Cargo politics

A cargo cult mistakes an effect for a cause. The original Melanesian cargo cultists watched cargo arrive after their colonial occupiers had built airports, and concluded that the cargo had arrived because the airports had been built. This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving. However, as we have seen in the earlier articles in this series, we frequently fall into this type of error ourselves.

Anthropologists might object that I have oversimplified cargo cults, by the way. For example, the Melanesian cargo cultists often believed that their gods had already prepared cargo for them, and they just needed to supply places for the gods to deliver it. Whether my definition oversimplifies cargo cults or not, the cargo cultists still had the chain of reasoning backwards. Whether or not you thought cargo already exists, building an airport doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. Even if you build a real airport rather than an imitation of one, building an airport still doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. The Soviet Union had many airports, but it didn’t receive much cargo.

These days we have a lot of politicians, but they're not delivering much politics. Even in the broadest sense of the word, in which politics means simply the exercise of authority, contemporary politicians seem remarkably apolitical. Consider their agonizing and posturing about climate change, and then consider the few, trivial decisions in which that agonizing has resulted. The government of Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocols, and then promptly started ignoring them. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but rather the art of avoiding the possible.

Political philosophy has followed the slide rule, restaurant counter service, and the dodo into oblivion. There was a time when conservative principles were based on the interests of the landed classes, liberal principles on the interests of the business class, and socialist principles on the interests of the workers. In Canada these days the national party with the closest thing to a political philosophy is the Conservatives, and judging by that philosophy they seem to represent the interest of pension funds. Everything is evaluated by the colour of the ink on the bottom line in the account books.

The New Democrats are now above all the party of proportional representation; the issue over-rides all others for them, and they drag it into the discussion of the most inappropriate issues (parliamentary ethics, for example). With a history of getting 20% of the vote and 10% of the seats, they're fierce about getting a system under which their 20% of the vote will get them 12% of the seats. They are losing the support of organized labour, but prefer to concern themselves with tinkering with the way votes are counted.

Both the Conservatives and the NDP have adopted the view that politics is a form of management. The Conservatives follow the managerial philosophy that all operations should turn a profit, while the New Democrats follow the managerial philosophy that all stakeholders should be persuaded to believe that they have a fair say in decision-making. As for the Liberals, they follow an approach known in the managerial literature as hill-climbing. That is, they believe in dealing with issues as they crop up, rather than in ways that are consistent with a political philosophy. They long ago abandoned their representation of business (as a class), and as for liberalism in the sense of promotion of individual liberty, they're the ones who, with the notwithstanding clause, decided the Charter of Rights should be perforated for easy removal.

Then there is the Bloc Québécois. It actually has the appearance of a political party. Its fundamental principle of sovereignty for Quebec is not well defined, if it is defined at all, but its decisions on parliamentary issues unrelated to sovereignty seem to be guided by consistent political principles. The Bloc also has a clear idea of the people whose interests they represent. There is a simple reason that the Bloc is more like an old-fashioned political party than the national parties are.

National sovereignty has been declining as international organizations and international agreements limit it, and as transnational corporations grow to ever more enormous sizes. Canada signed away much of its sovereignty, for example, to get free trade with the United States. In a world of declining national sovereignty, political principles and serious decision-making can get politicians in trouble with the people who really run the world. The Bloc can operate like an old-style party because for the moment the real decision-makers don't care what it does. Let Quebec become sovereign, though, and then someone new is going to be calling the tune.

The tune the rest of us are already dancing to, that is.

Cargo Politics © John FitzGerald, 2008

Out of Order

Let be be finale of seem,
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

– Wallace Stevens

“Canadians think of their country as an empty vessel, and are always searching outside Canada for people and things to put in it” – so said an article published on our defunct website ten years ago. That seems perfectly appropriate for a country which, in an article published there five years ago, I compared to a cargo cult As the latter article has it, “We have provided [Canada] with what seem to us to be all the characteristics of a nation, but on closer examination these characteristics turn out to be in large part primitive imitations of the real thing.”

My intention now is to enliven your intellectual life with a series of articles about the cargo cult institutions provided for us Canadians. Today we’ll be looking at the Order of Canada.

The Order of Canada, according to the Governor General’s website, is “the centrepiece of Canada’s Honours System and recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.” The Order was a brainchild of Lester Pearson’s, who already had a Nobel and so can’t be accused of creating an honour for himself to get. It was established in 1967, and its Chancellor is the Governor General. Members of the Order of Canada are selected by a shadowy group called the Advisory Council of the Order of Canada, which is currently chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Any Canadian may nominate someone for membership, but nominations are not publicized, deliberations about the selection of new members are secret, and decisions not to select someone are not explained.

I must admit that I have never been impartial about the Order of Canada, which I have always considered to be profoundly elitist and consequently un-Canadian. What sociological and anthropological evidence there is suggests that Canadian culture – or, at least, the culture of the great majority of Canadians – is egalitarian. For decades before the establishment of the Order of Canada, Canadians had been forbidden to accept honours in the higher ranks of the Commonwealth orders of merit, such as the Order of the British Empire, and few had complained about being denied the opportunity to lord it over other Canadians (of course, Conrad Black was young then).

But then separatism put in an appearance. All of a sudden people started thinking that perhaps Canada was a bit too decentralized and sectionalist for its own good. Furthermore, the separatists were arguing that Canada was not a real country. National institutions like those of real countries were needed, and Centennial year offered a golden opportunity to create some.

And so we got the Order of Canada. Unfortunately, in importing the idea of the order of merit, Canada didn’t look closely enough at foreign models. As a result, like cargo cult reproductions of airport control towers which omit important components of real airport control towers, such as radar systems, Canada’s order of merit ended up a feeble imitation of real orders of merit.

Our two mother countries provided models that we could have followed. France has four orders of merit and the United Kingdom sixteen, each intended to honour achievement in different fields. In France and the United Kingdom honours are also widely distributed; for example the Légion d’Honneur alone has over 110,000 members, or one for every 550 French citizens of all ages. Consequently, French citizens have a reasonable chance of being acquainted with a member of an order of merit, and a reasonable chance of success if they aspire to become members of one themselves.

But Canada decided to do the exact opposite. The Order of Canada is an omnibus order, intended to honour people in all fields. Consequently the goals which members are supposed to have achieved are only stated vaguely. The Order's motto is Desiderantes meliorem patriam (those desiring a better fatherland), which the Governor General's website makes even vaguer by translating it sloppily, as They desire a better country. That translation could as easily describe people who hate Canada and leave it. Even a good translation doesn't exclude many people. We all desire a better Canada, don't we? Those young fellows who supposedly wanted to behead Stephen Harper probably thought that would make Canada better.

The Order of Canada is also highly exclusive. Currently there are about 5,600 members of the Order of Canada, or one for every 6,000 Canadians of all ages. Consequently, its members tend to be important people. In fact, they consist largely of:

1. people of the type that politicians hang around with, and
   
2. people of the type politicians would like to hang around with.

So the members include a lot of rich people, retired politicians, journalists, sporting figures, and TV stars.

The members do appear to be highly worthy. When you exclude 5,999 of every 6,000 Canadians from the Order, you're going to end up with a highly worthy membership. However, you are going to exclude a large number of worthy people, and your membership will not be drawn from the great mass of the people. The members of the order of Canada are largely:

• distinguished people in the professions, sciences, culture, education, social service, sport, and journalism,
  
• philanthropists (a category which includes a large proportion of the entertainers), and
  
• big shots (including a fair number of provincial cabinet ministers of varying degrees of distinction).

I’m not saying that the Order of Canada is a private club for politicians and their friends, but that to a large extent it represents the limited perspective and experience of the ruling classes of this country. It includes chiefly people from their exalted and exclusive circles, and the chances of an ordinary Canadian being inducted are less than his or her chances of winning the lottery. In other words, the vast majority of Canadians have no reason either to be interested in the Order or to aspire to belong to it, and overwhelmingly they are not interested in it and do not aspire to join it.

If we must have orders of merit, they should have as their goals the provision of good examples, the encouragement of achievement, and the provision of outward and visible signs of important national ideals. A small, elitist Order of Canada cannot accomplish these goals. Canada could easily accomplish these goals, however, by following the Légion d’Honneur and having more grades of membership. The Order of Canada has three grades, while the Légion d’Honneur has five. The lowest two grades of the Légion d’Honneur contain over 95% of the members of the order. The Governor General would have to rub shoulders with people who wear ready-made clothes, but at least he would have contact for once with people who attended public schools and do their own housework.

We could also at least have subdivisions within the Order of Canada designating fields in which accomplishment is rewarded, with clear standards for membership in each division. That would also help eliminate the impression that many members got in because they know a politician.

Well, we could have a post office that delivered the mail, too, as well as armed forces that actually could exert armed force, and a health care system that actually cared for people. We could. Really. To do that, though, we would have to realize that institutions do not make a country, but rather that a real country creates institutions which arise from its culture.

I don’t know that Canadian culture needs an order of merit at all. There are other ways to honour distinguished Canadians without establishing an exalted caste. If we must have orders of merit, let’s carefully adapt the best foreign models to the requirements of Canadian culture instead of cobbling together a slapdash impersonation whose underlying assumption is that only one Canadian in 6,000 is really accomplishing anything for the country.

Out of Order © John FitzGerald, 2006, 2011

Aboriginal-bashing

Some Quebec nationalists believe the English-Canadian press is Quebec-bashing, as they call it. They comb the English-Canadian press for anything that can be considered to be anti-Quebec, find a dozen or so articles written over the past fifteen years, then claim that these articles represent a pattern on the part of the entire English press of smearing Quebec whenever possible.

As you will recall, Mordecai Richler was considered to be Quebec-bashing when he suggested that la revanche du berceau had not been a wholesome development in Quebec history. You can also be considered to be Quebec-bashing if you disagree with the government of Quebec, as the city of Westmount was considered to be when it opposed, along with many francophone municipalities, a project of amalgamation of municipalities.

The idea is that Quebec-bashing is part of a campaign to make Quebeckers look incapable of managing their own affairs, and therefore unready for sovereignty (whatever that might eventually turn out to be). Granted, the ignorance of Quebec displayed in the English-Canadian press is sometimes staggering, and if some people see it as a campaign against Quebec I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Also granted, some members of the English-Canadian press corps have formidable hates on for Quebec.

However, English-Canadians are well aware that Quebec has been managing its own affairs for 140 years. There is another group, though, which the English-Canadian press is bashing constantly, with the effect, if not the goal, of implying that it is incapable of self-government.

That group is aboriginals, and in particular members of First Nations. English-Canadian news coverage of aboriginals almost exclusively depicts them as ravaged by social problems and incapable of managing their own lives. On February 5, 2008, I did a search on the Google News Canada English-language site for the word “aboriginal” and the phrase “first nations.” The stories I found were overwhelmingly negative. They dealt with:

• a policing crisis on reserves,
  
• aboriginal drug addiction,
  
• the inability of some aboriginals to manage their compensation payments for abuse at residential school,
  
• the “growing and urgent needs of the aboriginal population”¹,
  
• discomfort felt by aboriginal students at university,
  
• rundown reserves,
  
• aboriginal unemployment,
  
• aboriginal alcoholism (you’ve been waiting for that one, I bet),
  
• the impeachment of the grand chief of the Dehcho First Nations of the Northwest Territories,
  
• the possibility of a shutdown of the First Nations Technical Institute on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario,
  
• the inflated remuneration paid the chief of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba,
  
• the refusal of a group of Roman Catholic bishops to apologize for abuse at residential schools, or to promise to bring abusers to justice.

Aboriginals are depicted in the English-Canadian press as people who are overwhelmed by the pressures of modern society, and unable to cope with these pressures themselves. Lurking behind this depiction are two inferences:

1. that maybe it’s best for Indians to continue to be segregated on reserves, and
   
2. that these problems are so huge that they can only be solved by Big Daddy, the government.

Well, the government’s been doing a fine job so far, eh? As far as I can make out, government policy towards the First Nations is to keep the chiefs happy. They do audit band councils, but the well-being of the ordinary citizens of the reserves, and of those members of First Nations who live off the reserves, is not a prime concern. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why conditions on most reserves are so abominable, and why the average income of Indians living off reserves is so low.

As for the Métis, the government looked the other way in the late nineteenth century when land reserved for them under the Manitoba Act was being given to white farmers instead. The Inuit were for decades the victims of daft federal schemes which imperilled their survival – for example, moving them to places where they could no longer hunt.

In short, the aboriginal peoples have been wards of government for over two hundred years, and its tender care has rewarded them with shorter lifespans, lower incomes, and higher suicide rates than the rest of us. And now we want the government to do more.

So, you may ask, what else can we do? Well, we could start trying to like aboriginals. We could ask ourselves why we have an apartheid system for Indians. Could it possibly be that we don’t want to have them among us? And why would we not want to have them among us? Could it possibly be that we consider them racially inferior? In this day and age?

Yep. It sure could. It could be that our long history of acting as if aboriginals were children, and the lack of success we’ve had when acting on this assumption, has left us with the idea that our approach failed because aboriginals are bad children, evil children, who are best encouraged to stay in the north or on their reserves where they can do the least harm.

If we are to overcome the current poisonous state of race relations in Canada, we could start by treating aboriginals as our equals. That would mean, for example, dismantling the apartheid system erected by the Indian Act. What do we do after that? I don’t know. It’s not as if we’ve ever had the experience of treating aboriginals as equals before. However, I’m pretty sure that whatever we try will have no chance of failing as catastrophically as the approach we’ve been taking so far.

Aboriginal-bashing © 2008, John FitzGerald

Iggy's excellent empire

The Conservative Party of Canada has decided to enliven our lives in recent days by running announcements on TV about how un-Canadian Michael Ignatieff is. Once we got over our shock at the Conservatives attacking someone for being pro-American, we decided this was the perfect time to dust off this review, first published in 2006.

Reviewed in this article:

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff(Vintage, 2003; 127 pages plus index; the Penguin edition, also published in 2003, is reviewed here)

He’s got that thing. Michael Ignatieff has been charming the Canadian journalistic classes for months now. The Globe and Mail published a fawning seven-page interview with him. Over and over we’re told how intellectual he is, how powerful his mind is, how he’s internationally respected as a scholar.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I decided to read some of this great thinking. The first thing I discovered while I was looking him up at the Toronto Public Library is that the Canadian people, or at least the Toronto branch, have not been inspired by reports of Mr. Ignatieff’s intellectual power (since Mr. Ignatieff is not teaching at the moment, I will use Mr. as his title rather than Dr.). No one’s been reserving any of his books, many of which are still on the shelves. In Toronto, at least, Iggymania seems to be confined to the employees of giant media corporations.

Anyway, I took out Empire Lite, which had the advantage of being fairly recent (2003) and topical (it deals in part with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; Mr. Ignatieff, in a departure from the policy of the party he aspires to lead, supports the latter invasion). It’s also short (127 pages of text in the Penguin edition), which I hoped would mean it hadn’t been artificially fattened the way so many books have been these days.

Mr. Ignatieff plunges into his topic immediately. His argument is that the old form of imperialism, which justified itself as necessary to spread civilization, has been replaced by a new stripped-down version which justifies itself as necessary to promote national self-determination – “hegemony without colonies,” as he puts it, “a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing” (p. 2). He calls this empire lite, and says “the key question is whether empire lite is heavy enough to get the job done” (p. 3).

What job is that? Well, Mr. Ignatieff is confusing about that question. He asserts in his summary that the “essential purpose" of empire lite is “to restore order to border zones essential to the security of great powers” (p. 109), which at least is plausible. However, from the end of the introduction on he assumes that the most important goal of empire lite is actually to promote self-determination.

He writes in his introduction, for example, that “critics of imperial power need to understand that self-government in these places [Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo] is unattainable without some exercise of imperial power….Imperialism has become a precondition for democracy” (pp. 23-24). However, 85 pages later we find him writing that one of the imperial characteristics of empire lite is that “real power [in the countries which have supposedly become self-determining] will continue to be exercised from London, Washington, and Paris” (p. 109).

Besides that, Mr. Ignatieff repeatedly writes, persuasively, that the failure of empire lite to provide true self-determination is one of its serious flaws. One could as well argue that although con men never deliver the Brooklyn Bridge to any of the suckers who’ve given them money, nevertheless if you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge you’re going to have to give money to a con man.

Mr. Ignatieff has been characterized by some as a groupie of the powerful, and his attribution of democracy-creating magical powers to imperialism – against his better judgment – seems to be an example of this. Nowhere does he make an argument to support his claim that imperialism is a precondition for democracy. He does not attempt to show how this assertion could be deduced from the defining characteristics of empire lite. In the three chapters between his introduction and his summary he marshals no objective empirical evidence which would support his claim or disprove a counterclaim that democracy can be established in a country without its becoming an object of imperialism. As we have seen, he characterizes imperialism (including empire lite) as inherently restricting national self-determination. His conclusion is that if empire lite doesn’t start living up to its supposed principles soon we’re going to be in serious trouble. But since imperialists say that their goal is to promote democracy, then ipso facto, Mr. Ignatieff seems to be arguing, that’s what their goal is.

I realize that what I’m claiming may not seem credible. However, if you’re a Canadian your public library probably has at least one copy of this book. All you have to do is read it. You will probably be as shocked by what you find as I was.

You’re probably wondering what goes on in those middle three chapters if Mr. Ignatieff is not marshalling evidence. What’s going on is some pedestrian journalism. In particular, the second of these three chapters is devoted to obvious character assassination of Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières and of Médecins du Monde. Well, Mr. Kouchner may be as evil as Mr. Ignatieff depicts him, but his argument is unsupported by evidence. “What Bernard Kouchner represents is the whole tortuous history of modern humanitarianism and its marriage of convenience with state power and military force,” Mr. Ignatieff writes (p. 59). Represents to whom? Who exactly considers him to be a symbol of these things, other than Mr. Ignatieff? And saaay – isn’t hitching the self-determination wagon to the locomotive of state power and military force what Mr. Ignatieff is arguing for?

Clearly the imperialism of today does not promote national self-determination. Bosnia is effectively run by the European Union. In Iraq the coalition of the all too willing is ostensibly promoting the self-determination of a democratic nation called Iraq, when many of this ostensible nation’s citizens think their true nation is something else – Kurdistan, or an Islamic Caliphate based in the Sunni regions, or an islamic Republic of Iraq. But Mr. Ignatieff is still pitching the supposed virtues of the invasion of Iraq.

Much has been made of Mr. Ignatieff’s supposedly suspect Canadianness. Well, this book will allay your fears on that score. He actually mentions Canada as if it were important, so he must be Canadian. However, his book is obviously intended not for Canadians but for citizens of a country (the United States, say) which is having grave doubts about the justifiability of its imperial adventures and looking for someone who can give it soothing reassurances that blowing up thousands of Iraqis and Afghans is just what the remaining unexploded Iraqis and Afghans needed. As an analysis of what's happening in the world, though, it is unsubstantiated, self-contradictory, and quite possibly disingenuous.

Iggie's Excellent Empire © John FitzGerald, 2006

Our Two Founding Lies

I recently came across my copy of an important Canadian book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. It was written in 1965 by George Grant, who is known reflexively to many Canadians as a distinguished historian. The theme of this book is the supposed loss of Canadian sovereignty resulting from the election of the evil Pearson in 1963.

I could summon up no memory of earlier readings of the book, but the many notes in my copy suggested I had been interested in it at the time. I therefore decided to give this distinguished historian a second chance. What I discovered on re-reading the book was a distinguished load of twaddle.

I found, to be exact, a spurious argument for the myth of the two founding peoples. Grant argues that Canada was founded when "the two original peoples, French and Catholic, British and Protestant, united precariously in their desire not to be part of the great Republic." His evidence for this assertion is – wait for it – the Constitutional Act of 1791! He writes:

The constitutional arrangements of 1791, and the wider arrangements of the next century, were only possible because of a widespread determination not to become part of the great Republic. Among both the French and the British, this negative intention sprang from widely divergent traditions. What both people had in common was the fact they both recognized that they could only be preserved outside the United States of America.

Well, let's review exactly what those constitutional arrangements of 1791 were. What happened was that Quebec lost its western half, which became Upper Canada. This was done so that the Loyalist settlers in Upper Canada could have English laws and institutions, especially the English system of land tenure (Quebec still had seigneurial tenure).

So what Grant represents as a union was in fact a division. What he represents as an accommodation was in fact a repudiation. The Loyalists rejected French law and institutions and the British government removed them from Quebec's rule.

Upper and Lower Canada shared the same Governor General that all the British North American colonies did, but were otherwise separate. They remained separate till the establishment of the United Province of Canada (one of those "wider arrangements of the next century") in 1841, when the British out them back together with the idea of creating unity by overwhelming the French and assimilating them to English culture.

So Grant represents the divisive act of a colonial power as the voluntary union of two peoples, and he represents a union imposed by a foreign power for the purpose of eradicating French culture as a voluntary partnership between French and English. The obvious nonsensicality of Grant's ideas of course did not keep the Progressive Conservatives from adopting them as policy almost immediately. The Tories' promotion of these ideas culminated in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown agreements, so Grant shares the blame for the collapse of the Progressive Conservative party following the referendum on the Charlottetown agreement.

The myth of the two founding peoples also undermined Canadian sovereignty, although Grant thought that preserving the supposed union of the two founding peoples was what Canadian sovereignty was for. However, once you believe that the essence of Canada is that it is a union of two founding peoples, you really don't need sovereignty.

The Tories, for example, could promote free trade as enthusiastically as they promoted Meech Lake and Charlottetown. Free trade, after all, wasn't going to imperil the union of the two founding peoples, especially when Quebec was keen for it. Free trade was going to cost the two founding peoples considerable freedom to act as they wanted, but those valuable British and French traditions were not going to be endangered.

Of course, the loss of Canadian sovereignty through free trade and the WTO was also facilitated by the other myth which competed with the myth of the two founding peoples. This competing myth was the idea of multicultural Canada, or of Canada as the community of communities. Canada's mission, according to this myth, is to furnish a place for ethnic groups to co-exist in harmony.

I call this a myth for the simple reason that, like the myth of the two founding peoples, it fails to describe reality. Most members of most ethnic groups consider that the interests of Canadians as a whole are superior to those of their own ethnic group. The one ethnic group where this is most likely not true has also firmly rejected the idea of a multicultural society, and many of its members long to separate from a country in which individual rights take priority over group rights.

As Grant notes, the idea of multicultural Canada was a favourite of the Cité libre crowd, and when they took over the Liberal Party, the Liberal party took over the idea of multicultural Canada. It became the party of multiculturalism.

Of course a multicultural Canada is not threatened by loss of sovereignty, either, and the Liberals have enthusiastically supported the WTO's depredations on Canadian sovereignty. The members of Canada's ethnic communities have lost sovereignty, but Canada still has a ministry of multiculturalism.

Interestingly, Canadians are increasingly coming to think that Canadianism is synonymous with anti-Americanism. We don't want to be like those vulgar Americans whose national myth is one of self-reliance and liberty. While the two myths of Canada fail to describe Canadian reality, they have at least succeeded in persuading Canadians that the autonomous life is not worth living.

No, we will stick with the Two Founding Lies of contemporary Canada. Although they have cost us sovereignty and the occasional problem like the country nearly falling apart, they both allow us to remain smug and self-righteous about the wonderful union of two peoples/community of communities that Canada supposedly is, and if being smug and self-righteous isn't Canadian, I don't know what is.

Our Two Founding Lies © John FitzGerald, 2000