It’s been an average year of reading. 160 books and about 500 academic papers, articles, short stories and other short items. History and anthropology dominated the book reading, as usual, with an emphasis on Australia, the Pacific, the Canadian North and West, and the ideas of 19th century Canadian democratic reformers. I became particularly fascinated by the 19th century convict colonies of Australia and the French Pacific possessions, and I amplified previous readings (such as Robert Hughes venerable The Fatal Shore, and the eye-opening but little known Australia’s Birthstain, by Babette Smith). Thomas Keneally, giving Hughes a run for his money in A Commonwealth of Thieves, covers the general subject with extraordinarily vivid prose, and Siân Rees makes a closer case study in The Floating Brothel — The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth- century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts. Read more »
Category Archives: A - BLOG - Page 17
Image of the month: a Syrian refugee “menaces” Europe
I’m proud to say that Canada is welcoming 30,000 Syrian refugees. They will make fine Canadians.
Sunday, December 20, 2015 — Pride
Canada’s Cabinet Ministers of Immigration (John McCallum), Defense (Harjit Sajjan), and Health (Jane Philpott) with Syrian refugee children.
I’m a curmudgeony cynic, most of the time, so it’s not often I get to proclaim that I’m proud of my country. But the behaviour of Canadians in the last week has filled me with pride. Last month, I posted a letter I sent to my Member of Parliament, asking that the commitment to admitting Syrian refugees to Canada be expanded to greater numbers. My sentiments seem to be shared by most Canadians, but that is not the case elsewhere.
In the United States, the majority of politicians (all Republicans, of course, but many Democrats, too) have decided to be pals with ISIS, collaborating in their attrocities by making it difficult for their victims to find refuge. The Marching Morons have triumphed, and there have been numerous acts of terrorism against innocent people, encouraged and abetted by Fox Pravda and the usual Conservative scumbags. Read more »
Image of the month: being male is more exciting than I expected
Friday, November 20, 2015 — A Letter to My Member of Parliament
I just sent this letter to my Member of Parliament:
To Hon. Bill Morneau, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1A 0A6
The events in France make it perfectly clear what kind of thing the Syrian refugees are fleeing from. Your party won the recent election with a mandate to accept more Syrian refugees and increase our participation in this crisis.
As my Member of Parliament, I urge you to stand up in that legislative body and propose that we TRIPLE THE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED NUMBER that we will commit ourselves to accept.
The recent generation of Canadian politicians — especially those in the Conservative Party — have fallen completely out of touch with Canada’s history and traditions. They have grotesquely transformed our immigration policy into a racket where we sell Canadian citizenship to the rich of the world, giving a safe place for them to park their assets. Such people will never see Canada as anything except a convenient pied-à-terre, or a sort of tax-dodge-with-a-passport. Those aren’t the kind of people that built Canada. We are a nation built by offering a home and a second chance to the poor and oppressed of other lands. That should be our pride, our glory.
Bringing in large numbers of refugees from foreign lands, often with languages, customs and religions that we find exotic, many of them traumatized by terror and war, and with the distinct possibility that there will be some bad apples among them (planted agents, criminals, faked identities) is nothing new to Canadians. We have done this over and over and over again in this country. Scots fleeing the brutal highland clearances, the six Iroquois Nations fleeing ethnic cleansing, African-Americans escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad, Irish peasants fleeing the potato famine, Armenians fleeing mass killings, Ukrainians fleeing Stalin’s terror, Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Hungarians fleeing the Communists, African Gujaratis fleeing Idi Amin, Vietnamese boat people, Sri Lankan Tamils fleeing civil war, Rwandans fleeing ethnic slaughter.… peasants and slumdwellers from around the world fleeing poverty and static societies that keep them at the bottom. Yes, there are costs and difficulties involved in taking in strangers in this way. But we know how to do it, probably better than anyone in the world. It’s our specialty. This time is no different. Years ago, I saw my neighbours roll up their sleeves and volunteer to welcome, sponsor, house, and help frightened boat people who arrived after weeks on flimsy rafts, being attacked by pirates, then months in gruesome internment camps. Now those former refugees are fellow Canadians we point to with pride, and they in turn volunteer for the same task. Yesterday, a Toronto couple were married cheaply at City Hall, and turned over the full cost of their planned fancy wedding to sponsor Syrian refugees. They, and others like them, are the spirit of our country. We must never forget this.
As a historian, I seldom read the news without hearing echos from the past. Here a quote from a history of Irish immigrants to Canada, fleeing the potato famine:
Shocked by the numbers flooding Boston, New York and other ports, the United States Congress passed two Passenger Acts. One limited the number of passengers a vessel was permitted to carry. The other increased the price of the cheapest passage to seven pounds, an amount that was well beyond what most poor Irish could afford. Starting in May of 1846, this resulted in increased traffic to Canadian ports. In fact, during one occasion, Grosse Isle [the immigrant processing point in Quebec] had a line of 40 ships, carrying 15,000 souls, waiting to land there. Of that number, many were seriously ill with fever and some were already dead.
This created thousands of orphans, most of whom were assigned to Canadian families. A special decree ruled that these children, to be raised in French-speaking Canadian families, would retain their Irish names out of respect for their heritage. Conservative newspapers and the Orange Lodge — influential in Canadian politics and high society — screamed that these refugees would all be nasty, bomb-throwing Catholic terrorists, and that the streets of Montreal and Toronto would be seething with ape-like, sub-human Irish criminals. Those orphaned Irish names — Riley, Kelly, Ryan, Johnson… now resound in Canadian history and culture.
Sound familiar? Here’s the latest news from the United States:
While Democrats initially stood up to Republican fear-mongering and bigotry, too many of them lost that conviction on the final vote for a bill that creates additional barriers for Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming to the U.S. Forty-seven Democrats voted with Republicans in a final vote of 289–137.
The same assholes are always around. We have such assholes in Canada, but, hopefully, fewer of them. At least we don’t have, as Americans do, the majority of our politicians falling over themselves to support ISIS. The Syrian and Iraqi refugees turned away by the triumph of the stupid in the U.S.A. should be welcomed to Canada with open arms. And we will end up all the wealthier, happier, and wiser for it — for we are the future, not the past.
Monday, October 19, 2015 — Good Riddance
“good riddance”
Used to express relief that someone or something has been gotten rid of. Also, “good riddance to bad rubbish”. A welcome loss or departure. This expression is often used as an exclamation. — from a dictionary of idioms.
For the information of my non-Canadian readers, Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party have finally been kicked out of power by a surprising Liberal Party landslide win. There has never been any Canadian politician that I have regarded with such loathing. He has represented everything I’ve considered vile, disgusting and immoral in Canadian politics. Divided opposition, abysmally low voter turnout and general apathy kept him in power for what seemed an eternity, but the Canadian people have finally woken up. As a succession of corruption scandals weakened his position, Harper hired an American campaign advisor — a hack strategist from the U.S. Republican Party — who advised him to run a campaign designed to exploit bigotry, superstition and ignorance in the manner of the Tea Party assholes in the U.S.. Canadians, to their credit, were largely disgusted by this kind of cynical creepiness. Voter turnout exceeded anything expected. There is little doubt that this was largely an anti-Harper wave, not inspired by any high hopes for any opposition party. “Strategic voting”, where voters carefully voted for whoever had the best chance of turning out the Conservatives, seemed to catch on, and young people seem to have flocked to the polls, too. I’m no particular fan of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, but he seemed to find his feet during the extended campaign, and his party will form a majority government, with a plurality in the popular vote on top of its victory in seats. The Liberals have many policy positions that I strongly oppose (such as support for the TPP and a partial acceptance of the hideous Bill C‑51). We’ll see how this turns out, but at least we’re rid of Harper.
Image of the month: not sure if this is a tree or an Ent
Sunday, September 27, 2015 — Assiniboine
What follows here took place during the second week of September. It was planned a long time ahead. A quarter century of friendship between myself and Filip Marek would be celebrated with an adventure.
We both love mountains. The Canadian Rockies has some of the finest, and most of them have not been gelded by roads, habitations and ski resorts. A lot of them are as wild as they were when their first human explorers came upon them pursuing mammoths down the “ice-free corridor” or perhaps filtered in from the Pacific coast. But the choice of destination had to be a compromise between the cost and time of access and the degree of wilderness. I had only one week free, and Filip could spare not much more.
Image of the month: if you were alive in the 1970s and 80s.…
.… you can probably identify this person with ease. Just a test.