Sadly, Quebec really does matter to Canada

Was reading Jeffery Simpson’s latest take on the Quebec provincial election and it struck me that Quebec is far more important to Canada than Canada is to Quebec.

Quebec matters to Canada because it talks and thinks about critical issues of identity -- issues that people in the Rest Of Canada (ROC) either can't or won't explore.

For the ROC to indulge in such an exploration of Canadian identity would be to risk finger-wagging accusations of "knee-jerk anti-Americanism" or, even worse, charges of intolerance.  Europe might not approve of our view of ourselves. The U.N. would certainly take us to task.

Because we are nice people who wish to be liked and admired by others, we dare not risk an honest discussion about Canadian values or Canadian culture. In fact, the thought of such talk is almost laughable, despite the fact that we actually have values and culture that are well-worth discussing. 

And thus we depend on Quebec to lead a discussion that we hope will lift us out of our colonial awkwardness.

While I'm reasonably sure an independent Quebec would be able to struggle along without the rest of us, I am less convinced the rest of us have the fortitude, as a people, to survive without them.

What exactly is Canada without Quebec anyway…apart from some maudlin sentimentality involving hockey and beer and taking a 2-4 to camp on the 2-4 long weekend?

There is an answer. But it is an answer that – as they used to say in the old days – dare not speak its name.

So without Quebec, the rest may be silence. And, as a result, the rest of us may be history.

The Inexorability of Zombie Boomers

Holy mother of the sainted sixties!

Members of the Baby Boom generation are now being cast as an inexorable threat to our future. Equated, if you will, to the Great Global Warming that will wash away our beloved cities and turn our pristine forests into bug-infested swamps.

Boomers. A super-heated world. Same thing, eh?

In a recent National Post column, Andrew Coyne wagged the finger of castigation at those who dare shrink from the deadly threat posed by a zombie army of Boomers, as they stumble toward senility, sucking the juice out of all that is good and holy in their death march.

"Like global warming, population aging is a problem in the long-term that requires us to take action in the short-term," warns young Andrew. "Gradual yet inexorable, the effects of each are serious but manageable — provided we get started now, rather than wait for the crisis to be upon us. And, like global warming, population aging has its share of deniers."

Inexorable. Like the remorseless grinding of tectonic plates or the soul-sucking winds of a prairie winter.

Damn deniers! Get out on the streets, you fools, and DEAL with those Boomers before they crash through the front door and steal your BABIES away!

All very exciting and end-of-the-worldish.

Here's the thing, though.

Boomers will eventually die off. They will get buried in cemeteries, or cremated and put in vases, which will then placed on shelves until they get lost in a move. They won't bother you anymore. They won't cost you any money. They won't impinge on your life. Time will pass. The boomer generation will be no more.

Climate change, on the other hand, will upend almost every aspect of your daily life. And it will go on for a very long time. Maybe tens of thousands of years.

Boomers are a small, localized blip on the population curve. Canada and the U.S. have them in spades. Other countries not so much. The generation behind the Boomers is a lot smaller. Then there's a feeble echo. Then another dip. The trailing generations will also, in time, work, enjoy their lives to the best of their ability, have children or not. They too will retire, collect pensions and die. Life goes on.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a big, expansive smack in the face that gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. There's no feeble generational echo. No Gen X or Y or Z. The world and its processes just keep amplifying their favourite things until they tire of them. And then they move into something completely different.

Global warming. Ice age. Perhaps a slight shift in axis to stir things up. A terrifying meteorite or two. Perhaps an age of really impressive volcanoes. Interspersed with a temperate inter-regnum or two for variety.The earth is never dull.

Damned baby boomers. Same as a conflagration in the world's climate, eh?

Not so much.

Don't be so darned silly, you knee-jerk Boomer haters. Is there a term for irrational fear of older relatives?

Diving for chump change wages again

Gotta love people like Andrew Coyne and his friends.

Caterpillar Inc. buys itself a Canadian company, sucks it dry, closes it down and moves the work to points south. Much of that work will probably land, eventually, in Indiana, where the company got a $28-million goodie bag from job-hungry locals to refurbish and reopen an old plant.

So Coyne wags his finger at the union -- to the cheers of the red-meat boys -- and gives workers a lecture on times are tough, gotta face reality, ain’t no 60-cent dollah no more, gotta be competitive, and all that predictable, hard-nosed, right-wing stuff.

The company may be nasty and greedy, but its actions are exactly what we should expect in this dog-eat-dog globalized world, he says. 

Canadians will just have to man up and learn to play in the real world's game where, apparently, any wage from our American boss is better than none at all. And there we are -- right back on the dock diving for quarters.

What a tough, realistic, capitalistic outlook.

Canada must have more chumps per square inch than any other nation on earth.

Porter's arrival marks watershed moment for North

This week, Porter Airlines celebrated the start of its new three-times-daily flights between Timmins and Toronto Island.

At a ceremony in the Timmins Victor M. Power Airport, Porter President Robert Deluce and Timmins Mayor Tom Laughren spoke of what the expansion of service means to both the airline and the Northern Ontario city.

New business and tourism opportunities, a welcome alternative for travellers, a validation of a unique approach to air travel – the launch is all of that.

But it also marks a watershed moment for Northern Ontario.

For too many years, northerners watched in utter despair as their services shrank, offices closed and commercial operations withered. The mining sector struggled and the forest products sector imploded. Young people left town, grocery stores closed, banks shuttered branches and transportation companies cut routes.

Those were very hard times, when many northern towns wondered if they’d get from one end of the year to the other.

And the hard times were made so much more painful by the contrast with an exuberantly wealthy south, which was then motoring along on the coat-tails of an American hyper-boom.

There was much talk, in those dark days, of sunset industries and yesterday’s regions. Academics spoke openly of perhaps shutting down some of Ontario’s struggling northern towns and moving their residents to larger centres where they wouldn’t be such a drain on the public purse. Fingers wagged; lectures were delivered; people pitied their raggedy-arsed northern cousins.

Well, times change, and Ontario’s economic world is…slowly, slowly…beginning to shift from paper to rock, from south to north, from autos to minerals.

It’s been a long time coming.

And if it lasts long enough – China’s gargantuan appetites and global markets willing –Northern Ontario may have a chance, finally, to fashion a strong foundation for a sustainable economy that will carry it along into a rosy future.

In the meantime, let’s hope northerners will be gracious, understanding and un-gloating in their demeanour as they watch their raggedy-arsed southern counterparts try to come to terms with an economy that has been gutted by global forces well beyond their control.

Front groups should be up-front about funding

Canadians have a right to know who is spending big money to influence their most important public policy decisions, particularly if that money originates outside the country.

The issue erupted with the opening of Northern Gateway Pipeline hearings in British Columbia this week, spurred by the federal government’s public attack on foreign-funded groups that “hijack” the regulatory process as part of a larger agenda that seeks to steer the Canadian economy away from “dirty” natural resource extraction.

Tides Foundation, which "washes" money for publicity shy American donors, has been pointed to as a concern, based on the work of B.C. blogger Vivian Krause.

Canadian environmental lobbyists don’t deny there is a lot of American money washing through their organizations. They justify it on the basis that there is a lot of foreign money flowing to the rapacious corporate side too.

Contributions from American philanthropic foundations like Tides help level the playing field so that the voices of concerned Canadians can be clearly heard above the corporate din, they argue.

One Tides defender – Vancouver writer, politician and urban food activist Peter Ladner – suggests we shouldn’t stress about it. Canada’s natural resources have always been a playground for foreigners. We’ve grown rich on it.

“Since when were organizations outside this country not ‘interfering’ with Canada’s natural resources?” Ladner asks in a mid-December article reproduced on the Tides Canada website. “Starting with the Hudson’s Bay Company, Canada has depended on all manner of foreign investors to make us the rich nation we are today.”

These arguments may be true. They may be valid. But they completely miss the point.

Canada is a small country that has long been dominated by foreign interests. Psychologically, we’re still a bit of a Rupert’s Land, far too accustomed to taking direction from other people in other countries. In our quest to become our own people, we struggle to cast off the heavy baggage of Empire and Manifest Destiny and foreign adventurers of every stripe.

That will be an uphill battle for us if we continue to let people in other parts of the world believe it’s their God-given right to interfere in our affairs.

Canadians have a right to determine their own destiny. Other people can pitch their arguments at us. They can openly lavish time, praise and gobs of money on Canadians who reflect their world views. They can posture and rant and huff and puff to their hearts’ content.

But they shouldn’t expect to get away with camouflaging their activities through phony front groups or sleight-of-hand funding mechanisms.

At a minimum, Canadians can and should demand funding transparency from individuals, companies and organizations who want to participate in the public processes that will guide our fundamental policy, political and economic decisions.

Reconciliation with the First and Foremost

Well, that United Nations envoy certainly put us in our place, didn't he?

So...

Is everyone clear now on how the Rest of Us should go about negotiating with Canada's First and Foremost Nations?

One of us will propose something -- a mine, perhaps, or a forestry project that would bring much-needed revenue to our cash-strapped government for little things like, uh, health care, education, welfare or new homes in one of Canada's needy FFN communities.

Or maybe it's just a testy comeback to a bit of political grandstanding.

The FFNs, assisted by their social justice friends, will respond to this insult by running off to the mainstream media to reveal the shocking truth about the evil, colonial, rapacious and uncaring government. We will get an earful about treaties, George III, residential schools, assimilation, greedy corporations, malnourished children, inadequate funding, destitute reserves, small pox and the duplicity of settlers.

If this fails to produce immediate capitulation, the FFNs will call on their team of non-Aboriginal lawyers to ask the courts to block whatever it is that the government might ponder doing or saying or permitting to happen. They will cite a Constitution that, apparently, applies only to them.

The courts will deliberate for about ten minutes, then issue a decision that favours the FFNs, humiliates the governement, ignores the Rest of Us and sets a precedent that further entrenches the right of FFNs to most of Canada's land mass.

As these "negotiations" are happening, the FFNs will ice the cake by racing off to New York to play their newly acquired "rights of indigenous people" card. The United Nations will oblige with a scathing attack on all things Canadian. The world will tut-tut about Canada's evil, colonial, rapacious and uncaring people.

Properly chastised by our betters, the Rest of Us will give the FFNs whatever they want.

Life will go on until the next set of "negotiations."

That, folks, is the meaning of reconciliation.









 




 

Attawapiskat debate has positive impacts

We owe a big thanks to Attawapiskat First Nation and MP Charlie Angus for thrusting the little community’s housing problems into the spotlight.

In setting off a firestorm, they have sparked a much-needed discussion about remote communities and their place in the larger nation. The debate has elicited nastiness and name-calling, of course, but it has also done several valuable and positive things.

First, it has prompted average Canadians to think about their relationship with First Nations and the more distant reaches of this country.

One impression emerges. The principal players in this drama – INAC and the native leadership – are locked in a dysfunctional dance that smells of another era. For too many years, this show has been run as a two-step on a ghost ship, with the Aboriginal industry providing accompaniment. There’s a wind-up gramophone on the bar, but it’s stuck in a groove of “Do as we say / Send us more money.”

Now that we’ve had a chance to peek through the porthole, we may want to shove the door open, stop the music and drag the dancers out into the light of the currrent century. It’s time for new steps to a new tune played by a better band on a different dance floor.

Second, the debate has stimulated creative suggestions, even bold actions, from outside groups.

For instance, Indian Country Today reports that Habitat for Humanity Canada is partnering with the Assembly of First Nations to help alleviate a crisis that afflicts a hundred or more reserves. Habitat has worked on Aboriginal housing for a while, but it promises to make it a priority for the next five years.

Meanwhile, homebuilder Mike Holmes, host of HGTV’s Holmes on Homes, has stepped forward to offer advice and assistance, also under AFN’s aegis


In a CBC interview, he proffered a simple solution to the housing situation – just “stop building crap” with inappropriate materials that are subject to rot, fire and mould. He suggests cinder block and drywall. And make sure you transfer the skills to build and maintain those sustainable homes to the First Nations. It will make a world of difference.

Thirdly, the crisis has exposed major weaknesses in our economic infrastructure.

For a country that prides itself on its transportation network, it is unconscionable that 15 modular homes cannot be delivered to Attawapiskat until the ice roads are ready in January or February.


Granted, this part of Ontario is vast and harsh, but we’ve been tooling around in it since the late 1600s. Yes, the muskeg is difficult. But back in the 1930s, Ontario managed to build a railway to Moosonee through very difficult terrain. And if we look across the bay, over toward the Quebec side, we might notice there are roads that link the Cree communities almost to Hudson Bay.


There is no real excuse, either, for our inability to design and build safe, sustainable communities in a northern environment.


Just 90 kilometres inland from Attawapiskat, De Beers Canada has built a safe, warm, comfortable community for its 500 employees. How could this be? How is it that one company, headquartered in distant South Africa, can conjure up a working town from the cold northern air, while we muddle along with under-serviced shacks and a string of excuses?

We will have to do a lot better -- in planning, designing, engineering and delivering -- if we wish to be known as a northern people, and if we have any aspiration of benefiting from our rich northern lands.