Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Justin's least favourite PM (click to view)
Date: February 21, 2012
One of the most attractive features of American politics is all the storytelling. Since the US is a such a geographically enormous country lacking a common race or religion and with a muddled history that only dates back little over two centuries, stories of shared values and experiences are basically the only thing Americans have to unite themselves with a sense of commonality.
You see this constantly in the current GOP primary: Santorum tells stories about his working-class immigrant father, Romney tells stories about entrepreneurship at Bain Capital, Gingrich tells stories about ambition and aspiration, and Ron Paul tells stories about freedom and individuality. In their own way, each candidate tries to spin some element of the fundamental "American experience" into a set of partisan talking-points that justify his particular brand of conservative ideology.
One of the worst aspects of Canadian politics is that we don't do any of this. Even though Canada is a country very much like America, a geographically enormous place without a common race or religion and only a few centuries worth of history, and even though Canadians are largely unified through shared experiences like immigration, entrepreneurship, ambition, and individuality, it's rare that our politicians try to weave these realities into larger stories of the "Canadian experience."
The reason, of course, is because that would be considered too "American."
To the extent we're allowed to talk about a "Canadian experience" in this country, it must always contrast with the sound and tone of the stories being told down south. Since the 1970s, this has mostly manifested in an obsessive desire to frame Canada as the country that is always entertaining left-wing alternatives to current American policy, from opposing the Vietnam War when America was in favor of it, to promoting public health care when America had only private, to championing same-sex marriage when Americans were voting to ban it. While the US might be held together by broad values like "freedom" and "hard work" that can be easily spun in either ideological direction, in Canada, our anti-American contrarianism has forced us to define patriotism far more narrowly: we're a
progressive country.
The myth of progressive Canada (and conservative America, for that matter) keeps a lot of left-wing Canadians very smug and happy, but it's an inherently divisive and limiting way to define nationalism in a democratic country. Since progressive political initiatives will almost always divide public opinion in a very ugly and inelegant way, one is constantly forced to see day-to-day left/right debates not in terms of two different ways to achieve a common, shared value (like "freedom"), but rather a mean-spirited clash between the patriotic and treasonous. If you say "it is a fundamental Canadian value to favor socialized medicine," for instance, what is the correct response when someone replies "but I'm Canadian and I hate it"?
Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Member of Parliament and debonair son of former prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (1919-2000), recently highlighted the weird places this sort of logic can take you when he mused last week about how Stephen Harper's right-wing government could rationally justify Quebec separatism.
"I always say," he said on a radio chat-show, "if at a certain point, I believe that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper — that we were going against abortion, and we were going against gay marriage, and we were going backwards in 10,000 different ways — maybe I would think about making Quebec a country."
His argument posits that it is little more than a certain collection of progressive political policies that keep Canada Canada, meaning that the second those policies change — if, say, abortions suddenly became harder to get, or all the country's gay marriages were somehow annulled — Canada would basically have failed. Time to start over with a new country!
It's a very myopic sort of patriotism in part because it makes it almost impossible to relate to the nation's history in any affectionate way. After all, 93% of Canada's 145 years occurred in an era where same-sex marriage was not permitted, and as the toon above hopefully shows, even Trudeau Sr., who was considered quite the left-wing nationalist in his own time, could easily be seen as more conservative than Stephen Harper based on the standards of the present. Under the progressive patriotic story, Canada is only a country worth loving right
now, or at best since the 1970s, since only then is the nation ideologically different enough from the US in a left-wing way we're currently capable of appreciating.
You do see some of this silliness from time to time in the States, admittedly; we all remember the liberal celebrities who made empty threats to leave America if George W. Bush was reelected, and certainly President Obama has had his patriotism questioned by right-wingers on a number of occasions. But Bush still had his stories to tell about America's benevolent duty to the world, and Obama had his about his about race and inheritance. There was always a unifying fallback narrative that was greater than the small partisan debates of the moment.
Though I still think he's better than the alternative, in some ways Stephen Harper has been a very bad prime minister for Canada simply on the basis that he presents such a depressing existential challenge to the whole idea of "what it means to be Canadian." In the years surrounding his ascent to power, after all, Canada was in the throes of one of its most aggressively anti-American epochs, in which the simplistic narrative of left-wing = patriotic and good, while right-wing = American and bad, was omnipresent in the country's press, politics, education system, and popular culture. Since Harper has failed to cobble together some competing patriotic narrative of his own (a nigh impossible task), the man seems doomed to forever remain unloved and unlovable, and will probably never be able to truly connect with anyone outside his narrow party base.
Harper inherited a country that has allowed its sense of purpose and nationalism to be defined in such a petty, small-minded way that there are no longer any good stories to tell about it.
Forum Super Elite 
Forum Elite 
CKA Super Elite 
