-no-clothes
Corporate Welfare Bum or Job Creator?
January 31, 2011
In Canada corporate CEOs average 155 times the income of average employees of their organizations. Yet Harper and the PMO want to give them more money. This is in keeping with the neo-cons’ fondness for cozy berths on boards of directors for themselves after retirement. See the example of Mike Harris in Ontario, an uneducated man attached to a top law firm with many lucrative directorships.
To facilitate this, the PMO has simply changed the label from the old “corporate welfare bums” to the new and improved “job creators” and the media and pollsters have obediently lined up to accept the new version of the truth.
So what’s the difference between a job creator and a corporate welfare bum? Well, when the latter phrase became popular in 1972 to ridicule corporate leaders becoming rich off government largesse, a CEO made forty times the average wage of his workers. That’s the difference: if you only make forty times an average salary, you’re a bum in Canadian politics. If you make 155 times the wage of the average Joe, you’re a neo-con god, and you have the right to demand further sacrifices.
Abuse of Power
December 28, 2010
The most upsetting abuse of power that I regularly see from Stephen Harper is his authority to name. It started with his angry reaction to the Dion coalition. Against logic and constitutional law he condemned his opponents as traitors, separatists and socialists, and Canadians by and large bought it.
Then he declared that losers don’t get to lead coalitions, and the media accepted his word on it. His phrase “Canadians don’t care about…” enables him to dismiss concerns which ordinary Canadians in fact do have, but it takes a confrontation with his Stephenness to get an alternative point of view recognized.
I could go on, but my point is that Stephen Harper has managed to become the voice of authority in Canada, and he will be very hard to unseat for that reason. What worries me is how quickly and easily he will convince Canadians that a coalition with Duceppe and the Bloc is a reunification of disparate wings of the Conservative party, should the results of the next election put Harper at a disadvantage.
Like inhabitants of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984, we will doublethink our way into a belief that it was always this way. That, Canadians, is abuse.
January 7th: Sue Riley in The Ottawa Citizen this morning listed the newest perversion of truth to come from the Harper Government. Over the last few weeks in the media it has been well documented that CEOs of companies in Canada make on average 155 times the salary of their entry-level employees. But to justify corporate tax cuts, all Stephen Harper has to do is change their names from fat cats to the new and flashy JOB CREATORS.
Now, magically, Canadians smile upon another Harper initiative to give us hope. Thin gruel indeed for the Tory faithful while this government makes corporations rich at the expense of the very voters who maintain them in power.
January 8th: He just keeps doing it. In an interview with David Akin of Sun Media today Harper spins his government’s foreign policy foul-ups of the last year in a way that had me trying in vain to adjust my bifocals. Didn’t work. Harper’s logic in this interview was “distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction,” to misuse an American master.
He said, “When we, as a country, offer to be part of a international mission to help protect global security then somebody comes along and uses that to try and leverage demands on our domestic airline industry, I don’t think that’s a situation we as a country want to be in,” Harper said. “What this teaches us in future and when we’re looking at other options is: Don’t get in a place where somebody’s going to try and use it to leverage some unrelated issue.”
This, I assume, is meant to justify isolationism: if Dubai, and the whole United Nations, for that matter, doesn’t want to play nice, we’ll just keep to ourselves. Blame the other guys, always. And why not? 30% of Canadian voters will buy it and with that he can form a government because the rest are too put off by politics to care.
January 12th: Newly-minted minister of the environment Peter Kent has redefined the biggest and messiest environmental issue in the country. Kent has taken a page from right-wing gadfly Ezra Levant’s book on the subject and has named the Alberta tar sands with its emissions, animal kills and water quality problems, “ethical oil.” Changing the paradigm from environmental stewardship to a battle between the forces of good and evil renders rational arguments and scientific evidence irrelevant, and seeks to sell Alberta oil to the fearful. This is pretty cheap.
It’s the faces of the kids!
November 21, 2010
On a November day in 1905, a man wearing a white beard and red suit stepped off the train, met Timothy Eaton and his wife, and walked to their store through downtown Toronto. This marked the beginning of a tradition which outlasted the Eaton corporation and has become an important part of our Canadian culture: the Santa Claus parade.
In 1908 a truck and a band joined Timothy Eaton’s annual procession. By 1924 Gimbel’s in Philadelphia, Macy’s in New York, and the J.L. Hudson Company in Detroit had picked up on the idea as a means to kick off sales for the Christmas season.
After watching this year’s Toronto Santa Claus Parade on television, I found the only thing which rang true was the comment by Santa in answer to an interviewer’s question. What did he find the most interesting thing about the parade? “It’s the faces of the kids!”
As a veteran of three Santa Claus parades, the last two this weekend, I have to agree with this Santa’s assessment. I’ll never forget the girl in the T-Rex outfit who followed us last year in Westport. This year in Prescott and Kemptville I found it hard to believe that there are that many kids in the country.
Families love a parade. People of all ages come out simply to enjoy the spectacle and the company of others. Despite the department store hype, it’s not so much about Santa, or advertising, or the other crass aspects of consumption. From what I have seen in these parades the magic of Christmas is about parents celebrating an idea of a world they can make work for them.
Each community has a distinct identity. Prescott emphasized lots and lots of lights on Friday night. My first impression of the parade came when I parked beside the only other truck in the marshaling yard when I arrived at dusk. The back of its trailer opened and out backed a golf cart loaded with great gobs of lights driven by a straining generator somewhere under the dozens of strings of decorations. The driver in a clown suit stopped, made a few minor adjustments, then flicked a switch to inflate an 8’ clown on top of the cart. Then he turned on the stereo and his tiny float was ready to roll. It looked good.
Marjory went over to talk to the guy. He’s been attending the parade for ten years, adding a bit to his cart each year, and getting better at keeping the thing operating until the end of the route. We followed him back to his trailer after the parade. At full speed for a mile down the highway his inflated clown was still hanging on and all of the lights still worked. Apparently the only problem was his chilly feet and hands.
Prescott’s evening parade may be a victim of its success. Huge numbers of floats entered. Many heavy trucks wheeled in with trumpeting air horns and gleaming chrome. One minor hockey float had a rear-lit projection of hockey scenes. As we lined up my heart was in my mouth: a very young boy wearing a hard hat from a utility company I did not recognize was perched alone in the cherry picker on top of a large service truck.
The way Federal Liberal Candidate Marjory Loveys operates in parades, I drive my Ranger, decorated with wrapped gifts and carrying the candy larder. She walks or jogs the route, meeting as many people as she can. Her growing entourage of volunteers dressed as elves pass out candy canes to the kids and generally look supportive.
In Prescott the elves panicked when they saw the vast number of kids. Four kilos of candy canes disappeared in the first quarter mile. What to do? Elf Shawn spotted a likely store and dashed ahead, soon to return with another five kilos. With care the elves were able to make this supply last for the remainder of the parade.
Everybody was astonished and a bit stressed by the sheer number of faces at the Prescott parade. Though there were lots of people there as well, Saturday afternoon’s outing in Kemptville was a more relaxed affair with some time to chat with fellow participants and spectators. Kemptville merchants spoiled us with hot chocolate and cookies, dashing out from their stores to hand the goodies to us as we passed. The COGECO master of ceremonies parked himself squarely in my path while he had an on-air chat with Marjory. And there was the sandwich shop owner who adorned three young women (her daughters, I suspect) with exceptionally creative costumes depicting her wares. The veggie-sub costume I immediately understood. The others were a little trickier, but amusing to see. Mom pulled a wagon loaded with mini-sandwiches and the girls handled distribution. They didn’t have any trouble giving them away.
And then there was the huge, pink, propane truck. I had to ask. The driver was happy to tell his story. Superior Propane bought two $400,000 Kenworth trucks painted pink in support of the Breast Cancer awareness program, one for Ottawa and the other to work out of Guelph. A portion of the revenue from every litre each truck pumps goes as a contribution to the fund. On a busy day, “As much as a couple of hundred dollars from each truck goes to breast cancer research.” It takes a real man to drive a pink truck, but the guys at Superior seem proud to do it.
Next week is the Brockville parade, so wish us luck.
“Try to live near a subway entrance”
October 10, 2010
Over his career author Douglas Coupland has playfully changed the way North Americans think. In 1991 with Generation X Coupland became the spokesman for the lost generation sandwiched between the aggressive Baby Boomers and their overly-entitled progeny, the Generation Y kids.
Coupland will deliver this year’s series of Massey Lectures, reading a series of five excerpts from his novella, Player One. Saturday’s Globe and Mail ran a set of his notes entitled A Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years. The ideas were too good to resist, so here are a few of his suggestions:
“Try to live near a subway entrance. In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it’s the only real estate that will hold its value, if not increase.” Coupland riffs on the end of oil for much of his lecture. If you stop to think about it, our current way of life is entirely dependent upon cheap oil, and the only thing keeping it cheap is our collective belief that prices can’t rise much or the whole economy will collapse. It’s hard to bank on that assumption, so…
“Enjoy lettuce while you still can. And anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it is they served in railway hotels in the 1890s. Jams. Preserves. Pickled everything.”
To think we threw out a trailer-full of jumbo Mason jars when we moved to this house! Then we started buying them back to hold maple syrup. Now with hydro bills passing $200 per month, the freezer is becoming an expensive luxury: perhaps canning will come back as an efficient way to store food. The garden has progressed from “another one of Rod’s projects” to a useful and reliable source of food. Maybe it’s time to allow some chickens and a sheep or two onto the property, as well.
“North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.” Notice how Coupland sneaks changes into the language? Hate States. This one’s going to stick.
“The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed.” This is truly frightening. Does this mean that democracy is doomed to become a shell of itself, manipulated by incumbents with the budgets to buy the latest in mind-control technology? What can we do?
Mobilizing citizens to get out and vote may be the best antidote to this decay. First step? Take the cameras out of the House of Commons to eliminate that daily mud-wrestling display they call Question Period. It disgraces Canadian politics and discourages potential voters, particularly the young. It feeds the politics of division where a solid voting block’s power is leveraged by the systematic reduction of overall voter participation.
But the anti-prorogation rallies last winter came as a surprise to most everyone. Thousands of Canadians looked around and simultaneously decided that enough was enough and hit the bricks on a cold winter day. Coupland assumes Canadians won’t take the initiative to save their system of government, and the only direction the elevator can go is down. He’d likely be delighted if we proved him wrong on this one.
“You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell. Over-criminalization of the populace, paired with the triumph of shopping as a dominant cultural activity, will create a world where the two poles of society are shopping and jail.” I guess we deserve our lumps for our fondness for shopping, but I hope that the mania for building more prisons goes away in the next year or so.
“Getting to work will provide vibrant and fun new challenges. Gravel roads, potholes, outhouses, overcrowded buses, short-term hired bodyguards, highwaymen, kidnapping, overnight camping in fields, snaggle-toothed crazy ladies casting spells on you, frightened villagers, organ thieves, exhibitionists and lots of healthy fresh air.”
This is an interesting one. Roads are dependent upon oil. Asphalt needs constant upkeep. Distances are vast. Railways are few. This vision of a new medieval era sandwiched between sci-fi connectivity and political breakdown may emerge as the new model for the future of Canada and the world. I hope not.
“You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought.” Hey, we miss them already, but Internet is way better now. Coupland suggests finding a place to live on a west coast so as to avoid the blazing heat and “cryogenic cold” resulting from climate change. But this was the first summer in my memory that vegetation has remained a constant green through to Thanksgiving. Young trees had a great season. Corn crops in the area are unsurpassed. The hay was pretty good, too.
Coupland’s prediction that “Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people,” takes on some currency with the current mayoral race in Toronto. And energy shortages are a worry. But all in all, on this Thanksgiving Sunday in 2010, as I look out the windows through crystal air at the brilliant maples and the emerald turf below them, the world doesn’t seem such a bad place.
Harper’s hubris
September 26, 2010
Following his party’s defeat in the House of Commons this week, the certainty with which Stephen Harper vowed to hunt down and destroy the Long Gun Registry put me in mind of a quote from Bertrand Russell I saw once on a tractor site: “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
In the ongoing soap opera on Parliament Hill, no one could accuse Stephen Harper of a comic role. He’s the stuff of tragedy: larger than life, towering above his peers, neither predominantly good nor evil, imbued with a personal vision quite apart from the conventional moral code. It is of this vision I wish to speak.
Over the last year Stephen Harper and his government have declared war on statistics and the more rational forms of record-keeping. Lump sum payments to wounded soldiers suddenly took the place of a rational system of disability pensions for life. So much for supporting our troops, up until then the mantra of the Harper Government, but the system was simple.
The census is the bastion of all rational public administration in Canada. This summer it had its foundation cracked on the laughable premise that no one should go to jail for the failure to fill out a form. No one has ever gone to jail for not filling out a census form. But without believable, objective data, one can only govern by one’s beliefs and impulses, and that seems just fine for Harper and his inner circle.
And the latest battle to destroy the Long Gun Registry took on the context of a rebellion against an oppressive law which criminalized honest gun owners. What madness is this? The strength of the LGR is the set of rules for the possession and storage of firearms it carries with it. Every time I handle ammunition I remember the rule which requires that the shells be locked up in a separate room. This legislated requirement for the careful storage of firearms and ammunition in Canada undoubtedly saves lives because it makes Canadians careful.
Even Jim Flaherty caught the mania. To the annoyance of his audience at the Canadian Club, last week Flaherty read a rip-roaring speech accusing the opposition parties of a lust for power so that they can destroy Canada. It ended with an extended pirate metaphor so corny that it would have had my grade nine students of a decade ago jamming fingers down their necks in protest. This is hardly fit behaviour for a Minister of Finance of a G8 country, but like Tony Clement, Flaherty does what his boss tells him to do.
So what’s going on in Stephen Harper’s head?
Remember two years ago when Harper and Flaherty devoutly promised Canadians that there would be no recession in Canada? Harper even denied the stock market crash, suggesting it would be a good time to pick up some bargains. Yet these same two plan to run on their economic record and expect a good number of Canadians to believe them.
Stockwell Day disregarded statistics which show Canada’s crime rate steadily declining over the last two decades, and justified billions of dollars in prison expenditures with his claim of “unreported crimes.” How do you know there have been crimes if they’re not reported? I guess Stock just believes there must be some, so we need more prisons.
“This madness erects therefore its own foundation, owing nothing to reason. While holding itself high above reason, it makes itself reason’s counterpart. It is through this madness that subjectivity becomes absolutely sovereign, and the ultimate truth of folly is revealed.” Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: the flight from everyday life in literature and art. Ch. 5
This mania for the subjective over objective evidence is the downfall of Harper and his government. Certainly a world closed in around a few strongly-held beliefs is more comfortable than one where the viewer is exposed to all of the banal, often hopeless confusion which makes up the normal world with its lack of a coherent narrative. If one can subscribe strongly enough to one’s mania, the world can be a comfortable, rewarding place. One can create meaning within the fantasy world, and appear frighteningly confident to an outside observer. But faced with the statistics of a nature “Which is but an inert mass that does not depend in the least upon one’s creative powers when all it does is remind us of our limits, of our fallen condition, of our imminent return to dust,” the fantasy crumbles and the created ego shatters (Van Zuylen).
Look at the sudden departure of former Harper spokesman Kory Teneycke from Sun Media two weeks ago. In combat with author Margaret Atwood, he pushed the delusion to a point beyond which the fantasy could not go, and he cracked.
I can accept a certain fragility in Canada’s prime minister and his or her government, but not at the cost of ignoring the real issues for which we need a parliament to provide leadership. Columnist David Olive offered the following list of critical issues in October of 2008. Have we made any progress?
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healthcare
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the Canadian mission in Afghanistan
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foreign policy generally (Do we have one? What should it be?)
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squalid conditions in Native Canadian communities
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education reform
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immigration reform
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conventional pollution, specifically the proliferating toxic lakes in the Athabasca tar sands, and the continuing disgrace of the Sydney tar ponds
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the infrastructure deficit
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the widening gap between rich and poor
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the flat-lining of middle-class incomes
The Backwoods Rebellion
July 25, 2010
“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
With the concluding words of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemmons gives voice to a rebellion against the American culture which plays out in extreme form today in the far right of the Republican Party and the current machinations of the Harper Government and Sun Media. The conflict is between the City with its central government and careful record keeping, and the Backwoods, with its romantic individualist, accountable to no one but himself and his small tribe, driven by memories and myths. It’s a revolt of the right brain against the left, the irrational romantic against the rational pragmatist, and it seems as if the Backwoods is on the offensive in Canada at the moment.
Clemmons uses Huck Finn’s willful stupidity to satiric effect throughout the novel. For example there’s the time he sells his fortune in pirate gold to Judge Thatcher for one dollar. The Judge can’t fathom what Huck intends by this, but he does what his client asks. Turns out Huck uses this dodge to get his money out from under the control of his abusive father, Pap. Huck has no real conception of numbers, but he understands Pap’s power to hurt.
If we can assume that Stephen Harper has a copy of Huckleberry Finn on his bedside table, then what can we expect from his government’s Backwoods attitude?
1. Huck sees nothing morally wrong with the fibs and deceptions he uses to pull off his cons. In fact he delights in living by his wits and respects only those whom he cannot deceive or who deceive him.
2. Huck rattles around driven by strong emotions, but he’s not very aware of himself. For example he blames himself for “stealing” Miss Watson’s Jim, and when he does not turn his friend in to the slavers, he decides, “I’ll just have to go to Hell, then.”
3. Huck’s is a world steeped in racism, where a suppressed and poorly-documented underclass does the work.
4. “Life is mighty free and easy on a raft.” Huck and Jim have a great time drifting along the lawless Mississippi, surviving on salvaged items and outright theft.
5. Opponents can be panicked into line through fear. Huck works a smallpox epidemic into immunity from questions to cover their passage on the river.
6. When off the raft Huck defers to his friend Tom Sawyer far too much. Tom’s half-understood schemes lead to grandiose and useless decorations, needless hardship for others, great expense, abused and confused citizens and policemen, and most seriously, the utter objectivization of Jim.
But why am I rambling on about Huck, you ask?
I’m concerned about a couple of things you might have missed this week: the purge at Sun Media and the resignation of Dr. Munir Sheikh.
Sun Media has not only hired Tory Teneycke, Stephen Harper’s former director of communications, but this week they fired six moderate columnists from the newspaper chain. Eric Margolis, Greg Weston, Elizabeth Thompson, Christina Spencer, Peter Zimonjic and Michael Harris have been dumped.
I didn’t often agree with Greg Weston’s views, but they did show some balance. Now he and his colleagues are gone, casualties of a Backwoods rebellion against rational thought.
The Harper Government’s attack on the census has all the marks of a Tom Sawyer scheme gone bad. It fell to Canada’s chief statistician, Dr. Munir Sheikh, to show the world what an honourable man does in the face of this mess of illogic and deceit. His letter of resignation was a resounding “No, it cannot” from the rational part of our society to those who would pervert the census into another organ of Conservative government propaganda.
For the census seems rather like Huck’s dollar. It’s the next step which I fear. If aboriginal peoples, ethnic minorities, immigrants and the poor are well-represented on the census, then government is obliged to provide services for them. If the census becomes less exacting and its data less trustworthy, then it becomes much easier to ignore those at the corners of society.
And Treasury Board President Stockwell Day is looming in the wings with a planned re-examination of affirmative action. That’s like conducting seismic tests in the Arctic to see if the seabed is a good place for a whale sanctuary. There won’t be any whales left by the time they’re done, so they might as well drill for oil as long as they’re there.
Arctic oil exploration is much easier if no one knows or cares about the Inuit. The Backwoods man says, “If they aren’t Conservative supporters, why count them? Let the other parties pay for their own research.” This narrow, tribal attitude seems to pervade Sun newspapers lately, and we are the less for it.
If you believe census data (back to that) we’ll soon face a labour shortage in Canada. Americans make extensive use of migrant laborers. Maybe the plan is to look outside the country for an underclass to do the work. An exacting census would make this kind of two-tier citizenship difficult.
Michael and me
July 15, 2010
As a guest on the Liberal Express I got first interview of the day.
I was rather surprised when Leeds Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys invited me for a ride from Brockville to Kingston on the Liberal Express, Michael Ignatieff’s ambitious summer march through all of the provinces and territories of Canada.
Marjory Loveys is a terrific interview because she knows politics and has a nimble mind. I use her whenever I can for columns because they always turn out interesting. Whatever she told the crew, they treated me with considerable deference, and maybe a little fear.
While we were waiting through the media scrum for a chance to board the bus a pleasant blonde woman beside me started to chat. I explained that scrums were of no use to me: I’m too deaf, so I prefer a one-on-one interview, and that this was the first time I had left home to do one. “Normally they come to me.” She smiled, amused, and we talked about the freedom which comes when one reaches a certain age. The kids are grown up, and one can start off on a major endeavour.
I introduced myself. She shook my hand, “I’m Zsuzsanna.” Ulp! Embarrassed. She quickly put me at ease and bade me welcome aboard the bus. Good start: I hadn’t recognized Ignatieff’s wife! Sweet lady, though. If I were a puppy I’d curl up at her feet.
The first available seat was with a young man in red t-shirt, one of the crew of interns with the Liberal headquarters in Ottawa. He’s from a town near St. John’s, Newfoundland, majoring in economics at Western. When the guy in charge warned me I was first up for an interview, I left my seat-mate my camera and made sure he knew how to use it.
The bus is set up with a number of seats facing tables. All except the leader’s are loaded with cookie bags, stacks of newspapers, and surprisingly large young men in dress shirts typing steadily on laptops. The bus has Internet. Somebody told me the password so I logged on and dashed off emails until my time came up.
With pen and pad in hand I moved up to join the trio at the table. Marjory beamed from the other side and Ottawa-Orleans candidate David Bertschi looked pleasant, if a bit detached. Mr. Ignatieff shook my hand and introduced himself as “Michael.”
“I’d like to begin with a question from political science, if you will.” Michael nodded. “It concerns the political spectrum. In the early sixties the Liberal Party could be comfortably described as slightly left-of-centre, but does the left-right distinction apply any more when people vote their wealth, their ethnicity, their religion, even their xenophobia? Is there a better way to distinguish between points of view?”
Silence. The Ottawa guy’s jaw dropped. Marjory grinned knowingly. She’s faced my questions before. Michael collected his thoughts for several agonizing seconds, then began:
“Since the time of Mike Pearson, Liberals have been a centrist party, a party of fiscal responsibility, strong defense, pensions, Medicare, and federalism with attention to the rights of Quebec. That was the centre. Some suggest we should move to the left or the right. We have many ideas in common with the NDP, but we are not the NDP. We can get it done.
“Stephen Harper pretends to be centrist, but he wants to move the political centre ten degrees to the right, and the people of Canada can’t let that happen.”
O.K., he’s just affirmed the basic assumption of Canadian politics. Nothing radical there. Time for the follow-up:
“I once wrote in a column that Michael Ignatieff is a better conservative than Stephen Harper. What do you have to offer to the Progressive Conservative who feels queasy these days?”
He’d fouled the first one back, but Michael watched this pitch drift across the plate, then knocked it out of the park.
“My uncle was George Grant, an ardent Red Tory and Canadian nationalist. He wrote Lament for a Nation. I grew up in a family where Red Tories and Liberals mixed freely. Moderate conservatives and Liberals are part of the same family.
“I don’t think Stephen Harper is a Red Tory. The Conservative campaign playbook is lifted from the playbook of the American Republican Party. Red Tories have always been ardent Canadian nationalists. While his tactics come from the United States, Harper’s ideas come from those of the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance. They are no mystery.
“And there is definitely room in the Big Red Tent for Progressive Conservatives.”
I had my interview and time was running, so I closed with a general question about Leeds-Grenville Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys.
“What I like about Marjory Loveys is that she has put down roots here. She knows Ottawa and is unimpressed and unintimidated by it. She can get things done there.
“Marjory cares about ideas. I have talked with her in detail about economic development in Leeds-Grenville. We need for our young people to stay in the community. They shouldn’t have to leave for schooling, or for jobs. People shouldn’t have to travel away from their community for medical care. Marjory should make an excellent MP.”
From what I could see on the bus and in the interview, Michael Ignatieff takes a traditional approach to politics. He’s going about this tour the methodical way, stop by stop, talking with Canadians and picking up ideas and believers as he goes. For example, Michael commented with a smile at the end of our interview: “In four years in this business nobody has ever asked me an initial question like that.” But have you noticed how he slips “Progressive Conservative” into every speech now?
the Walnut Diary 