A Nation Hooked on Gambling
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Vol. 17, No. 5
June 2009
Amir Attaran
The ugly
Canadian
Sad and surprising
discoveries
A L so I n this issue
Mark Freiman
Why Ezra Levant is
half right
Sheilla Jones
In search of the next
Einstein
J. Edward Chamberlin
The pets and prey
paradox
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Vol. 17, No. 5 • June 2009
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3 The Ugly Canadian
17 Small Things and an Irony
An essay
Amir Attaran
A poem
Susan Cody
7 Eat, Worship, Fear, Coddle
9 Poles Never Play Cricket in Summer
A review of Angus Bell’s Batting on the
Bosphorus: A Liquor-Fueled Cricket Tour
through Eastern Europe
Charles Wilkins
Robin Roger
A review of Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our
Government Is Undermining Democracy in the
Name of Human Rights
Mark J. Freiman
19 Homage or Hoax?
A review of The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels
Norm Ravvin
20 Tough Times
A review of Filthy Lucre: Economics for People
Who Hate Capitalism, by Joseph Heath, and
Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the
Economics of Capitalism, by Jim Stanford
Bruce Little
22 Creating Another Einstein
A review of Howard Burton’s First Principles:
The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science
Sheilla Jones
12 The Ever-Expanding City
A review of The Limits of Boundaries: Why
City-Regions Cannot Be Self-Governing, by
Andrew Sancton, and The Shape of the Suburbs:
Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl, by John Sewell
Joe Berridge
24 Routing Tokenism
A review of You Must Be a Basketball Player:
Rethinking Integration in the University, by
Anthony Stewart
Reg Whitaker
14 The Road to Hell
A review of The Uncertain Business of Doing
Good: Outsiders in Africa, by Larry Krotz
Ron Stang
26 “This Dreadful Vice”
A review of Casino State: Legalized Gambling
in Canada, edited by James F. Cosgrave and
Thomas R. Klassen
W.A. Bogart
16 East Idioms
A poem
Changming Yuan
Poetry Editor
A review of Priscila Uppal’s To Whom It May
Concern
Marianne Apostolides
10 Trial by Anecdote
28 The Value of the Seas
16 homing
A review of Alanna Mitchell’s Sea Sick: The
Global Ocean in Crisis
U. Rashid Sumaila
A poem
David Reibetanz
16 if the ocean was a prophet …
30 Letters & Responses
A poem
Patrick M. Pilarski
Anthony Westell
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A review of The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent
Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal
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J. Edward Chamberlin
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Literary Review of Canada
Essay
The Ugly Canadian
Forget middle power. Forget model citizen.
We’re becoming one of the bad kids on the block.
Amir Attaran
O
n April 22 of this year, a mysterious four-month-long nightmare ended
for Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, the
Canadian diplomats abducted in Niger by a shadowy group calling itself al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb. Fowler and Guay were on a secret mission for the secretary general of the United Nations,
although when they were abducted they were on a
private trip to a Canadian-run goldmine, travelling
without a protective escort. The kidnappers ripped
them from their UN-marked vehicle with such
intensity of purpose that the engine was left idling
and nothing was stolen. The village where it happened was named Karma.
The story had a happy ending, at least in terms
of Fowler and Guay’s physical health. Yet all kinds of
questions hang in the air, beginning with what
exactly did al Qaeda receive—and from whom—in
exchange for the hostages. Prime Minister Stephen
Harper adamantly denied that Canada pays ransoms or releases prisoners to satisfy kidnappers,
but it is clear from news reports that a complex
negotiation took place involving several countries and that
money, prisoners or both probably changed hands. But there are
other questions as well: Why was
there such a silence in Canada
over those four months? Didn’t
we care that two of our top diplomats had been seized in this way? Officially the
silence was said to be for their security, but it is
also true that many in Ottawa’s establishment disliked the reminder that to be Canadian no longer
implies beneficence and safety from harm. In the
face of a national mythology that everyone loves
Canadians—a mythology that has resulted in innumerable maple leaves being stitched like amulets
onto countless backpacks—the Fowler and Guay
episode was a cold wind of reality.
When ill fate strikes one’s country, it is awkward
or even taboo to pose the question of whether it
is deserved, for lack of a better word. In the wake
of 9/11, Americans reacted ferociously to anyone
who dared to hint that they shared in the blame. Yet
many foreigners knew America had it coming and,
after a dignified period of mourning, they said so.
On the first anniversary of the Twin Towers attack
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien famously reminded
Americans that “you cannot exercise your powers
to the point of humiliation of the others.” Canadians
agreed with him, and in a 2002 poll by The Globe
and Mail, 84 percent believed that America bore
partial or total responsibility for the attacks.
But the notion that there is karma for a country,
which trips so easily off the tongue when tut-tutting
about the United States, is surely not a notion from
which Canada is exempt. Canada too makes the mistake of exercising powers to the point of humiliation
of the others, and it would be fanciful to imagine
that Canada lacks the biblical sin of pride. Indeed, if
one takes an unflinching look at Canadian conduct
in the world, the evidence permits no conclusion
other than that the country has lately been engaged
in a liquidation of its internationalism. Canada
has lost the outward gaze that the British Empire
imposed, and that Prime Minister Lester Pearson
cultivated. Today’s Canadians, just 0.5 percent of
the world’s population, are more insular than even
their modest numbers suggest.
I do not make this criticism in the spirit of an
be a dove and a hawk, be principled but not dogmatic—and it served him (and Canada) so well he
rarely deviated from it. In Pearson’s five years as a
minority prime minister, he enacted laws and policies for universal health care, official bilingualism,
colour-blind immigration, crop insurance, student
loans and the national pension.
Yet nothing drove Pearson more than the will to
find solutions short of war. He was hardly a pacifist:
as a youth he enlisted in the Great War, and later in
life he cut short a vacation to be at his diplomatic
post in London during the Blitz. War taught him
the value of its avoidance and the importance of
countries honouring diplomatic commitments to
live together harmoniously.
Pearson made it his business to slip velvet
handcuffs on the exercise of state power. He did
this as a diplomat long before being prime minister,
by building international institutions and making Canada an early and eager joiner: the United
Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
and the Food and Agriculture Organization were all
largely shaped by Pearson at their
creation. When international crises emerged—Palestine, or Suez,
for example—it was to the international organizations that Pearson
turned. He knew Canada would
lose some sovereignty through its
chronic reliance on internationalism, but as Canada had only just gained sovereignty
from Empire, giving or taking a little sovereignty
bothered Pearson less than it might politicians
today. This flexibility was shared by Pearson’s
contemporaries, such as Eleanor Roosevelt with
her human rights treaties, or Robert Schuman
with his European Coal and Steel Community,
which later became the European Union, and it was
their vision that unlikely-sounding legal institutions
could bind countries and cement the peace. Like so
many Lilliputians, these great thinkers believed that
bureaucrats, lawyers and businesspeople could tie
down generals, demagogues and terrorists—and
actually win.
Sixty years later, the internationalists’ experiment must be judged a qualified success. The UN
is warily regarded: it struggles against incoherent
and wasteful complexity, but sometimes inspires
by averting a war, epidemic, famine or other
nightmare. The EU is unimaginably successful:
not only are Europeans richer and healthier than
ever, but the decision to take dominion over the
raw materials of war—coal and steel were chosen
for a reason—has given Europe an antidote to the
poisonous tribalism that for a millennium made
it the world’s bloodiest continent. NATO has a celebrated past and uncertain future: as a bureaucratic
organization it kept the peace during the Cold War,
Canada is now arguably the “leading”
advanced country in which to base a
corrupt international business.
Amir Attaran is a lawyer and scientist and Canada
Research Chair in Law, Population Health and
Global Development Policy in the Faculties of
Law and Medicine at the University of Ottawa.
He receives financial support from the Canada
Research Chairs program and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council.
June 2009
unpatriotic hatchet job. Unlike Canadians born in
this country, I came to it by choice, faults and all.
As a born Californian with a Berkeley and Oxford
education, probably I could live elsewhere, but I
was attracted to this very Pearsonian country in
the 1990s. I settled in Vancouver, studied law at the
University of British Columbia and became a
Canadian. While I love this place, learning it
through its laws has also shown me a dark side.
In a democracy where legislation is freely chosen, laws are a country’s DNA: they are the code
the country lives by, and if the code is ugly, by
merciless logic so too will be the country. On that
level, Canada’s laws give objective evidence that
Pearson’s Canada is comatose, if not dead. Today’s
Canada would not please Pearson, and he would
find the country’s outlook on foreign people and
international obligations oddly picayune and ignorant. He might even say that we are hazardously far
down the road of becoming a country of diverse
but ugly Canadians—and if we do not check this
tendency, karma could pay us back.
Belonging
Lester Pearson was a great many things, but complex was not one of them. By a certain age, he had
a formula—be assiduous, be respectful, be canny,
be humorous, be mindful of who is on the way up,
but forced to become a war-making organization in
Afghanistan, it is struggling.
The lesson of these three cases is subtle: the
Lilliputians of the international institutions can
preserve the commonweal, but only if governments
perpetuate their Pearsonian enchantment with
building institutions (as with the EU), while at the
same time discouraging bloat (the UN) and avoiding infirmity of purpose (NATO). Left-right politics
has little to do with it. Simply put, internationalism
is a pragmatic lesson in how collectively to make
the world, and Canada, a safer and more prosperous place.
Of course, none of this is really
new. Pearson did not invent
any guiding ideas, so much
as raise them to a functional
place in statecraft. Centuries
ago, Thomas Hobbes wrote of
people’s need for “a common
power to keep them all in awe,”
else they revert to the “war of
all against all.” In the war-weary
generation of Pearson, politicians had learned by blood that
“if there be no power erected,
or not great enough for our
security, every man [or country]
will and may lawfully rely on his
own strength and art for caution
against all other[s],” as Hobbes
wrote. How remote those days
seem now, as the Pearsonian
belief in a larger common power
has been throttled by Blairs and
Bushes who believed foremost
in the exceptionalism of their
own countries and the dangerous conceit that they might
become the common power. It
has not ended well for Blair and
Bush and their countries.
bandwagon. This lopsided deal would eventually
pay itself back, as the poor countries grew, became
rich and became new export markets; in the long
run everyone would win. Nothing could be more
internationally minded, and so as poorer countries
fought their corner, Ottawa decided to be as accommodating as it could.
But since then, the way in which Canada applies
differential and more favourable treatment is nothing short of bizarre.
In law, the Governor-in-Council decides which
developing countries get the preference of exporting to Canada at a discounted tariff rate. While that
Backtracking
But just as exceptionalism is
going back out of fashion, along
comes Canada to dumbly clench
it. Our recent history is embarrassingly rich in examples of joining institutions and
then breaking the rules. Saddest of all, Canadian
exceptionalism is frequently arbitrary, unexplained
or self-sabotaging, and the rest of the world is left
baffled about the motivations for our country’s
behaviour. In this, Canadian exceptionalism often
makes even less sense than American exceptionalism: at least when Washington thumbs its nose at
the international order, it does so with undeterred
conviction and a raft of intellectually veneered (if
often wrong) arguments. A look at Canada’s laws
across the board—in matters of economics, health
or human rights—shows how pointless Canadian
exceptionalism has become.
Global Trade Law. Before the current global
recession, the most prominent globalization debate,
which nearly killed the Doha round of World Trade
Organization negotiations, was whether free trade
advanced developed and developing country interests alike. The debate is not new, and three decades
ago it dogged the international trade system, until
countries agreed on a principle of “differential
and more favourable treatment.” The thought was
that if richer countries such as Canada opened
their markets, for instance by discounting tariff
rates preferentially for poorer exporting countries,
the latter could gain a toehold on the free trade
is supposed to be a decision based on countries’
poverty and need, politics plays a role too. Hence
democratic Belize and Botswana get the preference,
but despotic Belarus and Burma do not. Neither,
obviously, do developed Belgium and Bulgaria.
But how does one explain the Governor-inCouncil’s decision to give Vladimir Putin’s Russia
or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe the preference?
Neither seems a democratic government. Why do
Hong Kong, Israel, South Korea and Singapore get
the preference? Certainly none is poor or developing. The height of absurdity is Qatar: it gets the
preference too, although per capita it is the world’s
richest country.
When we twist global trade rules so arbitrarily,
imagine how it represents Canadian values.
Foreigners might wonder: Are Canadians cruel or
are they fools? Cruel, because we give a preference
intended for the poor to the rich, or fools, for handing rich countries unnaturally low tariffs to clobber our industries? Not only do Canada’s random
actions misrepresent Canadian values, whether
among leftist bleeding hearts or rightist free traders,
but they also damage our prosperity and economy.
Corporations Law. A more extreme example
of exceptionalism departing from Canadian values
is in the morally undisputed area of corruption.
Corruption is bad. Countries that coddle corruption are bad. Yet Canada deliberately maintains
the loosest corruption laws of any developed
country.
A decade ago, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development advanced a treaty,
called the Anti-Bribery Convention, which aimed
to criminalize the giving of bribes to foreign public
officials. Canada signed on and passed a law to
fulfil the Anti-Bribery Convention’s purpose. A self­congratulatory press release at the time quotes justice minister Anne McLellan touting Canada as “a
constant supporter of international anti-­corruption
efforts.”
That was, and remains,
deeply untrue. Far from targeting international corruption,
Canada’s law criminalizes only
corruption in Canada. Injecting
accuracy where its own minister
would not, the Department of
Justice writes that “Canada has
jurisdiction over the bribery of
foreign public officials when
the offence is committed in
whole or in part in its territory.”
Thus if a Canadian corporation
passes cash-stuffed envelopes in
Caracas and Harare, rather than
Calgary and Halifax, it is allowed.
None of the other 29 OECD
countries has this loophole and,
despite mighty complaints from
abroad, Canada cravenly refuses
to close it.
In fact, Canada is now arguably the “leading” advanced
country in which to base a corrupt international business.
In 2007, the same year that
the United States prosecuted
67 violations of the Anti-Bribery
Convention, Canada prosecuted
only one. By giving Canadian
firms a loophole in international
bribery rules, Ottawa gives them
an incentive to perfect skills in
giving baksheesh rather than
skills for real competitiveness. Neither the right nor
the left can possibly consider this a long-run strategy for Canada’s prosperity.
Health Law. While it is bad enough that
Canadian exceptionalism costs this country money,
taken a bit further, it can kill. When the SARS epidemic hit Toronto and claimed 44 lives in 2003,
residents were stunned that the World Health
Organization recommended not travelling to their
city. Although SARS affected dozens of countries,
only two drew WHO’s wrath: China, because the
apparatchiks in Beijing would not provide information on the epidemic’s spread, and Canada, because
the bureaucrats in Ottawa could not provide that
information. When WHO asked about Toronto’s
epidemic, an epic cat fight erupted between federal
and provincial officials over the answer. Left hanging, WHO had no option but to do the prudent thing
and isolate Toronto—a decision that embarrassed
Canada and cost it more than a billion dollars.
You might think that this humbling experience
would have taught Ottawa a lesson about playing well with international organizations, but you
would be wrong. WHO learned during SARS that
it needed a stronger commitment from governments to disclose information on epidemics, before
they become globally threatening. More than
Literary Review of Canada
190 countries agreed and, in 2007, WHO’s revised
International Health Regulations came into force.
These regulations oblige national governments—
meaning Ottawa, not the provinces—to share epidemiological information during outbreaks.
Yet Canada has done nothing to write WHO’s
new rules into Canadian law. Although the Harper
government passed a law to establish the new
Public Health Agency of Canada, it deliberately
kept the agency toothless. Canada’s auditor general
complains that without mandatory powers, PHAC
“relies on the goodwill of the provinces”—not
law—to obtain epidemic information in emergencies. Goodwill, of course, is what failed during
SARS. The auditor general also warns that PHAC
is “not assured of receiving timely, accurate and
complete information” in a future epidemic. Of the
ten provinces, PHAC has reached formal agreement with only one (Ontario) to share information
during an emergency—and even that agreement is
a failure because it is secret and not legally binding. Thus even as listeria-contaminated meat was
killing Canadians last year, Ottawa still refused
to tell Ontario which stores and restaurants were
affected.
More than any other example, epidemic preparedness shows how Canadian exceptionalism is a
knife pointed outward and inward simultaneously.
Senior WHO officials privately admit that Canada
is a country of concern, because without a national
agency having powers over
epidemiological information,
Canada could seed deadly infections in other countries before
officials become aware. WHO’s
fears are well founded, because
if Canada’s governments are too
secretive to share information on a comparatively
minor listeriosis outbreak, it is fanciful to think that
openness will characterize a larger emergency such
as an influenza pandemic, during which PHAC
expects “between 15 and 35 percent of Canadians
could become ill … and between 11,000 and 58,000
deaths could occur.” With the H1N1 virus certain
to reappear in the 2009 autumn influenza season,
perhaps in deadlier form, and our laws still not conforming to WHO’s wise direction, Canadians could
pay with their lives.
Human Rights Law. Up to this point, I have
stuck to politically neutral examples of Canadian
exceptionalism. Everyone loves money, and
nobody wants to die of a deadly pandemic, so these
issues raise few ideological hackles. But not everyone loves humans, or rather, not every human is
easy to love—there is Omar Khadr. Exceptionalism
in this territory is harder to evaluate because it
reflects ideological choices. Even so, there are clear
examples that reveal the pointlessness of Canada’s
human rights exceptionalism.
Consider the violation known as the enforced
disappearance of persons, which is basically stateorchestrated secret kidnapping. Security never
demands it, as governments can engage in lawful preventive detention or deportation without
shadowy disappearances. The only “advantage” in
disappearing persons is to ward off pesky lawyers
and to keep loved ones in confusion and terror—a
handy trick if the government intends to torture or
assassinate a person, as military dictatorships in
Argentina, Brazil and Chile did, and as the United
States has done in undisclosed CIA “dark sites” in
recent years.
You might think that Canada, which, under both
left- and right-wing governments has nurtured a
global reputation as a human rights defender, could
not move quickly enough to sign a treaty against
enforced disappearances. But again, you would
be wrong. The UN’s International Convention
for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance has been open for signatures since
2007, and so far 81 countries have signed. The
Harper government refuses to sign, although it
assured the UN General Assembly that Canada was
“pleased to support” the treaty. In short, our government lied and reneged.
Currently, a disturbingly possible reason for
Canada not signing the enforced disappearance
treaty is that Canada is committing enforced disappearances. In Afghanistan, the Canadian Forces
detain persons secretly, without criminal charges,
without notice to their families and without
recourse to law. When lawyers asked General Rick
Hillier for access to these detainees, he refused. A
few hundred detainees—the exact number is classified—have been transferred by the Canadian Forces
to the Afghan secret police this way, in full knowledge that those police torture. When a Canadian
Foreign Affairs official visited some transferred
detainees in the Afghan prison in November 2007,
he found not only allegations of torture, but the
torture implements themselves:
When asked about his interrogation the
detainee came forward with an allegation of
abuse … He alleged that during the [censored]
standing in the world. I could outline more negative
examples—Canada’s directionless foreign aid, its
contempt for global climate change initiatives and
its densely layered disincentives to foreign investment—or acknowledge some positive examples—
the landmines treaty, or certain aspects of Canada’s
mission in Afghanistan. There is no need, because
they do not change this central point: Canada’s
foreign and trade policies are so irrational as to
violate the global rules even when we are victims
of the violation.
Fixing this situation—as is only wise—requires
major improvements to the low quality of Canada’s
foreign and trade policy establishment.
Most importantly, Canada needs serious ministers in the foreign and trade portfolios. Pearson
was secretary of state for external affairs for nine
unbroken years—a tenure instrumental to his and
Canada’s success. Yet in the last decade, Canada
has had five trade ministers and seven foreign
ministers. You have to go back to 1989 in the United
States to count a total of seven secretaries of state.
Allies and enemies who see Canada swapping its
top representatives even more often than Japan
changes prime ministers can only conclude that
Canadian diplomacy is not serious—and they will
walk all over us.
Intellect and dedication also matter. Pearson
was an Oxford-educated university professor with a
hyperactive work ethic. If finding a comparable candidate requires the prime minister bypassing elected members
of Parliament to appoint an outsider by way of the Senate, that
is a lesser evil than entrusting
a diffident poseur like Maxime
Bernier with the job of picturing
Canada to the world.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and
International Trade also needs a near-complete
makeover to make it less picayune and more
insightful about the world. As the Maher Arar
inquiry so pointedly illustrated, even the most
senior and worldly-seeming Canadian diplomats
can be ignorant of obvious realities. Recall Franco
Pillarella, formerly DFAIT’s human rights chief and
ambassador to Syria during Arar’s ordeal, answering
no when asked if he was aware of “serious human
rights abuses … being committed” in that country.
His consul, Leo Martel, testified to doing “le maximum et plus” for Arar, but also admitted ignorance
of public reports concerning Syria’s human rights
record. Many DFAIT officials lacked the insight to
perceive and act on the foreign realities ensnaring
Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, Muayyed
Nureddin—and now Abousfian Abdelrazik. (How
odd that the same DFAIT bureaucracy which was so
incapable of helping these Muslim men swung into
high action when the victims were Brahmins such
as Robert Fowler or Louis Guay.)
One wants not to ascribe this pattern to intentional racism in DFAIT, so one requires an alternative hypothesis. Mine is that DFAIT failed on
these and unrelated challenges (so, not simply
racism) because it is actually quite naive, and lacks
a culture with empathic imagination for foreign
persons or foreign realities—a sine qua non of good
diplomacy. Currently, DFAIT’s senior ranks are a
monoculture of the scions of pure laine Canadian
families of European descent, so how surprising is it that Canadian diplomacy is complaisant
and Eurocentric in outlook?1 Even the Canadian
Space Agency now hires more “aliens,” of the visible minority kind, than xenophobic DFAIT. A
large-scale effort to employ more minorities or
Canada’s foreign and trade policies are
so irrational as to violate the global rules
even when we are victims of the violation.
June 2009
interrogation, [censored] individuals held
him to the ground [censored] while the other
[censored] beating him with electrical wires
and rubber hose. He indicated a spot on the
ground in the room we were interviewing in
as the place where he was held down. He then
pointed to a chair and stated the implements
he had been struck with were underneath
it. Under the chair, we found a large piece
of braided electrical wire as well as a rubber
hose. He then showed us a bruise (approx.
4 inches long) on his back that could possibly
be the result of a blow.
The federal court now notes several instances
where detainees were apparently tortured or went
“missing.”
Seizing persons and disappearing them to the
purveyors of torture is the sort of conduct one
associates with the United States; no wonder
Washington rejects the enforced disappearance
treaty. But love or hate Washington’s choices,
America is more honest than Canada, because it
never pretended to have a great commitment to
human rights law. For the U.S., rejection works—
the world has low expectations, and American
power makes for distinction in other ways—but for
a country otherwise as unadorned as Canada, faith
toward certain national ideals is its identity and
branding. Stripped of its human rights reputation,
Canada is like Switzerland without neutrality, Italy
without fashion or Tanzania without safaris.
Belonging Again
I have outlined four completely different examples
of pointless Canadian refusal to go along with
the global rules—so pointless that the outcome is
actually to diminish Canadians’ wealth, health and
New at UTP
Warming Up to the Cold War
Canada and the United States’ Coalition of the Willing,
from Hiroshima to Korea
by Robert Teigrob
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Canadian reactions to the myriad “emergencies” of the
early Cold War period....The author has done us a great
service in packing so much provocative analysis into
such an accessible book.’
Robert Wright, Trent University
9780802096159 / $24.95
Contemporary Canadian Federalism
Foundations, Traditions, Institutions
Edited by Alain-G. Gagnon
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9780802095336 / $37.95
Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie
A Historian’s Journey through Public Memory
by Ronald Rudin
‘Remembering and Forgetting in “Acadie” is more than a
work of history – in a sense it is like a documentary film
where the participants do much of the talking, revealing
multiple perspectives to the reader.’
Greg Marquis, University of New Brunswick
9780802096579 / $35.00
Racism in the Canadian University
Demanding Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity
Edited by Frances Henry and Carol Tator
‘Racism in the Canadian University exposes and
critiques the prevalence of institutional racism in
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of its existence.’
Joy Mighty, Queen’s University
9780802096777 / $24.95
New in paperback
Razing Africville
A Geography of Racism
by Jennifer J. Nelson
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milestone in the rehabilitation of the memory and the
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Note
1 A glance at DFAIT’s organizational chart, available
on its website at <www.international.gc.ca> (under
“About the Department”), shows an apparent dearth
of non-European surnames among DFAIT’s senior
officials. Knowing most of those officials, I can confirm
this is the case.
Moving?
Don’t leave
behind!
us
George Elliott Clarke, University of Toronto
9781442610286 / $24.95
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recent immigrants and to make DFAIT’s culture
more heterogeneous, as other outward-facing
agencies have done (e.g., the Immigration and
Refugee Board, Passport Canada), would go a
long way toward giving it the imagination and
flexible Weltanschauung it now lacks. Obviously,
a diplomatic corps that can better understand
foreigners and better explain Canadian actions
to them will better advance Canada’s political
and economic interests abroad.
While it is a subtle point, Canada also needs
a civil society that is less captured by government. Some of my fellow academics, particularly in schools of government or international
affairs, fear criticizing the emperor’s wardrobe
too vigorously because support from government agencies might dry up. Self-censorship
also stymies those Canadian non-governmental
organizations whose core budgets depend on
government grants; they should really be called
GOs, but calling them so is to hint they are
unnecessary. The practice, firmly established
in DFAIT, of hand-picking scholars and NGOs
for patronage is highly dangerous, for just when
Canada’s diplomatic or trade interests may call
for les vérités qui dérangent, the temptation is
greatest to solicit les mensonges qui arrangent
from a sycophantic gallery. A wise federal government would recognize this fact and dispense
academic funding only through the arm’s-length
research councils, would cap Ottawa’s largesse
to NGOs and would reform the tax laws so that
a larger charitable sector financed by private
benefactors could fill the void. These changes
would favour neither the right nor the left, and
would create a more vibrant brain trust of truly
non-governmental analysts to impose accountability and, especially, purpose on Canada’s
lackluster foreign and trade policy.
If Canada is a magnificent country, which it is,
then it should look itself in the mirror and fearlessly examine the evidence of its conduct in the
world. Currently, that evidence teaches that
the high-functioning diplomacy of Pearson’s era
is a thing of the past, to the shocking extent that
Canada lets slip even those international obligations that economically and socially benefit
Canadians. Self-neglect is our clearest warning
that Canada’s global outlook is misguided. We
can take the warning and do what is best for
ourselves and others, or we can wait for a meeting with karma to announce that Canada has
chosen a wrong road.
Literary Review of Canada