Our Canada: 10 reasons to celebrate

In English, the word "our" is ambiguous. Ir refers, on the one hand, to "our, not your." On the other, it means, "belonging to all of us." In Te Reo Māori, the language of the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand/Aotearoa, there are distinct words for each: to (pl. "o") mātou is exclusive, to (plural "o") tātou is inclusive.

Today, then, I celebrate to tātou Kanata. And so should we all--tātou katoa. But what's to celebrate? Here's my list o' ten: add your own in the comments.

1. We aren't Americans. (Hold on, don't get irritated--that's what Americans are saying.) All of the things that the benighted Washington Times finds to criticize, most of us read immediately as virtues. Hence, I suspect, most of us are amused, not outraged, by the linked editorial. Obama is like us? Well, good for him. Have a Labatt's Blue and a piece of backbacon, Barack. And don't forget to work on your French. (H/t.)
   
   
2. Canada is a breathtakingly beautiful place to live. This is what I mean. And this. And this. And this. And this. It just goes on and on.
   
   
3. We have basic guaranteed rights and freedoms. That doesn't mean we are truly free, of course: bourgeois legality doesn't make it so. But we are free, to a very great extent, to struggle for freedom. And we are free to argue about freedom. Take freedom of speech: some claim we are being silenced by Stalinist bureaucrats, and they argue this at the top of their lungs, day after day, month after month, with no commercial interruption or trips to the Gulag. Somehow our Stalinists fail to function. Good.
   
   
4. Medicare. Yes, there are delays, inconsistencies based upon geography, all manner of things that need fixing. But people here don't go bankrupt for medical reasons, everyone has access to health care based upon need, not their wallet, and the standard of care is high. (Don't believe everything you hear.) In Canada, your income isn't a matter of life-and-death. Rich or poor, you get the same top-of-the-line medical service.
   
   
5. Neither stones in a mosaic or more metal for a melting-pot, Canadians get along. Sure we have our ghettoes (or not), our tensions, our backlashes, even the odd bit of bizarrely incompetent terrorism on snowmobiles, but we prefer cutting remarks to knives and sarcasm to bullets, when we aren't trying to be civil. And the latter (in comparison with too many other countries) is something that a lot of us work rather hard at. The main point, though, is that we talk to each other. Or yell, but that's just another form of talking, isn't it?
   
   
6. Canada's first peoples have a shot at justice. They haven't got it yet--nowhere near--but in some countries indigenous peoples don't get to settle land claims or get funds and an apology from a hostile government as reparations for decades of appalling, sometimes bestial, treatment of their kids. Poverty, isolation and foot-dragging on land claims continue to take their terrible toll. But the people affected aren't taking any of it lying down, they have a lot of allies, and there is reason to hope.
   
   
7. Separation of Church and State. A no-brainer in the 21st century, one might have thought. And one would be very wrong. But for every Pastor Steve and Bishop Freddie and "Dr." Charlie, there are a bunch of churchy people who are content to do churchy things. Still, alas, on my nickel, but we're working on that.
   
   
8. The weather. It's, no pun intended, an ice-breaker. From the Carleton University Handbook for international students:
   
   Most people you will come in contact with will be friendly, however international students often remark that while Canadians are “polite”, they can appear to be distant or cold. The best way to strike up a conversation with a Canadian is to talk about the weather—weather is an important aspect of Canadian society.
   
   
9. The food. Whether it's rogan josh or beaver tails, pâté de foie gras or apple strudel, you can be sure that Canadian cooking offers the best choice available. Anywhere. And don't forget that country food. You haven't lived until you've tasted umingmaq. My mouth is watering as I write this. The Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife used to do maple-glazed chops. Not any more. But that was almost quintessentially Canadian, eh?
   
   
10. Canada Day. Never mind the stupid drunks who misbehave in our nation's capital, Canada Day is special. No tedious military parades; no appeals to nativist patriotism; no godawful speeches (well, some). It's party time. A time to feel good about ourselves and where we live. Fireworks. Fast food from booths. Picnics. Inconsequential blog posts like this. There are millions of motives at work here, but what's the collective result? Mostly, summer fun on a day off. What could be more Canadian than that?
    

So, for just one day, never mind our ridiculously undemocratic electoral system, our far-right ideology-driven minority government, our foreign adventures and our dimming international reputation, the deliberate pollution of our environment with government approval, the talking heads who constitute "journalism" in this country, the pitiful lack of true grassroots power or involvement. These are all the sort of thing that keeps a progressive's blog humming, but today let's raise a glass or two, if not to what we are now, then to what we can be.

To all the nations, then, warring in the bosom of a single State: First Nations, Inuit, Québécois, English, all of our immigrant communities, not to mention Western Alien Nation, and, God help us, SDA Nation.

Yup. My Canada includes Stephen Harper. It even includes Kate McMillan. Just don't ask me to party with them. Not today.

Photos from England

From the bus tour on the first day. We particularly noticed the signs, politely telling people what to do or not to do -- but does anyone know what a sign saying "Weak Subway" could possibly mean?

Great Line of The Day

Well, two actually.

Matt Bin guest blogging at Canadian Cynic highlights the plight of the families of Canadian veterans suffering from chronic conditions brought about through their service:

I've been saying since the start of our work in Afghanistan that the price of this war isn't tallied today, but starting ten years from now and carrying on to the end of this generation. We've sent thousands of Canadians into an intense war zone -- many of them reservists -- and we must bear the cost of dealing with the consequences of our little national adventure as great and as long-term as those costs might be.

If we don't actively and cheerfully bear those costs, if we don't care for the mental, physical, and emotional well-being of the wounded and their families for as long and as far as they need us, then we have failed as a nation. The "support the troops" brand of politicization, crude and inane as it might be, requires those who subscribe to it -- most notably our current government -- to actually put in place the infrastructure and mechanisms by which these troops are actually supported.

As Matt points out, Veterans Affairs Canada has seen a marked improvement in the provision of service over the past decade but VAC is still an inflexible organization, either unwilling or unable to assess the needs of wounded and disabled veterans and their families beyond a set of rigid and often pointless rules.

And in other news...

Henry Morgentaler is to receive the Order of Canada. The usual suspects are not pleased:

It is dreadful that this honour should even be considered for a man who's [sic] only claim to fame is that he is a professional killer of defenseless babies in their mothers' wombs.

Hmm, how can we work a little racism into this? No prob, Kate McMillan's winged monkeys rise to the challenge:

Morgentaler is getting an award from a Haitian voodoo princess? Who cares?

Ah, well. Congratulations, Henry. Long overdue and well-deserved.

Sunday nostalgia

Remember when...

"cop killer" used to mean someone who killed a cop?

"Christian love" wasn't a contradiction in terms?

Wars ended?

"Homewrecker" meant a woman attracted to husbands?

A square meal was good for you?

The ultimate crust

After chasing his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai out of a run-off election race and terrorizing his supporters, the one guy remaining on the ballot is declared elected, and invites the other fellow to his inauguration. He calls this "reaching out" and "a major step towards political engagement."

There must be a specific word or phrase for this, but it's not coming rapidly to mind. "Sheer cheek" and "colossal gall" somehow don't quite seem to cut it. Anyone?

The speech-warriors explain it all away

How on earth did the Canadian Human Rights Commission come to refuse even to hear the complaint against Maclean's magazine? It couldn't be that it simply judged the complaint to have no merit. Other forces had to have been at work. In the speech-warriors' own words:

Given the heat the Human Rights Commission has been taking I'd expect them to back off on the high profile cases. That way they can concentrate on the little guy that can't afford heavy duty legal counsel and doesn't have the resources to fight back.

The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean's go. That's the first smart thing they've done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can't afford Canada's best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country's literati.

Even with Taylor rules the mere threat of a CHRC complaint, not to mention the CHRC investigator’s rule-free techniques, put an ongoing chill on political conversation in Canada. The overbreadth of s. 13 means that for less well heeled respondents, the CHRC remains a real threat.

It seems the HRC is playing pure politics -- hammer the little guys but avoid the big players who could do it some injury.

Good grief, do these people have regular teleconferences, or what?

So here are some of the "big guys" that the CHRC has cravenly refused to send to a Tribunal...oh, wait, they did, and then the Tribunal settled the complaints:

The RCMP:

Amrow v. Royal Canadian Mounted Police

CSIS:

Goodman v. Canadian Security Intelligence Service

Via Rail:

Arsenault v. Via Rail Canada Inc.

Big bankers:

Adamsu v. Bank of Montreal

The Canadian Forces:

Beyer v. Canadian Forces

Oh, and the dread State:

Attorney General of Canada (Applicant) v. Public Service Alliance of Canada and Canadian Human Rights Commission. [The CHRT findings on pay equity in the federal Public Service were eventually upheld. The Canadian government has to make good to the tune of $3 billion to current and former PSAC members.]

Now, don't give me any guff about these not being Section 13(1) cases. Either the CHRC is afraid to take on the big fish or it isn't. But not all the big fish meet the standard for a complaint against them to be heard. Maclean's was one of those latter fish. We've been saying so all along.

But why should we expect accuracy or honesty from the speech warriors? They're on a roll. In fact, at this point they're most likely in a fugue state, devastated by their recent win loss. These are the folks who brought you this:

Congratulations to CHCH TV out of Hamilton. They had me on a show today, along with a comedian, debating the decision by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal to put a comedian on trial for unfunny jokes about lesbian hecklers.

(Umm...no, Ezra. Settle down. It wasn't off-colour jokes, but a tirade of homophobic abuse from a guy on-stage. It had nothing to do with his comedy routine.)

And this:















Umm...no, Kathy. You're being sued for defamation, because you publicly called a person a criminal.

And so the speech-warriors stagger into the dark night. Keep your eye out for the tell-tale flashes of heads exploding when the BCHRT, too, fails to uphold the complaint against Maclean's.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg.)

Posts we never finished reading

From the mudfortunate Dr.Roy: "Even dion realizeds he is difficult to understand in English....He has apparently has had his people contact a speech therapist..."

Physician, heal thyself.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg)

Change, we can believe in...

...but not this. Obama starts his Long March to the same-old, same-old. And Keith Olbermann isn't looking very good about now: Glenn Greenwald is on it, and Olbermann isn't happy. But his trademark rants won't save him this time. When his candidate flipped, Olbermann flopped, and that's all there is to it. One man's 4th Reich fascism, as it turns out, was another man's brave defiance of the Left. Sheesh. For my money, this makes Olbermann the Worst Man In The World, but you won't see that on MSNBC.

The FISA fiasco seems, however, like a good jumping-off point to discuss the art (or perhaps "craft" is a better word) of practical politics. The Bill that Obama is set to support will extend the government's ability to conduct warrantless wiretaps. Worse, information obtained in this manner may be used as evidence even if the tap is subsequently found to be unlawful--take a nice juicy bite of the fruit of the poisonous tree, folks. Finally, the Bill will allow bulk monitoring of electronic communications, making a hash of quaint notions like probable cause.A little safety trumps liberty anytime in Bush's America. And, it appears, in Obama's America too.

I'm not surprised or even very offended by this. American politics is a cramped room that simply doesn't permit a lot of new ideas to enter, as I've observed before. The best it can offer up is old, stodgy, sometimes dangerous ideas, adjusted for the times and presented in attractive new bottles. Obama is most probably just another one of those bottles. Heaven forbid that he seem Soft On Terrorism. Or Soft On Anything, where only a brutal hardness will do.

During a political campaign, it's important to remind ourselves that what a candidate says and does is a product of calculation. "Just be youself" tends to be bad advice. You aren't running by yourself, after all: a Verizon-like network is always right there with you, on and off the scene. Once a campaign starts, the aim is to win, and it's not just the candidate's personal ambitions that are at stake, to put it mildly. In some respects, almost everything goes; in others (when it comes to the candidate him- or herself) very little does that isn't scripted and vetted by a small army of handlers. The candidate could be Charlie McCarthy (and here I think of Ronald Reagan, for some reason). But that's no problem, if you've got a competent Edgar Bergen.

And the culture of US campaigns is a low culture, one of Sesame Street-like soundbites, swarms of politically-connected media talking heads parsing every syllable, continual appeals to emotion (usually negative), mines and deadfalls everywhere. Issues are important only as a collection of slick debating points and one-liners. Negative campaigning (imported to Canada by the Harperites) is the order of the day. "Swiftboating" is an ever-present threat. And that stuff works like a hot-damn: a candidate who golfed his way through the Vietnam War came off looking more patriotic and heroic than the guy who went and got wounded.

This dreadful style, furthermore, feeds on itself. Lapel pins! What your pastor said!* Your middle name! Every campaign seems to find a deeper barrel to scrape the bottom of.

Nice guys and gals finish last in this kind of contest. Ditto ones with vision, and overly thoughtful ones. There is little room for spontaneity on the campaign trail, and none at all for nuance. So political campaigns almost inevitably attract a certain type of person: glib, opportunistic, shallow, unprincipled. In fact, the people expect nothing more, and if you've got more, it's best to keep it to yourself until you win--and even thereafter, if you don't want to be a one-term wonder.

But suppose--just suppose--that Obama is more than just a bottle. Suppose he does have what Greenwald mockingly called a secret plan. What, then, in the American context, would Barack Obama do with his plan if he became President? Or, to put it a little differently, what could he do?

The US governance engine is never easy to influence, and, like the Borg, it absorbs those who find themselves in its toils. The President, even with all of his broad powers, can't do much by himself. He is surrounded by advisors, flacks, lobbyists, big-money donors calling in markers, the media, and countless elected officials. His powers are curbed by the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme Court, and their exercise is shaped and constrained by public opinion polls and the aforementioned interested parties. The new guy will be pushed and pulled this way and that until systemic stability is achieved.

We are so used to conceiving of leaders as almost by definition in charge that we seldom look at the human matrix, its complex set of associations, interactions and interrelations, that give a leader form and substance. In this vast, sticky web, leaders cannot easily act upon personal visions and hopes, wear their hearts on their sleeves, say what's on their minds, or even keep and maintain a functioning conscience. The "art of the possible" is a ceaseless series of compromises, big and small, that allows its practitioners to survive.

Obama is a fresh new face in American politics. In some ways his very candidacy is profoundly significant and positive. But I suspect that he's already had to put his official portrait in a closely-guarded closet somewhere. Welcome to the Machine, Barack. Resistance is futile.

H/t

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg.)
__________
*It goes without saying that every serious candidate needs a pastor, in a land where half the population rejects the theory of evolution and one-quarter not only believes in the Rapture, but thought it was going to happen last year.)

Releasing our inner Sweeney Todd

Dr. Dawg slices and dices Margaret Somerville's article against euthanasia so I don't have to.
But there's one thing I just have to comment on -- she asserts that if euthanasia is legalized people will be afraid to go to a doctor to get treated.
Now, this is just silly. First, it assumes that sick people have a single-minded fixation on making sure their doctors will let them die by inches, piously ignoring their suffering. And second, it assumes doctors are just champing at the bit to start slaughtering their patients.
But if the only argument she can come up with against legalizing euthanasia is how noble and meaningful it is for people to suffer, maybe the inner Sweeney Todd is closer to the surface than we would like.

There but for the grace of God

Alison introduces the saddest story you will ever read -- Ashley Smith:

"If I die then I will never have to worry about upsetting my Mom again."

Reading about what she went through, I realized I have known teenage girls who were almost as mixed up as Ashley was -- some girls just seem to spiral into disaster when they are 12 or 13, and they don't find their equilibrium again for four or five years, until they are 16 or 17. But the girls I knew lucked out, mainly because their parents could afford good lawyers and special schools and stays with relatives in other cities. So the criminal justice system never got the chance to chew them up and spit them out.

Great line of the day

Comment from DennisSCMM to TBogg's post about the mutual admiration society that is John McCain and Washington Post columnist David Broder:

In the good old days that both of them yearn for, McKrusty and Broder would, at this point in life, have both been smothered or stranded on an ice floe. They demonstrate that the custom is not without merit.

We're finally going to England!

Roger Miller - England Swings


Yes, on Saturday we're flying off to Merrie Olde England -- first London, then Edinburgh, for two weeks in all.
This was the trip which I had to cancel two years ago because of my car accident.
My sister has us all organized for day trips to Stonehenge and Stratford and Windsor Castle and Jack the Ripper's London and all that, and we also want to see the Imperial War Museum -- oh, and mustn't forget Westminster Abbey, the Tower of Big Ben, the rosy red cheeks of the little children...
My own posting on the blog will be light -- maybe a few photos if I can -- but I'm honoured to say that Dave from Galloping Beaver, Skdadl from POGGE and Dr. Dawg from Dawg's Blawg will all be posting some of their usual great stuff here while I am gone.

Immortality

There are 2,400 George Carlin videos on YouTube. with more than 700 posted today. Its a kind of immortality, I guess. He left us so much to remember.

Giving birth is not a choice issue

Shakesville has a skreed by a woman who has never given birth about how pregnant women have the right to give birth whatever way they want to -- turning it into a "choice" issue.
Sorry, no, it's not.
The only thing that is important in childbirth is a healthy baby.
The ONLY thing.
Nothing else matters -- the mother's experience, her doctor's opinions, her midwife's opinions, her husband's participation, whether or not she uses drugs, whether or not she uses technology, etc etc -- all of this is completely irrelevant to whether she has a healthy baby or not.
I get pretty hot about this issue -- my daughter would have died in childbirth if I hadn't been in a hospital and if I hadn't listened to my doctors -- who were quite candid about not knowing what was wrong and why my baby's heartbeat kept falling and why my labour was not progressing normally, but advised that I have a c-section.
Turned out the cord was wrapped around her neck, and was too short. If I had tried to give birth vaginally my daughter would have been severely brain damaged, if she had lived at all. I might have died, too, of course.
Then I had a neighbour tell me how sorry she was -- SORRY?
My daughter was alive and healthy. Nothing else mattered then, nothing else matters now.
Nothing else.