Oh, Canada!

The UK's student protests seemed like a big deal at the time: some minor disorder, a lot of police brutality and the usual panoply of outrage from politicians and rightwing media commentators. From the coverage, you'd have thought it was 1968 all over again. 


However, we have the French - or rather, French Canadians - to thank for another reminder of how to do protest properly. Nobody pays any attention to Canada even though it's huge and very interesting (Marge Simpson: 'it's so clean and sterile - I'm home!'). Quebec's students are very unhappy about their student fees being raised from (by UK standards) not very much to a bit more than not very much. But being French, they have a righteous sense of principle allied to a firm belief that the first thing to do in any situation is to get out onto the streets. And they're right. 


The initial cause has fed into a general sense of social outrage. The Canadian Conservative government is one of the most unpleasant, self-righteous, reactionary and undemocratic the first world has seen more generations: Prime Minister Harper has taken George Bush as a role model and perhaps gone even further. The cuddly Canada of peacekeepers, William Shatner, Due South, Degrassi Junior High and Anne of Green Gables has been replaced by a vicious corporate puppet which seems to actively enjoy poisoning the planet through tar sands oil (Canada cancelled its Kyoto commitments a while back) while using its newfound muscle to welcome in the Corporate Century without any regard for its citizens (and yes, Canadian voters are responsible for this insanity). 





The Quebecois students have protested so loudly and effectively for so long (103 days so far) that the government has introduced a Draconian set of anti-protest measures which only start with techniques familiar here (kettling, mass arrests etc) and end with an assault on democracy in the form of Loi/Bill 78. The university year has been cancelled! In response, large sections of the Canadian population, whether or not they agree with the fees issue, have flooded the streets and taken up novel ways to mark dissent, such as banging pots and pans ('casserole en cours) every night. 

[Law 78] imposes severe restrictions on the right to protest. Any group of 50 or more protesters must submit plans to police eight hours ahead of time; they can be denied the right to proceed. Picket lines at universities and colleges are forbidden, and illegal protests are punishable by fines from $5,000 to $125,000 for individuals and unions – as well as by the seizure of union dues and the dissolution of their associations.

In other words, the government has decided to smash the student movement by force.

I'm stunned by most of this - and surely it isn't constitutional. A blanket ban on university picket lines means that - for example - university cleaners facing wage cuts couldn't picket at their place of work, whereas staff at any other organisation can carry on as usual. Giving the police the right to ban any protest will of course be used over and over again whenever anyone wants to protest: powers once given are always applied widely and permanently.


Rather amusingly, when the police demanded a protest route map in advance, the students provided one - and the march's chosen course was… interesting. 

Culturally, there's an interesting feature to this movement: it's massively dominated by the French-speaking student bodies - they seem to be far readier to protest than Anglophones, perhaps because French gives them access to the traditions and tools of Mai 1968, and perhaps because being a linguistic minority in an anglophone-dominated country is an inherently more political position than being in the majority. There's a lesson there for the UK too: Welsh students used to be very active in the 1960s-1970s as the language and devolution campaigns accelerated - time for them to recover that fighting spirit. 


Additionally, Quebec is a special case because it's a European-style social democratic state within a country rapidly and forcibly being converted into a cutting edge free-market fundamentalist one. Yes, the rest of the world is realising that our economic and social woes are the result of capitalist fundamentalism, but Canada's previous social-democratic policies and the tide of oil money have cushioned the Canucks from the multiple blows the rest of us have received. If Canada's corporate government manages to smash Quebec, that's the end of social justice in North America. 


Canada: more interesting than you think, eh?

Add another tyrant to the list

Stephen Harper is the only man on the planet who thinks George W. Bush is a role model, and that the United States' approaches to capitalism (let 'er rip) and the environment (who needs it?) are admirable.

Unfortunately, he's the Prime Minister of Canada. He's the fellow who found a loophole in Canada's political system and just suspended parliamentary democracy for months on end whenever it was in danger of outvoting him.

He's done something rather Gadaffiesque now: announced that all official communications will no longer refer to 'the Government of Canada' or 'Gouvernement du Canada', but instead talk about 'The Harper Government'.

George Orwell would be proud. I think this is what the Canucks have to look forward to.

Cover me, I'm going in

Time to disappoint the punters with my paper on Anne of Green Gables. Oh God (there are no atheists at lecterns). I whiled away the last couple of hours by going for a pub lunch with an Australian and a Canadian, then strolled round a couple of colleges to remind myself what I could have had, if I'd passed my A-levels.

Still, it'll all be over soon. Back to concrete and pork scratchings. I know my place.

Do not adjust your constitution. We come in peace.

I've just attended today's plenary session (they're the big speakers, and no other panels run so that people from all the disciplines can attend). It was Benoît Pelletier, constitutional theorist and Quebecois politician, giving 'some thoughts on Canada's identity'.

To be honest, I thought it was a little too careful. Pelletier expresses himself extremely elegantly and persuasively, but he focussed the argument solely on constitutional mechanisms and accommodations: I didn't get a sense of how and why people in Canada define themselves as Canadian and/or Quebecois, Islanders, Brunswickers, Aboriginals and so on. Instead, Pelletier explained that Quebecers are all liberal progressivists keen to be Canadian while retaining their specific identity as a minority in the country and a majority in their province.

I can't help thinking that the same arguments are held elsewhere with much sharper elbows: Welsh-speakers in Wales could (should) argue for autonomy to preserve their cultural specificity. Should unionists in Northern Ireland, that remnant of expansionist Britain, be permitted to discriminate against Irish nationalists to avoid drowning in a sea of Catholicism? What about the Boers? What about, unfortunately, the BNP's hijacking of nationalist discourse?

These should be, first and foremost, cultural arguments. The constitutional niceties seem to be a way to evade the visceral, emotional, sometimes tribal ways in which we construct our identities. bell hooks (yes, that's how she writes it) says that we all have the ability to choose our histories and identities (not sure I agree, but still): the constitutional disposition argument I've just heard seems to be a 'once out of the hole' approach. It reminds me of Star Trek (no, come back): that show exists in a perfect, liberal society of peace and harmony, on earth and in the Federation of Planets. The gaping whole is how this is achieved. We get gleaming architecture, racial equality and the implicit assumption that these things happen because people eventually come to their senses.

If we've learned anything from the modern period (1600s-on), it's that people don't come to their senses. Give us trains and we'l load them with Jews. Give us accounting machines and they'll process said Jews and other groups into gas chambers. Give us radio and we broadcast Milles Collines. Canada's the United Federation of Planets: it's been pretty stable and the people seem level-headed, but that doesn't mean that constitutional conventions will replace local and cultural loyalties at the bang of a gavel. You can't legislate your way to the perfect society.

Beer, eh?

Very stimulating morning - the plenary in particular was interesting because it discussed empirical research in literary studies (like the Book Award paper I attended yesterday). I'd love to study book groups, but fear I wouldn't be professional enough to keep my big sarcastic mouth shut if confronted with some egregious misreading. Though in my professional life, I habitually employ phrases such as 'an innovative reading', 'you could read it that way, but what about…?' and 'perhaps, but could it also be…?' rather than 'Er…no. No way. What's going on in your head? Can you even read?', which isn't seen as particularly constructive.

OK, now the delicious buffet is over, it's off to papers on nation narratives and archive work. The alternative is a history panel including a paper on Canada and Beer. It'll possible touch on this:




which inspired this Quebeçois satire:

Maintenant, nous sommes tous Canadiens

Morning, mes enfants. It's day two of the BACS conference, and I'll be popping in and out. There's still work to do on my paper, but so many good things to attend. This morning's literature session is on multiculturalism and immigration, with presentations on failed integration narratives, M G Vassanji, who's new to me, Canadian drama and regional masculinity in Proulx and Johnston. I'm also looking forward to Danielle Fuller's 'Citizen Reader: Canadian Literature, Mass Reading Events and the Promise of Belonging', which draws on research into 'textual communities'.

Are you all gripped by election fever?

The Republic of Letters

This is how academic life should be: stunning modern architecture (I'll post some pictures later), serious and interesting discussions which reveal how fascinating things can be even if you've never given them a moment's thought previously, and no managers. 


I've learned about Francophone-First Nations literature, about Robertson Davies's politics (weirdly, I started a campus novel by him this very morning) and about the cultural complexities of the Toronto Book Awards. Next up (after a very agreeable lunch spent talking to Robyn Morris, who specialises in Asian-Canadian literature) is her paper and two on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake including one by Fiona Tolan, author of Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, which is excellent value at £48. Atwood's liberalism, the acculturated self and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is at the core of this paper. The other, by Heidi Butler, examines the commodification of women under capitalism in Atwood's speculative fiction. An s-f dimension opens…

Update: three fascinating papers on speculative fictions (Atwood's and poet Larissa Lai's rebel take on Rachel in Blade Runner) and constructions of women. Hardly any questions: I asked a couple of dumb ones simply because I was surprised by the lack of response. Perhaps it's because the papers were so comprehensive. Whatever, I've learned more about one of my favourite authors and intend to read Lai's work.

No mention of Due South yet though. I'll remedy that next year…

Talking of books I've read, don't bother with Michael Dobbs' House of Cards. It's a political thriller which was adapted very successfully for television, set in the upper echelons of the post-Thatcher Tory Party. I couldn't buy it new because that would mean giving money to a Tory, but I now resent the 25p I spent on the used copy. It is rubbish. Every sentence contains things like 'he said, menacingly'. Character seems to consist of assuming that all men want power and all career women are driven by emotional inadequacy. Reader, it is rubbish. Even if you're looking for an easy read (which I was), this isn't it, because every sentence is unreadable and politically objectionable. I don't know why Tory politicians think they can write novels (Currie, Hurd et al.), but every time they do, it demonstrates how little they understand of human nature. Which is no surprise to me. Tory Scum.

And we're off…

No sooner am I cloistered in academic conclave (the British Association of Canadian Studies conference) than a general election's announced. My attention will be unhappily divided between the polite rivalries of academic life and the rather less civilised discourse of a political world bereft of ideological values but replete with ambition, greed and hatred.

Now the election's upon us, my feelings are clear: I'd like a hung parliament with Labour depending on the votes of actual socialists to remain in government: a coalition with the Greens (if Caroline Lucas is elected), Plaid Cymru and the SNP. Labour on its own is tired and hopelessly compromised. The Conservative Party remains despicable, run by jolly toffs who, not far underneath, are less than jolly. They'll screw the poor, the black, the foreign, the young and the old. They aren't honest, or a breath of fresh air. Cameron is a US-style 'minimal government' freak with the conference that comes with Eton and £30 millions in the bank. He and his colleagues have never queued for benefits, looked for out-of-date food, faced a job interview with worry, used the NHS, attended a state school, been afraid of the bank manager or landlord, depended on a library or faced any problem which can't be solved with a credit card. This is why they should be stopped. Their world is not ours; their interests are not ours; their purposes are not ours.

I'll be online occasionally to update you on the latest in literary thinking on Canadianness and related matters (there are lots of other disciplines here, and I'll find it difficult to resist the politics panels. Right now, I'm listening to a fascinating paper on Canadian/Balkan literature and Orpheus by Milena Marinkova from Leeds: interesting texts and a much firmer grasp of theory than I could manage…

Acronym City

I've just spent two hours in the company of my comrades, moving module codes and titles around to produce an intellectually justifiable degree while satisfying the whims of management (there is a contradiction, unfortunately). 

I return to my office to find a similar example of cognitive dissonance in the American political system. 

Sarah Palin has recently and repeatedly described state healthcare as 'evil'. She's suggested that even the minimal healthcare available to the aged be cut so that taxes can reduced. But what's this? Sarah says that she used to drive 15 hours through Alaska to take advantage of the CANADIAN (state) health system. 

So not only does she think that Canada's system is better, she's prepared to steal another country's resources, while demanding stricter border controls to stop South Americans and Mexicans from entering the USA. She even defended two border control agents who illegally killed a migrant (their sentences were commuted by Dubya, presumably on the basis that Hispanic non-voters' lives aren't as valuable as others'). 

Clearly, it's time for Canadians to seal the borders. Not only to keep the ghastly Palin out, but so that Americans will be forced to improve their own healthcare rather than sneak over the border to leech off their Friendly Neighbours In The North. 

Benton Fraser, do your duty!

Constable Fraser says 'on your snowmobile, Palin'.

Just plain nuts

This picture of an interloper at Lake Minnewanka (no sniggering) has been round the world this week - the lil' fella was investigating the sound of the camera's autofocus.

Little known fact: grey squirrel is delicious, a little like rabbit. Neal furnished a fat one last autumn, stuffed with nuts. We roasted it with salt and pepper. Free-range, organic and in this country, unwanted. I bet red squirrel is tender though. Rare…

I get readers: odd ones (2)

Even better than the American who searched for 'nude Geordie lasses' is this Google search, from Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada:

do i need licence in b.c to keep a monkey

Maybe you do, or maybe you don't, but you definitely need your head examined if you think that keeping a monkey as a pet is a civilised thing to do. Leave it in the jungle (or the lab).

A very Canadian coup

The Canadians had an election recently, as did the New Zealanders. In both cases, the Conservatives won despite succeeding decent liberal governments. Thankfully, the Liberals in Canada have got together to form a coalition, throw out Stephen Harper's no-good Tories in a confidence vote and save the world. (Poor Anne would hate it - she's a die-hard Tory but only because Matthew Cuthbert was). 

So what have the sneaky low-down Canuck Conservatives done, eh? Just gone running to the Queen like the Aussies in 1975, when the viceroy (sorry, Governor-General) dismissed Gough Whitlam's government even though he had a majority. Harper's asked the Queen to suspend parliament to avoid losing the vote - the coward. His whips should be bribing and threatening and dragging in the sick-bed vote like most mature democracies would.