To be clear, this pattern of lacking leadership is not limited to Indigenous issues. Nor is it limited to a single leader or particular political party. In the same week Canada learned about the 215 children in Kamloops, we saw members of Parliament sit mute and accept the idea of a unilateral amendment to our Constitution rather than debate critical constitutional and legal questions about the future of our federation. We have a crisis of leadership throughout our system, wherein political parties render their duly elected members impotent.[1]
Showing posts with label Justin Trudeau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justin Trudeau. Show all posts
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
“21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act.” A Review in light of Wet’suwet’sen voices.
As national
bestsellers go, Bob Joseph’s book, 21 Things
You May Not Know About the Indian Act, provides valuable context to the
history of our First Nations Peoples, particularly given the current Coastal
Gaslink pipeline debate – or crisis, rather - that began in northern British
Columbia, and which has since spread to other parts of the country with a
number of strategic rail and road blockades.
Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs oppose the project, as they lay claim to
considerable swaths of unceded land through which the proposed pipeline will
run, while most elected Band Councils – which are products of the Indian Act – support it.
21 Things, which should be read by all concerned
Canadians, methodically details how the Indian
Act (1876), created when Sir John A. McDonald was Prime Minister, made
Indigenous Peoples (in variation of an oft-repeated phrase) “wards of the
state.”[1]
Moreover, the subsequent legacy of the Residential school system robbed
generations of youth of their family elders, ancestral values and cultural
identity, confronted as they were by physical and sexual abuse at the hands of so-called
denominational educators - and by high rates of death, especially from TB.
Echoing the
conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the words of Beverly
McLaughlin, former Chief of the Supreme Court of Canada, Joseph – like many
today – refers to this sordid episode in Canadian history as “cultural
genocide”, a term I prefer not to use.
The important memoir, The
Education of Augie Merasty, for example, which gives a child’s eye view of
the Residential school system, does not compare to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, or Elie Wiesel’s terror-fraught
Night, and here I am in accord with
Merasty’s own co-writer and editor, David Carpenter, who concedes “Augie might
differ with me on this”.[2] The sheer industrial scale and deliberate mass
destruction of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazi’s who were either
gassed, incinerated - and sometimes shot, when considered cost-effective - or
turned into soap products, suggests that a “genocidal” approximation of these two
different historical experiences – Jewish and Indigenous – is not quite tenable.
So what do
we call the Indigenous experience in Canada since the Indian Act? An “historical
wrong” is a generic term Justin Trudeau sometimes uses. A system of “apartheid” is perhaps a more
valuable and historically generalizable designation employed by Tommy Douglas
when he was Premier of Saskatchewan.[3]
A form of apartheid persists even today, and we can make comparisons between
the Indigenous and the Palestinians, as each are in their own ways “a landless
people", or deterritorialized, to use the term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, since popularized by legions of admirers of the two postmodern French
thinkers who wrote a number of seminal works together – one as a philosopher
and the other as psychiatrist.[4]
When
looking at the greater nineteenth century context, “historical error” - or, in
more modern parlance: “fake history” - is a term which apparently has its
rightful place according to another French thinker Ernest Renan in his classic
essay of 1882, “What is a nation?”[5] He explains that “historical enquiry brings
back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origins of all
political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most
beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally …”[6]
Renan insists that “the act of forgetting … is an essential factor in the
creation of a nation” and he adds that “progress in historical studies often
constitutes a danger for nationality.”[7]
In other words,
Renan might be construed as someone who – at first blush - considers Indigenous
studies at our schools and universities a threat to Canadian nationhood, but
his notion of such is that it presupposes “all individuals have many things in
common.”[8] He is not a racialized thinker: in fact, he
considers Europe to be a thorough mix of apparent “races”, and he argues that “the
primordial right of races is narrow and full of danger for true progress”.[9]
Renan also goes on to anticipate a
“European confederation” in the future.[10] But, even more significantly, Renan promotes
the right of national self-determination as first proclaimed by the French Revolution
with an eye to revisiting Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1871. “A nation
is a soul, a spiritual principle …. A nation is therefore a vast solidarity.”[11]
More famously, as he puts it, a nation is “a daily plebiscite.”[12]
Even though
the right to vote in the nineteenth century was restricted (only white men and
those who held property or who payed taxes were eligible), the electoral
principle - ostensibly a European construct, one could argue - was introduced
into the Indian Act, thus disrupting existing
traditional matriarchies. Not only were
Indigenous lands in a number of provinces reduced to postage stamp-size
reserves, the Indian Act specified
that “First Nations must have an election every two years.”[13]
This electoral principle (and Canadian Confederation) occurred – not by chance,
I would argue - along with Benjamin Disraeli’s Second Reform Act of 1867 which
enfranchised large numbers of the working classes in both England and Wales.
Tragically, however, the right to vote beyond the reserve was not extended to all
Indigenous Peoples until it was introduced by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker
in 1960, though Indigenous veterans of WWI were granted the vote in 1924.[14]
This
electoral principle is still at the nub of the Wet’suwet’sen debate. Band Chiefs, who have “status” according to
the Indian Act, are elected to a limited term and support the Coastal Gaslink
pipeline project. Hereditary Chiefs,
according to Bob Joseph, “have power passed down from one generation to the
next along blood lines or other cultural protocols” (though in the case of the
Wet’suwet’sen which of the two is not very clear), and they oppose the project
because it runs through their traditional territory.[15]
Josephs goes on to say – and this should be subject to further analysis - that
the Hereditary Chiefs are “similar to European royalty”.[16] Similar to European royalty when – in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries? Queen Victoria, as is
well-known, chose the location of Canada’s capital, Ottawa; she also chose the
name of New Westminster as the original capital of British Columbia, so she
participated in the colonial process on one level at least. She also enjoyed good relations with Benjamin
Disraeli, so her influence was likely by means of protocol and supine deference. Overall, the British Empire represented colonial rule in the name of its
monarch, which dates back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, also - and this is no
coincidence - the mainspring for the Crusades which followed.
Today’s
European royalty, however, are mere titular figures – constitutional symbols
that have no real authority outside of ceremony. The examples of Prince Harry and Meghan
Markle suggest that pomp and circumstance are no shield from the invasive
scrutiny of royals by the British popular press. In other words, the Wet’suwet’sen Hereditary
Chiefs who lay claim to an occupation of land that numbers in the thousands of
years appear to exercise a kind of power that exceeds that of European royalty today,
such that they can spark a national crisis – rather unlike Queen Elizabeth II
whose role is to stay above the fray of politics (but who is also by no means
marginalized).
European
democracy advanced hand in hand with science – in particular positivism, with
its focus on the observable, as found for example in Renan – in the nineteenth
and later in the twentieth centuries. Central to this was the expanded electoral
vote, which worked against hereditary influences in society mitigating the role
of the Crown. Today’s Supreme Court
of Canada, with support from the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
indicates that there must be “nation to nation” dialogue with the First Nations.
This brings us back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which indeed first
articulated such a relationship between the Indigenous and “settlers”, a lapse
in the longer tradition of British imperialism - later revived by the Industrial Revolution - following a costly Seven
Years’ War.[17] In other words, Canadians are being held to
account to an agreement when a monarchy, using its “soft power,” was apparently more inclined
to recognize other hereditary chiefs, that is, when the English Crown still had a measure of influence.
Most of us
in the modern world – with the exception of the Saudi royal family and perhaps Donald Trump's White House - have moved
on from the idea of hereditary power. Is
the idea of an unlimited tenure with actual authority, or the hereditary
chiefdom of the Wet’suwet’sen, consistent with Canadian democracy as we know it
today? Or am I imposing my own Western
values? Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
himself, a kind of Liberal Party hereditary chief, eldest son to Pierre Trudeau? These are questions we must ask ourselves as
we – Canadians and First Nations – work towards Reconciliation, and with that
in mind 21 Things is a good first
step.
[1]
Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know
About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous
Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam, BC: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018),
p. 60.
[2]
David Carpenter in Joseph Auguste Merasty (with David Carpenter), The Education of Augie Merasty: A
Residential School Memoir, ed. David Carpenter (Saskatchewan: University of
Regina Press, 2015), p. xxxiv.
[3]
Joseph, 21 Things, p. 45.
[4]
François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Intersecting Lives, tr.Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), p. 258.
[5]
Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? And Other
Political Writings, ed. and tr. M.F.N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018), p. 251.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid. The
full sentence reads “Now, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have
many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”
[12] See
Ibid., pp.
261, 262 Giglioli translates these key
words mundanely as “an everyday plebiscite.” Stefan Collini in The London Review of Books, points out
that Hobsbawm in his Nations and
Nationalism since 1780 offers a superior translation: “a nation is a daily
plebisicite.” In the original French: « L’existence d’une nation est (pardonnez-moi
cette métaphore) une plébiscite de tous les jours. » See Renan, Oeuvre Complètes de Ernest Renan, I, ed.
Henrietta Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, [nd]), pp. 904,903. See Stefan Collini , “The Enlightened Vote,” London Review of Books Vol 41, No. 24 (19 December 2019), p. 10.
Cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 7.
[13] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 109.
[14] Ibid., pp. 81, 82.
[17] For some text and discussion of the
Royal Proclamation of 1763 see Joseph, 21
Things, pp. 82, 83.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Montesquieu in Canada: Revisiting the “separation of powers”
In 1987 UBC
political scientist Philip Resnick published an interesting journal article:
“Montesquieu Revisited, or the Mixed Constitution and the Separation of Powers
in Canada”.[1] It was good to see a sophisticated
theoretical approach to Canadian politics, for once, though I would like to
offer some correction to his argument.
This post will not discuss at any length Resnick’s study of the idea of
a mixed constitution, the origins of which dates with Cicero; suffice it to say
it is less intriguing – and less persuasive. Instead we will focus on the
concept of the “separation of powers”, for which Montesquieu is indeed most famous,
in order to bring greater historical perspective to the SNC-Lavalin issue.
Overall,
there is agreement with Resnick that Montesquieu’s case for “moderation”[2]
as the path to political liberty is more characteristically Canadian than, say,
Locke, whose Huguenot-inspired resistance theory belongs to a tradition which
is far stronger in the USA.
We can point to aspects of official reaction to the Winnipeg General
Strike, the October Crisis, and, more recently, the G20 protests in Toronto
(while Stephen Harper was prime minister) as examples of a weak Lockean tradition. This is not to suggest, conversely (as
Resnick explores), that Hobbes prevails in Canada, though his political philosophy
plays a huge role in Stephen Harper’s thinking, a modern-day phenomenon, for
which there are few, if any, national antecedents.
Resnick
examines Montesquieu’s magisterial work The
Spirit of the Laws (1748) focusing on the celebrated discussion “Of the
Constitution of England” (Book XI, Chapter 6) as the source of inspiration for
Canada’s political order. Montesquieu
begins this particular chapter stating: “In each state there are three sorts of
powers: legislative power, executive power over things depending on the rights
of nations, and executive power over the
things depending on civil right.”[3]
He goes on to clarify that liberty
ceases to exist “when legislative power is united with a single person or in a
single body.”[4] Furthermore,
there is no liberty “if the power of judging is not separate from legislative
power and from executive power.”[5]
Resnick
places great emphasis on Chapter 6 as a political mirror to England, and from
there he makes a great leap to Canada. He offers no textual evidence of a
Canadian equivalent to Federalist 47 which mentions “the celebrated Montesquieu”.[6] American constitutionalists can also point to
Thomas Jefferson’s translation of Destutt de Tracy’s A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws
(1811).[7]
In other words, compared to the American constitutional experience, there
appears to be a dearth of references to Montesquieu in Canada, either in English
or French (as far as I am aware).[8]
Possibly a
more forthright approach to Montesquieu in the Canadian context would be to
identify his thinking in terms of a religious – as opposed to a strictly
political – framework, for The “Spirit”
of the Laws is an allusion to the continuing influence of Augustine, who is
mentioned in the text. More
significantly, Montesquieu’s ”trois
pouvoirs” (an oft-repeated phrase) is but another iteration of Augustine’s
Holy Trinity, which is why one admirer could refer to The Spirit of the Laws as “the Bible of all politicians.”[9] This religious dimension also helps explain
why Madison in Federalist 47 calls the separation of powers “the sacred maxim of free government”, but we
are getting ahead of ourselves.[10]
It is
important to point out that Montesquieu does not use the actual phrase séparation des pouvoirs and only uses
the word séparée once in Chapter 6. Furthermore, he uses the words puissance exécutrices, puissance législative and - distinctly – puissance de juger instead of pouvoir judiciare.[11] He also describes the power of judging as
becoming “invisible & nulle”
which suggests that it is the weakest link in the Trinity.[12]
This point is repeated, and it is worth noting (as quoted here in English):
“Among the three powers of which we have spoken that of judging is in some
fashion null.”[13]
In other words, there is some question in Montesquieu’s thinking as to whether the
judiciary had equal status with the legislative and executive powers.[14]
Moreover,
for all his devotion to Book XXI, Chapter 6, Resnick seems to ignore
subsequent Chapter 7, where Montesquieu speaks of the “distribution” of powers:
“The three powers are not distributed and cast on the model of the constitution
which we have mentioned; each instance shows a particular distribution of them
and each approximates political liberty accordingly.”[15]
Indeed, one may question whether Montesquieu intended a strict “separation” of
powers; rather, there appears to be an element of ‘balance’ (or the famous ‘checks
and balances’) in operation as the following two paragraphs below imply:
Here, therefore, is the fundamental
constitution of the government of which we are speaking. As its legislative body is composed of two
parts, the one will be chained to the other by their reciprocal faculty of
vetoing. The two will be bound by the
executive power, which will itself be bound by the legislative power.
The form of these three powers should be rest
or inaction. But as they are constrained
to move by the necessary motion of things, they will be forced to move in
concert. [16]
In other
words, the ‘balanced’ distribution of powers working “in concert” became – as understood in the USA - the ‘separation of powers’, and so Montesquieu became the first in a long line of prominent French thinkers to
be appropriated by American intellectuals. Madison’s Federalist 47 of
January 1788 codifies Montesquieu’s Trinity: “the preservation of liberty
requires that the three great departments of powers should be separate and
distinct.”[17] Note:
the phrase “separate and distinct” is repeated a number of times in Federalist
47. After being imported for the Constitutional purposes of the “thirteen colonies”, Montesquieu was likely then exported to affect the wording of France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
of August 1789 (Article 16): ”Any society in which the guarantee of rights
is not secured, or the separation of powers not determined, has no
constitution at all.”[18]
It is significant that, historically-speaking, Article 16 was regarded in its
own time as “somehow disconnected from the other articles of the Declaration.”[19]
So what is
Montesquieu’s influence in Canada? If
one looks to the British North America Act of 1867 we see the well-worn Trinity
of “Peace, Order and good Government”, the significance of which Resnick misses,
but does this reflect the ongoing influence of Augustine – or Montesquieu? Our Canadian Constitutional motto, such as it
is, corresponds to other Trinities, for example the American Declaration of
Independence’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the French
Revolution’s liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Given that these Trinities are still today prominent in their respective
Constitutions, Montesquieu might be considered the primary inspiration (which
is not to diminish the Christian subtext), yet – as Resnick and others point
out – significantly, the powers of the judiciary are not included in the BNA
Act.[20]
In other words, the judiciary was “invisible and null” (to borrow again from
Montesquieu) so Canada’s constitutional framework in 1867 was much like
Montesquieu’s understanding of England in the eighteenth century, taken
literally, as Resnick writes.[21]
Canada’s Supreme Court was formed in 1875, but it was by no means supreme: up
until 1949 appeal could always be made to the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council, which met in London, England. If our judiciary was separate from the other
two orders of government – it was separated, constitutionally-speaking, by the
Atlantic Ocean.
To sum up,
it seems difficult to speak of an explicit, textual tradition of a “separation
of powers” in Canadian Constitutional history: at best it was perpetuated by
the pervasive mantra of the Trinity. The
“spirit” of separation was implied by the unwritten factor which is to suggest
that, in Montesquieu’s original thinking, de
jure separation did not mean de facto
separation.[22] This may help to explain why - most recently -
the Liberals (not unlike other political parties in Canada) could employ
“department store” politics, appealing “to customers of all classes, doctrines
and social persuasions”, when faced with repercussions from the SNC-Lavalin
Affair: Justin Trudeau’s claim that he
was simply ’protecting jobs’ falls under this category.[23]
The prime minister’s argument is still consistent with Montesquieu’s original
notion of ‘balancing’ or ‘counter-balancing’ or even ‘distributing’ the orders
of government, which was informed by the unwritten constitution as examined in The Spirit of the Laws.
But the
English constitution has moved beyond its eighteenth-century mooring; moreover,
Canadians have since fallen sway to countervailing American constitutional
expressions. Those elements of Montesquieu that came to Canada, Resnick argues,
were “refracted through American lenses” (largely after 1949). [24]
He also argues - and this is widely acknowledged - that the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms of 1982 has changed everything, as now Canadians have a written
document which grants greater dignity to the judiciary, especially the Supreme
Court, which today more closely resembles its counterpart in the USA as the
final arbiter of law in the land.[25]
The matter of separation of powers - and consequently the rule of law and the power of the courts -
are much more doctrinaire these days, with the possible exception of Quebec
today, where the CAQ’s Bill 21, inspired by Rousseau’s ‘general will’ turns on
a notion of non-separation.
Overall,
however, Canadians have moved beyond any memories of political trinitarianism, thanks
to former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who introduced written
Constitutional principles enforced by a scrutinizing and independent “pouvoir de juger”. In other words, it is with certain irony that Justin
Trudeau’s greatest headache in the SNC-Lavalin Affair was perceived to be all
the more problematic – as it was his own father who, in 1982, did the most to
bring Montesquieu’s “separation” of powers (as understood in the USA) into the
Canadian fold than anyone else before him.
[1] Philip Resnick, “Montesquieu
Revisited, or the Mixed Constitution and the Separation of Powers in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/ Revue
canadienne de science politique, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar. 1987), 97-115. For more recent perspectives on Montesquieu
see also: Rebecca E. Kingston, ed. Montesquieu
and his legacy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). Kingston
teaches at the University of Toronto’s political science department. It’s worth noting that her edited book was
published in the United States – not Canada.
[2] “Men must not be led to extremes;
one should manage the means that nature gives us to guide them.” Cf. Montesquieu,
The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and tr.
Anne Cohler, Basia Miler, Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
190), Book VI, Chapter 12, p.
85. Again: “… men almost always
accommodate themselves better to middles than to extremities.” Book XXI,
Chapter 6, p. 166.
[6] James Madison, Federalist No. 47 in
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, The Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States: The
Principles of the American Government (New York, NY: Racehorse, 2016), p.
277.
[7]
See Jacob T. Levy, “Montesquieu’s Constitutional Legacies” in Kingston, ed. Montesquieu and his legacy, p. 136, n.
37.
[8] Readers
might be interested in Stephen L. Newman, “Free Speech and The Spirit of Laws in Canada and the United States: A Test of
Montesquieu’s Approach to Comparative Law” in Ibid., Ch. 11, pp. 221-236.
[9]
Aurelian Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous
Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 33.
This is an important and impressive work with fresh ideas on Montesquieu
and moderation from which I have drawn a number of salient points.
[10] Federalist No. 47, p. 282. Emphasis added.
[11] Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, p. 49. Craiutu makes this observation, and it is
rather evident when read in the original French.
[12] Montesquieu, De ‘Esprit des Lois, Tome 2,
ed. Irina Montreal (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1892 [Reprint]), p. 96.
See The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI,
Ch.6, p. 158.
[14] Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, p. 49.
[17] Federalist No. 47, p. 277.
[18]
Laura Masson and Tracey Rizzo, The French
Revolution: A Document Collection (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p.
104. Toute société dans laquelle la garantie
des droits n’est pas assurée, ni la séparation des pouvoirs déterminée, n’a
point de constitution.
[19] Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, p. 90.
[20] Resnick, “Montesquieu Revisited,” p.
110. See also: Peter McCormick, Supreme
at Last: The Evolution of the Supreme Court of Canada (Toronto: James
Lorimer, 2000), p. 2.
[21] Resnick, “Montesquieu Revisited”, p.
110.
[22] Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, p. 52.
[23] The metaphor of the “department
store” for political parties in was created by Joseph Harsch, an American., who
used it to compare their function in the USA with those in Britain. It was Frank Underhill who was the first to
apply the metaphor to Canadian politics.
See Frank H. Underhill, In Search
of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.
251-251.
[24] Resnick, “Montesquieu Revisited,” p.
111.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Trudeau’s blackface: further thoughts
Methinks
some Canadian media critics protest too much at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s
three occasions when he wore blackface or brownface, the latter (and most
recent) being in 2001, 18 years ago, while attending a party held at the elite
private school, West Pont Grey Academy, in Vancouver, where he taught. High School drama teachers enjoy centre stage
(his costume considered ‘outstanding’ at the time), though I doubt Mr. Trudeau
would ever have anticipated receiving such world-wide attention for this
particular episode.
Claims that
he lacks ethics, or is a racist or a fraud and should resign, or that we don’t
know the ‘real Trudeau’ are exaggerated.
Missed is the point that possibly, before he entered politics, he lacked
some insight into what being non-white was like, either in Canada, or in the even
world in general. When travelling the globe with his father, former Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau, he likely only met the prestigious few, not the ones
who have to scramble daily to make a living, so, yes, indeed he benefited from
a privileged background; but he appears to have, like many of us, developed
over time, and he now demonstrates considerable empathy towards marginalized
people: the Indigenous, LGBTQ, Syrian refugees, and of course women. I doubt
that his core values were ever racist, unlike his father who dabbled in an
admiration of Fascism at the hands of his early Jesuit teachers. And let us not forget former Prime Minister
William Lyon Mackenzie King’s recognition of a fellow mystic in Hitler before
WWII.
When is an
apology not enough? I note with dismay, that when federal Green Party Leader
Elizabeth May was recently asked who her hero was, she replied in an immediate
and unfiltered voice: “Jesus Christ” – and then apologized for her remark. If Elizabeth May has to say she’s sorry for
being Christian, what does Justin Trudeau have to say to redeem himself from
his blackface lapses? Is Canadian
society so secular – or cynical - that apologies are no longer acceptable? We have all made mistakes, or done things we
regret, myself included; and in Trudeau’s case I do not see his antics as
intentionally disrespectful towards people of colour. (Disclosure: I spent a year teaching History
in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies in the early 1990’s where the
minimum wage for the average citizen was a paltry US $8.00 daily).
People grow
up, they change over time (as do our social norms), and yet Trudeau was able to
prolong his adolescence – like many in education - precisely because he taught
high school. Trudeau’s maturity probably came with marriage in 2005, and then
with parental responsibilities. The
outpouring of condemnation for Trudeau’s errors in dress (imagine if he had
been pictured in drag three times – what would we be thinking now?) are perhaps
part and parcel of the current admixture known as Canadian multi-ethnic
democracy, another one of our post-colonial moments, an irony since it was Pierre
Trudeau who introduced multiculturalism to the land.
But do we
need to seek resolution for Justin Trudeau’s every apparent contradiction? If we cannot accept that consistency and neat
coherences in life are unrealistic, an unachievable goal, given “the crooked
timber of humanity”, then maybe we should consider emulating instead the
Chinese system, where the average person does not have to think about politics
and lives instead in ready admiration of the leader. As I indicated in my previous blog on the
same subject, man is fallible. Some outraged Canadian critics seem to think
that their political leaders should be infallible – for life. And to make a not too fine point about it,
liberalism is a political philosophy that tends toward contradiction, as it
avoids extremes of Left and Right, which is why the Liberal government can appear
a conundrum, declaring a climate emergency one day and endorsing pipeline
politics the next, but that is perhaps a topic for another blog.
I am more
concerned when a politician does not apologize.
Look to Donald Trump: he is in his third year of office, plans to run
for reelection, and has yet to apologize for any of his countless misogynistic,
racist and other vile remarks and actions. Trump has violated every known norm,
and continues to do so. If we can’t
tolerate Trudeau’s relatively small errors in the past, beware that we replace
him with someone else who is worse for the present. Look to Premier Jason
Kenney, now leader of the United Conservative Party of Alberta (after being in
the federal Cabinet for 10 years), who will not apologize for his actions as a
student in San Francisco (at about 20 or 21 years of age) when he prevented people dying of AIDS from seeing their partners in their final hours,
either in the hospital, or sometimes even at funerals.
Look also to
British Columbia’s former Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell arrested on drunk
driving charges in 2003 while in office but on vacation in Hawaii. Campbell subsequently
asked for forgiveness for his high state of inebriation, succeeded in various reelections,
and now is charged with sexual assault during his role as Canada’s High
Commissioner in London. Look to the
esteemed Doug Ford, Progressive Conservative Premier of Ontario (and likely
aspirant for Andrew Sheer’s job as Leader of the Opposition in Ottawa) who, according
to The Globe and Mail, peddled
hashish in the 1980’s. This is someone
who contributed to the regular impairment of peoples’ minds, and he is now
leader of Canada’s most populated province.
Maybe it is no accident that Doug Ford was chosen leader of his party and
assumed office in the same year the Trudeau government legalized pot: the
electorate has apparently forgiven him, even if he has not publicly come to
terms with it.
Much ink
has been spilled over Trudeau’s blackface. At worst, the prime minister could
be considered a boy king, a tumble-down Trudeau, dwelling at times too much in
the life of a thespian, unlike his father who would eventually become Canada’s
pre-eminent philosopher king. But he is
no racist. Born the eldest son, on
Christmas Day, named Justin by a father who spoke of a “Just Society”, our
current prime minister has had a lot to live up to, and there lies the catch: ideals
inspire, but no person is a ‘blank
slate’ upon which one can work freely and easily. John Stuart Mill learned that
at the hands of his father, much to his detriment. In Canada there will probably
always be “the persistence of the old regime”, of the era before the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms which was introduced in 1982.
Prejudices will persist, but it is incumbent upon Trudeau to rid himself
of the appearance of prejudice.
Trudeau’s
blackface reminds people of Canada’s continued systemic injustices, but we may
have bigger problems at hand. Donald
Trump recently floated the idea of buying Greenland but was rebuffed by the
Danish prime minister. Was he
serious? Does Trump now have continental
ambitions? Has American “manifest
destiny” even abated since Trump’s America First movement? Goldwin Smith, Canada’s first public
intellectual, warned pessimistically well over a century ago that Canada is an
absurd entity bordering on the behemoth we know as the United States. And I agree with the historian Margaret
MacMillan who has suggested some while ago in The Globe and Mail that as the climate crisis worsens, more of our
natural resources will considered be up for grabs, making Canadians and our way
of life more vulnerable to global geo-politics, in particular subject to
American ambitions.
Trudeau’s periodic
episodes with blackface have likely offended numbers of Canadians, but the advent of
the cellphone brings on a confusion of “then” and “now”, as this
all-pervasive form of modern technology contributes to the elimination of our
sense of time. With the cellphone
anyone can be reached at almost any moment, anywhere, helping to erase, as well, our sense
of the past. We gaze at a picture in our
hands of a turbaned Trudeau dressed as Alladin, forgetting even that it was taken
before 9/11, truly a different era. Meanwhile we continue to scan our cellphones for
the next world outrage, as our minds become ever-more mired by constant media and the oppressiveness of the human condition. At least we were distracted by Trudeau.
Friday, September 20, 2019
Fallible Man: Descartes’ Perspective on Trudeau and blackface
… when I presently turn back to myself, I find by experience that I am, on the
contrary, subject to innumerable errors.[1]
René
Descartes, Meditations on First
Philosophy (1641)
[1] René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Michael Moriarty (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 39. The quotation can be found near the
start of the fourth Meditation. See
also Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, tr.
Charles Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 1, where
Descartes is translated as: “I find myself subject to an infinity of
imperfections, so that I should not be surprised if I err.”
Saturday, April 6, 2019
Jody Wilson-Raybould: The 17-minute tape and a “recovery of intentions”
Former Attorney-General Jody
Wilson-Raybould’s 17-minute taped conversation with the Clerk of the Privy Council,
Michael Wernick, on 19 December, 2018, while she was in Vancouver - without a
secretary - and he in Ottawa, raises questions of intentions and consequences. The political scientist and intellectual
historian, Quentin Skinner, delves into the “recovery of intentions” in his
landmark essay “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas”, and I shall
attempt to borrow some of his analysis here.[1]
The tape
recording begins with Jody Wilson-Raybould speaking at times slowly: “SNC”, “DPA”, and it shows much more
consciousness, or self-consciousness, with statements clearly made and intended
for the record: “I feel uncomfortable
having this conversation …”. Then what
is her intent? Aide-memoire (as she claims) or is she collecting evidence? Skinner can be used to explain: “It is true
that unless I do perform the action or solve the problem which I intended to do, then it can never be known what
my problem was – for there will simply be no evidence.”[2] In other words, Jody Wilson-Raybould faces
what she considers to be a problem, so she collects evidence towards her case
in order that it be recognized. To further the point: in taping she is acting
in a forensic capacity as Canada’s top Attorney-General against the unsuspecting
top Civil Servant.
Michael
Wernick is speaking without self-consciousness, is not truly aware that he is potentially
crossing any lines, is not intending to violate “the spirit of the laws” (as
Montesquieu would have it) and certainly is not speaking with criminal intent.
Rather, he is communicating the Prime Minister’s position and in a frank manner
with a suggestion of reconciliation, which he repeats: (“I respect where you’re
coming from“ and ”I understand where you’re coming from”). The Prime Minister’s stated intention is to save jobs and to use “tools”
such as the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) – not to force a “Saturday Night
Massacre”, as Jody Wilson-Raybould decodes (or rather seems to anticipate) in her Attorney-General mode of
heightened consciousness. However, to
borrow a caveat from Quentin Skinner again: there may have been an “intention in trying to do something” but the
results – not necessarily a Massacre - were unsuccessful.[3]
It would appear that Wernick may have been trying primarily to raise the
possibility of getting an outside legal opinion, namely that of the former Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, Beverly McLaughlin, but the mere suggestion would
have implied (to Wilson-Raybould) that her own competence was being questioned, an
unintended consequence. Here we get to a general problem of miscommunication, a
mismatch of what is on one radar screen and not on the other: she expressly uses
the words “constitutional principle” and “integrity of the Prime Minister” -
not “criminal” or “illegal”, although she declares early on in the tape that “we’re
treading on dangerous ground”. Wernick
does not appear to register (or take seriously) Wilson-Raybould’s full forensic meaning – despite his statements (quoted
above) - as she draws in her mind comparisons
between perfidious Nixon and so-called ‘Just’ Trudeau, otherwise Wernick
would most likely have followed up with the Prime Minister – and immediately
so. In other words, she may have
misjudged Trudeau’s intentions, while transfixed by the idea of a Massacre,
which turned out to be a myth.
Had he been
made aware of the fact that the conversation was being taped it is rather
self-evident that Wernick would have chosen his words more carefully, would
have been less repetitive about the Prime Minister’s wishes – and he most
certainly would have ‘gotten back’ to the Prime Minister about the call,
despite the fact most people were going on Christmas break in the days that
followed. In other words, Jody Wilson-Raybould had the upper hand all along. But the irony was she did not succeed in
getting through to the Prime Minister (odd for a person who ‘speaks truth to
power’): the unintended consequence of the recording was that nothing really happened
– until the leak. She resigned after she had been shuffled from her Cabinet post not knowing her conversation of 19 December had not been forwarded
to the Prime Minister, according to Wernick’s lawyer. What originally appeared as an aide-memoire for Jody Wilson-Raybould, could
have been useful as an aide-memoire for
Michael Wernick: pity he too did not record the call.
But the tape
recording as received by the Prime Minister - and the Liberal Party - was quite
different from what Jody Wilson-Raybould intended. [4] If Jody Wilson-Raybould only intended to offer convincing evidence of political
interference in the SNC-Lavalin case (and there is an element of doubt as to
the singularity of her intentions), she also offered convincing but unintended proof
that she was no longer a colleague. As
Monty Python puts it: “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” But that’s just what was brought on, with the
eyes of the media and Opposition examining every resignation, every shred of
evidence in the controversy for two solid months since the story was first
leaked to The Globe and Mail on 7
February. And one reason why this controversy dragged on even longer than it needed to was because the Prime Minister was
secretly negotiating for a truce with Jody Wilson-Raybould, who appears to have
been unable to curtail her stipulations, according to news leaks. The early news leaks made her a hero – none of
them implemented by her, according to Jody Wilson-Raybould’s statements; later ones were intended to sully her reputation, not all of them appropriate.
Now
what? The Liberals are down in the
polls, and there’s a federal election in six months’ time: Advantage Andrew Scheer
and the Conservatives! Today Jody
Wilson-Raybould is a national icon for Indigenous Peoples and considered a valuable
role model for women, along with Dr. Jane Philpott who resigned in protest, as
well, only to be later booted out of Caucus. But, given the Opposition’s
first incarnation under Harper, all does not bode well: what will the
Conservatives do for Reconciliation?
What will they do for Climate Change, with four (read: “provincial”) Premiers lining up against the Carbon Tax, alongside Scheer?
Jody Wilson
Raybould’s full forensic approach to her role as Attorney-General was intended
to throw light on her perception of interference, however unwitting by Wernick. Irony rules in politics (and war) and
consequences have since well surpassed the plan to tape, for as the well-trod saying goes (and this could apply to Trudeau too) “the road to hell is paved with good
intentions”. It is not just hell for the
Liberals that I am concerned about, though: it is hell for all Canadians as the climate
warms, while the Conservative refuse to stand on guard and protect our environment.
Since the
story broke the Liberals under Justin Trudeau have been considered – by the
Opposition, the media, and the public – as a government of weakness and
constitutional illegality. While some
among the Trudeau team may have temporarily muddied “the spirit of the laws” -
Montesquieu’s trinity of the legislative, executive and the judiciary - I
humbly suggest that Harper was far worse with his habit of proroguing
Parliament at length when it suited him most.
In the very same chapter where Montesquieu’s trinity is first discussed,
he also warns: “If the legislative body were not convened for a considerable
time, there would no longer be liberty.”[5] Who among the Conservatives dared to ‘speak
truth to power’ then?
[1]
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his
Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 64.
[2] Ibid., p. 65.
[3] Ibid.
[4] David Wootton, Power, Pleasure and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to
Madison (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2018), p. 65.
[5] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws,
eds and trs. Anne Cohler, Bascia Miller, Harald Stone (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 151.
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