Larry Zolf: Why do they hate America?

The CBC's Larry Zolf gets called a lefty journalist, but out here in the blogosphere he's been disowned left, right, and centre. It's a good thing, too, because in his latest editorial (hat-tip to pogge), he hardly seems aligned with, well, anybody sensible:

Canadian hatred for George W. Bush and his war on terrorism is massive. Bush-hatred is definitely anti-American. Anti-Americanism has always been tied up with the Canadian identity. Anti-Americanism is dangerous and reeks of racism. Harper has been right in fighting it.

Apparently, if you hate the policies of George W. Bush, you hate America. Just where have we heard that before? From right-wing Americans, that's where. Zolf has previously been dubbed Canada's answer to Noam Chomsky, but with this most recent line of reasoning, he's sounding a lot more like Canada's answer to Dick Cheney or Ari Fleischer.

Now, I'll be the first to say that I have often found Canadian anti-Americanism rather annoying. What makes it annoying, however, is when it's knee-jerk, incorrect, and based in hearsay rather than in actual knowledge of the U.S. The assumption that U.S. English spellings of 'night' and 'through' are 'nite' and thru', and because of this, U.S. English is inferior to Canadian English--that's annoying. The ubiquitous comparison of the American "melting pot" with the Canadian "cultural mosaic" without any discussion of the criticism of the former that's gone on in the U.S.--that's even more annoying. The assumption that Canadians must all pay less for post-secondary education than Americans simply because we're Canadians and we're always better than those damn Yanks at that sort of thing--that's not just annoying, that's destructive.

But hating George Bush's policies? That's neither annoying nor anti-American; it's common sense. Not to mention the fact that these days, the vast majority of Americans are even in agreement with those "America-bashing" Canucks on that particular point.

I choose to call Lyle Oberg a blithering idiot

Alberta Conservative leadership candidate Ted Morton has sponsored a private members' bill that would--among other things--allow marriage commissioners to opt out of performing same-sex marriages for religious reasons. The bill is up for third reading today. Lyle Oberg, one of the other leadership candidates, supports the bill. Why? Because "no one should have the ability to make anyone do anything against their will."

No one should have the ability to make anyone do anything against their will.

He must have misspoken, you're probably thinking. Oberg doesn't really believe that literally--that would be ridiculous. But no, he actually rephrased the sentiment and repeated it a second time: "Nobody should be able to litigate against people who choose not to do something."

Okay, well, then I think I'll just choose not to put my kid in school this fall. When tax time rolls around this April, I think I'll choose not to file, and when my next Alberta health premium comes due, I'll choose not to pay the bill. Oh, and I think I'll drive down to Brooks and break into Lyle Oberg's house. When he tells me to leave or else he'll call the police, I'll just tell him that I find it quite comfortable there and choose not to listen to him.

(You know, it's not even these people's policies that get me so much as their pure, unadulterated stupidity. Why, why are they like this? The federal Tories manage to be right-wing without being stupid, so why are there seemingly no Alberta Tories with brains in their heads? It just baffles me.)

The article goes on to talk about how the bill isn't expected to pass because there's not expected to be "enough time" to debate it. Hmm, interesting that if they know there won't be enough time, that they wouldn't find some way to allow enough time. Might there be something being cooked up that they're not giving us the details about? Hmm, there might.

And I just might have pictures to share later on today. *grin*

Update: The pseudofilibuster, in which the Alberta NDP and the Alberta Liberals jointly organized to make sure procedural matters took long enough that the bill couldn't pass, was a success. The best part was the way in which they officially introduced all the members of the public in the gallery (we had to register ahead of time, and provide brief biographies to be read aloud). There were so many people there that the introductions alone took over an hour! It's sad that the Tories outnumber even a combined Opposition to such an extent that tricks like these are necessary, but it was still an incredibly creative use of parliamentary procedure to achieve political goals, and I was quite impressed. And I'm most impressed of all by the fact that the Alberta Liberals and the Alberta NDP were willing to put aside partisan differences and join forces for long enough to do the right thing.

I wasn't allowed to take the camera into the chamber, but the best pictures I could get of the enormous lineups to get in are over here. Too fun.

Yankee Klein

Every American I know who's read my 2004 post about Alberta's premier Ralph Klein has had one singular reaction: "Wow, he sounds like George W. Bush!" I cringe every time, but there's some truth to it; he's got the same sort of mixture of right-wing ideology, populism, and a mouth that overflows with quotable stupidity (his latest being that former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore is "about as far left as it gets." this coming from a politician who has sat in the Legislative Assembly with Brian Mason for years, now. the stupid, it burns).

In any case, it sounds like Klein, who is preparing for the next leg of his career since his unceremonious ouster from the leadership, has been welcomed with open arms at a well-known U.S. think tank, where he will undoubtedly have plenty of opportunity to run into his ideological and intellectual equivalent. What I want to know, though, is this: is there any chance of them keeping him?

CBC headlines: an endless source of amusement

Today, the same CBC headline writers who brought us the delightfully ambiguous "Marrying gays optional for commissioners," the tongue-twisting brilliance of "Klein's clean coal claims questioned," and the barely-parseable "Visa delays plague games for gays" are making sure those darned homeless don't end up with any advantages:

Advocates worry about bias towards homeless

Damn straight! Equal rights for wealthy suburbanites!

Meeting up in Quebec City?

Two weeks from tomorrow, I will be winging my way to Montreal, and then joining up with NDPers from across Canada to take the free NDP Express Train from there to Quebec City for Convention 2006. Will any other NDP bloggers/blog readers be attending? The schedule looks pretty jam-packed, but it would be a shame if we were all there and didn't manage to meet up even once.

Anybody else going? Anybody else up for a bloggers' meetup?

Update: I've gotten two inquiries in email so far, so...if you don't want to put your name out there for the world to read, you can reach me in email at idealisticpragmatist at gmail dot com.

Upperdate: Okay, I've now got several inquiries, but I'm trying to see if I can spread the word a little further. I've sent out email on this to all the Blogging Dippers whose email addresses I could find, to ask if they're going to be at convention and might be interested in a bloggers' lunch or something similar. If you wanted to help perpetuate this beyond my blog's readership, it'd be great if you could link to this post in your own blog. Thanks!

6 September update: The bloggers' meetup is scheduled for Saturday lunchtime, at an inexpensive restaurant not far from the convention hotel. Reservations have been made for the group that's already told me they could make it, but all it takes to get you added is a quick note to me (idealisticpragmatist at gmail dot com) saying that you'd like to come as well! The more the merrier--I just need to let the restaurant know how many we are. To be absolutely certain you reach me, you should email me tonight by 10PM mountain time (midnight eastern time), as I'm hopping a very early flight tomorrow.

Wente Watch

A blog that's long overdue: Wente Watch. Dedicated in its entirety to debunking the mad ravings of one Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail columnist and embarrassment to American immigrants across Canada.

What a Liberal should sound like

According to the dictionary, my blog's name is an oxymoron, since 'idealist' and 'pragmatist' are supposed to be antonyms. To me, though, it's more than just a cute piece of wordplay; it's actually my personal philosophy of politics. My strongly-held beliefs about the ways we should help the less fortunate in our society are what propel what I try to do in the political arena. What this means is that I think Canada hasn't done nearly enough to adequately fund public health care, social housing, or education, nor has it done enough to protect the environment and encourage more sustainable practices--whether under Conservative or Liberal governments. And yet at the same time, I think it's equally important to propose creative solutions to those problems that end up actually being practical and implementable. Ideology underlies my politics, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of it.

I've thought for a long time that a healthy Liberal party would also tend to consist of idealistic pragmatists. The ideals underlying the practical solutions they propose would be rather different from my own, given that they tend to value social justice and economic prosperity equally, while I tend to favour the former--but the logic of their decision-making should tend to resemble mine. As such, I don't expect to agree with Liberals much of the time, but I do expect to respect the reasoning behind where they're coming from. What I'm seeing in most Liberal rhetoric these days, though, is the "pragmatist" without the "idealistic." They want to take back power not because they're brimming with new solutions that they're just dying to implement, but because they want someone other than Stephen Harper to be in charge. This is what I meant when I encouraged the Liberals back here to tell us what they stand for, because at this point, we honestly don't know. Given my own ideals, I don't expect their vision to be something I agree with, but it should still be something which, as an idealistic pragmatist, I can respect. And that will require them to stand for something bigger than ensuring that Harper gets the boot.

I mention all this as background to saying that for the first time in a long, long time, I listened to a Liberal speak and thought: you know, this is what a Liberal should sound like. That Liberal was Martha Hall Findlay, and the context was an interview with Conservative blogger Greg Staples. I didn't agree with what she said about the Third Way, health care, or post-secondary education--but then again, I didn't expect to. What I did think while listening to that interview, though, was that she was definitely a politician I could respect. She not only has integrity in spades, but she was able to make very clear that her pragmatic ideas are grounded in a serious commitment to strong underlying principles, and that there are limitations to how far she'd be willing to compromise on those. She actually answered yes/no questions with a "yes" or a "no" rather than trying to weasel out of taking a strong stance. She took Greg to task on the points where they disagreed without resorting to personal attacks. And finally, she's willing to do more than just spout campaign talking points, even if that means disagreeing with her party's sacred cows or criticizing the road they've been on recently.

Here are just a few quotes from the interview that illustrate what I'm trying to say:

On Pierre Elliott Trudeau: "Oh! Economically, yeah, not perfect by any stretch of the imagination!"

On health care reform: "We have to have an honest discussion, without getting caught up in terminology and rhetoric. A perfect example is the word 'private.' The status quo's not going to work--it isn't working. And in a time of aging demographics and more expensive technologies, we simply can't carry on by writing bigger cheques. And I want to make sure we can get away from the word 'private' as this bugaboo that prevents us from having an honest discussion. So stressing that I support a single-tier system in this country, publicly funded, we need to let the private sector participate in the delivery."

On the environment: "I was very upset during the last campaign. We signed Kyoto, and that was absolutely the right thing to do--global warming is something we have to address. But after signing Kyoto, we wrapped ourselves in the flag and then didn't actually do much."

On the last Liberal campaign: "I've got to tell you, being Liberal means a lot more to me than just not being Conservative. A whole lot more. And it was really frustraing in the last election. When was the last time Toyota put up pictures of Hondas and said 'please don't buy these cars?' Choose the lesser of two evils? This is so not enough for me. If we're going to go and ask the Canadian public for their support, we have to show why we have policies for Canada's future, why we're best positioned to implement those policies for Canada's future, and not just why somebody else isn't."

She's not going to win this race--she has neither the political experience nor the throngs of support that would be necessary. But despite the fact that I don't agree with much of where she's coming from, in a Liberal leadership race where we've mostly been seeing a whole lot of spin without much substance, she's still a breath of fresh air. And if the next Liberal leader doesn't give her a top-notch critic portfolio or cabinet position, he's missing a huge bet.

Choosing a Liberal candidate: an outsider's view

While I was busy with more mundane things, Liberal bloggers were all a-twitter over Maurizio Bevilacqua's decision to drop out of their leadership race and support Bob Rae. Jason Cherniak was "shocked," Calgary Grit called it "a big coup for Rae," and Any Idiot Can Have a Blog snarked: "kudos to Maurizio in retaining his strong right wing values, where money talks and personal values walk."

Miles Lunn went so far as to speculate that "Rae promised him something in return if he is elected," and while he may well be right in this particular case, there are other explanations as well. There is, after all, a longstanding tradition in the Liberal party of supporting a particular candidate for reasons other than ideological ones. A Touch Left of Centre characterizes himself as "a centre-left Liberal and a strong supporter of Michael Ignatieff," who's anything but centre-left. Jason Cherniak, on the other hand, refers to himself as a "blue Liberal," but he's supporting centre-left candidate Stéphane Dion. Pragmatism ("can this candidate beat Harper?") and personal factors ("does this individual have the charisma necessary to gain a following beyond True Grits?") seem to weigh more heavily than ideology into many Liberals' decisions. So maybe Bevilacqua was promised something, but maybe he just thinks Rae's going to win and wants to jump on his bandwagon while there's still a seat available.

Over at the Tory blog Political Staples, there's been much sneering over this sort of pragmatic decision-making. "Policy and platform always takes second place to power with these guys," says one commenter, and another says that this is an indication that Bevilacqua "believes in nothing in particular, but merely adopts policy positions and backs candidates purely out of political expediency." There's another way of looking at this, though, and it's at least somewhat less cynical: many Liberals seem to go into a decision-making process like this with the assumption that because Liberals are all centrists, they're already ideologically close enough to any of the candidates for their own comfort. And once you've taken that on as an underlying assumption, it's much easier to support a particular candidate because of other factors such as personal charisma and ability to win elections. To those of us on either the left or the right of the political spectrum, this can look unprincipled, but maybe it's just a different ordering of the same priorities all of us have.

The reason for this difference is clear--it's simply less threatening for Liberals than it is for either the NDP or the Tories to choose candidates on a more pragmatic basis. For the NDP, for example, the purely pragmatic decision would always mean always picking the most centrist candidate possible. This would throw off the balance in a party that has members ranging from the far left to the centre left, and would disenfranchise a large portion of the membership. The Liberals, on the other hand, will always be able to lay claim to the middle, so whether they tilt a little to the left, a little to the right, or land dead centre doesn't make nearly as much of a difference to their internal makeup.

I'm an American who always used to choose the furthest-left candidate in any primary election, and so I find this to be a foreign way of thinking. But at the same time, I do see the logic in it. And I also have to wonder whether the parties that are closer to the edges of the spectrum might not benefit from some small element of this logic as well. Choosing between members of your own party should mean balancing ideology, electability, and one's own personal affinity for the candidate. I'm not convinced that the Liberals are on to the right mix of those three factors, but a choice based solely on ideology doesn't make much sense, either.

More Americans by birth, Canadians by choice

Over here in the political blogosphere, we all have a tendency to have blogrolls that consist exclusively, or almost exclusively, of other political blogs. But political blogs aren't the Alpha and the Omega of the blogging world, and last year, this recognition even led to Robert expanding his Canadian Blog Awards beyond just the political. Recently, I was excited to find that there's a whole subcommunity of bloggers out there who are blogging about their personal journeys as Americans who have decided to emigrate to Canada. Some of them are lefties, some of them are queer, some of them just felt out of place in the U.S., and some are all of the above. And while I've got a rather different sort of blog over here, I still feel an affinity with all of them.

There's Laura from We Move to Canada, a freelance writer who shares a bloggy tagline with me, and who left New York City for Toronto along with her partner Allan last summer. She details her journey not only in her blog, but in a Cafepress book.

There are the two gay men from Florida who write the Moving to Vancouver blog. They already sport a "No Deep Integration with the USA" banner on their blog, despite still being in the process of applying for permanent residency in Canada.

There's Daniel and his husband Alan from Would-Be Canadians, who hope to move from Seattle to Vancouver. Their blog details the anxiety over the limbo that immigrants can feel as they're wondering when and if their applications will be accepted.

There's Juan and Mr Tew of Wondrous Canadian Renewal, a binational (U.S. and an unknown Latin American country) couple who are currently living in Michigan and hoping to move just across the border to Windsor.

There's Tom of Canadian Hope, one half of another binational gay couple living in New Jersey. Due to his mother's recent illness, he's been thinking a lot about what it means to move far away from his close-knit family to an entirely different country. But he seems grounded in his decision to move to Canada when he writes about everything that's going wrong in the U.S. and its politics, and his hopes to find something different in this country.

There are the two women of Two Moms to Canada, a couple from Minnesota who have delved deeply enough into Canadian politics to link to the Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Council of Canadians, and Rabble. They were recently in Montreal for the national conference connected with the OutGames, and were particularly impressed with Louise Arbour and Irshad Manji.

There's Mason and Nick of Life Without Borders, who after several long years of waiting, have just received their official permission to come to Canada (congratulations, guys!). Their recent posts are eloquent statements of the combination of sadness and happiness, of trepidation and excitement that inevitably surrounds any decision to leave the country where you've spent your whole life.

I've long maintained that becoming an immigrant is about more than just deciding you're unhappy where you are; it's also about choosing a particular other place and doing the work that's necessary to be happier there. It's an act not just of despair and rejection, but also of hope and acceptance. These people embody both sides of that sentiment. Their stories take me back to my own fears and worries about coming here for good, and my own process of figuring out what makes Canada tick and affirming the reasons why I wanted to live here. If you found my recent post about my own immigrant journey interesting, you might want to check some of them out.

Crazy as a blogger

Conventional wisdom has it that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a bit of a madman. I have to say, though, I'm always skeptical of such pronouncements--after all, you only have to look as far as George Bush to realize that one person's madman is another person's hero. But now something has happened that's got me leaning a bit toward that position myself. No, he's not threatening to blow up the whole Middle East, at least not today. Instead, he's starting a blog.

The man's not just crazy; he's as crazy as we are.

(Hat tip to skdadl at pogge.)

Who's Canadian enough, take three

I'd like to start this post with some kudos for Stephen Harper and his government. No, really, I mean it. Despite the incredibly daunting task of removing 8700 some-odd Canadian citizens from Lebanon over the last couple of weeks, they came through. There were some snags (some would say a lot of snags) but despite repeated protests of "undeservingness" from the likes of Garth Turner and various right-wing talk show hosts, our government went to great lengths to make sure every Canadian who wanted to be removed from Lebanon was brought to Canada at the government's expense. It wasn't just the right thing to do; it was the only thing to do, given current Canadian policy on these matters. As I said in my last post on this subject, current policy doesn’t state that if you fail to take advantage of the right to live in Canada, you don't have the right to be evacuated from a war zone along with the Canadians who are just visiting. And as I'm sure most of us will agree, the middle of a humanitarian crisis is hardly the time to change a long-held policy.

Now that the immediate crisis has abated somewhat, though, Harper's government is thinking about reconsidering the rights that go along with Canadian citizenship. They're not, it should be said, thinking about dividing Canadians along the lines of immigrant citizens and non-immigrant citizens; they're saying that any Canadians, whether they were born in Canada or not, should have Canadian residency if they want to be evacuated from war zones at Canada's expense. On the face of things, this seems like a perfectly reasonable change--it favours those who have really "made a commitment to the country" over those who've "put other allegiances first." Nonetheless, I'd strongly encourage the government not to give in to the pressure to rethink the current policy. And in order to explain why I feel that way, I'd like to describe my own journey toward becoming a Canadian. This is important, I think, because there seems to be a popular notion that an immigrant's journey is simply "too damn easy," and many of the people making assertions about that don't have much first-hand knowledge of what goes into making a new Canadian.

It was 1993 when I first decided that I wanted to emigrate to Canada. I'd known for a while that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the U.S., but it took a trip to Ottawa during the momentous federal election that occurred that year for me to stop looking across the ocean and start looking north. Unfortunately, I was a graduate student at the time, preparing for an academic career in a very narrow field in which there are usually no more than two or three jobs world-wide in any given year. And while I really did want to come to Canada, I knew that realistically I had to go where the jobs were. To make a long story somewhat shorter, I happened to be ready to go on the job market during a year where one of the two available tenure-track jobs was in Edmonton, and I was fortunate enough to get it. Because the process of attaining permanent residency is so long and complicated, though, I initially came to Canada in 1997 on a temporary work permit. This permit allowed me to work here, but threw up a number of obstacles in my path at the same time. My U.S. credit history wasn't recognized, for example, so I couldn't buy a house or even qualify for a credit card. To get a bank account, I had to get a letter from the chair of my department detailing my salary and the fact that he intended to keep me on. I was required to get a Canadian driver's license, but because I wasn't a permanent resident, it had to be renewed yearly rather than every five years. And finally, I also needed to renew my work permit each year.

Because of these bureaucratic tangles, I was especially eager to apply for permanent residency. I spent a few months getting the extensive paperwork together and finally sent in my application that fall. I was a bit nervous, though, because of Canada's rigorous points system. To obtain permanent residency, immigrants have to qualify as skilled workers, which means coming up with at least 67 points awarded for factors such as educational background, work experience in fields Canada needs workers in, age (young people are drastically favoured), ability in one or both of Canada’s official languages, et cetera. In my case, I had a Ph.D., a tenure-track academic job in Canada, I was twenty-seven years old, I spoke English natively and some French as well--and yet I still only barely made it over the top because I was straight out of graduate school and had no real experience in my chosen field. Definitely a bit nervewracking.

In addition to my worries over the points, I also had to be concerned about money. The non-refundable application fee is $550 for each of the principal applicant and any accompanying family member over the age of 22, and once the application is processed, they require an additional $490 from each immigrant in the form of a "right of permanent residence fee." There are also hidden worries in terms of qualifying for residency medically (you’re out of luck if you have any serious or costly medical conditions), the list of the names and addresses of every organization you’ve ever been a member of that you have to make and let the government comb through, and being fingerprinted by the police in every country you’ve ever lived in and allowing all of those governments to do a lengthy background check. For me the whole process took only a little over a year, but due to stricter requirements that were put in place a few years ago, it can now take up to three or four years. And I was also very lucky in that my employer helped me out both financially and in terms of moral support. When I think about the many people who go through all that without the benefit of a secure job, and usually with much fewer financial resources, much less of an education, and much poorer language skills, I can't help but be impressed with their tenacity.

After receiving permanent residency, I was required to wait three additional years before I could apply for citizenship. Because I travel quite a bit for work, however, and because every day spent outside of Canada counted against my residency requirement, I had to wait much longer. I not only had to submit to yet another lengthy background check, I also had to justify every single trip I'd ever taken outside of Canada, with a detailed assessment of the specific dates I'd been gone and my reasons for being out of the country. I finally had all my paperwork ducks in a row a few years later, and sent in my application (along with yet another application fee). After about six months, though, my application was returned because there had been some errors in my residency calculation and I was being asked to correct them and resubmit the application from the beginning. I did so, and another few months after that, I was finally sent the study guide for the citizenship exam in the mail.

Next came the studying. Despite my clear advantages both linguistically and in terms of educational background, there was still an awful lot in that guide that I didn't know, and I did have to spend quite a bit of time preparing. All together, it had been just shy of two years before I was informed that they were ready for me to take the test. (I lucked out here, too, by the way--if you're not a native speaker of one of Canada's two official languages, you get called in during this time for an interview, during which you have to prove sufficient proficiency in one of those languages. This can prolong the process.) I detailed that experience in an old post, but to sum up: I passed the exam, waited another month or so, and finally received Canadian citizenship in September of last year.

At this point, I think it would be difficult to say that I haven't proven my loyalty to Canada. I've paid my dues (literally and figuratively), and I've jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops they required of me. I've held a full-time job in Canada for nine years, paying Canadian taxes all the while. I've participated avidly in Canadian society (I hold a position in my political party of choice, and I've worked on five campaigns, four of which were before I was allowed to vote), and I shout from the rooftops to anyone who will listen about how thrilled I am to be living in a country I can respect. I even swore a loyalty oath to Queen and country. But the fact is, I still have an academic career to think about--one in which we all have to go where the jobs are. And if one of the top U.S. universities in my field made me an offer I couldn't refuse, I'd have to give it a lot of thought. I'd rather stay in Canada, of course, but depending on the offer, it would be an awfully hard decision.

Let's imagine, then, that I did get offered my dream job somewhere in an American "blue state" I could bear living in, and I reluctantly went back to the U.S. to pursue my career aspirations. And let's imagine that a few years after I had done this, the U.S. became a terrible war zone in which cities were being bombed daily and the countryside was plagued with a lack of edible food and potable water. Under those circumstances, I'd absolutely want to chuck my career out the window and come back and rebuild what was left of my life in Canada. And I ask you, would the few years I'd spent back in my country of birth really negate the huge commitments I've made to Canada by this point? Enough that you'd want to tell me that I didn't quite count as Canadian enough for the country I spent all those years in to spend taxpayer money to save my life? Honestly? People say that dual citizens should appeal to their other country of citizenship to bail them out, but in such a dire situation the U.S. would be facing bigger problems than how to get me to Canada. And for anyone who wants to claim that my situation is different--that not every dual citizen has the extenuating circumstances I've described--I can only say this: you're right, it is different. The difference, though, is that I have a ready-made audience and the ability to tell my personal story to get my point across, while the Canadian citizens that got bailed out of Lebanon are nameless, faceless masses that people can project any generalizations they want onto.

No matter what people say, the facts remain: coming to Canada as an immigrant isn't at all easy, and attaining Canadian citizenship on top of that isn't exactly a cakewalk, either. In fact, just being an immigrant here can be difficult as well--you have to cope with cultural expectations that are different from what you're used to, and with practical problems like recognition of your foreign credentials and starting from zero on your credit rating. The people who go through all that don't do it because they're masochists with too much time on their hands; they do it because they care enough about this place to devote the necessary money, time and energy to earning the right to stay. And if for whatever reason some of them eventually decide that some other part of the world needs them more, that decision doesn't make them any less Canadian than those who stick around.

A somewhat more familiar "death cult"

Many other lefty and centrist bloggers have already expressed their outrage over a post made to the Western Standard blogs by RightGirl, as well as over the comments both on that post and on the post of the one Western Standard blogger who dared to disagree. I'm not going to add to the pile. But I have to admit, I'm puzzled by one thing. RightGirl's original post and her comments in the ensuing discussion state that Islam is not a "religion of peace" because:

• many people have committed violent acts in the name of Islam
• some of Islam's followers are told that if they commit those violent acts, they will be rewarded with a delicious fantasy
• many people believe that Islam's ideals are supreme and are willing to fight for those ideals in various countries around the world
• the only "good" Muslims (i.e., the ones who don't do the aforementioned terrible things) are those who don't follow the orthodox tenets of Islam, and orthodox Muslims don't consider them Muslims, which only proves that Islam proper is bad and dangerous

Her conclusions from these observations are as follows:

• Islam is not a real religion, it is a cult/corrupt ideology that has been afforded the status of a religion
• Islam should be banned
• Islam's places of worship should be "turned inside out and upside down" and "shaken until the skeletons come out"

What puzzles me is this: By RightGirl's own logic, she should be making precisely the same arguments about Christianity. Because if you're looking for the commission of violent acts in the name of a religion, elders telling their followers that they'll be rewarded by a delicious fantasy if they commit those violent acts, a willingness to fight for their religion's tenets in many countries around the world, and people getting denounced as infidels for not adhering to the orthodoxy of their religion, you don't have to look as far afield as Islam.

I'm not saying she'd be right to make those arguments about Christianity, mind, but if she wants to be consistent, it would seem to follow naturally.

Canadians vs. Americans on freedom of the press

Clicking through some old links, I accidentally stumbled upon an ancient discussion that took place in the comments section of this equally ancient post by the U.S. blogger Bitch, Ph.D. The context was "World Freedom of the Press Day," which happened to occur smack dab in the middle of the sponsorship scandal and the egregious American misunderstandings about Canadian press freedom that came out of that situation. The conversation is primarily between two commenters: American "PorJ" and Canadian "Andrea." And between them, they manage to say everything I tried to say about the differences between press freedom in the two countries back in this post--but in dialogue form.

PorJ starts out with absolutes:

I'm an idealist. I also know the work of Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, and Chomsky, and other theorists you would throw out to convince me what a sham the concept of a "free press" is. But don't waste your breath on me. Tell it to the Chinese or Iranian kid who dreams of one day running her own newspaper. Or perhaps she dreams of starting a blog to talk about how much she hates her academic job in the middle of China and wants to move to a big diverse city to raise her little boy. [...] Canada? I don't think we can say a state with legally-sanctioned "publication bans" has a free press.

It's this point where Andrea steps in:

PorJ, I think you need to learn a bit more about Canada and our publication bans before you can make sweeping generalizations about Press Freedom here. Contrary to what that one article seems to think, oftentimes they are imposed to protect the privacy of victims or families giving difficult and personal testimony during a trial. The salacious details of a woman's rape should not be fodder for a sensationalistic press; whatever is dragged through the courts should not then be dragged through all of society. And while we may have a temporary publication ban on the Gomery inquiry, we don't have secret military trials conducted without virtue not only of press coverage, but of any due process of law. In December we will see all of the reports and testimony from that inquiry. When are you going to find out what's happening in Guantanamo bay? In 50 years when it's declassified?

But PorJ is undaunted:

We agree: I'd take the CBC over any American news network right now. But I'm not talking about the performance of the press. I'm talking about the pure idealism and optimism that undergirds the American system. [...] Our government cannot ban anything "temporarily" except in extreme circumstances. The Pentagon Papers case took care of that. That's why last Sunday evening on "60 Minutes" over 20 million Americans heard Sgt. Erik Saar, a former Guantanamo Bay translator, talk about the bizarre, sadistic torture of detainees in Guantanamo. Now, if American politicians had recourse to a "temporary publications ban" whenever something scandalous threatened to bring them into disrepute, do you think we would have heard Sgt. Saar's accusations? [...] I'm not trying to be offensive here - I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of supporting some "publications bans" and not others. We've already taken care of that problem: Thank You, First Amendment.

At this point, Andrea corrects some of the misconceptions PorJ has about Canada's publication bans by listing off the rather explicit criteria that need to be met for a publication ban to be permitted, describing the openness of the trials in question (with press and public present), and reiterating the impermanent nature of any ban. And then finally, she goes on to criticize the practical results of the U.S.'s rigidly ideological press freedom laws:

What has that optimism and idealism gotten you? A prostrate press that publishes pentagon-produced news stories as fact; planted reporters in press conferences spewing scripted "questions"; reporters banned from press conferences for daring to ask unscripted questions. That doesn't sound like freedom of the press to me, nor does it sound like "optimism and idealism"; it sounds like cynicism and hopelessness. [...]

If you actually read the [sponsorship scandal's publication ban] ruling, you'll see that it's not "the government" hiding anything. Justice Gomery decided to implement the ban, not "the government;" and it took some convincing, too. The publication ban is quite limited and at least we know when we're going to find out what happened. Meanwhile, secret military trials are being conducted in the US. (I'm not talking about the torture, which fortunately has become public, though I fail to see that's had any real impact; I'm talking about the related secret military trials). You don't have "publication bans" on them, which would at least permit the press to be present and record the proceedings for future broadcast. You don't even have lawyers or due process of law. Read this and this. Then tell me you don't have "publication bans." Not only have you lost freedom of the press, you've lost due process of law, to boot. [...] So you'll have to pardon me if I do find it objectionable to have the US held up in front of me as a light for the rest of the world to emulate in this regard.

Culture clashes like this are always fascinating to me, because I understand so well where each side is coming from. On the one hand we have an American arguing that the ideas that underlie the U.S.'s First Amendment are good ones--whether or not they work--and that things are better in the U.S. because those ideas are better. From the Canadian perspective, though, we hear that if the ideas don't work in practice--if they're not efficient, as Joseph Heath would say--they're not worth the paper they're written on. These days I tend to err on the side of Canada's "efficient society," but as a former free speech ideologue, I'm more than familiar with the forces that must have shaped PorJ's arguments as well. These are the kinds of cultural differences that can sneak up on us and have each side screaming at the other: "You're not making any sense!!!" When two cultures look so similar on the surface, it can surprise everyone involved when the people who have been shaped by them come from such opposing stances.

One point that Andrea did try to make throughout, but which I'd like to highlight since it seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, is that it's the very absolutism of the ideology behind American press freedom laws that allows things like secret trials to happen. When there's no possibility of a middle ground like a temporary publication ban, and your government feels the need (justified or not) to hide what goes on in a courtroom from public view, then the only way to do that is to lock it away permanently. This can be done by closing the courtroom to journalists and outsiders and swearing anyone inside the room to secrecy, as in the Valerie Plame case, or by hiding the existence of the courtroom in the first place, as in the Guantanamo trials Andrea points out. It was this realization that finally broke me of my own prior ideological stance on this subject: when absolutist ideals lead to exactly the situation you're trying to avoid, then those ideals are fundamentally flawed, no matter how good they look on paper.

As a final word (and at the risk of sounding like some sort of a scary stalker-type) I should mention that Andrea impressed me enough that I checked out her own blog, where I ended up disappointed to discover that she doesn't talk politics and culture there. If I ran one of those group political blogs like the blogscanada egroup or pogge, though, I'd sure as hell ask her to join it and at least occasionally share her wisdom with the rest of us. Because holy cannoli, is she ever good.

Bloggy copyright

While I'm already talking about blog culture, I feel like I should say something about this odd little mention I got in the Toronto Sun last Friday. The whole piece is essentially a reprint of my "Who's Canadian enough, take two" post with a few cosmetic changes, but if a fellow blogger hadn't pointed it out, I'd never have even known about it, as there was no direct link.

Caught between feeling flattered and feeling a little weirded out that they used so many of my words without asking permission or even letting me know, I turned to my friends for their opinions. Some of them said that the Sun was justified under "fair use," especially since I'd clearly written the post to be disseminated. Others, though, said I should be annoyed, and that I'd even have grounds for a lawsuit.

Now, I have no interest in suing a major newspaper over something that was clearly well-intentioned, so that's right out. What I did take away from the experience, though, is that if I ever feel like taking an article from the Toronto Sun, removing a few sentences here and there, changing a couple of the words and the title, and republishing it in my blog, I should feel entirely justified in doing so. :-)

Combatting the echo chamber: a challenge

By the standards of the Truth Laid Bear's Canadian blogs community, I have a "midlist" blog with a pretty average-sized readership. It fluctuates somewhat, of course, with less traffic in the summer and more during an election or when I write something that gets linked around a bit. But for the most part, the audience for Canadian political commentary just isn't all that big, and even the bloggers at the top of that list have to be satisfied with a few hundred hits per day.

I've been aware that things look a little different south of the border--I mean, I've heard Markos Moulitsas on the radio talking about how his Daily Kos gets between five hundred thousand and a million hits a day. But last week, when my post about the cultural implications of George Bush massaging German Chancellor Angela Merkel got linked by an A-list American blog at the same time that blog got linked by the Washington Post, I had my first brush with the kind of traffic that some of those folks get on a regular basis. (It's more or less back to normal by now, although I'm still getting dozens of hits per day from all the google traffic--I'm apparently in the top five hits on "Bush groping," and number one for "president bush touching woman.")

Now, I admit that my first reaction was to be pretty excited--after all, if we bloggers didn't care about being read, we'd be writing our screeds in our personal diaries and hiding them under our pillows. It didn't take long, though, for the excitement to give way to a sort of irritation. I like to think that I've written at least a handful of decent posts over the couple of years I've been doing this, but I slap something up there with the words "george bush" and "groping" in it, and I've suddenly made the big time? All at once I had a lot of sympathy for Just Society's observation that when you write "Michael Ignatieff" or "Warren Kinsella" in your post, you get a lot more traffic than when you write about things that actually matter to you. More frustrating even than that was the fact that most of my visitors were from the U.S., and pretty much none of them stuck around to read anything else. And apart from making a few snarky remarks to my friends about that annoying tendency Americans have of ignoring anything that's not about them, there wasn't really anything I could do about it.

Picking on the Americans isn't really the point in this case, anyway, because the whole damn blogosphere is like this. The mainstream media has leveled a lot of criticism at us bloggers in the last couple of years, and among the most apropos is that we're nothing but an echo chamber. Let's try an experiment: Raise your hand if you regularly read a blog written by someone with someone with a very different political perspective from your own. Keep it raised if there's more than one. Keep it raised if you also regularly read at least one blog written by someone who lives in another country. Keep it raised if that country is not the United States. Is there anyone left with their hand still raised? I'm betting pretty few. And when it comes to political and cultural blogs, this is a particularly damning assessment because it means that we're using the full power of the Internet not to expand our horizons, but to narrow them. When all we do is listen to our own opinions magnified a dozen times in others, then this is precisely the sort of behaviour that entrenches our unconscious confirmation bias (hat-tip to Andrew and Jim Elve) beyond repair.

I've written in the past about the importance of resisting the Balkanization of the blogosphere, and over time, I've tried to put my money where my mouth is. My blogroll (visible on the front page) contains not only fellow NDPers, but non-partisans and partisans of various other stripes, and not just fellow Canadians and Americans, but bloggers from several parts of the world. With this post, I'd like to challenge everybody who reads this to do the same. If all bloggers saw to it that we could keep our hands raised in my little experiment above, then we might not change the world, but we'd at least think a lot more interesting thoughts and have a lot more interesting conversations. Human nature makes it awfully easy for bloggers to Balkanize, but luckily for us, the nature of the Internet makes it just as easy to resist that tendency if we so choose.

First the bumper sticker, now the book

There's a new book coming out in September called Wait! Don't Move to Canada: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America.

Damn, I think they're on to our little scheme.

Alberta's one-party state: why you should care, and why there might be hope

We've all heard it before: Alberta is a one-party state in which conservative voices are king. To be fair, this is in large part the fault of our first-past-the-post voting system, since Ralph Klein and his caucus didn't actually win the support of 50% of Alberta voters in the last election. But it's certainly true that when your party's got a full 73% of the seats in the legislature, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Including changing the start date of the legislative session so that you can go fishing. Including...well, I've written that post already.

Now, I can see some of you out there shaking your heads and thanking your lucky stars you don't live in a place like that. But the thing is, Alberta's one-party state affects you too--and that's true whether you're sitting in front of a computer in Toronto, in Boston, or even in Europe. See, Alberta has the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Since most of that oil is in the form of tar sands, removing it from the ground wreaks havoc on the environment. The immediate impact of this is most obvious in the form of damage to the landscape, but far more damaging to the planet as a whole is the sheer amount of greenhouse gases that get pumped into the air for every barrel of oil produced. You know those Kyoto targets Canada failed to meet? Alberta's doing. These effects can be felt not only in Alberta, but across Canada and across the planet--and yet nothing's being done about it because that same Alberta government that can do whatever it wants has rejected decades of scientific inquiry into the climate crisis outright. And of course, the one-party state makes sure the opposition is too weak to stop it from happening.

Depressed yet? Welcome to the Albertaverse. But one other thing we're constantly hearing about Alberta lately is the sheer number of people flocking to this province to look for work, and I have to admit, that has my attention. When we're talking about the population growing by 25,000 people in every single quarter, aren't some of those folks going to be bringing their political culture along with them? Surely not every single one of those new residents is a die-hard conservative who fits right in with Ralph and his buddies, right?

Since I have easy access to the second-largest library in Canada, I decided to do a little sleuthing to see whether the existing political science scholarship would support this theory. And to my utter astonishment, there seems to be nothing at all published on this topic. [Political science students desperately trying to come up with a topic for your MA thesis, take note! You can thank me in your acknowledgements. :-)] But evidence from the UK (McMahon, Doreen et al., 1992, "The electoral consequences of north-south migration," British Journal of Political Science 22, 4: 419-443), Australia (Charnock, David, 1994, "Internal migration and elector turnover in Australia," Australian Journal of Political Science 29: 292-301) and the U.S. (Gimpel, James et al., 2001, "Interstate migration and electoral politics," The Journal of Politics 63, 1: 207-231) certainly seems to suggest that internal migration can lead to a change in voting patterns. The changes aren't always in the direction that we on the political left would tend to like to see them go in--many political scientists credit internal migration for the realignment of the U.S.'s south toward the Republicans, for example--but they're there.

Now, there are those who will argue that Alberta's been importing people from across Canada for decades, and that's never had much of an impact on voting patterns. The Gimpel article even suggests that because the people who move are the ones who can afford to do so, internal migrants are more likely to support the parties that look after the interests of the wealthy. But Alberta's current boom is like nothing we've ever seen, which makes comparison more problematic. Up until now, most of those "new Albertans" have been coming here to work in the oil fields, which means that they've been mostly young, working-class, and very very busy--classic nonvoters. These days, though, this province is importing not just oilfield workers, but everyone. There are labour shortages in every sector, especially in Calgary and Edmonton, and the resulting astronomically high wages are attracting people who previously would have never considered moving to Alberta. I've already met one Cape Bretoner who, when faced with the prospect of having to relocate to Alberta for work, purposely chose Edmonton because of its relative political diversity (and Edmonton-Strathcona because of its propensity for voting NDP)--and where there's one, there are probably more like him. I'm only an armchair political scientist, but as an informed amateur, I think it could be a perfect storm that just might shake up Alberta's sure thing.

Whether it will happen quickly enough and decisively enough to reverse the damage being done to the planet is another story, of course. But at the very least, if I'm right, it's going to be awfully interesting to watch.

Who's Canadian enough, take two

Okay, once more, with feeling.

What do you call someone who was born in Lebanon, came to Canada as a refugee in the 1970s, adopted Canadian citizenship and built up a successful small business, and then 20 years later decided to expand that business into the now much calmer Lebanon, living part-time in Canada and part-time in Lebanon?

What do you call someone who was born in Canada to Lebanese immigrant parents, married a Lebanese man and moved to Lebanon with him in order to invest in and rebuild that country? Even if she "considers herself Lebanese" as well as Canadian?

What do you call someone born in Canada, who decided to go to university in Lebanon so as to pursue a degree in Middle Eastern Studies with some hands-on experience? Even if he didn't work or pay taxes last year in Canada, or vote in the 2006 election?

If your answer to any of those questions is anything but "a Canadian," you'd better be able to explain why. And you'd better be willing to accept the consequences of that line of reasoning, and support changing our current policies to correspond with it. Because at the moment, we have only one class of Canadian citizenship and one set of rights and responsibilities that go along with that citizenship. At the moment, if you're a Canadian, you don't have to choose between being that and being something else. At the moment, dual citizenship has no influence whatsoever on the rights afforded you as a Canadian. And at the moment, Canadian citizenship grants you the right to live in Canada; it doesn't say that if you fail to take advantage of that right, you will suddenly become less Canadian than those who currently reside somewhere between Victoria and St. John's.

The "dividedness" of the Liberal Party

Much hay has been made of how divided the Liberal Party is these days--or to put it in a somewhat more neutral way, how prominent party members and leadership candidates have taken opposing sides on various issues. These issues have ranged from the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan to the Conservative Accountability Act. The conclusion seems to be that this is yet another piece of evidence that the Liberals are in complete disarray, because they can't even come up with a common position on important issues. And Stephen Harper is some sort of political genius for exposing this Achilles heel.

Exactly why is this a problem again?

I'm aware that this is one of those Ignorant American questions that I work so hard to avoid having to ask, but I've thought and read about this for more than a month now, and I'm quite honestly flummoxed. I mean, I know this isn't the U.S., where divided votes are an everyday occurrence. I realize that it's common to toe the party line on most issues in a parliamentary democracy, and I also realize that there are actually good reasons for this. But if you're not allowed to take differing positions on various issues during a leadership race, when are you allowed to do that? They'll eventually have to prove they can unite behind their new leader, whoever that ends up being, but at a time when leadership candidates are supposed to be distinguishing themselves from each other, whipping the party into some false unity would seem unnecessarily harsh and restrictive. And wait a minute, didn't the old Reformatories--of which our new prime minister was once a proud member--think free votes/divided votes were a positive thing?

I'm also finding myself scratching my head that none of the party's PR people doing damage control on this image problem have simply said: "issue x has two sides to it, and our party is large enough that we have members who stand on either side of the line. This is a good thing!" Even in the blogosphere, where you can generally find every opinion under the sun, only Far and Wide comes close to that position. There's got to be some piece of cultural context I'm missing, some bit of tradition or some slice of history. Anybody want to take a shot at explaining it to the Silly Immigrant?

Blogging in a war zone

I haven't said anything on this blog about what's going on in Lebanon. One of the advantages of writing an "occasional in-depth commentary" blog instead of a "daily news" one is that I get to keep my mouth shut and just listen to everyone else when I don't know enough to say anything informed.

But a local friend, a Lebanese-Canadian, has directed me to the Lebanese Bloggers, a blog that's co-written by several different Lebanese citizens. The posts are moving, but it's the comments that are the truly fascinating bit of blog culture. It's being read by people in both Israel and Lebanon, and both sides are commenting on current events in real time as the missiles fly.

I wish courage to the Southerners. Is the shelling targetting residential areas? Please keep us updated, the MSM can be painfully slow.