From the Toronto Star

Canada's new politics of discord could carry a heavy price

Michael Valpy - January 01, 2013

Barrie Maguire/NewsArt 2012 in Canada was the year of "The Cleavage."

Call 2012 the year of The Cleavage, the year when the fractures in Canadian society gaped wide enough to threaten the legitimacy of our democracy, of our political trust in one another and much of what remains of our common national imagination.

Day by day these past 12 months, when Canadians might have been collaborating with one another to build for the common good, to respectfully acknowledge and find room for each other's thoughts and beliefs, we've advanced resolutely in the opposite direction toward suspicion and loathing and marginalization and the rejection of a communal public life.

Willing collaboration is the definition of social cohesion. Ours is battered. American commentators write regularly of the United States unravelling. We, too, are unravelling, being rent by demographic fault-lines of age and education yawning over the past two decades toward chasms.

There is no longer simply one or two Canadas - say, the old two Canadas of French and English ritually, comfortably, smiting each other with the biblical jawbones of asses.

There are three, four and five Canadas yelling at each other, contemptuous of each other's values and world-views.

The British sociologist Michael Mann, one of the world's leading theorists on social cohesion in liberal democracies, points out that one of sociology's most sacred tenets is that values are beliefs governing actions. He then explains that it is not shared values that primarily define a cohesive society. Rather, he says, it is the ability to tolerate dissonant values.

Well, look at us. Are we doing that?

In 2012, Living Planet, the upmarket design shop on Water Street in St. John's, did a slap-up business selling Second World War-môde posters bearing the caption "Attack Harper on All Fronts" and T-shirts proclaiming "I am not Canadian under a Harper government" and portraying a 1940s wartime little girl asking her father, "Daddy, what did YOU do to stop Stephen Harper?"

In 2012, across Facebook and other social media sites downloadable posters were offered that quoted the Pulitzer-Prize-winning U.S. journalist Chris Hedges, a darling of Canada's intellectual young, calling the prime minister "a poster child for corporate malfeasance and corporate power . . . dismantling everything that's good about Canada . . . a pretty venal figure."

Other Internet posters excoriated his environmental and foreign policies. One had an icily smiling Harper saying, "We're tough on crime except for election fraud." Another bore his portrait photoshopped with a dog's snout. Think of that . . . the head of the government of Canada, the once-peaceable kingdom, portrayed as a dog.

The messages from the other side were just as vicious.

Conservative cabinet ministers branded environmental opponents of the government's policies as eco-terrorists laundering foreign money. They branded civil libertarians as child pornographers.

They've defunded Canadian non-government organizations at home and abroad deemed to be pursuing goals at odds with government policies - organizations like the court challenges program and the Canadian Council on International Cooperation. They and their municipal brethren in Ford Nation have gone to war on unions.

They have withdrawn from obligations to monitor employment equity and address discrimination, ended support for agencies that advocate for women's rights, terminated scientific research, ended health care for refugee claimants, been contemptuous of Parliament and its rules. They've fuelled a civil society, a polity, of us and them.

This essay is not an anti-Conservative or anti-Harper rant. Most of us are contemptuous of Parliament. It's broken. The most effective opposition in the country for decades has been extra-parliamentary. And, yes, of course, we have had inflamed political divisions throughout our history. French and English, East and West, Left and Right, the generational rift of the '60s and '70s.

But what we have today is different. What we have are profound, systemic demographic divisions of age and education that aren't going to go away for years, if ever - divisions which Harper, like Shakespeare's Brutus, has recognized as a tide in the affairs of men that, taken at the flood, can lead to victory.

He's deftly caught the baby-boom on the boomerang - the young and rebellious of the 1960s and '70s who grew into the old and cantankerously conservative of today.

He's made hay out of the discontent of the non-university-educated who have been persuaded that the country's so-called elites have made a hash of things.

A survey by Ekos Research presented at last month's annual State of the Federation conference at Queen's University found a 20-point gulf between university-educated Canadians who self-identify as small-l liberal, and high-school and college-educated Canadians who identify as small-c conservative, thus giving us the trappings of a class conflict in Canada, something we've taken pride in the past in declaring didn't exist.

If Canadian voters - that is, Canadians who actually vote - were all under age 45 and university-educated, there would be no Harper government, there would still be the long-form census, the Canadian Armed Forces would never have become mythologized as warriors, the country would not have become a side-taker with Israel in the Middle East, we probably still would have failed to keep our commitments under the Kyoto Protocol but at least we wouldn't have withdrawn from it and we would not have advanced down the road to gutting federal environmental assessments.

What's odd is that Canadian default values, according to Ekos, haven't really shifted to the right and the prime minister and his government really don't represent the country's defining political and ideological beliefs.

What has happened, first, is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians under age 45 have stopped voting - not out of apathy as far as anyone can tell, but because they simply don't see their political agendas mirrored in the agendas of Parliament and the provincial and territorial legislatures. How democratic is a country where most citizens below the median age don't vote? Canada has become a country governed by a gerontocratic minority.

Second, in a society where the well-educated are seen as possessing an unequal hold on power and an unequal share of the country's socio-economic fruits, Harper and his Conservatives have been successful at presenting themselves as the voice of Canadians who incongruously have the short end of the inequality stick that government policies have allowed to grow.

Third, government research (until the government stopped doing this kind of research at about the same time as the Conservatives moved into office in 2006) has suggested a cause-and-effect phenomenon exists between the diminished presence of the state in Canadians' lives - which the Conservative government is vigorously pursuing - and signs of Canadians' diminished attachment to their country.

Fourth, a growing number of Quebec academics, politicians (federalist and sovereigntist) and journalists have warned that the Harper government's domestic and foreign policies are so antithetical to mainstream Quebec values that they risk driving Quebec out of the country without help from the sovereigntists.

Is Harper aware that his government's policies are not in step with the country's default values? One of Canada's most astute political scientists, McGill University's Antonia Maioni, suggests that he is, and that by employing what she calls a calibrated move to the right, he's creating what Canadians in time will come to see as a new normal.

A big gamble. A dangerous gamble.

If, as sociologist Mann says, social cohesion is measured by a society's ability to tolerate dissonant values and the rising anger level in Canadian public discourse suggests tolerance is eroding, what have we got?

The Financial Times reported not long ago that some of the brightest minds at Moody's bond-rating agency have been considering a fascinating question: Should there be a formal rating of "social cohesion" in sovereign debt indices, when they judge whether a government is likely to default on its debt or not?

The discussion, says the FT, points to a fundamental issue that will hang over bond markets this decade: As governments struggle to eliminate debt without unleashing political instability, or full-blown revolution, do their countries possess enough social cohesion for them to take truly tough choices or even rewrite the social contract?

What do the suits who moil the money markets think of Stephen Harper through that lens?

Michael Valpy is a Toronto writer.

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 From iPolitics.ca

Why Theresa Spence's struggle matters 

By Michael Harris | Jan 3, 2013

Theresa Spence's resolve versus Stephen Harper's stony silence: it is still the only really big story in Canada right now.

My good friends over at CP got it wrong - or rather the editors they consulted did. Luka Rocco Magnotta was not the Newsmaker of the Year. He was just a Hannibal Lecter who slipped off the screen into real life and temporarily diverted the public's attention for a few weeks last spring. He is Robert Pickton with terminal narcissism and a cellphone.

Will he be the newsmaker again next year should he go to trial? He shouldn't be. A monster with an exhibitionistic streak is still just a monster.

One of the true contenders for Newsmaker of the Year was Chief Theresa Spence. A year has 365 days and the fact that she started her hunger strike with only 20 days left in 2012 makes no difference. Then again, she is aboriginal and hardly anyone noticed what she was doing. It goes with the territory.

Why is she so important? For one thing, she has young people interested in politics again. For another, she believes in standing up for her rights in a peaceable way. For a third, she knows that official BS is still BS.

At the most basic level, it comes down to this: In a lethargic nation, dazed by a neo-conservative blitzkrieg on the country's democratic practices, the environment, science, foreign policy and public probity, an aboriginal woman has made people think about the nature of their country and government again - and about their own power and value as citizens.

That's no mean feat in these soul-numbing, corporate political times.

Whatever happens during federal elections these days, most of the official participants act more like candidates for building superintendent than for national leadership.

Except in that ghastly, boilerplate rhetoric that leaves normal people semi-conscious after just a few seconds of 'moving forward together', no ideas regarding our national identity are ever discussed. Instead, there is fuzzy talk about jobs, future budgetary targets, and a sense that rearranging public borrowing at better rates on the bond market will solve all our problems.

And promises, of course. They all promise like champions. Has anyone else noticed that the bigger political promises now play out on timeframes that outlive the mandates the would-be governors are seeking? It's all a little like being placed on a gurney in a hospital run by Stephen King. You know someone is taking you someplace - but you don't quite know where or why. Elections don't inform and inspire - they depress or incite.

So last December 11, it was shocking to see someone actually want to talk to the prime minister as the country's most important employee, not as an imperial figure who lives at the top of an unapproachable mountain shrouded in mist. Chief Spence had the audacity to think that she was important because her concerns were important. She was also sufficiently committed to the notion of democracy (however battered it may be in Canada) that she believed talking to the prime minister - nation to nation, as promised - might benefit everyone.

The prime minister has more than a few things to answer for. What happened to those exalted promises of a new, respectful relationship with Canada's aboriginal people made so recently by the government? Where is the vision to replace the one the federal government smashed when it abandoned the Kelowna Accord? What did Harper's apology for the sadistic residential school system really amount to, if he won't even pick up the phone and talk to one of its survivors?

When she was a student in that hideous system, Theresa Spence's mother died on Christmas Day. Spence was nine years old. Officials at her school barred her from attending her mother's funeral. Had the PM called Chief Spence on Christmas Day 2012, one wonders what ghosts he might have helped exorcise. Instead, he was working on his New Year's Eve message about how his government "continued to strengthen First Nation relationships in 2012."

George Orwell and his Ministry of Truth never offered as complete a disconnect between reality and the agenda of Big Brother as you can find in those pitiful words. What could the PM have been talking about? Granted, no one enjoys writing his own report card more than Harper, but even he must have blushed at such utter nonsense. He did such a good job of "strengthening" the relationship with aboriginal peoples that 2012 ended in roadblocks, national and international protests, rallies, round-dances and a life-and-death hunger strike.

Remember those First Nation chiefs bringing it to the doors of Parliament? Remember how the chiefs panned that Crown-First Nations gathering the PM likes to crow about? Remember Idle No More? And as APTN reported this week, First Nations chiefs are planning a campaign of economic disruption beginning January 16 if the prime minister doesn't agree to a significant meeting. Which is precisely what Chief Spence is asking for - and the Anglican Church thinks it's a good idea.

In Robert Bolt's great play A Man for all Seasons, the prosecutor asks the jury a question about Thomas More's unspoken opinion of the king's marriage: "What does it betoken, this silence?" Well, what does Stephen Harper's silence betoken? At one level it is obviously a contest of wills, precisely the kind of brick-wall standoff the PM so enjoys. He likes his political opposition in powder form. But there is another, much darker aspect to a leader's silence when powerful emotions are running through the land.

There are some Canadians who have interpreted the prime minister's silence as an opportunity to denounce, degrade and attack aboriginals in this country. The MacKenzie Institute, a group with great access to the prime minister, is muttering in its December newsletter that "perhaps some aboriginal figures have been amateurishly chumming around with some Iranian government officials."

Elsewhere, all of the ugly stereotypes have been on display: Indians as lazy, Indians "freeloading" (that quote belongs to former Manitoba Tory youth leader Braydon Mazurkiewich), drinking all day, fighting all night and living lives that are just one long flight from responsible living. As for their leaders, we're told they steal from their own people, are profligate with public money and try to hide from public accountability.

Here is a representative example of how those who do not like Chief Spence and what she stands for view aboriginals. It was sent to me by someone who thinks my columns on this subject have missed the mark.

"You failed to point out the double standard that exists here. Indians can misappropriate millions and not be held accountable to anyone. A white person would be investigated by the RCMP and likely jailed. Certainly not handed more money as we do the Indians. Or they can block highways and RR tracks and not be jailed, where a white man would be ... It is clear that many, not all, of the Indians of Canada cannot function without the people of Canada (Mr. Harper) to hold their hands or give them a handout. This nonsense of dependency has to end ... We the people are not responsible for their every need ..."

Which is to say (in the opinion of the author of those words): he's too heavy, he's not my brother and buzz off. But a few quibbles arise. If the writer is unhappy about Indians getting away with things that a white man couldn't, he ought to explain why 18.5 per cent of the federal prison population is of aboriginal descent, while aboriginal people make up just 2.7 per cent of the overall adult population in Canada. Surely the lesson is that, in relative terms, far more aboriginals go to jail than white men, not fewer.

And if native leaders have been guilty of stealing from their own people, wasting public money and avoiding accountability, who have been their ablest teachers if not the federal politicians who brought us Adscam, purchased those dud subs, invested millions in promoting old wars, gave us the F-35 fiasco, and spent like drunken white guys on the G20 and G8? Who has been less accountable, for that matter, on issues of public policy than Stephen Harper? Isn't that why he was found in contempt of Parliament?

For me, my correspondent fails to make his case. Nowhere in his words is there any sense of Canada's treaty obligations to aboriginal peoples. Nowhere is there a sense that the prime minister spoke duplicitously when he promised not to unilaterally amend the Indian Act.

Nowhere is it mentioned that the government of Canada violated its constitutional duty when it failed to consult with First Nations peoples before jamming through omnibus legislation that clearly affected indigenous rights and land title. And nowhere is it mentioned that the Harper government committed at the UN to a much better treatment of aboriginal peoples than they've been dispensing.

Perhaps there is some element of truth in Stephen Harper's silence. Perhaps he just has nothing to say

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his "unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us." His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.