Posted on 09/30/2003 1:36:10 PM PDT by quidnunc
The Canadian chattering class is much delighted by this week’s Economist cover : a moose in surfer glasses beneath the headline: “Canada’s New Spirit.” Now that will sell magazines!
I haven’t read the issue yet, and anyway the story is not available on line, but I hope it is an improvement over the Economist ’s last Canadian cover, in the summer of 2000. The writer of that survey managed to travel thousands of miles, talk to dozens of people, and (apparently) put tens of thousands of dollars on his expense account without absorbing a single idea beyond the weary clichés of what the great Mark Steyn has called “Trudeaupia”: ie, Canadians are gentler, more compassionate, and all around nicer than Americans, and if the Canadian economy malfunctions and young people flee the country, that is the price of Canada’s superior virtue — and Canadians are happy to pay it.
The New York Times last week also succumbed to a nasty bout of Canadian clichés. Reporter Clifford Krauss observed that while same-sex marriage and the recent social changes imposed by Canadian courts and federal governments are bitterly controversial, they have somehow provoked little public protest in Canada. Krauss attributed this lack of response to the “compromise, consensus, and civility” that characterizes Canadian political life.
Um, not exactly. Canadian political life is hardly characterized by “compromise.” The rules of the Canadian political system have allowed one party — the Liberals — to hold near-absolute power for almost 75 of the past 100 years, even though they have seldom won more than 44% of the vote. Since the prime minister appoints judges at his sole discretion, political power has translated into judicial power — an important fact in a country that in 1982 adopted a strikingly open-ended Charter of Rights. Until last month’s vote on same-sex marriage in the federal House of Commons, virtually none of the gay-rights advances that so impressed Krauss was enacted by a legislature — all were imposed by the courts.
So why did Canadians keep so quiet? It could be Canadian culture at work. It could also be that Canadians who do not keep quiet are liable to be hauled before an administrative tribunal, prosecuted without benefit of jury, and fined .
In the US, right and left argue over whether the media is biased for or against them. Not in Canada, where the case is open and shut. From the front page of this morning’s Globe & Mail report on the California recount:
“After two weeks of entertaining mayhem, Californians awoke yesterday to learn that it’s very likely that the world’s fifth largest economy will end up being run by a monosyllabic bodybuilder, chosen by a tiny percentage of the population. The reaction sounded a lot like panic.
“ ‘Up to now, I just worried that this would look stupid, but it mostly seemed fun,’ Maria Sobiya, a worker at a Los Angles Starbucks said. ‘But now I’m starting to get really scared.’”
Presumably some of the large plurality of Californians now poised to vote for Schwarzenegger are unpanicked — maybe even delighted.
Of course, noticing that would require reporter Doug Saunders to surrender some of his prejudices — and maybe interview somebody other than the girl who sells him his morning latte.
09:17 AM
What you suspect is true.
On the campus of the college where I teach
(in Ontario)
several women have been mugged, raped and one was murdered.
The views he expresses probably are shared by most of the reporters in Canada.
Uhhh ... pointer please?
Exactly. These views are ubiquitous among the media, academia and the civil service but generally not shared on the street.
WE ARE THE DAMNED
TELL YOUR CHILDREN OUR STORY SO THAT THIS NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN
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