Murdoch, Toronto and Ontario

Bill Murdoch has made this claim that Toronto and the rest of Ontario should separate for the best of rural Ontario. The idea here is that the big bad city is overpowering the voices of the insane landowners’ groups springing up everywhere. The reality is though that even outside of Toronto’s clout, there’s a considerable population of urban Ontario – there’s some two or three million in the 905, another million or so around Ottawa, nearly 700, 000 in Hamilton, and half a million each in Kitchener-Waterloo and London. Right there we have a clear majority of Ontario voters living in cities. What frustrates Murdoch and fellow-nutjob, Randy Hillier is that more people live in cities, like cities and do not share the delusions of the Ontario Landowners. Sorry Bill, city-folk are in the majority, now shut up while we pass some laws on your ass.

Prorogued for This?

Everyone else has said it, but the government’s Olympic holiday was shown to be a total sham (like everyone knew it was) with today’s throne speech. We need to change the anthem? Ooooooh, that took three months to figure out. In three months we could have let someone rewrite the whole thing, make it more like this:

Still Firewalling Alberta

Reading about our pathetic show at the climate change conference in Copenhagen it’s hard for me not to conclude that the government we currently have has a clear number one priority: protect the oil extraction industry in Alberta. Once again I put forward my thesis that the current Conservative Party is every bit as regionalist as the Reform Party before it or even the Bloc today – except that they have duped the rest of the country into voting for them. Make no mistake, unless you work in non-renewable energy, the Cons are perfectly willing to sacrifice your industry to keep the dirty oil pumping out of the Athabasca basin.

Who Are We? Where Are We Going?

Standing back and looking at the two big Canadian political stories in the past month – Afghan torture revelations and Copenhagen – I have been struck by how utterly changed we are in Canada. We are now one of the global foot-draggers on climate change and a country that is actively trying to cover up human rights violations (real ones, not ones that are less inconveniencing than the passport office, like Ezra Levant having to answer a couple questions one time) made by its own military. The contrast between this and Chretien’s wise decision to sit out the Gulf War in 2003 could not be greater.

Conservatives Make Some Canadian Heritage

Apparently Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore is trying to bring the UFC to Vancouver. So important is this work that he’s posting Twitter updates on the matter. Wow, well, I guess this is what Canadian “heritage” is for the Cons. What will happen if they get a majority? All of our current cultural activities might have to go in favour of more Ultimate Fighting along with perhaps monster truck races, jello wrestling, and bounty-hunter olympics (okay I made that last one up, but seriously, aside from his murder conviction, I don’t see why it would be hard to get Dog Chapman up here).

Bloc Albertain

Imagine if the Bloc Quebecois could somehow get Canadians all across the country to vote for them. Actually it would keep separatism at a minimum in the province, but only because the Bloc would be able to engineer a sort of reverse-takeover of the rest of the country. If the BQ formed a government it would allow them to impose a Quebec-centric agenda on the entire country.

Now for the BQ to be a national party, it would have to pay lip service to the rest of the country’s needs and desires. Any time though that Quebec had a conflict with the rest of the country, Quebec’s interests would prevail. BQ politicians, trying to get elected in the entire country would have constant trouble concealing their contempt for the rest of the nation. Inevitably old speeches would come out revealing their utter contempt for the country they wish to rule.

This Bloc-ruled Canada sounds strange, doesn’t it? Well, this is what we have, except the Bloc is not one from Quebec, but one from Alberta. As further details continue to emerge from the proposed climate-change plan of the Conservatives, it is apparent that the plan is designed to benefit Alberta’s dirty oil sector at the expense of all other industries in the rest of the country. Only a hyper-regionalist agenda could lead to such an unbalanced plan. Taken with Harper’s remarks over the years about Canada and Canadians, it should once again be obvious that the core of the Conservative party is a bunch of Alberta-first partisans who are helped along by useful idiots who happen to be ideological fellow-travelers or opportunistic political climbers in other provinces.

Control, Control, You Must Learn Control

I have not studied the polls with the sort of depth needed to have a really solid sense of what would happen if the Harper government fell this fall. My quick-and-dirty guess is another minority, maybe Conservative, maybe Liberal. What looks better for the Liberals is the appearance that Ignatieff is in control of the situation. He has said that he’s not satisfied that the Cons are working hard enough, especially on EI reform – a non-trivial issue given the economy. By talking in this manner, Ignatieff gives the impression that he is prepared for an election and has an actual issue over which he could conceivably fight it. It’s a much better appearance than the one Dion presented where the Liberals appeared mortified at the thought of an election. Dion barely seemed in control of his party at times, let alone the overall situation in the House.

Like a lot of progressive-minded Canadians, I’m still not a super-Iggy fan but it’s nice to have a political tactician who can do the realpolitick thing as well as Harper. Also, it has to be a huge benefit for the Liberals to have Bob Rae playing the role of the good soldier and pointing out that “[a]n election is not a political game. An election is about fundamental choices. It’s about our values. It’s about our interests, where we think the country needs to go and there is a sense that this government is just not up to the job.”

“Real” Canadians

If you’ve been following along, it hasn’t exactly been a good thing lately to be a non-white Canadian in trouble overseas. If you haven’t been following things, Dr. Dawg has the goods here. Why is this happening? Since everything is political to the Harper Cons, I wonder if this is all part of a subtle appeal to the self-proclaimed “real” Canadians.

Who are the people who call themselves “real” Canadians? I don’t have the sociology chops to really define this group, but since it’s about self-identification I can share where I have heard this sort of self-identification. I recall a friend about ten years ago saying her boyfriend wasn’t “Canadian” like she said she was, or I was. What is he then? I was told he was Italian and so asked “you mean he was born in Italy?” No. Apparently he was born here. So does he now hold an Italian passport and Italian citizenship? No. So he’s Canadian, is he not? No, I was told he wasn’t really Canadian.

I started to notice that there is a pattern in this country where a subset of white Canadians tend to identify themselves as “Canadian” as a sort of ethnic group apart from citizenship. Typically these people are a mixture of Northern European ancestries and they usually only make this identification as “real” Canadians (or more often just “Canadians”) to others of this ilk. My Anglo-Germanic-Irish-Scottish ancestry is almost prototypical of this group and therefore gets me admission to these kinds of conversations.

Now there are some cases where sufficiently assimilated whites from other parts of Europe (Italy, Greece, Ukraine, etc.) might be granted admission to this club, but it’s important to see what “Real Canadianism” is. It’s an attempt at the creation of a Canadian volk. Actually, since I reject the notion that these self-identified “Real Canadians” are the only “real Canadians” perhaps I should call them Volk Canadians. Volk Canadians need not be racists per se, but they are creating a sort of racial identity for themselves in using this method of describing themselves.

Now why don’t we hear a great deal about Volk Canadians? There are a few reasons: While many of them may have political views, they aren’t that politically involved – I suspect that Harper is appealing to them in order to change that. Secondly, like I said, most of the Volk Canadian conversation happens only among those considered Volk Canadians. I suspect that most Volk Canadians have the sense that what they are saying about themselves and, by implication, about non-Volk Canadians isn’t really in line with Canada’s multi-ethnic, multi-cultural identity, so they keep it on the down-low. Lastly, this creation of a Canadian Volk is most likely to be identified in lower economic and class strata. Since most of the media is targeted to professionals making $80 000+/yr most media isn’t talking to Volk Canadians. The closest they probably have to a voice in the media is Don Cherry.

Make no mistake though, the Volk Canadians are out there, if your ancestry is anything like mine you probably know because you’ve been privy to conversations where you just stare at your feet and/or get in a shouting-match with co-workers or family members. If you haven’t, then you need to know that this is going on in our country. We who reject the being called “real” Canadians at the exclusion of all other Canadians don’t like to talk about it, because, it’s embarrassing to us, believe me. But you need to be aware that Harper’s Conservatives are courting this group of people and is attempting to politicize them.

Safe Injection Site for Toronto

There’s a story in the Toronto Star suggesting that the city of Toronto is looking at setting a safe injection site for intravenous drug users akin to Insite in Vancouver. While Insite enjoys broad support in BC, the Conservatives appear to revile it and the RCMP attempted to smear it. The consensus is that safe injection sites do appear to extend the lives of drug-users and, it would seem, give them an opportunity to come into contact with those that could provide them with the resources to get clean. From an ideological perspective though, Harper’s gang seems more interested in viewing drug use as a moral weakness and punishing users for this.

Asking For It

Don’t worry girls, Harper’s government is here to make sure you don’t bring violence on yourselves by dressing sexy. A lot of blogs are offended by what this says about the current government’s attitude towards women. In another way though, I would expect men to be equally offended. This sort of talk implies that men are completely lacking in self-control and can’t keep it in the pants when a girl dressed in something less than a burqa walks by. It’s interested that demeaning women also demeans men. Women can dress how they want and men can behave.