The Coquitlam Confucius Institute is a pretext for “good will”

In an effort to eliminate “confusion” the Coquitlam Confucius Institute is now rebranding after dropping the name of China’s most famous philosopher.[1] Meanwhile, in another shell game, it is no longer affiliated with Hanban, a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education but will be headquartered in Guangzhou at the South China Normal University in a so-called sister-to-sister relationship with School District 43. 

This is all sleight-of-hand. Consider the front page headlines from the Globe and Mail which raise specific concerns, as SD43 applies white-wash. [2] Children celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Confucius Institute in Coquitlam can be found in a YouTube video all synchronized and pumping their fists in the air while reciting “I am proud. I am Chinese”, lines from a patriotic poem which also praises the “five-star red flag” as well as the spirit of the Communist revolution.

SD43 Superintendent Patricia Gartland has also long claimed that Confucius Institute teachers are sourced within Canada and have undergraduate degrees or more.  But upon investigating LinkedIn accounts the Globe and Mail determined that “at least two instructors worked as teachers in mainland China shortly before beginning work for the Coquitlam Institute, which says it only uses local staff.”

On top of this there have been problems with educational materials in the form of textbooks from China which depicted Taiwan as a province and Tiananmen Square as sanitized.  Clearly SD43 has been less than truthful about the China’s influence, and Gartland and our Trustees should be held accountable.

But what is the true cost of doing business with Beijing? SD43 sees it as a boon with about 10 percent of its budget paid for by fees from overseas Chinese students, on average twice the rate of other school districts in the province.  Lest we forget, however, about the over 5,000 British Columbians who have died from overdoses of illicit fentanyl which derives from China. In today’s postcolonial world, it’s likely considered payback for that country’s national humiliation following the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century.

If we look at the controversy surrounding Huawei, Global News has reported on the link between that company’s sudden rise and the bankruptcy of Nortel, Canada’s telecommunications gem.[3]  Too interested in profit margins, Nortel failed to protect its own research and development as China-based military hackers downloaded and stole from executive accounts.  The Globe and Mail has also reported that listening devices were found in the former Nortel building walls.  Perhaps SD43 would consider this sort of information  as beyond its purview.

Myopia prevails at SD43. Speech is not free in China.  It’s a police state with internet firewalls, censorship in overdrive, intrusive facial recognition technology, and a pervasive social credit system to regulate its people.  There is no “public” in mainland China, a concept which suggests “openness” – something President Xi sees as a political enemy.  It also has an aggressive international agenda which should be clear to all.  In other words, the Coquitlam Confucius Institute is just a pretext for Chinese Communist Party “good will”.

Confused?  Beijing certainly is not – though it appears SD43 is muddled about which side of the Pacific Ocean it is meant to serve: China and its despotism, or Canada and its democracy? I know which I prefer.

 

 

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[1] “China has no influence on schools, say trustees, as they double down on Confucius Institute”, Tri-City News online, Wednesday October 14, 2020.

[2] “Beijing uses B.C. schools to push agenda”, The Globe and Mail, Thursday October 15, 2020.

[3] “Inside the Chinese military attack on Nortel”, Global News online August 25, 2020.

On Conservatives, Roman History and the "Gothic balance"

Recently Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail published an interesting column: “Political scholars fiddle while Rome burns.”[1]  While there is some merit to the fact that Canada’s scholars are not playing as big a role in our national debates as they used to, I wish to draw attention to the “Roman” metaphor considered apart from the familiar allusion to Nero’s role during the great fire of AD 64. It is in fact Canada’s Conservative Party, once aided by  Tom Flanagan (since fallen from public grace) that has pushed the references to Roman history; any number of Professor Flanagan’s Globe and Mail op-ed contributions drew examples from the Roman period. But are Conservative Party principles consistent with Roman history?

A reading of the philosopher- historian R.G. Collingwood would imply some consistency but is not flattering. He explains in The New Leviathan: “although the word ‘legislation’ is one we owe to the Romans, the Romans did not clearly distinguish in their own minds between what we call legislation and the enactment of an executive decree.”[2]  This is clearly the problem with the Harper’s very troubling use of numerous “omnibus bills” (amounting to hundreds of pages in length each) which mask the executive as the legislative.   Another significant historical parallel are the Enabling Acts, beginning in Weimar Germany in October 1923, which gave Cabinet the power to “enact such measures as it deems advisable and urgent in the financial, economic and social spheres.”[3]  Does the reasoning not sound familiar?  Germany had previously engaged in four years of trench warfare and was at the time enduring hyper-inflation.  In a recent statement the incoming Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, described recovery from the 2008-09 financial crises in excessive terms as “post-war reconstruction.”  For the “Harper Government” in other words, history implies a Roman legacy of executive decrees – or war.

Another thing the Romans gave us was the rule of law, which by inversion meant that everyone is equal before the law.[4]  However, this central principle suggests that Conservative Party thinking is not in agreement with Roman history.  In Canada everyone is equal before the law, except for the “Harper Government” which rules as if there is no reciprocity in political life, because expanding one’s power is considered more important than Parliament.  A corollary of this is Harper’s definitive refutation of Friedrich Engels (the close collaborator with Karl Marx) who famously claimed that “the state is not ‘abolished,’ it withers away.”[5] Harper’s anti-statism is only party pretension, and we can see that in his current interference with the CBC, which should be at arm’s length from the government of the day.  In Canada the state shall not wither away, because the Conservative Party has now become the country’s ruling class.[6]

The Romans also gave us the secret ballot, and here is James Harrington on the topic in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), aided by his reading of Cicero:  “the tablet or ballot of the people of Rome (who gave their votes by throwing tablets or little pieces of wood secretly into urns marked for the negative or affirmative) was a welcome constitution of the people, as that which, not impairing the assurance of their brows, increased the freedom of their judgement.”[7]  Given the implicit role of some unknown people in the Conservative Party behind the “robo-call” affair, and given the continuous brow-beating of negative party advertising, one wonders how “free” the vote is in Canada.  Again, the Conservative Party does not compare well with this Roman example.

Finally, it is worth noting that the Parliament buildings in Ottawa are not “Roman,” or “neo-classical” (as in Washington, which definitely has a more than a touch of Versailles to it); rather, they are neo-Gothic, modelled after the Houses of Parliament in England, which burned to the ground in 1834, after standing for 800 years, only to be rebuilt.  And keep in mind that the average Gothic window has only three points to it, likely inspired by St. Augustine’s Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, a theme that I have developed elsewhere in this blog.  This three-fold nature is also known as the “Gothic balance”: there is an implicit sense of mediation, reconciliation and reciprocity – in other words, a notion of “the middle”.[8]  These are not intrinsically Roman values (despite the moderating influences of Cicero and Horace); they are Medieval ones, aided as I have said elsewhere by St. Augustine and, of course, Aristotle.  By preoccupying themselves with various aspects of Roman history, the Conservative Party may have missed the boat on essential Canadian history and culture.  In other words, under Harper there is no sense of “Gothic balance”. This essay is an attempt to clarify a very un-Canadian problem.

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[1] The Globe and Mail, Tuesday June 4, 2013, p. A11.

[2] R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism. Revised ed. by David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) p. 217.

[3] Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), p. 25.

[4] Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 329,331.

[5] Friedrich Engels, Anti-dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, tr. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, nd [Nabu Press, USA, Reprint, 2010]), p. 315 (Part 3, Chapter 2).

[6] See R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 277.

[7] James Harrington, “Oceana” in Ideal Commonwealths, Intro. Henry Morley (New York: The Colonial Press, 1901), p. 205.  Harrington first published The Commonwealth of Oceana in 1656.

[8] For “Gothic balance” see Harrington in Ibid., pp. 216 or 217.

"Free" trade with China?

Thanks to columnist Lawrence Martin for his column: “Why no debate of the China investment pact?” (Globe and Mail, October 23)  The old problem is that the Canadian mentality is still encumbered by colonialism: first Britain, then the USA, next China.  The other problem pertains to the nature of Harper’s rule.  If we look to Karl Popper on Plato, Canadians should be asking themselves the question: “What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead?”[1]  But Canadians are not fond of asking difficult questions.  Neither is the Globe.

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[1]  Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (New York: Routledge Classics, 2011), p. 117.

George Grant on Stephen Harper

Mr. Trudeau [Mr. Harper] has consistently used the politics of confrontation and contempt against anybody who opposed him and that has done great harm to this country in the last decade.  It has been repugnant to hear Mr. Trudeau [Mr. Harper] to treat such men as Mr. Douglas and Mr. Stanfield and Mr. Ryan with shallow contempt over the years.  One of the difficult truths about politics is that one cannot fight such means by employing the same means.  Mr. Clark was surely right not to respond when Mr. Trudeau [Mr. Harper] tried to talk him down contemptuously. …

Source:  George Grant to Richard Doyle, Editor of the Globe and Mail, 15 May 1979 in George Grant, Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp.304,305.  Grant’s original comments pertain to the federal election of 22 May 1979.