Yesterday's Dreams

A glimpse into modern Canada:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is scheduled to make a stop at the Ford plant in Oakville, Ont., Friday afternoon, to announce a multi-million-dollar subsidy program for the auto industry, but he could be greeted by a First Nations protest.

The group, “Rising Tide Toronto,” has planned a rally at the plant at 10 a.m.

Pause to consider the scene. The Prime Minister is taking time out of his busy day to shovel millions of dollars of pork into one of the largest industrial firms in Canada. By the strangest coincidence said firm's headquarters and primary production facility are located in a swing riding, which the Tories had spent years trying to capture from the Liberals. Accompanying the PM will be the Minister of Labour, not as one might expect the Minister of Industry, who just happens to represent the neighbouring riding of Halton. 

It's amazing how much coincidence occurs in Canadian politics.

Greeting Mr Harper and Ms Raitt will be a group loosely affiliated with the Idle No More movement. The anti-Idlers are not your typical protest group. The homepage of their website helpfully explains their mission statement:

Idle No More calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth.

In other words they want to remain stuck in the eighteenth century. Sadly it's not even the positive bits of the eighteenth century, the Adam Smith and James Watt stuff, but instead trying to preserve some highly romanticized version of the aboriginal past. The great wilderness is not coming back. Not that most aboriginals have the slightest interest in abandoning the benefits of western civilization. Bitch as aboriginal nationalists may about the white man, they seem rather fond of the technology developed by European societies and their offshoots.

Amidst the despair of the aboriginal reserve welfare ghettos, aboriginal nationalists have spun a mythology of a golden age that needs to be returned to. No matter how deluded such myths are to the vast majority of Canadians, they represent hope to the desperate. There will, however, be no return to those imagined arcadian splendours. The life of men and women of all races before the industrial and scientific revolutions was nasty, brutish and short. The choice that faces the aboriginal peoples is whether to join the modern world or reject it.

Semi-nomadic tribes cannot survive in a society of settled agriculture, mass production and high technology. They may eek out an existence on the margins of that society, as supplicants or threats, but such an existence is hardly to be envied. The mythology of the aboriginal nationalists, acceded to by a cowardly intellectual establishment, gives false hope to their people. Hope brings expectations and the inevitable dashing of those expectations brings anger. History tells us that anger expresses itself in many ways.

Less dangerous, because they are regarded with less pity, are the vanishing working classes of Canada. For a century southern Ontario was one of the world's great industrial regions. Its thousands of factories manned by a vast unskilled and semi-skilled labour force. During a golden age which stretched from the end of the war until about the mid-1970s such work, always physically demanding but now well paid, allowed for an unprecedented middle class existence. With the advance of technology and the pressure of international competition that way of life is now largely gone. 

A few days ago I was talking with a professor of economics who teaches at a well regarded MBA school in southern Ontario. He bemoaned the fact that many of the top graduates in the program had struggled to find entry-level positions at car rental companies. It isn't simply the humanities and social sciences degrees that have seen their market value plunge. Even the more applied fields are seeing their graduates struggle.

If these people are having a rough go of it, imagine being a high school graduate with few marketable skills who has spent a lifetime engaged in a single menial task. That high school graduate is often also middle aged and with all the obligations that entails. The world has changed and left him behind.

Meeting in the leafy and pleasant suburb of Oakville will be two groups trapped in nostalgia and afraid of the future. The economic structure of the auto industry has changed forever. A few hundred millions in subsidies may purchase some votes for the governing party, but it cannot change the underlying reality. The billions which the taxpayers of Canada pour into the bottomless pit of aboriginal affairs will not make real the dream of Turtle Island. The money goes we know not where, we know only that the Chief's driveway is always paved and his home well heated. 

Government will not solve the problems it helped create. Instead it preserves those problems, allowing them to be passed on from generation to generation, open wounds that are never allowed to heal. Had governments allowed the auto industry to sink or swim on the market tide the workforce would have been compelled to move on. A short period of pain and readjustment, followed by a cold and frank look to the future. Instead another generation of unskilled labour is being deluded about their future.

Had governments in generations past stopped subsidizing the reserve system, stopped treating the aboriginal peoples as witless children who were to be alternately pandered to and bribed, the aboriginals would have suffered and then moved on. In time they would have made their peace with modernity. Instead yet another generations has been raised into taxpayer subsidized delusion.

Big government is ultimately a Big Lie that breeds smaller ones. Among the most pernicious of those lies is that the state can stop the clock.

 

Comments

[Eric]

Speaking on the anthropological level: The lives of people in the past weren't as nasty, brutish or short as one might expect. In fact hunter-gatherers lived very healthy lives. The archaeological record attests to the fact that they were healthier, lived longer, experienced less famine and less illness than the early agriculturalists that eventually drove them out in Europe and the Near East. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle, being the lifestyle that humans originally evolved to live in, is in fact highly healthy.

That being said: These aboriginal nationalists are still full of bullshit in their naive, often uneducated views regarding their own past.

[nomdeblog]

“He bemoaned the fact that many of the top graduates in the program had struggled to find entry-level positions at car rental companies. It isn't simply the humanities and social sciences degrees that have seen their market value plunge”.

That is a huge problem that can only be fixed by vibrant growth in the economy. During the usual rounds at Christmas parties this year is was startling how many of the Dads who usually complain about their kids taking gender studies and not finding work are now talking about their kids in commerce or MBAs who graduated a year ago and are still looking for work.

We have to grow the economy. That takes a lot of risk capital willing to invest and take chances. Big Government is a drag on growth.

[copinacus]

I have three kids. Two went to university and got degrees and the youngest went to community college and learned a trade.
Guess which one has the most job security and can work seven days a week if he wanted to.
Oh, and he also makes more money than the other two.

[Dwayne]

The people who were living a stone aged existence here in North America can go back to living a stone aged existence without welfare, snow mobiles or guns. Oh yeah, and no big screen TVs, xboxs or automobiles too. We can stop with the houses and farms and send them off to hunt and fish, that being so good for them. If it was that good back then, well, I support their desire to head out in the wilderness and die in it. Of course, that isn't what this is all about, it is about other people's money, and how they can get it without working.

As for the government shoveling money into losing buisness, the corporate welfare needs to stop, that simple. Stop giving money away, it isn't an investment, it is a waste and nothing is gained from it.

[Cytotoxic]

I take exception to Eric's statement regarding hunter-gatherers. A study of pre-historical remains found a double-digit murder rate and short lifespan amongst these people. Their lives were terrible.

[Eric]

Cytotoxic: It does largely depend upon the level of advancement of the hunter-gatherer society. A primitive hunter-gatherer society such as the kind that existed in Africa and Europe for millions of years, based on small bands and kinship groups living together, experiences very little violent conflict with other groups or within itself, is surprisingly egalitarian and has a lower rate of famine or disease than most early agricultural societies. However in North America, more complex hunter-gatherer societies evolved, such as the Sioux and Lakota of the Prairies or the Iroquois and Huron of the East Coast. With more complexity came more hierarchy and also more tribal warfare and conflict between them.

I'm just pointing out that history isn't a narrative of short, brutish, miserable life styles all up into the modern age where everything suddenly becomes better in every way. I mean yes the modern lifestyle IS better, but other lifestyles had their own virtues in their own times. I certainly don't want to live as a hunter-gatherer, but I think scholarly honesty requires us to admit that the lifestyle was not 100% horrible.

[nomdeblog]

Small tribes can work fine but the key is small populations with lots of space between the tribes. But in a complex globally connected economy that is heavily populated tribes don’t work. Tribes don’t work anymore in the now heavily populated Middle East and they don’t work here. They appeared to work for awhile because the Western world propped those tribes up with outside funding...oil money in the ME and welfare here. Without that propping up Darwin would do his work and they would adapt or collapse. So ...stop the propping.

[Markon]

Tell you what forked-tongue "aboriginals". You have been given land. If you wish to live your ancestors lifestyle then go live on the land you've been given, stay on it, and leave us all alone. By the way, the money train stops too. No cash for you as you don't need it to build a teepee.

The stench of corruption on the reserves should shame you all, but noooooooooo, insead of addressing that they gotta @$@$$ up everyone elses lives instead.