Dawg’s Blawg

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. ~George Orwell, “On Shooting An Elephant”

Much has already been said on the Boyden scandal, more than likely too much. I would be foolhardy indeed to attempt to recapitulate the eloquence of indigenous writers and scholars like Hayden King, and will not make any such attempt here. Instead, as a white, relatively comfortable Canadian, I’d like to come at the issue tangentially: in particular, regarding the question of identity itself.

A friend strongly rooted in her Jewish identity once challenged me, in a manner similar to the indigenous “where are you from” gambit. She was puzzled that I didn’t seem to have a clearly marked identity of my own. I was uncharacteristically speechless. I have dwelt on that question ever since. I had, and still have, no fully satisfactory answer for her. I remain amazed that other people I know—but not all other people—seem so clear on the matter.

The identity field seems impossibly strewn and complex to me. I have a name, and a family, and citizenship in a country that is founded upon civic engagement—not, thankfully, on blood or ethnicity. I have specific interests that keep me working and involved. I’m male, and I’m white, and I share in colonial privilege too, but questioning all of those privileges is also part of what I am. So, then, who am I? I dunno. What community claims me? Ditto. To what community am I accountable? Ditto.

Indeed, what is a community? Again, I have little idea: the way the term is thrown around these days, a lot gets erased. There is talk of an indigenous community, for example, but in fact there are a great many, and none of them is monolithic.

Perhaps because of privilege, both my identity and my community, whatever they happen to be, are more amorphous. There is less call to define, to include and exclude, to identify markers, to band together. Nevertheless, the same social processes have been at work. I did not get here by myself.

But back to Boyden. It is clear that, in many eyes, a grievous wrong has been committed: a writer, claiming an indigenous connection by ancestry, has done well in the CanLit realm, been showered with acclaim, has won prizes, awards and grants reserved for indigenous people, and made political interventions in the slow process of reconciliation between First Peoples and the rest of Canada. Most of that work remains to be done, and it is no doubt confounded by self-appointed spokespeople who are accountable to no one, and whose claims to a shared indigenous heritage, in the present instance, are now in considerable doubt. The reaction has been completely understandable.

We have heard very little of substance from Boyden himself, the erstwhile culture-bearer of the indigenous peoples. His Facebook statement seems defensive, and is far from illuminating. But here we need to step cautiously. Judging from an ill-fated interview three years ago, he reacts badly to personal questions, even if he was perhaps understandably provoked on that occasion by the superficiality of the interviewer. Retreating now under withering fire, he may well have been properly exposed as a fraud, and perhaps relative silence is all that is left to him.

But if he does not possess an “authentic” indigenous identity, who is he? Or, as Hayden King reiterates, “where is he from?”

Identity is not related to blood, unless one accepts the discredited Nazi notion of Blutsgefuhl—“blood (racial) consciousness”—or the colonial masters’ invidious “blood quantum” measure. Instead, it derives from the social, in which individuals find themselves immersed at birth. It’s a complex construct, a web of personal interactions, social scripts, and the internal stories one tells about oneself. Identities also seem to take hard form under duress: the most salient aspect of the identities of racialized minorities is the fact of their oppression, giving rise to defiant expressions of identity that too often seem, in dialectical fashion, to valorize the categories into which the dominant power structure has placed them.

“Identity” at its most fundamental implies connection, in a world that reinforces only the most superficial relations (e.g., social media “friends” and “followers” and what-not). It is a cry for community, for the social as opposed to the atomistic individual. And it is here that the Boyden case invites deeper interrogation.

The suspicions that have surfaced about him may well be entirely well-founded. That is, that he constructed an identity in order to reap material and cultural rewards. But consider this: we all to a greater or lesser degree construct ourselves, confabulating who we are. We fill in the gaps to make coherent internal narratives. We drop some discordant elements, we keep others, and we imagine still more. We discover ourselves, in others and in the world, in our real and in our imagined connections. By immersing himself in indigenous lore, tradition and history, Boyden may well have fashioned a mask. But I am tantalized by the possibility, however faint, that he became the very mask that he donned.

Christmas is an entirely secular holiday for me, and yet I plunge in, year after year, just basking in it. The raw sentimentality pleases me.

I notice small acts of kindness that seem to go with the season, and ignore the godawful Christmas music (never carols) in the supermarkets and shopping malls. This time, I begin to say a thankful goodbye to the worst year I have personally ever experienced. Death and madness the world over.

For me, Christmas is family, friends and hope. I wish all readers the very best of the season, and a New Year that is better than this one—it could hardly be worse, but maybe I lack imagination.

Thank you to friends, including those I have never met face-to-face. And to those who have, in some way large or small, blown back against the prevailing winds.

A tragic story out of Ottawa—and the carrion-eaters are already out in force.

A young man with a history of mental illness murdered his two sisters. But he was a Muslim, and so were they. He is presently on suicide watch, and is due to appear in mental health court, a special court dealing with crimes committed by people with mental illness. But that makes no difference to the professional Islamophobes.

His sisters were by all accounts devout. One, Nasiba A-Noor, taught the Quran at the Tarbiyah Learning school in Ottawa.

From the very beginning, this had none of the hallmarks of so-called “honour killings,” but that didn’t stop the bigots in social media from jumping immediately to that conclusion. Meanwhile, the “journalists’ at Rebel Media were on the case, as the Tweet above indicates. The sick-making Faith Goldy was dispatched to Ottawa to feed on the tragedy. She apparently interviewed—a cab driver.

The ink-stained tribe was up in arms when Ezra Levant was denied access to an Alberta presser, and later when he was refused UN credentials to attend a climate conference. But they got scant thanks for it. Ezra has gleefully seized upon the Nazi term “Lügenpresse” to describe the very people going to bat for him. At least he had the grace to translate “Lügenpresse” for us this time. After all, not all of his lynch-mob yokels speak German.

One has to wonder why real journalists would so fiercely defend a man who was described by a judge in a recent ruling as demonstrating “a reckless disregard for the truth.” But we’re living in the post-truth era now. Whatever journalistic standards might be these days, they clearly don’t have much to do with fact-finding and integrity.

Ezra’s scabrous underling has already established her alt-right credentials by targeting Muslim schoolchildren. Now she’s in my town to batten upon the sorrow and grief of the Ottawa Somali community. The bodies are scarcely cold, and the ghouls are already feeding.

It is no secret that the Left is split on Aleppo and on Syria in general.

At first I found it hard to understand. The record seems clear enough. The rising of the Arab Spring in Syria led to a brutal clampdown by its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, that developed into a full-fledged civil war. Rebels wanted an end to Assad’s torturous reign. Soon, other less savoury groups opportunistically joined in: Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jabhan Fatah al-Sham), ISIS, and (possibly) Khorasan. Many groups, many fronts, many battles, many objectives.

Assad gained support in several progressive quarters because some could not distinguish all the rebel groups from each other, and they imagined that this was solely a fight between Assad and ISIS+al-Qaeda. But the emergence of Russia’s involvement in the war sealed the deal for many. Old communists and new became ardent defenders of Assad.

What’s it all about? I suggest nostalgia.

“Russia,” in too many minds, is still the USSR. So some backed it more or less uncritically: in some ways this was understandable, given the ferocious and overblown coverage of the Soviet Union by the corporate media. Scepticism became stubborn unbelief. If the media said “A,” the truth must be “-A.” This purblind mental laziness pervaded the Left, for decades too long.

I used to see this close up.

So the knee-jerk responses we are seeing are instinctual. Consider what one normally sensible individual responded when I complained on Facebook that Russian scammers are always locking down my non-existent bank accounts (just follow those phishers and pay attention to the URLs). “Red-baiting, John? Really?”

“Red-baiting?” Really?

Not only are we seeing an immensely complex revenge tragedy playing out in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria, with uncertain narratives comprising our “knowledge” of it, but now some insist on looking at the whole thing through a foggy lamination of Cold War history.

I pity them. It must be like trying to see through granite spectacles.

UPDATE: I may owe the commenter I quoted an apology. He tells me the “red-baiting” comment was meant to be jocular, in response to what he thought was my “channeling Tailgunner Joe.” But he does cop to the nostalgia.

The last post divagated into a discussion of the goings-on at Wilfrid Laurier. I thought I’d open a new thread for general discussion.

There is no good idea that cannot be pushed too hard and too far, with serious human consequences. I suggest that this is what has happened here. Folks who posted on the last thread are welcome to repost their comments here.

…but doesn’t inhale.

Our fearless Canada Revenue Agency at work, cracking down in force on Mom-and-Pop operations and charities while sheltering the wealthy.

This organization, like the RCMP, appears to be “horribly broken,” and needs to be rebuilt. Heads at this point really should roll like a handful of marbles.

The Liberal government, trying to recover from Minister Maryam Monsef’s astonishingly bumbled performance in the House of Commons last week, has decided to seek a little consultation camouflage, using an on-line survey that has already been roundly mocked for its heavy-handed tendentiousness.

I don’t approve of on-line surveys. Self-selected sampling is extremely suspect. The results may say little or nothing about a population wider than the sample itself, and hence lack sufficient meaning from which to draw conclusions. That was a significant problem with the Household Survey that replaced the long-form census under the previous government. Voluntary participation leads to self-selection bias, and over- and under-reporting biases in a complex population. And the Liberal survey, just to make things even worse, can apparently be submitted as often as one wishes, increasing the possibility of freeping.

But then there are the survey questions themselves. Some Conservatives managed to sink this to the level of parody. But in some ways, the Liberal survey is scarcely better.

Let’s note the positive aspect first. The Liberal approach is to begin with a probe of voter values and electoral preferences, rather than offer a selection of off-the-shelf systems from which people are expected to choose. In theory, this is the right way to go. Any change in our electoral system should ideally be a made-in-Canada one, reflecting the process and outcomes preferred by a majority of the electorate. You don’t start with a system: you end with one.

The Citizens’ Assemblies in British Columbia (2004) and Ontario (2006) were examples of doing things right. Ordinary citizens were chosen to decide upon a preferred electoral system that reflected the values of their fellow-citizens. The assemblies heard from many of them, in public meetings and through written submissions. There was also a considerable amount of expert background provided to the assemblies on various existing systems. The former settled upon the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, the latter, on a form of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). What is important to note is that these were conclusions, not opening positions.

(The recommendations were subject to a popular vote in the two provinces. In BC, all ridings but two reported majorities in favour of a change to STV. The over-all vote for change was 57.7%. Not enough: the government of the day had already legislated a 60% minimum. In Ontario, the MMP proposal lost by a margin of nearly two to one. A flawed model and general lack of information were both blamed.)

Surveying values and preferences, then, should form the basis of any proposal for changing the electoral system. But how well does this new survey perform its alleged task?

As it turns out, not very well; in fact in some cases, ludicrously badly—which led to some hilarious parodies at a Twitter hashtag, #RejectedERQs. The survey as a whole is heavily tendentious. The “propositions” with which respondents are invited to agree or disagree are too often loaded to the breaking-point:

• There should be parties in Parliament that represent the views of all Canadians, even if some are radical or extreme.

[Comment: The snarl-words “radical” and “extreme” were inserted to influence the responses. They are highly subjective terms that some would even apply to the current parties.]

• Voters should be able to express multiple preferences on the ballot, even if this means that it takes longer to count the ballots and announce the election result.

[Comment: How much longer? Why appeal to people’s general impatience? And note that “multiple preferences” could mean either STV (where those multiple preferences translate into MPs) or Alternative Vote(AV), aka “instant run-off,” which wastes up to half the votes cast and would likely translate into Liberal majorities until the end of time. (Both NDP and Conservative voters would likely vote Liberal as a second choice.) Opposition to multiple preferences could mean either support for MMP or for the current first-past-the-post system. Answers, then, could reflect powerfully opposing points of view aggregated together. Of what functional use is such a result?]

• It is better for several parties to have to govern together than for one party to make all the decisions in government, even if it takes longer for government to get things done.

[Comment: Again, this is an appeal to impatience. There is no guarantee that coalitions would take longer to get government business done. After all, the current Liberal and Conservative parties are, in essence, big-tent coalitions. The other thing to consider is compromise: if the House of Commons is reflective of the electorate, then compromise between points of view is a necessary part of the democratic process.]

And the survey often forces respondents to choose between two false options. For example:

• Ballots should be as simple as possible so that everybody understands how to vote OR ballots should allow everybody to express their preferences in detail?

[Comment: How are these two alternatives opposed? Is an STV or an MMP ballot all that complex? Are Canadians too stupid to figure out how to use them? The underlying assumptions here need to be seriously challenged.]

• Which would you prefer? Having many small parties in Parliament representing many different views OR having a few big parties that try to appeal to a broad range of people?

[Comment: The purr-phrase “try to appeal” will skew the responses. And the underlying assumptions here are highly questionable, for a number of reasons. Would anything but a pure proportional representation system—which no one is proposing—produce a plethora of small parties, given electoral thresholds and Canadian political behaviour? Germany and New Zealand have each had MMP for some time: the Bundestag, like Canada, presently has five parties represented; the NZ parliament, seven.]

This sondage of elector values is also fundamentally incomplete. Do voters simply not care whether their votes are given equal weight or are simply wasted, or whether the make-up of the House of Commons reflects the electorate’s differing preferences? Should a minority effectively be able to rule the rest of the country unopposed for four years, with “false majority” governments? No questions appear that deal with these matters.

Those questions, however, would not have been based upon hypotheticals. Since World War I there have been seventeen majority governments, only three of which have had actual majority support from the voters. In last year’s election, more than 50% of all votes were for losing candidates, and hence wasted—that’s over nine million voters!

But instead of even whispering the concept of proportional representation in the survey, we are asked substantially less important questions, about voting machines and mandatory voting (again with scare-caveats), and even quizzed on where MPs should spend their time—the latter being something that no electoral system would address.

I cannot see a clear bias towards AV in this survey, as some have alleged, but I do see an obvious bias away from any form of proportional representation—which was favoured by 90% of those testifying and making written submissions to ERRE. While the survey does go a little deeper than most, asking for respondents’ priorities in an electoral system, for example, its drafting is chock-full of rookie mistakes (if mistakes they were) that would appall undergraduate students taking a methods course.

The results will be obviously and significantly skewed, by omission and commission, against proportional representation—the popular favourite. The latter, by the way, is a principle—a value, if you like—not a voting system: this cannot be stressed enough. So why would a survey allegedly intended to elicit the values Canadians would prefer in an electoral system, according to its defenders like Philippe Lagassé, so deliberately steer respondents away from this one?

The conclusion is clear: the purpose of this survey is cynically self-serving and political. Justin Trudeau won a majority with 39% of the vote, after all. As dub poet Lillian Allen says, “No one in power ain’t giving up nothing.”

“Evidence-based policy” is a cant phrase that has been around for a while. I first heard it used—repeatedly—at Justin Trudeau’s coronation in Montreal in 2012. It was clearly a term that was intended to set the Liberals off from the Conservatives, who governed in the teeth of evidence, facts, logic and science.

But once in power, this fresh new approach to governance was not to be. Climate change? Here are a couple more pipelines. And mind your manners, Injuns—we’ve got police and the military to sort you out if need be, and you’ve seen that movie before.

For many, changing the antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system was perhaps Trudeau’s key election promise. Presently, less than 40% of the electors can push the other 60%+ around for four years at a time. Most Canadians want proportional representation: in other words, a Parliament that fairly represents the electorate. The vast majority of witnesses and submissions to the special Parliamentary committee on electoral reform were solidly in favour of change. The ERRE laboured long and hard, and fulfilled its mandate to a T.

The response from the Liberal government is encapsulated in the above photograph, which is worth considerably more than a thousand words. It’s the vapid, smirking face of the Minister to whom the ERRE reported, Maryam Monsef, holding the formula for the Gallagher Index while mocking the Committee and lying through her teeth about its mandate and its work.

For any not already clued in, the Gallagher Index is just a formula for measuring proportionality across systems. It’s far from “incomprehensible,” as the Minister claimed—even I can figure it out—but maybe her math class was tough. It’s not a voting system, and it’s not something voters even need to know, any more than people out for a stroll need to be aware of gravitational wave theory to get about.

But barely a year after Sunny Justin was elected, we have come to this: a yokel rising in the House to mock mathematics and deride her own Committee and the myriad of experts who made submissions and testified before it. Flashbacks, anyone?

UPDATE: Monsef’s apology. Take it as you will.

His enemies say he was an uncrowned king who confused unity with unanimity.

And in that his enemies are right.

His enemies say that if Napoleon had a newspaper like Granma, no Frenchman would have learned of the disaster at Waterloo.

And in that his enemies are right.

His enemies say that he exercised power by talking a lot and listening little, because he was more used to hearing echoes than voices.

And in that his enemies are right.

But some things his enemies do not say: it was not to pose for the history books that he bared his breast to the invaders’ bullets,

he faced hurricanes as an equal, hurricane to hurricane,

he survived 637 attempts on his life,

his contagious energy was decisive in making a country out of a colony,

and it was not by Lucifer’s curse or God’s miracle that the new country managed to outlive 10 US presidents, their napkins spread in their laps, ready to eat it with knife and fork.

And his enemies never mention that Cuba is one rare country that does not compete for the World Doormat Cup.

And they do not say that the revolution, punished for the crime of dignity, is what it managed to be and not what it wished to become. Nor do they say that the wall separating desire from reality grew ever higher and wider thanks to the imperial blockade, which suffocated a Cuban-style democracy, militarized society, and gave the bureaucracy, always ready with a problem for every solution, the alibis it needed to justify and perpetuate itself.

And they do not say that in spite of all the sorrow, in spite of the external aggression and the internal high-handedness, this distressed and obstinate island has spawned the least unjust society in Latin America.

And his enemies do not say that this feat was the outcome of the sacrifice of its people, and also of the stubborn will and old-fashioned sense of honor of the knight who always fought on the side of the losers, like his famous colleague in the fields of Castile.

~Eduardo Galeano, “Mirrors”