Paddling with my good friend Craig Harris yesterday down the western shore of Penelakut Island, I was haunted by an inkling of what it must have been like for a First Nations inhabitant, gliding through the same waters before the colonial era.
Much as I am enthralled by nature, I realized that I am but a tourist on the region’s land and sea; I can only imagine the deeper connection of a hunter-gatherer society, whose people ‘lived off the land’ and whose spiritual awareness was as deeply rooted and binding as that of the surrounding forests.
Before going any farther, an explanatory note: I am a Canadian of European ancestry. The influences that define me have been shaped and interpreted in that context and from that perspective. I do not want to be anything or anyone else. I do want to accept the challenges European social, scientific, and economic development and innovation have led to. The late-20th and 21st centuries have been a necessary time of reckoning. We either take responsibility for creating a better, more inclusive, more sustainable world, or accept the consequences and blame for our selfish, shortsighted decisions and behaviour.
It was from that perspective that I asked: What knowledge could we have gained from the indigenous peoples of North America and the world if only we had restrained our colonial incursions and taken time to learn from them what we had unlearned through centuries of abstracting technological and cultural development that had distanced us from the ‘natural world’?
That haunting question leapfrogged me into the present day, and a more timely consideration. What might we learn through the process of Truth and Reconciliation, as we honour the survivors of our colonial depredations and build a new relationship with them? That we are attempting such a feat makes me hopeful; if we can actually succeed, I will be truly proud as a Canadian of European ancestry.
It’s the dawn Of a new day In an old era In the same old way.
It’s the cycle renewed Again and again without end A ceaseless iteration Of nation against nation Of despair strangling hope Shoots of hatred Tendrils of fear A choking underbrush Infesting our gardens of Eden
Who was it said We must kill, and kill, and kill Until all are dead Who would become invasive species? Whose god roared that battle cry Under the glaring sun Denying even the possibility of innocence Declaring even the unborn ‘Enemies of our state’ Infected with murderous intent? Vermin only fit to hate?
Bloodlines. Worm like veins Through our sacred soils Rooting the detritus That defines us. Ancient scrolls And chiseled texts Implacable as tombstones.
North Cowichan Council made the right decision last night when, by a 4-3 margin, it decided to uphold the principles of the municipality’s new Official Community Plan.
But the tenor of the debate left me feeling we’re not yet at the point where we can say it made this crucial decision for all the right reasons.
Municipal politics have never been more complex or important than they are today, and the 2022 update of our OCP is a case in point. As a document that will guide decision-making for the next decade or so it will have to be read and re-read for its full reach and implications to be appreciated.
It speaks to environmental issues from a global-to-local perspective; provides guidance on essentially humanitarian issues like homelessness; looks to sustainability and stability by focusing on a ‘regenerative economy’.
If you wanted to design a course in principled decision-making, it would make a pretty good syllabus. Perhaps the day will come when historians look at documents like our OCP and say, ‘It was ahead of its time.’ Hopefully the survivors of the environmental and social degradations we are now witnessing won’t end up saying, ‘It was too late in coming.’
Councillor Bruce Findlay, whose motion to offer a two-year ‘amnesty’ to property owners whose land was removed from the municipality’s Urban Containment Boundaries, said he was acting on behalf of the people who elected him.
That’s old school any way you look at it. The election’s over, councillors are now tasked with thinking and acting on behalf of all the citizens of North Cowichan, and (here’s the rub) to do that job properly in the 21st Century they have to place their decision-making in a global, humanitarian context.
I voted for a council that takes all that into consideration when it approves zoning, influences community policing, builds a road.
Note: I am a board member of the Chemainus Residents Association, and attended the Feb. 1, 2023 meeting of North Cowichan Council from that perspective.
Can political debate can be summed up in the words ‘F**k you!’?
Saw a pickup parked outside a house in Chemainus the other day, behind it a hedge with a Canadian flag draped over it like a banner. In the window of the pickup, a sign said ‘Fuck Trudeau’.
Like most polite Canadians I have tried to ignore this bit of crass, childish incivility, but my conscience keeps telling me: “Say something! When democratic values are being undermined by the behaviour of a radical minority, we have to speak up. Our silence gives their claims credence.”
Let me begin by saying, I can’t put a sign up in my window saying “Hooray for Trudeau” I was deeply disappointed – felt cheated actually – when he didn’t move to implement proportional representation after having promised to do so before he became Prime Minister in 2015. His party’s progress on issues like climate change, poverty and homelessness, to name a few, has been ineffective… and so on.
But he’s a duly elected MP and leader of the party that has formed our government. So when I direct an epithet or slogan his way, I have to remember I’m not addressing him, personally; I’m talking to the Canadians who continue to support him as Prime Minister, and in fact the vast majority of Canadians who believe in democratic institutions and abhor the possible alternatives.
Let me be blunt. If I say ‘Fuck Trudeau!, I’m saying ‘Fuck Canada!’
Canada isn’t a place; it’s an idea. The fundamental concepts we share are a set of values and beliefs about how we make decisions and settle disagreements. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a democracy. And, of course, civil disobedience is a valued part of the political spectrum. It’s at the far end of the spectrum, however, and descends into darker and darker shades of grey when it becomes uncivil, disorderly, disruptive, threatening.
The irony here is, those who claim to be the heroes of the Freedom Convoy can just as easily be tagged the harbingers of repression. When a minority – supported largely by funds from outside our borders, and many of whose members espouse ideas that are repugnant to most Canadians – impedes the day to day functioning of a city, governments at all levels have to enact measures that are outside our democratic norms.
The same is true when a group threatens to disrupt emergency response services throughout the country, if charges are laid against one of its members and a court of law decides those charges warrant prosecution. As with government, our judicial system is not a thing; it’s a legal code we agree to as citizens, and any actions aimed at thwarting the enactment of our laws brings us closer to a state of lawlessness.
Freedom is the obverse side of a coin whose main currency is ‘responsibility’. I am responsible for the well being and safety of my community and the community of communities called Canada. I am responsible for abiding by and upholding the standards that make Canada a peaceful, privileged nation.
I’m not alone when I say the behaviour of some Freedom Convoy supporters has diminished the pride the rest of us can take in Canada’s flag. Most of us don’t take pride in a country where the level of political debate can be summed up in the words ‘Fuck you!’
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On August 2, 2021 a March for the Children, organized by the Penelakut Tribe, made its way from the BC Ferry terminal in Chemainus, through the town up to Water Wheel Park. An estimated 1,500 people joined in the commemoration.
Penelakut Island is the historical site of the Kuper Island Industrial School, a site of the Canadian genocide of Indigenous people. The march was for the children, healing, and reconciliation.
Saw a picture the other day of an Albertan wearing a baseball cap with Let’s Make Canada Great Again emblazoned on its peak.
I suppose it’s not surprising that a Trumpian brand of nationalism is spreading north of the 49th. There will always be a segment of the population drawn to what is essentially a fascist ethic. It’s sad to see, though. Our saving grace – for the time being – is we don’t have an egoistic personality of Trumpian MAGAtude to incite Canadian worshipers to the kind of nonsense exhibited in Washington DC recently.
Before the madness takes root here, we should consider what the historic ‘greatness’ this Albertan proclaims consists of, then compare it to a version of greatness that isn’t a lie.
When, in the mid-16th Century, Jacques Cartier ‘claimed’ the territories he had explored for King Francis I of France, he was ignoring the fact that the land was already occupied. ‘Ignored’ doesn’t quite describe the Eurocentric hubris and nascent French nationalism of that historic moment. The fact that the land was already inhabited simply didn’t occur to him, which is tantamount to saying the original ‘owners’ were not really considered people.
That to me is not a mark of greatness; it’s a mindset that resulted in despicable acts of genocide by colonizing nations the world over. ‘Greatness’ today – true greatness – will be the successful reconciliation, and genuine recognition that we have much to learn from and share with resurgent First Nations across this land.
The name ‘Canada’ is a Europeanization of the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning village. It’s a crowning irony that the very hunting-gathering cultures our Canadian ancestors almost destroyed, and which still face pervasive discrimination to this day, gave our country its name.
Having confiscated huge swaths of ‘free land’, including approximately 25 million square kilometres in North America, the world’s colonizing nations prospered during the transformation of the global economy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. And the economic ‘greatness’ of this continent and the European homelands of its settlers, was in large part due to the vast resources that could be extracted, grown and eventually manufactured here.
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But plundering, not living in harmony with or even sustainably managing the land, was the order of the day. As the industrial and consumerist revolutions took off, fuelled by an insatiable greed for more and more ‘raw materials’ clawed and hacked form the motherlodes appropriated in North America and all over the colonized world, the toll on the environment became increasingly ominous.
So the ‘greatness’ of North America has been based in part on the economic equivalent of an environmental reverse mortgage taken out on our continent… oh, I forgot, it wan’t really our continent to begin with, so in truth it’s a reverse mortgage taken out of other peoples’ land. Any way you look at it, the ‘greatness’ we’re so proud of in that equation is unsustainable, and to think of making ourselves ‘great again’ through that kind of rapacious appropriation doesn’t take us to paradise. It’s a fool’s dream.
So what could that misguided Albertan possibly aspire to as a form of ‘greatness’ not morally corrupt and environmentally disastrous? What would give us true pride?
Never in the long record of evolution has there been species that could consider its actions and circumstances, look into the future, and consciously proclaim: ‘What we have done and are doing is neither morally acceptable nor sustainable.’ Humanity is the first life-form that can deliberately adopt an ethic that goes beyond the cruelty and ultimately self-destructive impulses summed up in the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’, or more aptly in the 21st Century, ‘bloating of the richest’.
Our only chance is to adopt lifestyles and technologies that allow us to live in harmony with each other and the environment, and which prove what intelligent, morally upright creatures we really are. That’s something no species or civilization has ever attempted, and – as with every historic challenge – it requires courage, vision and generosity of its champions, the true hallmarks of greatness.
