Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Marching towards fragmentation

Has it come to this, then?

When Alberta Wildrose leader Danielle Smith calls for a firewall around her province — much like the firewall Stephen Harper called for in 2001 — and the rest of the country essentially shrugs, is it really just Canadian business-as-usual?

Pretty much. Postmedia columnist Michael Den Tandt, for example, says it’s no big deal. “Quebec’s firewall has existed since 1976,” he wrote this week. “Alarm about this today is muted.”

Sadly, he’s right. Like other aging Canadian nationalists of the Trudeau era, I may continue to be appalled by Quebec’s wilful self-isolation. But apparently I belong to a dwindling minority.

One firewall? Two? Thirteen? Does anyone care any more?

Across the country, it seems, we Canadians are being drawn to the small, the narrow, the self-interested. Rejecting old notions of pan-Canadian equality, we have opted instead for regionalism, courting disintegration. And it no longer seems to bother us.

Some of the seeds were indeed sown in 1976 with the first Parti Québécois election, but others found fertile ground more recently. In 2004, there was Newfoundland premier Danny Williams yanking down the national flag in a fit of provincial political pique.

Three years earlier, there was Harper calling for the insulation of Alberta from the rest of Canada — which he had previously described as “a second-tier socialistic country.”

No wonder someone asked him, shortly before he became prime minister, if he loved Canada. To which he said neither yes nor no.

And maybe he does, though one wonders about how he shows it, beyond the lapel pins and attendance at hockey games. Restoring “royal” to military designations, putting the Queen back up on embassy walls and passing legislation designating “les Québécois” a “nation” hardly constitute a lasting Canadian legacy.

Still, to its credit, The Harper government hasn’t banned the flag so despised by the gang that still calls it the “Pearson pennant.” Or turned God Save the Queen back into our national anthem. Yet.

Make no mistake, many Harperites would.

What is it with these far-right conservatives, ideologues who have as much in common with Conservative nation-builders such as John A. Macdonald and Robert Borden as the neighbourhood crank? They seem to hate the very home that raised them.

And yet it is difficult to decide who deserves the greater castigation. The self-haters have indeed been ruinous to Canadian nationhood, but so have the self-servers. Consider those partisan minds who, in the late 1980s, hatched such false mythologies as Quebec’s constitutional “exclusion” — hoping to play the hero, bring the orphan back into the fold, and win incalculable political advantage. The effects of that destructive legacy haunt us still.

When Pierre Trudeau campaigned against the Meech Lake Accord — sorry, but invoking Trudeau is unavoidable in this context — it was because he thought it would be disastrous. Over and over, with crisp intellectual rigour, he dissected the accord’s constitutional failings and its self-destructive implications for Canada — the nation, that is, as opposed to some soulless conglomerate of squabbling satrapies.

And he took particular issue with the notion of constitutionally enshrining distinct-society status, for Quebec or any other province. He told a parliamentary committee it would promote “a provincialist view of Canada,” driving “a massive shift toward provincial patriotisms.”

He didn’t believe such narrow loyalties could hold us together, sea to sea to sea.

So consider our new normal. Provincial firewalls are being touted as a good thing. Quebec, legendary for its relentless whining for bigger pieces of pie, is being held up as a model. The Conservative government, only too happy to confer ambiguous “nation” status on “les Québécois,” has traipsed steadily down the path of devolution. From shrinking the federal role to shifting more taxation and powers to the provinces, the Harper crowd has done its best to erode the transcending Canadian reality.

And reduce it to the mere sum of its provinces.

How did we let this happen? Election after election, obsessing about jobs and taxes, did we never think to ask about the larger picture, the longer journey?

At what point, exactly, did we become a collection of indifferent nationals, people whose passion for the country is limited to hockey contests?

When did Canadians decide that our steady disintegration — politically and symbolically, at home and abroad — was worth no more than a shrug?

And how, in the name of all that is hopeful and blessed in this world, did we ever decide it was morally acceptable to squander the gift of a laboriously and passionately constructed nationhood? Especially for the short-term political gains of small, small minds?

Some day, historians will figure it out.

In the meantime, we know this. As we continue our incremental march toward fragmentation, we are to blame, all of us.

And some day we may have to share, all of us, in the shame.

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Janice Kennedy,

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