Posts Tagged ‘Canadian’

Positioning – or lying to win votes. Are we falling for it?

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

It is (municipal) election time in my part of the world and the campaigns (including the mud-slinging ones) are out in force. To play the straight guy is to risk losing these days. So go out and smear your opponents with the smelliest shit is the mantra it seems. And while you are at it, make sure that all those skeletons in your own closet are firmly locked away behind an unbreakable door and that the key had been buried deeper than even those brave miners in Chile.

This is also a time for slanting the truth, or “positioning” as they call it in marketing parlance. If you look at some of the larger issues that have been positioned recently it makes my skin crawl.

My favourite is the one on US vs. Canadian Medicare. My US colleagues, so bombarded by ultra-right fear-mongering, surreptitiously ask me if indeed our Medicare is “death ordained by the government”? When I laugh and ask them in turn whether their (sick peoples’) deaths are not determined by profit-seeking insurance companies instead of a deficit-happy government, they scratch their heads and say, “Oh, didn’t think of it like that!”

And the Long Form Census is another one. “We will not know who is living in this country anymore,” says one group, “Facebook has more info on us than the LFC,” says another, “It’s a violation of our human rights” says yet another, even though the Charter of Rights came into being in 1982 and the LFC has operated under its aegis all this time.

How about that other “long” one – the Long Gun Registry? The Tories, wanting to get rid of this burden on their tax revenues, insist that the registry is a duplication of information already held by the police. The police deny this and say that they need the LGR to keep tabs on the bad guys. Then a former top cop of Toronto himself, wanting to grab a seat on the Tory bench, decides to relegate his former colleagues the lair of liars and goes public stating that the LGR is a waste of money. At this point in the debate, my neck is developing a crick like an umpire’s at a tennis game watching a rapidly rallying ball across the net.

All this “bog” only serves to remind me that writers must be failed politicians, those who jumped off the political bandwagon in order to “lie to tell a higher truth” through their fiction, while leaving their erstwhile colleagues to “lie to win more votes” through their positioning.

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Olympic Reflections

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

So we owned the podium, eh? But the naysayers, our Canadian alter-ego, had a lot to say about it before we got there. Our typical Canadian hang-up got in the way during the dog days of the Olympics, during that middle stretch after the great gold performance by young Bilodeau, when the medals seemed to dry up. The naysayers seized the advantage, and many of my fellow countrymen involuntarily followed suit, falling into their pet blame game: blame VANOC for their aggressive American-style slogan, blame Vancouver for technical malfunctions and chain mail fences, blame God for denying Whistler its bucketfuls of snow, blame Canada for being assertive; why couldn’t we just show up for the game like we normally did in the past and went away empty handed, why did we have to win, we hewers of wood and drawers of water, how dare we desire to come of age on the world stage and say that we are a proud nation? The naysayers started to give me a belly ache and made me want to immigrate again.

Then our Canadian Olympians started to turn the tables on the unbelievers in their quiet, unobtrusive way (well, perhaps the Canadian women hockey players got a bit carried away, but who cares, at least they could drink and drive a Zamboni, even if some of them were underage – let any naysayer who did not take a drink when they were underage throw the first stone!) And before we knew it we had more gold medals than anyone has ever had in history. “Stop! This is too much for our Canadian modesty!” shouted the naysayers. “Screw off,” I replied, “I am enjoying this—finally!” And then to crown it all, our glorious men’s hockey team turned around what looked like another classic US come-from-behind victory pulled recently at the World Juniors, with a “take this and suck it” goal that sunk our southern neighbours for good in overtime. We were done, we owned the podium—no doubt about it.

After 22 years of being in love with this country, I was finally also proud of it. We stood in front of the world and we did our country proud, showcasing it for all its variety and excellence in sport, entertainment, culture, diversity, tolerance, fun, and humour. And we showed the world that we were just not a bunch of good natured, apologetic, nice, quitters; that we also had balls. I bet our American cousins did not know that William Shatner was Canadian, eh? We even managed to get President Obama to go shopping for Molson beer – waddayaknow!

After watching these Olympics, I became a firm believer that despite the shit that is going on in the world right now, with earthquakes and tsunamis and wars and economic meltdowns, we need symbols like these games, and role models like these athletes, to give us a jolt of encouragement. These young Olympians train for years for a few seconds of performance, where a fragment of a second’s improvement can catapult a player from fifteenth to first place. And they never give up. Thank God we have them, and thank God we invest in them, naysayers notwithstanding, for when the tough times come, it will be these future leaders who will say, “Hang in there, we can ride this out. And we can win!”

Way to go, Canada! Let’s own the podium from here on…

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Looking Beyond

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

The waters are calm when looking over the ocean from the battlements of the Fort that guards the entrance of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba. Off to the right over the horizon lies Jamaica in the sun, and to the left is Haiti in its destruction, while down below, in 1898, the Spanish galleons had come out in single file, like innocent sheep, only to be sunk by American warships lying in wait outside the mouth of the harbour. This fort is a vantage point of history, recent and past, representing the beauty and horrors of life. I could not see any of this at street level. “Look beyond,” my wise teachers and mentors had told me, “and you will find vistas never seen before.” I was reminded of their words while sitting up there in those battlements.

I wrote the paragraph above while touring Santiago de Cuba with a group of Canadian writers recently. There were many such set pieces that I captured on paper in this land that seems to be frozen in time, reminding me of what life was like when I was growing up in a tropical island somewhere else in the world, where scarcities had been a fact of life, where the developed world was out there somewhere, a place impossible for us forgotten ones to get to. I remember climbing the giant Jam tree in the front yard of our family home, perching myself in its highest branches and looking out over the paddy fields, watching the planes fly overhead and wondering when it would be my turn to fly away.

Over the years, by a combination of looking beyond, being dissatisfied with the status quo, striving, and luck (isn’t luck the product of hard work?) I seemed to have swapped places with those fat-cat tourists who used to come to my island home and dole out money as if there was no end to the flow. In Cuba, this time around, it was my turn to dish out the pesos, while the locals looked on in anticipation. I wanted to tell them not to be fooled, that there was a finite end to this supply of money; that even in rich countries like Canada, bounty came from hard work, and that jobs could end with a small downslide of the stock market ticker. But what did they know about stock market tickers? All they knew was that they worked hard too, but did not have the money to show for it, so according to them, we must have some other unknown secret. It’s because of freedom and private enterprise, I wanted to say, but being a man following the Middle Way, I did not want to be a poster boy for Capitalism.

I did not know what to tell these islanders, and returned from my trip somewhat frustrated. In retrospect, I should have told them to go to a Fort-like place and look beyond, look to the sunshine and destruction in lands beyond, look at the world with all its possibilities, good and bad, and pick a spot to play, beyond one’s comfort zone. Perhaps that was the only way out beyond scarcity and insularity, the path towards growth, and towards finding breakthrough solutions beyond the “tried and true” that provide only marginal returns and keeps one like the unenlightened frog, forever circling in the slow-boiling cauldron.

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Voting – a forgotten civic duty?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

The Opposition had finally got its act together it seemed and was going to make a fall election happen – not! The timing was apparently not right – again!

I wonder what the real holdback was this time? Courage? Or anticipated low voter turnout? Maybe that’s the real concern. And why do our voters not show up? Apathy? Democracy taken for granted? A neglected birthright? A “let the other guy vote because nothing changes anyway?” attitude? A “I have to hold down three jobs to survive, I have no time to vote” excuse?

Oh, yes we seem to have lots of excuses—not only for not calling elections, but for not voting at them. Not very healthy, I dare say.

I remember feeling proud the first time I received my Canadian citizenship— I was able to vote again! I had only had that experience once in my life in my home country, where thereafter elections became fewer and far between due to civil wars or nepotistic rulers who kept arbitrarily extending their rule by edict. After becoming a Canadian citizen, I voted in every municipal, provincial and federal election since.

For inspiration, I look over at that desert and mountainous country half a world away, which our young soldiers are valiantly trying to defend in its conversion to democracy. Over there, elections were held as planned, despite vote rigging, death threats and other obstacles. Citizens, who could barely sign their names, braved machine guns, bombs and other forms of terror, to go out and vote, exercising their desire to make their world a better place, believing that despite all the mayhem and corruption, the worm would turn and democracy would prevail, believing in Winston Churchill’s famous dictum, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Perhaps there is a lesson from that desert outpost – that when you lose something (or never had it) you fight a tougher battle to get it back (or obtain it for the first time), but that when you have something that is considered a birthright, you can fall into complaisance and easily stand to lose it.

Therefore, I am advocating that as much as reading 50 books a year become a new civic duty, voting at the next election for the party of your choice return to active civic duty—if the Opposition ever forces an election, that is.

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