Nick's Café Canadien

I read something dumbfounding today. You could say it was founded on dumb.

On first inspection, John Ibbitson’s article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (“Core support keeps the PM in thrall”) is an ordinary, forgettable opinion piece that uses the recent silliness over the lyrics to the national anthem as a springboard for restating the obvious: the Conservatives can’t win a majority because every time they’re close, the mythical Republican-style rabble-rousers lying in ambush in the tall grass of the Alberta prairie celebrate with a premature volley from their unregistered firearms, and the rest of the country begins to have second thoughts about whether letting them win is a good idea.

Never mind the questionable statistical basis for linking one issue to the other. This isn’t news to anyone who follows Canadian politics in a sound state of mind, nor is Ibbitson’s sensible identification of the Tory core as moderate centrists (however incongruent that may be with partisan caricatures from both the left and right). There’s nothing here to see.

But the way he puts it is bizarre:

The great political irony for the Conservative Party is that, while it must avoid estranging core conservatives at all costs, extreme core conservatives keep the party from winning a majority. They are the social Darwins.

[...]

Most of the time, these right-wing nuts are ignored. But whenever Mr. Harper appears to have enough support to form a majority government, the base starts to get excited and aggressive, and social Darwins “bare their teeth and embrace things that the majority of Canadians don’t want to see,” says Mr. Turcotte. This frightens enough centrists to keep the Liberals in the game and the Conservatives confined to minority governments.

For those of you who are unaware, I am presently writing from what must surely be the Darwin capital of the world. It’s wall-to-wall Darwin here. All year long I have bathed in the most glorious talk of the literary Darwin, the proto-feminist Darwin, the abolitionist Darwin, the invalid Darwin, the patriarchal Darwin, the imperialist Darwin, the epistemological Darwin, the analogical Darwin, the cultural Darwin, the impressionist Darwin, and Quentin Blake’s cartoon Darwin. I am a stone’s throw away from Darwin’s letters, Darwin’s Plots and the Darwin College bar. I’ve seen the poor fellow’s name used and abused in every imaginable way.

I don’t have the foggiest idea what John Ibbitson means by “social Darwins.”

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Time will tell what I remember of the Vancouver Winter Olympics decades from now: not much in the way of specifics, I expect, but a lingering oddness of having missed the biggest national celebration in my country’s recent history on account of being overseas. On face it was an Olympics like any other: foreign, inconveniently scheduled, and mediated by coverage that was indifferent at best and infamously vicious at worst.

I watched that hockey game, of course, and could only have been happier with the Crosby goal if my hometown messiah Jarome Iginla got in on the play—oh wait, he did—but the BBC cut away before the medals were awarded, and I missed almost the entirety of the rest of the games. (CTV had online video feeds but insisted that I install Silverlight—a bizarre choice of technological affiliation on their part, almost as baffling as if they had decided to license exclusive content to a dead-in-the-water device like the Zune. I mean, Silverlight? Who in their web content team thought that was a good idea, and when will they vacate their jobs? I am available for an interview and will supply references upon request.)

Several of my compatriots took to the keyboards, composing paeans to the full bloom of maples metaphorical, declaring the fortnight as a whole (but the men’s gold medal hockey game in particular) a milestone of national pride for a country where the very idea of identity is a bit of a running joke. The statistics back this up: in an age where popular media has splintered and television has declined as a central force, to be the most-watched broadcast in Canadian history is no small feat. To say this will remain a defining moment in the country’s perpetual quest to come to terms with itself is to make a self-fulfilling prophecy: over two-thirds of active Canadian history textbook authors are likely to have watched the game (and probably more, if we suppose this demographic to be of a more patriotic bent than the mean). Comparisons to the Paul Henderson goal of 1972 can hardly avoid cementing themselves as fair, only this time we have victories in thirteen other competitions and a global audience in the mix.

The sheer neatness of the narrative should have us scratching our heads and running background checks on the referees to uncover scandalous past careers as European ice-dancing judges. Come to think of it, I should have known we were in for a Canadafest of unprecedented proportions when I caught the last half-hour of the opening ceremonies, at approximately the mark where the ever-undercapitalized k.d. lang broke the standing moratorium on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”.

And yet it is striking to think how little of Canada as we know it now, how few of our quaint clichés of public exhibition, were around for the Calgary Olympics in 1988. The ink hadn’t dried on the Constitution Act, national unity was far from a given, and we hadn’t even reached the point where Céline Dion was considered a good idea, let alone a bad one.

This I do know about the Calgary Olympics: it created the entire sporting infrastructure of the city as I knew it growing up and as we continue to know it today. For citizens of my generation to imagine a Calgary before the Olympics is borderline impossible, and the spirit it injected into the civic culture, all too easy to take for granted in the ahistorical mist of youth, was in retrospect a full-fledged metamorphosis. For all the objections to the Vancouver games and uncertainties over whether it was money well spent, the legacy of its spillover benefits will course through the city for decades to come.

There is value in being world-class. It doesn’t matter if you contrive to suspend Parliament for months to secure yourself a once-in-a-lifetime seat next to Wayne Gretzky or celebrate in your ivory tower over a bottle of ink and a sheaf of parchment addressed to a newspaper that likes you; you can appreciate it all the same—yes, even if you’re in the UK.

I missed most of the live broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, but from what I saw it was quite the Canada-fest. Someone should look into how it compares to the way Calgary presented the country in 1988. As someone who grew up in Calgary in the decade following the Olympics, I can attest that it had a permanent transformative effect on the city and its sporting culture, and its legacy can still be felt there today.

But let’s begin with some links. I read up on much of what I missed via this article by Paul Wells, who saw the opening from inside GM Place. Jonathon Narvey and Adrian MacNair made photographic excursions to capture the early protests, which they described as scattered in a plurality of marginally coherent agendas; that was before things turned violent. For an alternative look at the political counter-programming, my friend and former schoolmate Meera Bai visited the Poverty Olympics in the Downtown Eastside. The political dimension of the Olympics doesn’t interest me all that much, to be honest, but the stories and pictures are flavourful.

I have a lumbering giant of a feature article in the works that will hopefully see the light of day soon. Until then, content yourself with some further reading:

• Kevin Brown of Geographicus wrote a comprehensive introduction to authenticating rare and antique maps—a must-read for the cartographically inclined.

• And while on the subject of maps, Google incorporated aerial images from World War II into Google Earth.

• Roger Ebert took a mental walk around London. Like most of the personal recollections Mr Ebert has put in writing of late, it’s a beautiful piece—and near the end he comes by my present stomping grounds in Cambridge and Grantchester.

• Terrence Deacon raises some problems with the theory that language is a product of natural selection.

• When David Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of Israel, he considered Albert Einstein for President. Einstein declined.

You didn’t seriously expect me to let this pass without comment?

Were this a political blog, I would have little to add to the obvious analysis that every national publication promptly shoved out the door. Nobody knows what to do with this, yet everybody knows what to do with this because there isn’t that much to debate. Say, wasn’t that rather good? Aren’t the lyrics ironic in light of Conservative policy? Didn’t the Prime Minister previously criticize this sort of arts gala as too removed from public concern? Is this a gift-horse for the artsy-fartsy elites or a populist slap in the face? And isn’t Michael Ignatieff ever in trouble when all he has to his name is a tour of duty as a BBC culture personality in the 1980s (which carries a lot of weight with me, as you can probably guess)? Colour me bored. The one refreshing piece of journalism in all this is this human-interest story in The Globe and Mail about how Laureen Harper arranged the gig—and I call it refreshing not least because it’s, you know, The Globe and Mail.

We can ask ourselves if this was an “honest” move or a shrewd grab for political advantage (as if the two were mutually exclusive!) until we are blue in the face. But this is not a political blog, and what Mr Harper’s performance says about politics is a good deal less interesting to me than what it says about music.

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This week’s selection: The Rights Revolution (2000) by Michael Ignatieff.

In brief: The text of Ignatieff’s appearance in CBC Radio’s Massey Lectures series makes for an effective plainspoken introduction to the complex balance of rights in modern liberal democracies. What remains to be seen is whether the positive vision of Canadian-style governance, founded on civic notions of identity rather than ethnic ones, has a realistic chance of spreading to the societies that need it most.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Rights Revolution, keep reading below.)

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I am typically very strict about preserving this journal as a non-political space, but the events on Parliament Hill are too exciting to pass up. Furthermore, it is my position that everyone involved needs a swift non-partisan kick in the head, and I am more than happy to deliver it.

At this precise moment in history, I am reminded of the scene at the end of Lawrence of Arabia where the Arabs run the Turks out of Damascus and promptly descend into inter-tribal squabbling over basic matters of infrastructure. I am also told that Lawrence of Arabia is Stéphane Dion’s favourite film. If that is so, I’m not sure he was paying attention.

There is no question that the coalition-in-waiting—or, as some have come to call it, the New Libs on the Bloc—has the constitutional and democratic footing to oust the Tory government on a confidence vote. Coalitions are a feature, not a bug, in the parliamentary tradition; in fact, I prefer stable coalitions to outright party mergers.

The legitimacy of the agreement does not mean the move to topple the government is anything but an ill-timed, moronic, and utterly shameless manoeuvre. At least wait for the budget, you dummies. When the electorate has chosen, within the last month and a half, to place their trust in the perceived party of patient fiscal prudence by granting them a stronger plurality (if not a majority) of seats in the Commons, forming an emergency coalition on the basis of unknown hair-trigger stimuli that will no doubt involve concessions to the socialists is not my idea of stable governance.

Irrespective of Gilles Duceppe’s signature on the agreement, the Governor General is within her rights, not to mention her faculties of reasoned thought, to take this to the electorate rather than green-light the coalition. We are looking at a prospective Liberal-NDP government that does not have a plurality in the House, the stability of which rests on the approval of the Bloc Québécois. We are looking at yet another minority serving as a de facto majority on the strength of a non-governing separatist party’s endorsement, only this time it comes signed and sealed. We are looking at a 114-seat government with a 143-seat Official Opposition. The optics are horrendous.

The right move at this juncture is to call an election with the coalition agreement on the table for everyone to see, and make it a referendum on both the proposed coalition and the Tories’ post-election tactics—the political party subsidy, the NDP conference call tape, the works. Sadly, not happening.

Assuming that neither an election nor a prorogue occurs and the coalition takes power, which is shaping up to be the likely scenario, the right move for one or all of Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Dominic LeBlanc is to promise an election call as part of their respective leadership bids. Their fates, and that of the Liberal Party, will ride on whether they manage to facilitate a dramatic economic recovery. The sooner they can be rid of the NDP and the Bloc, the better. Sadly, not happening.

The wrong move, for the Tories, is to dump Stephen Harper without prior pause for thought. Given how much they spent in the last campaign on massaging his middle-class image, he’s in the best position to ride the popular backlash should the economy implode on the coalition’s watch. Sadly, not happening.

On second thought, let’s wait until Peter MacKay goes head-to-head with Michael Ignatieff, the NDP and the Bloc fade into the background like they should, and we can put the inmates back in the asylum and forget this ever happened. Can I dream—or is it written?

This week’s selection: The Manticore (1972) by Robertson Davies.

In brief: The second novel in the Deptford Trilogy never quite attains the the ambitious moral order and dramatic unity of its sublime predecessor, but it doesn’t need to, as it is a very different book tailor-made for a very different narrator. The story on the surface (a rationalist lawyer exorcises his personal demons with the aid of Jungian psychiatry) is not by itself earth-shattering. Where Davies’ genius shows its hand is in his depth of vision and talent for expository voice, best displayed when the book interlaces its characters and events with those of the previous volume. The Manticore stands independently, but with diminished elegance; I recommend it as essential reading for anyone who loved Fifth Business, which should or will be all of you.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Manticore, keep reading below.)

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