The Silly Season in the Sensible Dominion

Word reaches us that in the early 1970s one Rita MacNeil, whom we are told is a singer out in the Maritimes, was under surveillance by the RCMP.  This bit of historical trivia reminded me of something one of my high school history teachers - a deranged old Red Tory of the finest caliber - once said about Canada:  nothing ever happens here.  Obviously things happen in Canada, even the Red Star does not invent from whole cloth, distortion and innuendo being its preferred M.O. The newspapers and blogs of the Dominion overflow with news.  His point was that nothing all that important happens here.  Stephen Leacock - the funniest economist in history (which might be considered damning by faint praise) - is best known today for writing Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.  A brilliant, though kind-hearted, satire of small town life, its set-piece climax is the sinking of a steamboat in six feet of water.  Leacock described the fictional "little town" of Mariposa - based very closely on Orillia - thusly:

Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels.

He was only partly right, infact Leacock captured the whole country perfectly, forever sinking in six feet of water.  Until 1984 our intelligence service was better known for its colourful uniforms and synchronized horse riding.  So, naturally, they were trailing a harmless country singer, in her late twenties, while she caterwauled about equal pay for equal work.  Pierre Berton used to boast that you could get away with saying anything in Canada so long as you wore a bow-tie, a point he proved repeatedly as a socialist and atheist in a country that has always detested extremists.  Canada has generated only one true terrorist movement, the FLQ.  Before and since we've preferred to import our murderous loonies, from the Fenians to whomever blew up Air India.  Even the FLQ got along for years by blowing up mail boxes, and whoever happened to be standing near them.  When Pierre Laporte was murdered in cold blood, the fun of sticking it to Les Maudits Anglais wore off pretty quickly.  Our villains usually lack seriousness, and when they don't they come off as being rather earnest in their villainy, example Norman Bethune.  The poor sucker seems to have actually thought Mao meant what he said.  Satre once observed that Americans didn't truly believe in the existence of evil, Canadians have never hear the word spoken this side of a Saturday morning cartoon.  Thus Mounties hear Rita bitchin' and singing about doing the dishes and they think, geez, this girl must be a Red.  My mother would never do that. 

The silliness enters into the realm of public policy, Exhibit A of which is our policy toward aboriginals.  The current federal government has talked much about transparency and accountability on reserves, a point highlighted by former Tory backroomer Tom Flanagan.  Only in Canada would it be controversial to insist that some form of rigorous supervision be applied to the billions that flow from the federal treasury to our aboriginal tribal government.  The reserve system in Canada is a network of third world governments living off what is in effect foreign aid.  It would too impolite, as well as positively racist, to inquire how exactly all this money is being spent.  It's more than being guilt tripped into silence, it's that uniquely Canadian assumption that people who are down and out would only spend free cash in a wise and responsible manner, after all that's what most Canadians would do? Right?  A few years back the late Liberal government boasted about how the world needs more Canada.  Perhaps it does, but is it really a wise policy to assume that the rest of world, including those unassimilated bits of the Dominion, think like Canadians?  The world ain't like us, to assume as much is to be truly provincial.

Following a time-tested policy of two steps forward, one back, Canada's half-conservative Conservative government issued, from the lips of the Stephen himself, an apology for the Komagata Maru incident.  The groveling was evidence not, as with the Residential Schools apology, on the floor of the House of Commons, but in Surrey, B.C.  All this comes from the Brian Mulroney school of "We're very, very sorry that our ancestors were mean to you, now please vote for us" politics.  The Brian, as those with long memories will recall, apologized for the internment of Japanese-Canadians.  Never mind that it was a federal Liberal government who implemented the policy at the behest of a provincial Liberal government, never mind that one of the few notable dissenters from the policy was a future leader of the Conservative Party, one John George Diefenbaker.  Ethnics don't vote for us, so let's be nice to the ethnics so they'll vote for us.  There's being diplomatic and being politic, and groveling ain't either.  You're never going to get anyone's respect, and vote, by apologizing for something that other people did to other people long before you were born.  The wave of apologies also skews the public's - which is extremely ignorant of actual history - understanding of race and ethnic relations. 

The White Anglo Saxon Protestants are always the villains, everyone else noble "savages" or simple kind-hearted peasants.  Racial and ethnic bigotry was a matter of course for all of human history until very recently.  It was more noticeable among the white races because, due to historical accident, it was the nations of European descent which modernized first.  Had the roles been reversed, it's unlikely a boat load of Englishmen showing up in Calcutta harbour, looking for work, would have been greeted all that kindly by the local authorities.  Incidentally, Publius is still waiting for a formal apology from Stephen Harper for the legal ban on Portuguese immigration until the 1950s - honestly what did you think we were going to do, trash the place?

Lacking grand scale crimes against humanity, we prefer to agonize over what were the petty injustices and fears of the past.  We're sinking fast people, but don't worry, it's only six feet to the bottom.