When the Colonials Leave Canada

"You stole our land - now go away," said a Canadian First Nations protester recently to the descendants of colonial settlers. So, what if 37.6 million Canadians agree to leave?

"Be careful what you wish for, in case it comes true", goes the old saying. Let's do a thought-experiment: what would happen next, if First Nations people got their wish and non-aboriginal Canadians self-exiled?

With descendants of Colonials the more recent immigrants also depart -- including the very last one from wherever s/he came in the world whose people Canada had welcomed in. After the 37.6 million Canadians leave, one and a half million First Nations people remain.

What's life like now, for the 1.5 million? The tax base is gone: no federal or provincial governments are left, meaning no more subsidies, no support for Band Councils, no welfare, housing programs, native health services remain.

The hated "colonial" education system is gone. Illiteracy grows, quickly and alarmingly. Roads deteriorate, no engineers remaining to maintain them. Ferries stop running. Avalanches are not cleared nor bridges repaired. Auto repair businesses are gone: no brake checks, no oil changes. No oil is refined or imported.

The railways, closed down by protesters in February 2020, stay closed for good. Food, gas and heating fuel are no longer distributed. Universities are abandoned. Professionals in all fields disappear. Their buildings -- universities, hospitals and offices -- are emptied, and then looted. Police forces have left -- sent away like everyone else employed by colonial institutions. Air traffic controllers too are gone, their towers abandoned. Planes from elsewhere cannot land. They try, and collide, and everyone on board is killed.

Parliament and Legislative buildings in each capital are abandoned. Homeless people move into them. They quarrel. One invention aboriginals were glad to inherit from "settlers" was guns. They use them. The justice system that ran the courts has disappeared, de-populated of experts. Anyone can be a lawyer now -- practicing indigenous law. People don't feel that justice is being done, so the tribes replay the wars of the past. Raids happen, rivals are killed, slaves are taken once more.

With skidoos, all-terrain vehicles and ferries un-serviced, breaking down and their parts not imported, and grocery stores emptying of food, aboriginal people are now able to return to "traditional lifestyles". The Nature they considered themselves the guardians of no longer seems welcoming however, for winter temperatures kill when there's no heating fuel. Only foraged wild plants are available to eat, once food-importing colonialist grocery chains are gone. Animals are killed with extreme cruelty, once the bullets are used up: now spears and primitive traps do the job -- slowly. Off the west coast, some people decide to hunt orcas again. Calves are killed, mother orcas mourn, hunters drown.

In the decaying cities, elevators get stuck, often with people inside them, trapped until they die there. Rats take over the high-rises. Banks are closed; no money can be withdrawn from cash points. On reserves, pipes freeze and crack in the houses. Hot water heaters aren't replaced. Once the plumbing fails hygiene goes out the windows -- which aren't replaced when they break. Drug stores run out of medication; what's left is looted and sold on a black market. People begin burning books as fuel, looting them from the public libraries with relish, as hated records of "colonialist" thought and culture.

The printing presses fall silent, newspapers die, the whole publishing industry dies with no means of production and no customers for consumption. No service providers remain to maintain cellphone coverage. Gradually, tablets and laptops reach their planned obsolescence and aren't replaced. The Last Nations gather around their book-fueled fires, beating drums and telling stories about the time they got what they wished for: the time when the colonials were banished and their traditional lifestyle came back.

In Canada, every day's Apology Day

My Apologies

    I want to say I'm sorry for your loss. I heard you'd lost inclusion and respect, and possibly my ancestors were responsible. I'm sure my ancestors would be very sorry had they known more about inclusion back in the day when they were alive and people didn't fret enough about exclusion and inequity and such.

    I'm sorry you feel dis-entitled and disrespected -- if you do -- my apologies if I've got that wrong and you're actually perfectly fine. Although it must be a burden if you are unfairly excluded from victim-hood. Sorry about that. I didn't mean to be insensitive. My mistake: sorry.

    I apologize if my race has had anything to do with it. My race is something I inherited unconsciously, but I know that's no excuse. I apologize for my ancestors having the genes they did, I'm sure if they'd realized all the trouble their genes would cause they wouldn't so thoughtlessly have passed them on. Some of them even had the bad taste to get their names on monuments and statues, not knowing how offensive monuments would become (or even that their names would be on them), but again, that's no excuse. I'm sure they're posthumously regretful and that they’re perfectly okay with having their statues torn down. Sorry about historic names and places. Sorry about history, it should never happen.

    But don't worry, the politicians will apologize for it, they're in training for the Apology Olympics. I'm only a recreational apologist myself. But it's puzzling that an "apologia" originally meant a speech in defence of something, explaining and vindicating when no offence had been intended. But sorry: I know intent has nothing to do with it and that making amends means you must pretend that offence was intended, even if it wasn't ...

    But sorry, I'm losing the thread, I apologize for not sticking to the point which is my guilt and your victim-hood. Sorry for being obtuse, for it's clear that the insulted have a right to feel insulted and no one can take that away from them, for that would be to pile guilt upon guilt and even all the hand-washing of Lady Macbeth would fail to wash the stain away.

     I'm sorry that that lady was so entitled by the way, she being titled. And not only that but heterosexual and Anglo-Saxon, so her descendants would be settlers of a particularly accomplished, educated colonial type, which is elitist. No wonder she couldn't stop washing her hands, perhaps anticipating the unclean doings of her race.

    But sorry Lady Macbeth: maybe it's not all your fault because you had to deal with toxic masculinity in your partner. So you don't need to hate yourself as much as I do. If only I could hate myself enough maybe I could finally stop apologizing. 

    But sorry -- let's get back to you. You have every right to feel aggrieved about ... your grievances. I hope you'll forgive me. I'll follow the political leaders in learning what you're aggrieved about – or would that be cultural appropriation? Sorry: by “learning” I didn't mean I'd become in any way elitist-ly "learned" (mea culpa).

     I don't know why, since we have a national “day” for everything else, Canada doesn't have an Annual Official Apology Day. We have a day for every disease, we have Oceans Day, Bee Day, Orange Shirt Day, Seniors, Child, Multicultural Day, and dozens more. If we had an Apology Day everyone could celebrate it by surging into the streets and blocking traffic (so the traffic knows we're serious) and waving signs saying I'M SORRY. A blanket apology would let all the offended people feel included at once by the apolog-industry.

     But wait -- I am begin to feel something new: I believe it's the onset of apology-fatigue. I even foresee the day when I will retire from this tearful wallow. Sooner rather than later, I think. In fact: why not now?! I feel that my sorrow-stamina has suddenly run down. I'm afraid I may not make it to the next national apolog-orgy after all.

Please accept my regrets,

FJ

"Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl." -- Nellie McClung

Is it time Canada listened to this one-time Member of Parliament?


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The Writer Needs to Be a Non-Writer As Well

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing” – Benjamin Franklin

Re. CanLit and Canada Reads 2020 -- when considering it here's an old-fashioned and unpopular concept: "writer" isn't a career category. It never used to be, when writers were brilliant and literature could be "classic". People used to write about their areas of expertise. Writing was a tool, and such luminous novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, the "Bloomsberries", early Canadian writers and countless others would have been puzzled by the concept of a university degree in "Creative Writing". Writing was what people did to explain what they already had a vocation in, or to get an idea across -- or it was imaginative storytelling. Storytelling was done in the "room of one's own" after the home was maintained, the family cared for, the income secured. Perhaps it was done around the fireplace on a winter's night before television hi-jacked imagination. Since anyone can do it, whether well or boringly, can storytelling properly be called a profession?

Apparently rapper, addict and refugee can be (if Canada Reads 2020 is anything to go by) and one can also be a professional queer, two-spirit, or aboriginal. There's nothing wrong with identifying as these things, but are they job categories? When did an identity become a career?

If we count as a profession anything you get paid to do, presumably these things are indeed professions now, because plenty of people get paid for talking about their identity. How does this affect professionalism as a concept? The word used to suggest high qualifications. Can we assume that it no longer does? Logically this would follow from the everyone's-a-writer proposition.

It used to be that only someone with something to impart wrote a book, that writing was a tool and a process. Young writers are less interesting than old because they have less experience and knowledge to write about, and too often end up writing about writing. They lack fuel, meaning subject matter. Life experience, expertise, research and scholarship create subject matter. Maybe the label "writer" should be reserved for people over forty. The top of the line practitioners are generally over sixty.

This is not about limiting free speech. Anyone of any age should scribble, practice constructing eloquent sentences, record memories, experiment with verse forms (ideally not "free verse", until they've learned the forms to get free of), but to be called a "writer" you need to be other things as well. You need something substantial to offer readers. You need emotional maturity and at least one body of information to be master of, and to pro-fess interestingly about.


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Canada Reads Something Else

Who chooses the books for "Canada Reads", or rather, who chooses the choosers? As a book addict among book addicts, I don't notice many fellow readers reading Canada Reads selections. The CBC seems to be on a self-appointed mission for what they consider the "marginalized". Maybe they're trying to be hip, or "woke" -- but I suspect that illiterately ugly syllable doesn't describe the mindset of most Canadians (most of us didn't even figure out what it meant for the first year it bounced mindlessly around the social media echo chamber).

But as for the Canada Reads book list: last year's winner (holocaust survivor Max Eisen's By Chance Alone) was a relevant personal story about historic events we all need to understand. Most people who survived the holocaust are unfortunately not surviving the relentless passage of time: they're old, so they're dying off. So, it's a matter of urgency that their memories be recorded.

This year's Canada Reads list seems repetitiously to gush out what doesn't need to be recorded -- or not recorded yet again. It seems like the list to miss. So what Can-Lit to read instead, for the CBC's stated goal of "bringing Canada into focus"?

Michael Layland's In Nature’s Realm: Early Naturalists Explore Vancouver Island 2019) is top of my list. I'd accompany it with an older book about early Ontario naturalists (and immigrant farmers in the bush), Charlotte Gray's Sisters in the Wilderness (1999), the sisters being Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. 
And then I'd go back to those authors' own works: Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada, which Traill wrote in 1885 when at 83 she was the oldest writer then publishing in all the British dominions. That was when "Can-Lit" was truly breaking upon the wider world's literary horizon. Canada read Catharine Parr Traill for decades, but today the book trade ignores authors like her (i.e. "colonial").

More's the pity. We should not, in aid of re-focusing the public's attention, be forever hustled on to the next thing; let's re-read what's already good. For example Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (2016), is spritely and clever but overlooked, there being no television version of it. (Of course there was that play of which it's a modern version -- The Tempest, by that 16th century guy -- Shakespeare.)

As for new books, I'd go for the non-identitarian, unpretentious mysteries with plots, such as William Deverell's  or Peter Robinson's latest -- not things that would ever turn up in Canada Reads, although they're what Canadians read. 

We're better, I would venture to suggest, at non-fiction. It's interesting that looking at new fiction turns one back to the older titles, and then one wonders why the new are always a nine-day-wonder. Who remembers the Canada Reads winners from two, three, four years ago? But the old stuff which made its own way over time, without influencers and thought-engineers combatting each other on the radio, are still the most appealing.

What John A. Macdonald Thinks About the Removal of his Statue

Dear Victoria:
How you have changed since I was your MP, back in 1878 -82 -- you're all grown up now! Yet - not so much. Many wise, well-educated, hard-working folks lived here 140 years ago, in civilized homes full of books and art, some even had pianos brought all the way around the Cape. I'm sure there are some residents like that today -- literate, temperate, cosmopolitan. I recognize a few trees too, which were mere saplings back in my day. Their survival is miraculous, given the vast stretches of pavement one sees now.

That my statue survived as long as it did may also be surprising. Its removal in 2018 is not surprising, given the tenor of the times -- nor, for me, is it a matter of regret.

The bad time was not when my statue (from the Latin "stare": to stand) was stood-down; the bad time was when it was put up. I had to stand immobile, as cold stone, I who had once been flesh and blood. I was even called "fiery" in my time, full of heat and lust for life and for work. Making a nation out of widely scattered regions, gathering together an educated populace from folks of many backgrounds, harmonizing quarrelling political parties and meshing liberal with conservative -- that was not easy. Who knew that of all my sins and weaknesses, it would be the part about educating the populace that would bring hatred on my head in the 21st century? I came from the Scottish tradition that believed education, learning, scholarship and literacy were to be shared among all races. How could I have known it would somehow become wrong not to have left the aboriginals out? I still don't get it.

But as I say, it was not being removed that bothered me, it was being erected as lifeless rock in the first place. As Prime Minister, binding provinces together through a railway (British Columbia would be American Columbia had we not got that railway built) it was my job to "put out fires", not to become rock. After becoming, like everybody does, dead meat and crumbling bone I then had to become stone, and stand alone in the midst of the gawking crowd. Better to be granted the dignified anonymity of death. I like it best when people walking by on the street don't notice me, to tell you the truth.

We public figures never get to retire from the public gaze. As statues we must stand for decades while the curious (and the incurious) stream past us. Facial reactions change as people respond like puppets to the ideologies of each era. One year they're all taking your picture, and the next they only stop to glare. Some even scrawled scurrilous messages on my plaques. Thousands of other Canadian "Johns" and "Macdonalds" get to rest in peaceful privacy, not molested in sculptural form, and I confess to envying them. Being taken down as a statue gave me in a counterintuitive way something of a lift. Being stationary on a plinth in the first place was the come-down, for one who was once so alive.

My real monument is Canada, great nation which I and others molded together. I understand, Victoria, that Canada is well-thought of across the world these days, especially among the millions who live without such niceties as education, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Being one of those who secured those blessings is monument enough for me. The standing legal statutes are my memorial. History itself is my memorial, however some folks may want to obfuscate history with ideology.

I've been in the actual "fuscus" (dark) these past many months -- in a dark storage-room owned by the Municipality of Victoria. But it's been a relief to lie down. Now please excuse me while I continue to rest in this moment of obscurity, for it may not last. I've heard that I still have admirers and they want me standing upright again. Others meanwhile are preparing a plaque of insults about me to accompany my resurrection. It all sounds very tribal and childish, so who knows how well-rested I may need to be in future?
Sincerely yours,
John A. Macdonald, PM

Don't Lose the Plot, Writers

"Plot" is one of those glorious Middle English words of unknown parentage, those guttural and simple single syllables that reverberate with meaning. A "plot" is both a piece of ground and the plan of a play or story. The word straddles matter and mind, physical and mental, earthy and human. Plot is essential in a story -- it's the ground of meaning. In traditional story-telling it's the piece we possess, or discern, of the wild landscape of ideas and meanings we live with.

The plot is what we enclose and cultivate in story-telling, and requires a traditional beginning, middle and end: development, action, revelation, conclusion (harvest). We have narrative minds and narration requires process. From that comes meaning -- food for thought. No overlord should tell us what to grow, what to think. We must not let ourselves be dictated to, and the ideas we grow in our plots must not be censored.

The garden plot is a simple metaphor, and it should be simple to keep diverse growth in our garden of thought. The "native plant only" ideology in gardening is akin to the identitarian one in speech and writing: a form of control, of policing, of failing to dig new compost into the soil. Students and young writers need one simple writing tip: resist narrow ideology with wide reading! Fertilize your plots.

Woe Is They: Pronouns in the Satirocene Age

Woe Is They

       To the ever-growing list of mental ailments the contemporary mind is heir to, we can add Pronominal Phobia. This disability means that those who selves-identify as non-binary fear non-plurality of pronouns, thinking the old-fashioned grammatical ones unsafe. It's hard to address these “two-spirit” persons however, for like Schrodinger's cat they might jump either way mid-communication, declining to be pinned down to any linguistic spot they feel you might be inequitably consigning them to.

        "Oh let myselves not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven," they might cry like King Lear.

       So good-hearted inclusionists, fearing to use the wrong pro-noun about anymany, will chase after whatever handy non-nouns they can invent in a desperate attempt to anti-name the world in pursuit of equity. We must do this because we can't expect any everymany who declines binary-ness to feel unsafe just because we want to be comprehensible.

       You can't ask non-binary persons themselves about this in case it triggers their Pronominal Phobia. That much is clear to everysome, for it depends on how a person feels themself. But why, to themself, does this they-ness feel safer? It's a mystery. Don't ask me (sic). We don't know – we only know that in the face of singularity, woe is us -- and woe is they. Speaking for ourself (all my me's) we feel safest therefore inside the shelter of silence – thou too?