Today is the last day of May, the day before the beginning of June, which is National Indigenous History Month in Canada. There can be no more chilling reminder of why Canada needs to have a National Indigenous History Month than what transpired in British Columbia this past week, when the remains of at least 215 children were unearthed at the site of a former Residential School.
For those of you who aren’t aware of this shameful history, the Canadian government ran Residential Schools for indigenous children from 1863 to – get this – 1998. At least 150,000 children were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to schools far away from their families, mostly run by church authorities. The stated objective was to “take the Indian out of the child” by removing anything related to their homes and culture, including language, instilling the Church into them, and giving…
I grew up in an Italian Irish family. What else would I be except a devout Catholic? The bigger question is how did I go from being a Catholic to an Atheist or at least a 75% percent Atheist? I now claim I am seventy-five percent Atheist and twenty-five percent Agnostic. I will explain this formula later.
Well, my journey from one God to no God started many years ago and perhaps mimics the trajectory of many a lapsed Catholic. Went to a Catholic school. Lots of Catholic theology. Bible study each week. Surrounded by priests and nuns. Confession on Fridays followed by ten “Our Fathers” and twenty or so “Hail Marys.” Church and communion on Sunday. Back to being bad, masturbating and thinking dirty thoughts about the girl in the pew next to me on Mondays. She kept wearing skirts that hiked up above her knees when she sat…
Anosh Irani’s latest book is Translated from the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One Half Truth. He teaches Creative Writing in the World Languages and Literatures Department at Simon Fraser University.
ISTOCK
In 1951, the French author Marguerite Yourcenar published her novel Memoirs of Hadrian; it is a book I return to time and again, whenever I need to feel recharged. Reading her work is akin to taking a dip in a river; the water is cool and calm – it energizes – and I can see right through it, at the body that lies in its depths, that of the main character, the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Written as a letter from the ailing emperor to his successor Marcus Aurelius, the novel is exquisite in its imagination and restraint, portraying a character examining his own mortality and his place in history.
Upon my most recent encounter with the book a few days ago, one image struck me in particular. Strangely, I did not come across it in the text of the novel, but in a section at the end of the book, wherein the author reflects on the process of writing the novel itself. When confronted with the issue of inhabiting the mind and body of a human being who lived centuries ago, she states: “The problem of time foreshortened in terms of human generations: some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain, would be enough to establish unbroken contact between Hadrian and ourselves.”
Time and mortality.
Is there anything else we are thinking about right now?
I am not surprised that a book written in the 1950s, about a Roman emperor who ruled in the second century, points to our current predicament so accurately. After all, that is what great literature does: it lives both within time and outside of it. It also makes us, the reader, question our own existence. That singular image, of a chain – that most binding of things – made me wonder if it is, in fact, a conduit to freedom.
Like most things, we question freedom, or truly value it, only when it is taken away from us. There is no doubt that the world is a giant prison right now. Our entire planet, this mystical ball that floats in space, has entrapped us. It has entombed us as well. It is precisely at a time like this that we need to chain ourselves to each other. Not physically – although human contact is what so many of us long for – but imaginatively, metaphorically. A chain that is linked by a single question: How the hell did we get here?
For isn’t that what a prisoner asks? What secretly lurks in the cornered heart of every criminal, petty or otherwise?
We are criminals, too. I am not speaking of governments. Nor am I speaking of corporations and institutions in power. I’m talking about you and me – whoever, wherever we are. Our crime is repetition. We, as a race, are addicted to patterns, and it was those “five and twenty aged men” who made me think of this. On my way to the past, no matter where I stopped, I saw one human quality glaring back at me more than any other, repeating itself with deathly precision: unkindness.
But what does unkindness have to do with a pandemic? We need science, not morality; we need to get back to business, not Buddha.
Maybe. But let’s examine our present situation. For a moment, I’d like to point to India, not to lay blame – far from it. India is my home and I have a deep love and respect for it. But I mention it because it is the epicentre of tragedy right now. As a country, air is slowly being sucked out of its lungs. This second wave is far more lethal than the first, and absolutely unforgiving. Completely relentless.
Relentless. That’s us. Unforgiving. That’s us.
Wave after wave. Generation after generation.
The first wave of the virus is gone; the second is thriving, the third … are we already in one? Will there be a fourth? It seems almost … cruel.
Now where have I seen cruelty before?
Right from the time I was a child. Right next door to where I grew up, a stone’s throw away from Mumbai’s red-light district, where girls less than 10 years old were locked up in cages and tortured by 10 men in a single night. Am I, as someone who is currently living in Canada, separate from them? Is my state of being independent of theirs?
If that little girl reaches out to us, extends her hand, will we look the other way?
Yes, we will. We have trained ourselves to.
By repeatedly choosing blindness. By convincing ourselves that we are separate from each other. This virus, in a twisted way (and in the most obvious way, too) is simply reminding us that there is no distance between us anymore. There is no separation, there is no “other.”
And yet, we refuse to learn. As I write this, the news is filled with images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In that sense, we are more powerful than the virus. It cannot stop us. Nothing seems to deter us from our natural propensity to destroy each other. Stop anywhere on Ms. Yourcenar’s chain, pick any time in history, and we will be reminded of our dark side, be it gassing people in death chambers or selling oxygen cylinders on the black market.
But is that the purpose of the pandemic – to throw back at us our own bile?
Perhaps purpose is the wrong word. Suffering does not have a purpose, but we can give it meaning. This pandemic is meant to make us take a good look at ourselves.
Whilst we have lived for months without haircuts, as beards have grown, and faces have puffed up and others turned gaunt, aged in a single year, we are staring less into mirrors. In a weird way, it is our vanity that is keeping us humble. But we should be looking at ourselves even more.
According to Ms. Yourcenar, “One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to discover the simplest things…” The problem is that we are investigating the wrong subject. The subject is not the pandemic; it’s us. That’s who we should be examining. And what can be simpler than kindness? We are able to communicate with a satellite in space, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to utter a kind word to a neighbour. You might say, “But there’s inspiration out there, too.” Sure, there is. In the midst of all this horror, one can see our shared humanity – individuals donating time and money, and in countries such as India, going out of their way to find a dose of Remdesivir, or a hospital bed, for a complete stranger.
But the horror – that’s the disease. Compared with our kindness, it’s torrential. That’s what we keep repeating.
At some point, the pandemic will end. We will pick ourselves up, and – resilient primates that we are – we will move on. But there is no moving on. We are not evolving; we are simply going round and round in circles.
Ms. Yourcenar’s human chain made her look into the past.
However, right now, we need to hold hands and look into the future. If we do that, we will understand what this virus is showing us: If someone else is sick, we are sick. Their pain is our pain. One of the most telling symptoms of COVID is when we have lost our sense of taste. Not of food, though. We are unable to taste someone else’s pain.
Years from now, when our children ask us what we did during the pandemic, we will say, “We survived.” But for what? Of what use is survival if we continue to perpetuate the same line of thought and action, if we keep repeating what we have mastered so beautifully, ever since we have been in human form? Inhuman form.
Down the line, we will offer our children the same ugliness.
If the virus is attacking us, we must not fight back. Instead, we must retreat. Surrender to the highest part of ourselves. That is our only power, our foremost duty.
Perhaps our immunity is at an all-time low because our hatred is at an all-time high.
It will take us years to forgive China. Didn’t they start all this? Wait, fortunately for China, it’s India’s turn now. Yes, let’s swiftly remind Indians of what they have done. Who’s next? Worry not, we’ll find someone. We are experts at carrying false wounds and nurturing them for centuries. But when will we carry light?
Will the future Yourcenar, centuries from now, look back at her human chain and stop – halt in her tracks – at the year 2021? Not because she followed the same tired line of darkness, but because she noticed a moment of illumination. We have the opportunity to make that happen; dazzled, she will be forced to shield her eyes when she reaches this present moment, when a relentless disease transformed into an equally relentless kindness. Then, she will recognize us all as Hadrian – emperors of our own souls. Once ailing, we found ways to live. Not just to survive, but to live. Not just to live, but to shine.
The vaccine might prevent us from dying, but it does not have the power to heal.
Only we do. We have to unmask ourselves. We need to peel off everything that is stuck and ugly, and stand in front of each other – unafraid, unjudged, but not unloved.
ANOSH IRANICONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAILPUBLISHED MAY 28, 2021UPDATED 6 HOURS AGO3 COMMENTSSHARE TEXT SIZEBOOKMARK00:00Voice1x
Anosh Irani’s latest book is Translated from the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One Half Truth. He teaches Creative Writing in the World Languages and Literatures Department at Simon Fraser University.
ISTOCK
In 1951, the French author Marguerite Yourcenar published her novel Memoirs of Hadrian; it is a book I return to time and again, whenever I need to feel recharged. Reading her work is akin to taking a dip in a river; the water is cool and calm – it energizes – and I can see right through it, at the body that lies in its depths, that of the main character, the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Written as a letter from the ailing emperor to his successor Marcus Aurelius, the novel is exquisite in its imagination and restraint, portraying a character examining his own mortality and his place in history.
Upon my most recent encounter with the book a few days ago, one image struck me in particular. Strangely, I did not come across it in the text of the novel, but in a section at the end of the book, wherein the author reflects on the process of writing the novel itself. When confronted with the issue of inhabiting the mind and body of a human being who lived centuries ago, she states: “The problem of time foreshortened in terms of human generations: some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain, would be enough to establish unbroken contact between Hadrian and ourselves.”
Time and mortality.
Is there anything else we are thinking about right now?
I am not surprised that a book written in the 1950s, about a Roman emperor who ruled in the second century, points to our current predicament so accurately. After all, that is what great literature does: it lives both within time and outside of it. It also makes us, the reader, question our own existence. That singular image, of a chain – that most binding of things – made me wonder if it is, in fact, a conduit to freedom.
Like most things, we question freedom, or truly value it, only when it is taken away from us. There is no doubt that the world is a giant prison right now. Our entire planet, this mystical ball that floats in space, has entrapped us. It has entombed us as well. It is precisely at a time like this that we need to chain ourselves to each other. Not physically – although human contact is what so many of us long for – but imaginatively, metaphorically. A chain that is linked by a single question: How the hell did we get here?
For isn’t that what a prisoner asks? What secretly lurks in the cornered heart of every criminal, petty or otherwise?
We are criminals, too. I am not speaking of governments. Nor am I speaking of corporations and institutions in power. I’m talking about you and me – whoever, wherever we are. Our crime is repetition. We, as a race, are addicted to patterns, and it was those “five and twenty aged men” who made me think of this. On my way to the past, no matter where I stopped, I saw one human quality glaring back at me more than any other, repeating itself with deathly precision: unkindness.
But what does unkindness have to do with a pandemic? We need science, not morality; we need to get back to business, not Buddha.
Maybe. But let’s examine our present situation. For a moment, I’d like to point to India, not to lay blame – far from it. India is my home and I have a deep love and respect for it. But I mention it because it is the epicentre of tragedy right now. As a country, air is slowly being sucked out of its lungs. This second wave is far more lethal than the first, and absolutely unforgiving. Completely relentless.
Relentless. That’s us. Unforgiving. That’s us.
Wave after wave. Generation after generation.
The first wave of the virus is gone; the second is thriving, the third … are we already in one? Will there be a fourth? It seems almost … cruel.
Now where have I seen cruelty before?
Right from the time I was a child. Right next door to where I grew up, a stone’s throw away from Mumbai’s red-light district, where girls less than 10 years old were locked up in cages and tortured by 10 men in a single night. Am I, as someone who is currently living in Canada, separate from them? Is my state of being independent of theirs?
If that little girl reaches out to us, extends her hand, will we look the other way?
Yes, we will. We have trained ourselves to.
By repeatedly choosing blindness. By convincing ourselves that we are separate from each other. This virus, in a twisted way (and in the most obvious way, too) is simply reminding us that there is no distance between us anymore. There is no separation, there is no “other.”
And yet, we refuse to learn. As I write this, the news is filled with images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In that sense, we are more powerful than the virus. It cannot stop us. Nothing seems to deter us from our natural propensity to destroy each other. Stop anywhere on Ms. Yourcenar’s chain, pick any time in history, and we will be reminded of our dark side, be it gassing people in death chambers or selling oxygen cylinders on the black market.
But is that the purpose of the pandemic – to throw back at us our own bile?
Perhaps purpose is the wrong word. Suffering does not have a purpose, but we can give it meaning. This pandemic is meant to make us take a good look at ourselves.
Whilst we have lived for months without haircuts, as beards have grown, and faces have puffed up and others turned gaunt, aged in a single year, we are staring less into mirrors. In a weird way, it is our vanity that is keeping us humble. But we should be looking at ourselves even more.
According to Ms. Yourcenar, “One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to discover the simplest things…” The problem is that we are investigating the wrong subject. The subject is not the pandemic; it’s us. That’s who we should be examining. And what can be simpler than kindness? We are able to communicate with a satellite in space, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to utter a kind word to a neighbour. You might say, “But there’s inspiration out there, too.” Sure, there is. In the midst of all this horror, one can see our shared humanity – individuals donating time and money, and in countries such as India, going out of their way to find a dose of Remdesivir, or a hospital bed, for a complete stranger.
But the horror – that’s the disease. Compared with our kindness, it’s torrential. That’s what we keep repeating.
At some point, the pandemic will end. We will pick ourselves up, and – resilient primates that we are – we will move on. But there is no moving on. We are not evolving; we are simply going round and round in circles.
Ms. Yourcenar’s human chain made her look into the past.
However, right now, we need to hold hands and look into the future. If we do that, we will understand what this virus is showing us: If someone else is sick, we are sick. Their pain is our pain. One of the most telling symptoms of COVID is when we have lost our sense of taste. Not of food, though. We are unable to taste someone else’s pain.
Years from now, when our children ask us what we did during the pandemic, we will say, “We survived.” But for what? Of what use is survival if we continue to perpetuate the same line of thought and action, if we keep repeating what we have mastered so beautifully, ever since we have been in human form? Inhuman form.
Down the line, we will offer our children the same ugliness.
If the virus is attacking us, we must not fight back. Instead, we must retreat. Surrender to the highest part of ourselves. That is our only power, our foremost duty.
Perhaps our immunity is at an all-time low because our hatred is at an all-time high.
It will take us years to forgive China. Didn’t they start all this? Wait, fortunately for China, it’s India’s turn now. Yes, let’s swiftly remind Indians of what they have done. Who’s next? Worry not, we’ll find someone. We are experts at carrying false wounds and nurturing them for centuries. But when will we carry light?
Will the future Yourcenar, centuries from now, look back at her human chain and stop – halt in her tracks – at the year 2021? Not because she followed the same tired line of darkness, but because she noticed a moment of illumination. We have the opportunity to make that happen; dazzled, she will be forced to shield her eyes when she reaches this present moment, when a relentless disease transformed into an equally relentless kindness. Then, she will recognize us all as Hadrian – emperors of our own souls. Once ailing, we found ways to live. Not just to survive, but to live. Not just to live, but to shine.
The vaccine might prevent us from dying, but it does not have the power to heal.
Only we do. We have to unmask ourselves. We need to peel off everything that is stuck and ugly, and stand in front of each other – unafraid, unjudged, but not unloved.
A flare stack lights the sky from the Imperial Oil refinery in Edmonton, on Dec. 28, 2018.
JASON FRANSON/THE CANADIAN PRESS
At the headquarters of the International Energy Agency in Paris, there is a striking view of the Eiffel Tower. It presents a useful perspective on history, progress and change.
When the tower opened in 1889, the wrought-iron wonder was the world’s tallest structure. It held the title for four decades, until the completion of the Chrysler Building. There is an elegant permanence to the seemingly timeless landmark – yet, like all things, it is temporal.
The International Energy Agency was created by developed countries in 1974, after the oil crisis spiked the price of gasoline and rocked economies. The E in IEA would have more accurately been an O – for oil. The source of energy the IEA was most concerned with was oil, the 20th century’s economic lifeblood. Thinking about a more secure supply, Henry Kissinger, then United States Secretary of State, likened the oil crisis to the “economic equivalent of the Sputnik challenge of 1957.”
The IEA’s job was to foster co-operation among Western countries to better plan for oil’s future – the need for ever more oil was an enduring given, wasn’t it? Until a few years ago, the IEA was warning that massive amounts of money were constantly needed to be poured into developing new sources of oil, to ensure adequate supply.
But the energy market has been evolving, and so has the IEA. A turning point came in 2018, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said, to live up to the Paris Agreement, and to prevent radical changes in the weather, there would be a need for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
Since then, two little words have become the easiest, and most popular, thing to say: net zero. The soft phrase obscures a much tougher reality – particularly for Canada.
This past week, a half-century after the IEA’s founding, the energy body whose answer to most energy questions used to be “oil,” unveiled a new self. The IEA has drawn up a detailed road map for getting the planet to net-zero emissions by 2050. If humanity takes its climate promises seriously, then this is the mountain that will have to be climbed.
It will mean that some things that have long been permanent – such as demand for oil – will no longer be so. The IEA says that, to meet carbon goals, the era of oil must begin to come to an end, and most electricity must be generated by the sun and wind.
In such a future, the challenge for Canada will be immense. One-quarter of our national emissions are from the oil and gas industry – the industry that has greatly enriched this country. The IEA’s road to net zero says the end of new oil and gas exploration should start now, as in this year. That doesn’t mean the oil sands gets shuttered – they can keep producing as global oil output is slashed by three-quarters over the next 30 years – but under the IEA’s prescription, no more new oil or gas should be sought.
One may question the likelihood of the IEA’s timelines, or its focus on wind and solar. But it’s hard to disagree with the broad direction of what it’s both predicting and advocating: For carbon emissions to fall in the decades to come, the use of carbon fuels must also fall.
Canada has its own particular challenges and, globally, the hurdles are immense. In the 2020s, the required technology to stop using fossil fuels exists, yet, consider this: In solar power, according to the IEA, the largest solar array currently in existence would need to be replicated, every day, for the next 10 years.
There is a reward at the end of all this, and it’s not just a livable climate. The IEA predicts that, in the long run, the world economy would be better off. But for an oil-rich country such as Canada, an energy revolution means managing the eventual contraction of a huge industry that has long spun off jobs and wealth.
The IEA’s map to net zero is not the only one out there. But its publication, by a formerly oil-centric body, is a milestone in the world’s long, slow acceptance of the enormity and severity of climate heating. For the Canadian economy, change is coming, and it’s going to be a challenge.
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We’ve had a big milestone in our house this week. We’ve been parents for 50 years now. Yes, that’s right, our first born turned the big 5-0.
When you think about it, it’s a little surprising that there are no celebrations of parenting milestones. I guess those are things we do within the confines of our own homes, celebrating when our children achieve a new accomplishment or milestone and especially when they are finally – and hopefully successfully – launched. There’s Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for sure, which are lovely. But as parents we don’t usually stop and appreciate the magnitude of the role we’ve taken on, usually without having given much thought to what we were getting into!
Some truisms that few of us stop and think about as we’re entering the delivery room, signing the adoption papers, or otherwise taking on responsibility for another human being:
One way to get a sense of how powerful something is is how scared people are of it. Why have governments gone to such trouble to ban various books over the years? Why do people try to censor things they disagree with? Because they’re scared of meeting ideas on an open playing field. Would Nazism or Stalin’s communism have been possible if people had more access to information? Possibly, but it would have been harder.
Today, most of us don’t live in totalitarian regimes (if you did, you probably wouldn’t be able to read this). But that doesn’t mean those forces of censorship don’t still exist. Indeed, that’s the plot of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: Firemen burn books in that novel at the request of the people because no one wanted to be offended, or offend anyone. In America, this trend continues. The left wants to ban certain books or ideas for being politically incorrect, for supposedly being racist (or being from racist eras), for expressing dangerous ideas. The right gets upset when books are immoral or transgressive or when they are critical of power.
The Stoic must have the courage to resist both of these impulses, whatever their political persuasion. Think of Seneca, reading Epicurus like a “spy in the enemy’s camp.” Think of Epictetus reminding himself that it’s not possible for anything to offend him, that being offended is a choice. Think of Marcus Aurelius saying that there’s nothing wrong with being proven wrong, in fact, he welcomes ideas that challenge his thinking. Think of the biggest failing in Stoicism—it’s persecution of the Christians—and think about what that was rooted in: Ignorance. Close mindedness. Suppression.
For us, there should be no such thing as a banned book. In fact, the more controversial a book, the more open we should be to reading it. We should always have our mind open. We shouldn’t hide from offensive or even stupid ideas—we should try to understand them, to see how the enemy thinks, as Seneca said. You can’t learn what you think you already know, Epictetus said. How can you get better, smarter, more wise if you only read books that you agree with, that stay within your comfort zone?
Read widely. Read dangerously. Read courageously. And remember: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”
P.S. If you’re looking to be a better reader—to build a real reading practice—the Stoics can help. We built out some of their best insights into our READ TO LEAD: A DAILY STOIC READING CHALLENGE. It walks you through 13 actionable challenges that will help you elevate your game as a reader, learn how to think more critically, and discover important books that will change your life.
Can science and spirituality be reconciled? Is there a way of looking at things that brings them into alignment? Of course, the answer is ‘yes’. In his book Spiritual Science, published 2018, Steve Taylor gives a convincing answer. His subtitle is ‘why science needs spirituality to make sense of the world’. Steve gives the reasons and, from my perspective, comprehensively demolishes the arguments for the recently dominant paradigms of materialism and scientism.
Steve looks at the origins of materialism. Science originally developed alongside religion through pioneers such as Descartes, Kepler and Newton. They were not seen as incompatible. it was around the second half of the 19C that Darwin’s theory of evolution came to put into question whether the biblical stories could actually be true; there came a theory that religion was not necessary to explain the world. TH Huxley was a leading proponent of what became the materialistic…
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a press conference in Ottawa in October. He was joined virtually by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. (Sean Kilpatrick/CP)
The news-cycle being what it is of late, by the time you are reading this column, it is possible that you will have forgotten the moment in April when the COVID-19 situation seemed so dire in Ontario that federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh implored the federal government to invoke the Emergencies Act and take control of that province’s response to the pandemic.
The call did not gain traction, firstly because the federal government was no better equipped to coordinate a provincial response to a health crisis than the province itself, and almost certainly significantly less able to do so. And secondly, because the suggestion was delusional—akin to realizing the earth is shaking, then casting about for the adult in the room who can stop the lamps from toppling over.
Whatever trouble Ontario may be in by press time, the federal government is only looking good by a very poor comparison.
It’s been popular to castigate Conservative provincial governments for poor COVID-19 performance and praise the progressive ones, but the comparison doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. The death tolls of the western provinces have all been within statistical skipping stones of one another on a per capita basis—even in NDP-led British Columbia, lauded early on as a pandemic hero, and now struggling to contain variants of concern. Meanwhile, the clear winners are the Atlantic provinces, which had the foresight—and ability—to combine travel restrictions with strict lockdown measures. These provinces are led by two Liberals and two Conservatives, providing hope that productive cooperation across the aisle is at least theoretically possible.
Further, this framing gives an incredible pass to the federal Liberals, whose laundry list of failures read something like this; they botched early warnings of the emerging threat of the virus, advised against masking, argued against border closures, were unable to establish early basic screening protocols at ports of entry, maintained lax border restrictions, established pandemic Kabuki theatre quarantine hotels that failed to stop variants of concern from entering the country and—despite a virtually limitless budget—were unable to procure early access to enough vaccine to prevent a third wave.
Anyone who can look at that list and think Ottawa ought to be running more of this show has lost the thread.
Look, if this pandemic hasn’t inspired you to a quasi-serious meltdown over the deeply sclerotic state of our national institutions, you’re rather missing out. The federal Liberals have spent several years wrapping themselves in a lot of fine nostalgia for Canada’s glory days. But at the end of the day, Ottawa has revealed itself to be run by a lot of well-intentioned but feckless cheque-writers who have no more grand sense of what this country is, or what it ought to be doing with itself, than anybody else.
There seem to be a growing number of scholarly types who think this is a bad thing; that our evident lack of national capacity to manage not just a crisis, but far more ordinary problems like buying airplanes or running a payroll system, is a very serious problem. I cannot say that this is wrong. A nation that can’t procure a ship, or run a credible website for its revenue agency, can be rightly labelled a barely functional liberal democracy.
My own very radical rebuttal to this pessimism is that maybe Ottawa is exactly where it ought to be: confined to saying pretty things about Canada and wiring the provinces money to run the place.
For most of our country’s history, we’ve enjoyed the luxury of complacency. Thanks to the economic, cultural, and military might of our neighbours to the south, we’ve never had to shoulder the consequences of failure. As long as America skated through its golden age, we could ride in the glorious wake.
COVID-19 is the hidden price of our slacker strategy. This pandemic is forcing us to contend with the consequences of our high-minded inadequacy.
Yet Canada isn’t broken so much as been allowed to wither; our system is fine, as long as we have capable hands to run it. Our failure is not that we are incapable of running a quarantine, enforcing intelligible and sustainable lockdown restrictions, or securing an IT platform to oversee vaccine rollouts; these are all just technical and logistical problems. Our failure is that we elected people who lacked the skills and the foresight to see the problem clearly, and then do what was necessary to manage it.
We need to start acting like the adults in the room that we are. We can no longer treat our parliaments and legislatures as places to park our over-ambitious dimwits. We need smarter people—the types who would normally channel their talents to more profitable and rewarding endeavours—to step up and become politically engaged. Politics is a terrible and awful profession, and one generally avoided by rational and accomplished people in this country, but I’m afraid there is no avoiding it. The call to duty and service is now dire.
There is also no avoiding the nature of the Canadian Constitution, which devolves the most important powers to the provinces. That means a drive for real leadership is going to have to begin there. Maybe if effective people see the provinces doing useful things, more of them will be called to the challenge. The Atlantic provinces have offered us a glimpse of a model of competent provincial leadership working together as a regional bloc in order to define and create solutions to regional problems.
Leave the grandstanding to Ottawa; it’s what matters the least, anyway.
I need to put the title of this post in context. I did not learn these things from my dearly departed mother-in-law as a result of her explaining their importance to me. She never gave me any advice at all as I recall, at any time. And I didn’t learn these importance lessons by watching her, at least I didn’t realize I was. I’ve learned the lessons since, as I age myself and remember all the things this lovely woman did, quietly and purposefully, as she aged well all the way to nearly 97 years old. Of course, at the time, my husband and I didn’t think much about what she was doing except that it was endearing in its own way. But now we realize just how impressive her approach to her later years were, all on her own as a widow.
My mother-in-law, Eloise, described herself as more…
As I have learned more about human nature and the way societies work I’ve come to realise that many of the fundamental frameworks wrapping the darker side of humanity are right there in front of us. Often.
Hi. I’m your teacher…
As just one example, when I was a kid at Nelson Park primary school in Napier, New Zealand, children were routinely punished for things they hadn’t done. Accusation meant guilt, guilt meant punishment; and the teachers took a very great deal of pleasure from finding any excuse to hurt the kids. The problem was that some kids quickly found out they could exploit this by ‘telling on’ other kids – alleging their target had done something against the myriad petty ‘rules’, and so getting them punished. It was a great bullying device. I discovered this when I was abruptly called out at assembly, in front of the school and
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Musings and Wonderings 