A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, by John Ralston Saul (Penguin Canada, 2008)
In an earlier post, I asked why our public conversations have grown so polarized. I went so far as to use the term “proto-fascist” to describe the strange evisceration of democratic institutions that has stricken Western nations. I relied on Umberto Eco’s list of “symptoms” which he used to describe the pathology of Ur-Fascism. However, I noted that when Eco wrote this in 1995, he could not have anticipated the impact of social media upon our public discourse. New media provide a space that encourages extreme statements without the benefit of both a reflective pause and a sense of personal responsibility that seem necessary to more civil conversation.
Like any account, mine is incomplete. In A Fair Country, John Ralston Saul offers another account as to why we find it so difficult to engage one another without recourse to polarizing habits. In brief: Canada has inherited from both France and England a colonial perspective. In fact, Canada is doubly colonized when one considers Trudeau’s statement that living in Canada is like sleeping beside an elephant; in subtle ways, we have been culturally and economically subjugated by the U.S. But the colonized are also colonizers. We have plundered our country’s natural resources without thought for the sustainability of our practices. We have only recently recognized the harms our governmental and religious institutions perpetrated against First Nations peoples. And we continue to treat the North as a place to be exploited rather than as the home of fellow citizens.
The colonized and colonizing mindset stakes its claim in a polarized worldview. The world “out there” is the other. We are separate from the world (and separate from those who are not us). Because of this separation, we can do as we please to the world without consequence to ourselves. As with conversation through social media, we absolve ourselves of the need for reflection and personal responsibility in our relationship to the world. We can exploit it with impunity. We can take it, parcel it, sell it, and leave gaping holes behind when we’re done with it.
JRS argues that this colonized and colonizing mindset does not reflect Canada’s true heritage but only emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, this period was preceded by two hundred and fifty years of something entirely different. While our school curriculum teaches children that Canada was founded upon two cultural pillars — French and English — Saul argues that there has always been a third pillar which is as influential as the other two. We are a Métis nation, one whose colonial foundations are moderated by a First Nations influence. The consequence has been a long-standing habit of seeking the third way, the middle path, and of speaking with a voice of conciliation.
While Canadians often have difficulty articulating what is distinctive about Canada and distinctive about our identity as Canadians, this three-pillared cultural foundation has brought us our finest moments. We were the world’s first colony to achieve independence through peaceful secession, and this provided a model for nearly a hundred other countries. We developed a template for peaceful negotiation which diffused the Suez crisis and provided the United Nations with a new role for troops in subsequent international crisis intervention. Peaceful negotiation doesn’t have the “mythic” cachet of bloody birth through revolution which grounds America and France. Then again, these revolutionary births might simply be manifestations of political immaturity.
Saul surveys the many First Nations images and practices that have seeded Canadian culture with alternative visions of itself. There is the conception of communal living as eating from a common bowl, a spatial understanding of consensus as a widening of the circle rather than a demand for individual conformity, fairness, integration with the natural world, an embrace of complexity without the need for resolution, an honouring of oral tradition and collective memory. Although First Nations in origin, these ways of being have always made themselves felt to everyone living here. We’ve seen this in Canada’s resistance to the “melting pot” culture south of the border; we’re more inclined to let people live as they are. We’ve seen this, too, in land settlements like Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2007) that have established title based on oral testimony and relinquished our obsession with written documents to establish interests in real (cognate with “royal”) property.
Nevertheless, in a lengthy section aptly titled “The Castrati”, Saul documents the ascendancy of the elites in Canada with their susceptibility to the colonial mindset as evidenced by a renewed enthusiasm for the kind of talk that comes from somewhere else. This is the talk of “trade liberalization” which sees Canadian companies purchased by foreign interests, then cannibalized for short-term profit. The most egregious example of this, at least in symbolic terms, is the purchase of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 2008 by U.S.-based NRDC Equity Partners. There is no reason why the Canadian government could not have intervened or implemented tighter foreign investment rules, but it has chosen a laisser faire stance that would make even Alan Greenspan blush. Hence the term “castrati.” This emasculated politics was never more clearly illustrated than by Harper conservatives when they declared before, during and after the conference on climate change in Copenhagen that they would act in lockstep with the U.S. There was a resigned inevitability in Jim Prentice’s tone, as if the manifest destiny has finally been realized and we have no say in the matter. After all, what can we do when we sleep beside an elephant?
Saul warns against this kind of thinking. It is, after all, only thinking. If we choose, we can think of ourselves in entirely different terms. We can think of ourselves as Métis, a Western nation moderated by the spirit and substance of a third way. With only two ways, we live in a polarized world, although we don’t really live at all; we merely exploit, then leave. But with a third way, one in which we feel a commitment to and responsibility for our world, one in which we eat from a common bowl, we assume for ourselves a different kind of destiny, one which may not attract the stirring rhetoric from populist leaders, but perhaps the only kind of destiny that has any credibility in today’s world.