No safe place

Globe columnist Rick Salutin found his voice today. His column has suffered of late from a finicky pedantry, but this one needs to be read and taken to heart by those who imagine that "terrorism" is a creed rather than a mode of warfare, and that al-Qaeda is a real organization. In fact, this is a good take-off point to have a go at the current mythos of "terrorism" that slimed our TV screens and our collective consciousness yesterday.

In my last entry I noted that, whatever the mode of killing and destruction, the victims are equally terrorized. Yet we are politically selective, if not outright cynical, in what we deem to be "terrorism." Salutin rightly points out an example that I missed yesterday: the American-financed contra war in Nicaragua. Those "moral equivalents of our Founding Fathers," as Ron Reagan liked to call them, used to throw bombs into daycare centres, but they were on the American side. Hence, they weren’t terrorists, but "freedom fighters." Clear?

Fast-forward to 9/11. The popular discourses around this terrible event were nothing short of bizarre. Anyone who asked the question "why" was thunderingly denounced. Somehow looking for the root causes took away from the Manichaean good-versus-evil frame in which it pleased the US leaders and media to place the act. It was "blaming America" in a time of tragedy and mourning. It was insensitive at best, an indication of un-American sympathy with the terrorists at worst.

And yet everything has a cause, at least in the real world. Denying or obfuscating this reminds me--dare I say this even now?--of the isolation of the Jewish Holocaust from its historical context. There were twelve million victims of death squads and the extermination camps, not six, at least two attempted genocides, not one, and many tens of millions of deaths on top of that, all victims of the war of racial conquest Germany unleashed against the rest of Europe and the world. Yet the Shoah became (and largely remains) an almost metaphysical event rather than a part, albeit a significant one, of the Nazi killing machine.

But such detail clutters up our thinking. We seem to need to see things in black and white in order to make sense of them. So yesterday we heard that "the terrorists" or "these terrorists" are the enemy, as though that enemy held to one shadowy creed, one of hatred for everything we hold dear. We are told time and again that "they hate our freedom," but just perhaps the hatred arises from the liberties the West takes with the rest of the world.

An expert on CNN yesterday admitted that al-Qaeda is no longer an organized command structure—anyone can claim to be a part of it. Its cells are like those of the "leaderless resistance" championed by the American ultra-right in The Turner Diaries. If "we are all Londoners," then there will assuredly be those on the other side of the divide who will reply, "And we are all al-Qaeda."

So we had better look at those unfashionable root causes while there’s still time. Yesterday’s "barbaric attack" (and so it was) was one horrific episode in an otherwise peaceful city. But it’s everyday news for people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who will report on today’s casualties there? Who will bring their wounded images to our TV screens? Who will denounce those barbaric attacks?

We had better get it through our heads that there are not three worlds, with the Third World getting the worst of it at a safe distance. If there’s a lesson to be learned from yesterday’s carnage, it’s that there is only one world, and we’re all living in it. There are many sides to every war, and these days there are no boundaries in our little global village. So long as we righteously think we know best, and impose that best by force of sophisticated arms against states we disapprove of and peoples we dispossess, there is no safe place anywhere. For them, or for us.

Terrorism

The news out of London, a place where I once lived, is grim indeed. I have taken the underground through every station hit by the bombs today. I have waited for the train countless times in those enclosed, dingy, smelly subterranean spaces, never dreaming of being maimed or killed. I can't imagine what it is like to be a target. I didn't do anything. Surely they couldn't be after me.

Hearing of the attacks this morning, seeing some of the casualties on CNN, and listening to Mr. Bush offering condolences to the dead rather than the living, I began to think about terrorism. What is it? And who are these terrorists? It appears that there are tricks of perspective involved. The innocent victims of the blasts, and many more, were certainly terrorized. When foreign battles are suddenly spilling over into our own comfortable neighbourhoods, we are all terrorized. Wars are supposed to happen somewhere else, and be watched on CNN.

I often do try to imagine what it must be like to be on the receiving end of terrorism, that is, to be terrorized. And at this point, I begin to feel anger, and not just at the desperate, murderous individuals who slaughter civilians, who massacre children on their first day of school, who bomb subways at rush hour, but at the damned selectivity of our media and world leaders who use the term "terrorism" so generically and dishonestly.

Because there are so many terrorized people in the world, and I can't tell them apart, the terrified toddlers in Beslan, Iraqis and Afghanis dying by the thousands at the hands of their "liberators," Palestinian olive harvesters shot by Israeli settlers in Nablus, children hunted for sport in Khan Younis, office workers burning alive in the WTC, children dying by the hundreds of thousands in a blockaded Iraq, even, going back a few years, the mental patients bombed by the US in Grenada, and the slum-dwellers levelled with their shacks in Panama.

When we watched the invasion of Iraq, we saw it almost entirely from the invaders' perspective. Only on French TV did we see a little of the other half of the equation, the hospitals filling up with Iraqi civilian casualties, the moans and the blood. We saw and heard about the kids in Beslan, but we're a little hard of hearing, it seems, when it comes to Russia's brutal war of attrition in Chechnya. We see in living colour the results of suicide bombing in Israel, but know so little even now about the Palestinians, their wretched conditions of existence, even the fact that their civilian casualty rate dwarfs that of the Israelis.

People who strap bombs to their chests or take hostages are terrorists. No argument there. But people who drop bombs from airplanes, bulldoze houses, target a children's zoo, devastate entire peoples with the very latest in military hardware, are--what? And yet all the victims are equally terrorized.

Bombs are routine, everyday, in far-off places like Afghanistan and Iraq. But when they start to explode in Britain, or Spain, or the US, so many innocents ask, Why are they coming after us? We didn't do anything.

And maybe, just maybe, that's the problem.

Of Christian love and gentle mice

Headline in the Ottawa Citizen this morning: "Church shuns MP for backing gay marriage." It seems that Charlie Angus, NDP MP for Timmins-James Bay, has been refused communion by his local priest, with the blessing of the priest's archbishop, for voting in favour of C-38. The "last straw" for the priest, apparently, was seeing Angus shake hands with gay MP Bill Siksay. ("Oooo! He touched one of them! No wine 'n' wafer for him!")

That increasingly odious oxymoron, "Christian love," needs to be named for what it really is. In the hands of people like Angus' priest, it is an active, virulent hatred, a life-denying, soul-destroying cult of exclusion. That is not to say that there are no Christians who exemplify humility, caring and an intolerance of injustice. There are many such, but they have little power and less authority. The late Pope put liberation theology under the ban, and an earlier Pope did the same for the worker priest movement.

And, lest anyone think I'm picking on the Roman Church, the fundamentalist Christianity of George Bush and his tens of millions of American supporters allows little room for compassion, fellow-feeling or turning the other cheek, as any Afghani or Iraqi civilian will tell you--the ones left alive, that is.

Did man once walk with dinosaurs? No doubt. We're still doing it. And, as a taxpayer, I'm helping to subsidize the scaly monsters. That has to stop. Charitable status for those who believe in caritas, say I.

Meanwhile, a human gene has been used in a spectacular feat of genetic engineering to make vicious mice gentle. Maybe one of these days they'll transplant the gene back into people. Perhaps it could produce kinder Christians. At least it might have helped prevent a fistfight at the Israeli Embassy.

The banality of evil

There she was again, this time damned near large-as-life in the two morning papers I read, Karla Homolka telling all to the TV cameras. For once, Christie Blatchford (or an editor) got the hang of the thing: "Not much silence from this lamb."

It is simply impossible to read what she has to say without noticing that it consists almost entirely of shallow, trite and sentimental observations of the Hallmark variety, strung together in a well-rehearsed narrative. It's an ambiguous discourse in which we don't really know at some points whether she's faking remorse or boasting:

"I am a woman and it's very rare for a woman to do the kinds of things I have done."

"I was an exemplary detainee."

The rest of the time she sounds like a celebrity guest just out of de-tox on a late-night talk show:

"I am a very private person and don't like to talk about my feelings."

"I think I can remake my life."

"I think socially I have to do as much as possible to help people."

"I don't want people to think that I am a dangerous person who's going to do something to their children. I think it's time I talk."

and here's my favourite:

"I'd like to have an iced cappuccino...from Tim Horton's."

Karla, the quintessential Canadian.

I've always thought that evil, far from being something evil people have that the rest of us don't, is a lack of something. Call it empathy, although that doesn't seem to capture it entirely. Clearly sociopaths don't have empathy, but when you read Karla's words, what's skin-crawlingly creepy about them is their very ordinariness. It's as though she had only been caught stealing a cookie, and, having to face the wrath of a parent or teacher, demurely says "Yes, that was a very naughty thing and I'm sorry and I won't do it again." There's a missing dimension here, and it's not just the obvious absence of genuine caring or human feeling.

Anyway, Hannah Arendt has said it much better than I ever could: Karla Homolka is a living example of monstrous, mind-numbing banality.


Meanwhile, in other news:

• Corporations vs. warm and fuzzy. In Edinburgh at the G-8 demonstrations, a protester dressed as a rabbit waved a carrot at police horses, while, here at home, the National Capital Commission, now red-faced and falling all over itself to apologize, caved in to pressure from Shell Oil and banned the mascot of the Canadian Renewable Fuel Association, Corn-Cob Bob, from Canada Day festivities.
  
  
• Cordon blech. Britain is furious that Jacques Chirac made fun of British cuisine. (British cuisine, there's an oxymoron if there ever was one. I remember a fellow from the West Indies standing on a box at Hyde Park some years back: "Every country in the world has its own cuisine," he shouted. "What does England have? Table manners!" Right on.)
  
  
• Not a prayer. A Nortel executive, Gary Daichendt, told his board of directors that God had intended that he be CEO. He wanted them to boot out the incumbent, and the chief financial officer for good measure. They disagreed. He is now a former executive.
  

Enough for one day. In fact, more than enough.

Buying the stairway to heaven

Surely the oddest conjuncture of people and events came together in an op-ed piece in today's Globe and Mail. From an article whose title and contents frankly gave me the willies, "Can we forgive Karla?", by that indefatigable Christian flak Lorna Dueck, a familiar name emerges--Eleanor Clitheroe. As is so often the case, the main text vanished in a puff of vaguely sulfurous smoke. Clitheroe, Rev. Eleanor. Where have I heard that name before?

Dueck didn't leave me in suspense. This "newly-ordained Anglican cleric," now insisting that "Karla could be in heaven beside us," is none other than the infamous ex-CEO of Hydro One. You remember: $2.2 million a year salary, including the obligatory memberships in exclusive clubs, $330,000 for limousine rides over a three-year period (including dropping the kids off at daycare), and $214,000 in car allowances, presumably for those occasions when she took the wheel herself.

Clitheroe was about to follow the usual CEO path, heading off with a $6 million severance package and a yearly pension of $1.1 million. She had been named businesswoman of the year by (who else?) the National Post. She was Chancellor of the University of Western Ontario and sat on a bunch of boards and commissions. But Hydro One was changing, and so was the leadership of the Ontario provincial government, and this just seemed a bit much; and so her severance was cancelled, and her annual pension was reduced to the measly sum of $150,000, and off she went.

(What do CEOs do for their wages? Leap over tall buildings? Walk on water? Raise the dead? Questions were asked at the time about Clitheroe's actual work, but the same questions, in fairness, could be directed to any of this breed. Perhaps I'll go into a little more detail on CEOs and public policy in future entries.)

After she was tossed, then, from the top spot in Hydro One, none too roughly (although she sued), "she studied the work of the soul" at Wycliffe College, and is now the director of an outreach program called Prison Fellowship. An inspiration, one might say, to the worldly. And someone, as noted, who could wake up one day to find herself sharing her Philly dip with Canada's most celebrated serial killer.

With the acceptance of God's grace, there she'd be, Clitheroe says, "beside us." And that was the phrase that caught in my mind, the very key to the mystery. For Clitheroe never doubts that her berth on the glorious yacht in the sky is secure. It's the comfortable, nonchalant (dare I say bourgeois) assurance in her phrasing, uttered en passant as it was, that gives the whole game away. Here is a person who was born to privilege, who has a pre-ordained right to the best of all possible worlds--this one and the next.

How fortunate to be Eleanor Clitheroe. And to think that someday she might be playing shuffleboard on the divine deck with none other than Karla Homolka. God does work in mysterious ways.

O Canada

At this time of celebration in the sticky heat of an Ottawa day, I think of Maher Arar and what his vision of Canada must be like.

His story contains everything that is true and wonderful and tragic and terrible about his adopted country. If we can ever get at the slippery concept of "Canadian culture," it will be through the prism of such people and their narratives.

The basic facts are known to everyone here. Born in Syria, he came to Canada at the age of 17. He became a Canadian citizen in 1991 and moved to Ottawa in 1997, along the way becoming qualified as a wireless technology consultant. The story was a not-unfamiliar one: an immigrant who worked hard, got an education, and settled comfortably into his new home. Canada was built by such immigrants, looking for something better, and finding it here.

As we all know, things changed in 2002. Returning home with his family from a holiday in Tunisia, Arar was detained by US officials , and spirited off to Syria, where he was confined in a tiny cell and brutally tortured for nearly a year, as a suspected al-Quaeda operative. A "confession" was eventually extracted from him, duly delivered to CSIS and the RCMP by the Canadian Ambassador at the time, and in the natural course of events selected bits and pieces found their way into the media.

Upon his release and return to Ottawa, Arar looked Canada in the eye and told us in simple, sometimes halting words, what had happened to him. We looked back, and saw right into the man's soul. There was no trace of a performance there, no rehearsed statements, no attempt to manipulate, no hidden agenda. What we saw was what we got, and we knew it, and the nation was horrified--not only by what he had endured, but by the growing suspicion that paranoid and obsessive American officialdom had been helped along by Canadian authorities.

Our possible complicity in Arar's "rendition" is now the subject of a Commission of Inquiry, a good deal of which is happening behind closed doors. We have heard from our former Ambassador to Syria, Franco Pillarella, who claimed to be unaware that Syria used such interrogation methods. (An appalled Paul Heinbecker, former Canadian Ambassador to the UN, said afterwards that Pillarella's testimony has tainted the reputation of the entire diplomatic service.)

Gar Pardy, a now-retired Foreign Affairs official, found "warning signs" early on that Arar was being mistreated, and heatedly claimed he had passed this information up the line. But ex-Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, offering Arar a firm handshake and a weak apology for not getting him out sooner, claimed no one had told him about any torture.

Meanwhile CSIS has been wiggling on a hook of its own making. According to Lorne Waldman, Arar's lawyer at the inquiry, it's been leaking selective information to the media to try to absolve itself of blame.

As for the RCMP, the senior officer in charge of the went-nowhere investigation of Arar in 2002, Superintendent Michel Cabana, says Arar was tortured all right, but so what? The Mounties have no choice: they have to work with miserable regimes like the Syrian one because the safety of the Canadian public is at stake. So they offered to share all the information they had on Arar with his torturers, an offer that the Syrians never took up.

Essentially admitting that Arar had only been of peripheral interest in a much wider investigation, Cabana nevertheless stoutly defended the RCMP's generous offer of cooperation. Indeed, shortly after Arar's incarceration in 2002, his lawyer had asked for a letter from the RCMP affirming that he was not the subject of a criminal investigation. Cabana refused, stating that this would be "problematic and inappropriate." Only in the summer of 2003 did the government of Canada confirm to Syria that Arar was not a threat to national security and should be sent back.

Cabana was asked if he knew whether Syria had received Canadian investigative information through US channels. He paused, a government lawyer objected that he shouldn't answer the question, and that was that. The cover-up continues. A lot of asses are being covertly removed from the fire under a convenient "national security" blackout. Arar is having his day in court, but there are a lot of hours missing.

So there you have it. An honest man, an immigrant to Canada, caught up in the post-9/11 hysteria, thrust into a nightmare designed and produced by Franz Kafka with the assistance of the Marquis de Sade. Faceless, bumbling officials filling out forms, passing along information, doing their jobs, covering their butts. Excuses, always excuses: "I didn't know." "I did, but I couldn't do anything about it." "I knew, but I didn't think I should do anything about it." "I'm sorry. No one told me." The just-following-orders crowd, just following orders.

But you know what? When you weigh everything in the balance, and not to minimize in any way the suffering that Maher Arar and his family endured, something overwhelmingly positive seems to emerge. This is Canada, where bumbling officials come under the glare of spotlights. This is a country where an innocent man can tell us his story and be believed. This is a country where senior officials, even Ministers, if not ultimately called to account and punished, can at least be caused no end of discomfort.

This is Canada, where ordinary citizens are aroused by official injustice, incompetence and complicity in maltreatment: they're mad as hell and not too shy about expressing it. This is a country where five men, not even citizens, are held under a star-chamber "security certificate" system, but where a groundswell of opposition is everywhere felt, where individuals and organizations dedicate long, unpaid hours, days, months, years to obtain such things as charges, a fair trial and access to the evidence against them.

Is Canada some kind of utopia? Obviously not--ask the Lubicon, ask the family of Dudley George, in fact ask any First Nations person. We're just a country where a surprising lot of people have good values, a sense of justice and humanity and fairness and decency, clear vision and the desire to make things better. Where countless individuals and groups are willing to go to bat for a fellow-citizen, to give him the benefit of the doubt over the official fiddling and foozling of police forces, diplomats and government spokespeople caught with their pants down under the kliegs.

O Canada! I'm proud today, proud as hell. I'm raising my first glass to Maher Arar, citizen. And my second to the rest of you.

Bits and pieces of Canada

• More on the Homolka-Teale entity: Many, many column inches today from Christie Blatchford in the Globe, who only last week told us in another lengthy column that people were sick of the subject. And some handwriting analysis thrown in: seems that the shape of Karla's letters indicates criminal tendencies, secretiveness, weak will and low self-esteem. Funny. I have no training in the subject, nor in phrenology or astrology, but I could have told you the same thing by reading her tea-leaves or casting hexagrams. Paul Martin's handwriting, I can inform you after careful study, reveals indecisiveness coupled with ambition. And Blatchford's exemplifies that of an extroverted sensationalist with acute spasms of faux-moralizing.
  
  
• The price of an apostrophe: $786, at last count. Seems that the language cops in West Quebec acted on a complaint that Bob Rice, a plumber, has referred to his business as "Bob's." The money was a combination fine and bailiff fee. "Chez Bob" would presumably have worked, or even "Bob," which came within a whisker of replacing "Northwest Territories" a few years back.
  
  Ah, but there may be more here than meets the eye: the Office de la langue francaise denies all knowledge of the ticket. Stay tuned.
  
  
• "Safe predictions on a slow news day" department: "Military jails child porn collector: Conviction, six-month sentence likely to end air officer's career" [Ottawa Citizen]. If I don't make it as a handwriting expert, maybe I can get a job as a seer.
  
  
• Deserting a sinking ship? Seems that Harper's senior advisors are taking flight. Is this a case of bad advice being punished, or intractable material to work with? In any case, off go Geoff Norquay (communications director) and Yaroslav Baran (strategic communications manager), and very possibly Chief-of-Staff Phil Murphy in the near future. Watch for another Harper makeover. Speculation is warmly invited.
  
  
• UnCanadian: Pierre Trudeau's son, Sacha, is taking on security certificates. Good on him. These measures, under which people can be, and are, held for years in Canadian prisons without charge, trial or access to evidence, are intolerable. When asked why he was going to bat for Hassan Almrei, Trudeau replied, "For my country." Ah, at last: a patriotism I can relate to. It won't get me waving a flag tomorrow, but it does make me just a little prouder.
  
  

• Meanwhile, in another part of the forest: "Animal with mad cow disease was born in Texas." Another take on the same subject: "BSE Positive Cow was Completely American." And my favourite: "Spain joins Canada in gay marriage."
  
  
  Have a fine Canada Day weekend, everyone.

  
  

Give Bev Desjarlais the heave

Bev Desjarlais. NDP MP. Homophobe.

Why is she still in the NDP caucus?

Doesn’t the NDP claim to stand for human rights? No exceptions? No equivocations? Didn’t Jack and a few others celebrate yet another human rights triumph last night?

Don’t, please, hand me any guff about her alleged “crisis of conscience.” She voted against human rights. Period. And she’s staying in the caucus.

If the Conservatives discovered that one of their MPs was a member of CPC (ML), would anyone (for once) challenge Harper’s judgment in making him or her sit with Chuck Cadman? If Gilles Duceppe discovered that one of his sitting members was campaigning for federalism, wouldn’t he take decisive action that no one, given the context, could challenge?

Human rights. We’re all the same before the law. Gays and lesbians are first-class citizens, and they can’t be denied access where straight people can head right in. Marriage is a state-sanctioned institution: no colour bar, and now no “orientation” test. Whatever one thinks of that creaky institution, and the state’s continued involvement in what is no more than a quaint and oppressive mediaeval custom, everyone gets equal access. No separate water-fountains, no separate institutions for gays and straights.

Bev Desjarlais thinks otherwise. Her conscience tells her that gays and lesbians shouldn’t be treated equally before the law. Her conscience tells her that they are second-class citizens. Her conscience believes in “separate but equal.” Her conscience tells her that human rights are OK, “except for.”

Hey, no problem. Let her sit with Vic Toews. He’s got one of those consciences too. But she has no business, no business at all, sitting in the caucus of a party that claims to stand for human rights. And as long as she sits there, she raises questions about the firmness of the NDP’s commitment to them.

C’mon, Jack. Do the right thing.

The Jewish Conspiracy

Leon Mugesera is going home.

The Rwandan national, who incited genocide in his home country, but somehow obtained a permanent residency permit to live in Canada, will be deported after a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. It took ten years, but better late than never. Good riddance.

The Court did not take kindly at all to the suggestion--hell, it was a full-blown accusation--by Mugesera's lawyer that it could not try the case fairly because it had been "infiltrated" by some kind of Jewish cabal. Details need not be recounted here--you can read all about it in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Some things never change.

But there is an interesting wrinkle in this case. The Canadian Jewish Congress did, in fact, win intervenor status before the Court. And this is not the first time that we have heard from the CJC when the issue of racial or ethnic hatred is raised. When a Tamil is beaten into a coma in Toronto, or some skinheads mount a racist demonstration against Roma, or when the leader of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front bites the dust, the CJC is always first up in the media, as though the communities involved had no spokespeople of their own, as though Nazis and Jews are in some kind of binary opposition.

This sort of thing distorts recorded history--how many people know, for example, that twelve million, not six million, perished at the hands of Nazi death squads and extermination camps?--and it excludes and silences the authentic and legitimate voices of other victims of hate crimes, including genocide. Were there no Tutsis in Canada to make their case before the Supreme Court of Canada against Mugesera? Are there no Tamils or Roma to speak for themselves, no other victims of race hatred to celebrate the death of a neo-Nazi goon?

This is not to deprecate the voice of the Jewish community, with its own considerable history of suffering, persecution and mass murder. It is simply to make the case that other stories are there to be told as well, if the media would only create the space for them. As things remain, Jews appear to be expected to carry not only their own burden of history, but that of every other people in like circumstances. The CJC may embrace this burden willingly, but it is time for those other voices to be heard.

Is separatism fa-a-bulous?

On the increasingly surrealistic landscape of Canadian parliamentary politics, same-sex unions and separatist agendas are the ballroom theme as pols writhe and gyrate to the haunting strains of accordion music played skillfully by pundits with too much time on their hands. The pace is revving up, and Stephen Harper, spurned by Gilles Duceppe (whose waltzing skills have vastly improved) is now sitting by himself, a grimacing wallflower making rude remarks about his former partner, now pirouetting on the dance floor with new friends.

It’s not a pretty sight, that scowling man in off-the-rack mortician clothes licking his wounds in public. As the twirling couples while away the hours, Paul Martin and Jack Layton making an impressive political fashion statement all of their own as Jack leads Paul in some unfamiliar steps, one is left to ponder: what makes souverainisme “that way?” What did Harper’s political gaydar reveal?

For separatism, it seems, in some bizarre and subterranean fashion, is indeed a part of the Gay Agenda. It seeks to unite what Harper would put asunder. At the same time it seeks to divide what Harper would keep together. Federalists, he says, are against what some news sources now refer to as SSM (oooh, that sets the mind racing, doesn’t it?). And now he’s sulking in the corner, his manly blue eyes misted over with tears, being an absolute party-pooper, looking like his underwear is too tight.

Come on, Stevie—get down and boogie with the rest of us while there’s still time. You don’t want to go home alone, do you?

Statistical equality

Employment equity is in the news again.

Two professors from the University of Manitoba, Wayne Simpson and Derek Hum, have generated some stats to show that there is no wage gap (with the exception of Black men) between Canadian-born visible minorities and whites. In consequence, they argue, current employment equity strategies need to be re-thought, targeting visible minority immigants (males in this category make 13% less than their white counterparts) and Black males (a staggering 24% gap), rather than "treating visible minorities as a homogeneous group for public policy purposes."

A demographer at Western, Roderic Beaujot, has weighed in as well. Reacting to the fact that first-generation visible minority Canadians are almost twice as likely to hold a university degree as a third-generation-plus white Canadian, Beaujot concludes: "That, I think, is a very important indicator that Canada's doing very well in terms of not maintaining a continuous disadvantage to those who have visible minority status."

What is wrong with this picture?

To begin with, the stats collected by the Manitoba professors were from the current period. Employment equity legislation has been in place for many years. One would indeed hope that such legislation is working, and, with some exceptions, it appears to be. So what conclusion should we draw from this? Simple, say the profs. We don't need the legislation anymore. Let's concentrate on the people the legislation missed.

Now, that's a bit like arguing that, given the superior wages and benefits now enjoyed in the public sector (I say this hypothetically), public service unions are no longer necessary. Indeed, I recall being told this on numerous occasions in my past life by people who seemed to be entirely serious. Abolish the unions, and somehow those wages and benefits will continue, and even improve, is the implicit claim. Abolish employment equity legislation, and the soaring numbers of women, people with disabilities, aboriginals and visible minorities in the workforce in recent years will continue their meteoric rise. The barriers are gone. The battles have been won.

Such commentators, of course, are either disingenuous or dreaming. All their statistics prove is that employment equity legislation, and unions, are both successful projects. Should attention be paid to those who are left out? Of course. This should be a social priority. But why should that mean getting rid of the very measures that have benefited, and continue to benefit, the others? Have employers grown less rapacious? Has racism disappeared?

It's good to know that visible minority Canadians are so successful at university. But why does Professor Beaujot see this as a triumph over disadvantage? It is far more likely that it reflects precisely that disadvantage--that these young people, in other words, have to work twice as hard as their white counterparts to join and survive in the workforce. How many of them end up in jobs for which they are overqualified? What promotional opportunities do they enjoy in comparison with whites? Perhaps investigations in such areas would be of more use than jumping to facile conclusions about equality based on university graduation rates.

Statistics, after all, are just statistics. It's the conclusions one draws from them that need to be looked at with a critical eye. And these equity studies just don't stand up to scrutiny.

The ties that bind

Count me as one of Heather Mallick's most fervent groupies. She writes with a flair and a style that I would kill to have, she has a take on the world that sends rightists into gibbering fits, she has a column that I paw desperately through the Saturday Globe and Mail to find first thing, inevitably spilling my coffee onto the bedclothes in the process, and she's magically and quirkily right on most of the time.

Did I say "most of the time?" Yes, alas. For, this weekend, I must part company with her. Not a divorce, but certainly a separation is called for. A walk in the snow, which would be nice right about now anyway--this muggy Ottawa heat reminds me of Samoa. Time by myself to cool off and consider.

Because she wants me to wear a tie.

I have sworn that I will keep this blog neat and tidy, but I will admit that the first thoughts that arose in me, after realizing that she was serious, expressed themselves in an uncultured manner. I spent years in executive union office without once having to wrap that noose around my neck, while succumbing to custom and habit by donning a jacket and black turtleneck (a Pierre Cardin, now at least twenty years old, and still hanging in there) for formal occasions. In fact, the last time I choked myself with some stupid, multicoloured yard of fabric is lost in the mists of time.

Now I'm told, in so many words, that I need one to score.

No. No way. No...way. Not if my life, and I don't mean just my sex life, depended on it. Never.

Is Mallick unaware of the origins of this custom of public half-strangulation? Anthropologist Marvin Harris says it's no more than a badge to indicate that the wearer is above physical labour. Maybe I won't wear one to get lucky, but I'll whip it out (due obeisance to Mallick's sub-text here) when it's time to do the dishes, or weed the garden.

Ties, of course, go with suits, and suits go with class. No, not "elegance in dress or behaviour." I'm talking hegemony here. A tie is nothing less than an accessory to a uniform, and that uniform, especially in its pin-stripey iteration, simply reeks of privilege, oppression, exploitation, the fun little world of banksters and privateers.

Ties are uncomfortable. I could never master that damned Windsor knot anyway. But herein, do we not find echoes of that looking-glass chatter that surrounds us today from the right-wing geckoes and crickets of popular culture? "Hey, men are oppressed too. We suffer, we feel, we aren't even allowed to cry." "Hey, whites don't have it so easy. Just try mowing my lawn and see for yourself. Here, let me fix you a drink." The relatively minor choking and itching that a tie creates allows its wearers to say, in effect, "We know what it is to suffer. We're just like you. Really, we are. We feel your pain."

John Berger, responding in a brilliant essay ("The Suit and the Photograph") to a famous photograph by August Sander, sums up what Mallick unfortunately misses: "Villagers... were persuaded to choose suits. By publicity. By pictures. By the new mass media.... The working classes... came to accept as their own certain standards of the class that ruled over them - in this case standards of chic and sartorial worthiness. At the same time their very acceptance of these standards, their very conforming to these norms which had nothing to do with either their own inheritance or their daily experience, condemned them, within the system of those standards, to being always, and recognisably to the classes above them, second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive. That is indeed to succumb to a cultural hegemony".

Not me. Even if I'm condemned to monkhood by Mallick's foray into fashion-mavenhood. To be honest, I began avoiding ties because they chafed and choked, but now, dammit, I'm making a political statement. The struggle continues.

A quiet day in Ottawa...

My partner and I, members of the Ottawa Witness Group, were on duty this a.m. at Ottawa police headquarters, where a squeegee protest was to take place by a number of Ottawa's homeless. The Safe Streets Act, a law that criminalizes "aggressive panhandling" (yes, that means squeegeeing), passed in the bad old Mike Harris days, is still in force, and is used by a number of Ottawa police officers to hassle homeless people. They issue tickets to them, a modern take on the blood-from-stones notion, they arrest them on occasion, they move them along and generally make their lives more miserable than they already are.

So a small crowd showed up, squeegees and leaflets in hand, and a demonstration permit too, which caused no end of grief. By getting the permit, the group had effectively agreed to specific restrictions that likely went beyond the law--bad idea. A few decided to head right into the police station walkway, and were told by officers that this was "private property," a comment that had some of us scratching our heads. Nevertheless, the protesters backed away, and many went off downtown to squeegee and deliver their message. We followed them, but there were no police and no incidents.

Walking back in this steambath Ottawa weather, we came upon a familiar figure: Dr. Henry Morgentaler, here for a Humanist conference, taking a street break. The Ottawa Citizen had predicted crowds of protesters, but there was nary a one--this, after all, is a get-out-of-town day, if ever there was one. We go back a few years, so we chatted a little, and my partner was more than pleased to meet him and shake his hand. I wished "Dr. Dr." well, and on the way back we agreed that this sharp and sprightly octogenarian gives us ageing boomers hope.

We passed the police station on the way back to the car, and caught a few stragglers, who thanked us for being out. One of the leaders had just put in an official complaint about the police for their handling of the demo, thus helping to legitimize a cop-heavy procedure with no credibility--but it wasn't our role to get into active discussion with protesters. More on the role and work of the Witness Group in later posts.

Tomorrow, who knows? A quiet day would be nice...

Hill japery

OK, OK, I may as well pile on too, if there's anything left underneath the seething, blogging mass of gleeful commentators today. Harper lost, the NDP got its budget, the Liberals received salvation from the Bloc, same-sex marriage is a dead cert, and meanwhile they're duking it out--literally--in the Senate, if you can believe Anne Cools. (Not that I'd ask those in their right minds to do any such thing.)

There are more wheels within wheels here than a dozen Ezekiels could figure out. I'm not even going to try. Call me cynical, call me anything you like, but you know what? I really don't much give a damn.

Of course I'm happy that gay rights legislation is being passed, to a flourish of howls from assorted bigots and those who troll for their votes. And I'm happy that the NDP got their budget, although in a year or so everyone will praise the Liberals for it. And I'm always happy to see the Tories sucker-punched. But was last night really--politics?

Clever procedural manoeuvering is, of course, part of the game. But it's not the whole of it. Too many commentators are so taken with, or appalled by, the late-night deal between the Liberals and the Bloc that they've lost track of the issues themselves. The Bloc comes out of this one smelling like the proverbial roses--they didn't ask for some pro-separatist quid pro quo, after all, just for the long-overdue passage of an equal-rights bill upon the defeat of which the luckless Harper seems to have staked his shabby and increasingly shaky career.

So the inevitable has been put off for a while. Good. Maybe when the tumult dies we can have an election that's about issues: the erosion of health care under the Liberals, the erosion of rights that would surely follow a Tory victory, the erosion of public services that would accelerate under either, that unquenchable ignis fatuus called "Canadian unity," proportional representation (read: "democracy"), deep integration with the US, and our appalling involvement in Haiti, to name just a few. Have we heard a single original, bloggable comment on any of these recently from the major players in last night's shenanigans? Are we about to? Don't hold your breath.

Bring back Hockey Night In Canada, I say. Switch Don Cherry and Mike Duffy. Stay tuned. And maybe I'll say a bit more about Anne Cools in an upcoming piece.

Chemical cover-up

A lot of folks in the vicinity of CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick are dying or already dead from a toxic rainbow of herbicide sprays, and the military is looking for plausible deniability. Agents Orange, White and Purple were deployed in reportedly massive quantities in the 1960s, with the consequences we would now expect: 170 soldiers in the Black Watch regiment at Gagetown died of cancer, many of them at a young age; civilians working on the base, and their families, have suffered likewise. Sarnia redux, by the sound of things.

A military spokesperson claims that the use of these deadly chemicals was limited and carefully controlled. But the news item noted that the chemicals at the time were considered harmless to human health, so why the controls? In fact, many of those who worked on the base at the time recall being soaked with the stuff. Clearing out sprayed bush, recalls one worker. "We cut it, we ingested the fumes, we burned it, therefore we inhaled the smoke ... and when it came time to eat, we sat down among all the toxins and we ate lunch with our bare hands."

Another, recalling that the spraying had gone on for years from fixed-wing aircraft, said "[The] first few times that we were out there, we came in, we were coloured orange, we were coloured yellow from the spray that came down on top of us." Both have cancer today.

A former Black Watch member recalls that soldiers "were out in the exercise area and the planes flew over spraying and they were told to just put ponchos over their head, that it wouldn't hurt them," Graves said. Duck and cover all over again. Which is, it seems, the current military strategy as well.

The recovering rich

You have to love the way business news gets reported these days. In the Globe and Mail, on page B3, we read that a "high-profile Parliamentary committee" (actually a gaggle of Senators) is urging "across-the-board tax cuts." (Yawn). These would include abolishing the federal capital tax, cutting corporate income tax--and reducing personal income tax for middle and upper income earners.

On page B13, utterly disconnected from this corporate wet dream, a small headline informs us that "Canada's richest regain big share of income." The on-line version is oddly headed, "Canada's wealthiest regain touch," whatever that means. One of the many meanings of the word "touch" is "to solicit money," but I digress.

In essence, the sweaty toil of the top 1% of income earners in Canada presently garners them 13% of the total Canadian personal income. This is back to pre-WWII levels: during the war the share plummeted, and continued to drop until 1980, when it reached 7.5%. But (let us all breathe a sigh of relief here) at that point "the recovery started."

Back to Jerry Grafstein, the chair of that Senate banking, trade and commerce committee. Big tax cuts, he says, are the only thing that can fix our "lagging productivity." Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that the neoliberal philosophy amounts to this: "The poor have too much money, and the rich don't have enough." Nice that the latter have pals like Grafstein in their corner to help their recovery along.

Fangs and wags

This will be an irregular feature in Dawg's Blawg.

First, a serious bite at FrontPage Mag's latest nonsense: the "revelation" that the POWs, er, "enemy combatants" in the Gitmo Gulag have legal hearings.

Turns out this means "in front of a military tribunal."

And they have rights under the Geneva Conventions--"in situations where those treaties apply."

And anyway, American citizens considered to be "enemy combatants" are treated no worse: "Obviously," one former Attorney General says, "if these procedures are sufficient for American citizens, they are more than enough for foreign detainees."

A nice bit of parsing, to be sure. In plain English (which I favour), military tribunals have the last word about guilt or innocence, the Geneva Conventions aren't relevant, and American citizens can also be driven to suicide by years of vigorous interrogation, so that's OK then.

On the Dawg Scale, this rates a 4 out of 5: ^^^^

Closer to home, inveterate rightwing Bible-thumper Kathy Shaidle, in an article quaintly entitled "The United States is the greatest force for good the world has ever known," attributes her rejection as a literary critic as due to her, well, being a critic: "I've been quietly let go from reviewing posts at Canadian literary journals because I've dared to (gasp!) write critical reviews." Er, as opposed to what? Being one of them lit-critters myself, I'm downright curious. Although I got into a little trouble once upon a time for being unkind to Barbara Amiel. But that's another story.

On the Dawg Scale, this barely rates a nip: 1 out of 5. ^

A tail-wag, however, to whatever conjuncture of political forces, common sense and decency has extended Parliament until the same-sex marriage legislation is passed. Now, I will admit that this is a conflict for me, a bit like fighting for women in the priesthood. I mean, here we are defending the rights of everyone, regardless of "orientation," to participate in a thoroughly reactionary institution, originally conceived to pass women from father to husband with no intervening self-identity. I would have preferred civil unions for everyone, with church / temple/ synagogue/ mosque add-ons if people really want them--in other words, for once in my life I favour privatization, in this case of marriage.

But of course, this isn't what's at issue. If marriage licences, dog licences (don't get me started), fishing licenses and driving licenses are available to heterosexuals, then there is simply no good reason to deny any of these to gays and lesbians. To do so is to be in clear violation of the Charter. Parliament may as well bow to the inevitable: being homosexual doesn't make you a second-class citizen, whatever assorted bishops, evangelists and neo-Nazis think, if "think" is the right word to use here.

As to what constitutes the nature of citizenship, however, perhaps we need a wider debate: must it include equal-opportunity adherence to institutions with roots in mediaeval times? I'm typing this on a computer, after all, not scribbling on parchment. Anyhow:

Three Dawg wags: ~ ~ ~

Road Rage

"An affront to democracy!" "Appalling!" Ottawa Councillor Diane Deans, representing upscale Alta Vista, could barely contain herself.

What a fine piece of news to wake up to: a key city committee in Ottawa has put what promises to be the kibosh on the Alta Vista corridor--another massive expressway project threatening to pave communities and congest the downtown area with hundreds more cars per hour.

A little history here. Expressways are the wave of the past. The concept has no place in 21st-century thinking. Car-centred planning is being replaced by the notion of environment-friendly public transport, like buses and light rail. But a few years back, the corridor--which would bring cars and trucks down a four-lane highway into the heart of Ottawa's downtown--somehow found itself part of the official city plan.

The battle has been on, with lulls, ever since. For a while, it looked like the fix was in. The firm advising the city on the corridor was also first in line to bid on the eventual road-building contract. Their "environmental assessment" of increased traffic flows took place at off-peak hours, and did not include the effects of vastlly increased traffic into the downtown core. $5 million was set aside by city bureaucrats in the 2005 budget to commence work.

Then the mayor, Bob Chiarelli, stepped in. Now, I've always had a dim view of the man--a Liberal apparatchik, great defender of the police after their assault on peaceful protesters at the September 2001 G-20 (yes, I do tend to carry grudges), took the only police critic off the Police Services Board, that sort of thing. But I might even vote for him after this. In April, he held a press conference to express his strong opposition to the current corridor plan. Now the city committee has recommended that $32 million be deleted from the long-range budget (which is where the corridor money would have come from) and the corridor lands be devoted to green space and community recreational areas.

Ah, parks of rest and culture.

Chiarelli, being the politician that he is, said that this doesn't necessarily kill the corridor in the future, just for the next fifteen years. The Alta Vista councillor is hopping mad, though, and says this effectively "sterilizes" the land--and let's hope she's right. All that is needed now is City Council approval for the back-flip. The July 13 Council meeting may be the final conflict in this long saga of roads versus people.

So they finally nailed the old bastard...

...but so what? Ku Kluxer Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty, not of murder, but of manslaughter in the "Mississippi Burning" case. In 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerners, were murdered by a KKK death squad. Now, more than four decades after the fact, a Mississipi jury deadlocked 6-6, and finally agreed on the lesser charge. A former preacher and church-burner, the old so-and-so may even do time.

It's hard not to think of these cases as diversions. Plucking sick old racists out of history has its charms, to be sure, and I for one, in my darker moments, hope he expires on a chain gang, but what does any of this have to do with the endlessly-morphing and still virulent plague of racism today? Prominence given to such stories has an undertext: that racism is something out of the past, that only a few loose-end individuals remain to be "brought to justice," and we can all celebrate the end of a stone-cold era. Would that it were so.

Here in good ol' Canada, racism is alive and well. In Ottawa alone, the police have been involved recently in a number of unsavoury incidents, including:

• repeated raids on the restaurant of a Caribbean-Canadian health-care worker at the Perley hospital, resulting in significant damages to the place but not a single charge. She has finally bowed to the inevitable, and closed the restaurant. Too bad, the jerk chicken was superb. But the police were more interested in drugs, weapons and even, believe it or not, child molestation. Seems like any and every crank call about this struggling worker's attempt to run an eatery was taken oh-so-seriously by Ottawa's finest.

• a raid on a Somalian restaurant, precipitated by a racist neighbour who phoned in a complaint that someone on the premises had a firearm. The police were taking no chances, and descended on the place, roughing up the owner and placing every Black person there under arrest--but not the lone white person. Many were held overnight. One of those pernicious (at least from a public policy point of view) "undisclosed settlements resulted. We aren't permitted to know if the cops involved were disciplined, or anything else.

• a "driving while Black" incident a matter of weeks ago. Chad Aiken, a young man driving his Mom's Mercedes, was stopped by a police officer allegedly for not wearing a seatbelt. Indeed, he was wearing one, so the cop searched the vehicle, came up with a burned-out licence-plate light, and ticketed him for that. The officer refused to give his name or badge number, and hassled Aiken, even reportedly punching and choking him. His quick-thinking girlfriend caught much of this good-natured banter on her cellphone. Since then, both Aiken and the girlfriend have, according to their lawyer, been under plainclothes police surveillance.

Now this has all happened within a short timeframe, in one city, in Canada, not at the hands of KKK whackos, but at those of police officers sworn to uphold the law, which, when I last checked, included the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Act. Perhaps, then, rather than celebrating the four-decades-late under-conviction of an ancient Mississippi nutjob, we should start thinking--and acting--locally.

An odd beginning to the week...

Headline: (Ottawa Citizen) "Nun crucified; priest faces murder charge." Perhaps it was the news that he proceeded to officiate at her funeral that pushed me over the edge.

How is a writer supposed to out-do this? A work of fiction on this topic would be dismissed as contrived. The critics would have a field day with it. Art doesn't imitate life these days--it struggles to keep up.

Headline: (Globe & Mail) "Kazemi wasn't censored." An opinion-piece by veteran journalist Barbara Yaffe, who apparently believes that removing an exhibition of photographs by the murdered Iranian-Canadian photojournalist from a library in Montreal's Côte St. Luc district doesn't qualify as censorship. See, it wasn't the photographs, but the accompanying text, "in part written by (her) son," that caused the problem. Yet we are informed a few lines further down that the town council sanctioned the removal of the photographs themselves. I believe that Yaffe's vanishingly-fine distinction would qualify as a good example of Talmudic pilpul. The fact remains: Kazemi was murdered in Iran for daring to take photographs, and here at home they are being removed from libraries.

Headline: (Globe and Mail) "Union protest greets opening of Blue Man show." It's seems that this aggressively anti-union bunch of artificially pigmented Americans, which refused to work with local unions in Toronto, has little regard for freedom of assembly: it tried (unsuccessfully) to get the union protest banned. Well, we all know that "freedom" is a highly coded word down there, so no surprise. Anyway, they obviously have company. Here's Martin Bragg, artistic director of the Canadian Stage Company and Blue Man enthusiast: "It's 2005; we're not sitting in a coal mine."

Moving on from labour illiteracy, how about "Homolka longs to be the girl next door" (Montreal Gazette)? On that slightly creepy note, perhaps this morning's excursions into the mediated world should end.