Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (23 page)

Extreme rhetoric is often a mask for weak argument. It is also very often an attempt to override discussion in favour of a stampede to predetermined and unexamined policies. Surely, with all the science that Kyoto and its advocates
have lined up on their side of the debate, dipping into the history of appeasement and the Holocaust is, at the very best, unnecessary.

David Suzuki has stirred a minor controversy, recently, by some remarks he made in a speech to six hundred students at McGill University. A report in the
McGill Daily
tells us “he urged today’s youth to speak out against politicians complicit in climate change.”

“Complicit” is the damning word there. People are complicit only in dark and pernicious undertakings. He went on to suggest the students “look for a legal way to throw our current political leaders in jail for ignoring science,” those comments drawing rounds of cheering and applause.

Well, this is a turnaround of some proportions. In the old days, the really old days, it was the foes of science, the enemies of what we have come to call the Enlightenment, who used to call for the rack, the stake and the dungeon to treat those who challenged religion’s pre-eminent authority to both speak and know the truth.

We generally look upon it as a backward moment when the Catholic Church put the bridle on Galileo, subjected him to house arrest and the tender rebukes of the Inquisition. So it’s at least mildly disconcerting to hear of a celebrated son of the Enlightenment, in the person of one of Canada’s star communicators, urging a university audience, no less, to seek to “jail” those whom he perceives as “ignoring science.” I think it’s fairly clear he doesn’t really mean science in general here, but rather a
very particular subset of that great endeavour, the contentious and agenda-riven field of global warming.

I am under no illusion about the force of the global warming consensus. It is the grand orthodoxy of our day. Among right-thinking people, the idea of expressing any doubts on some of its more cataclysmic projections, to speak in tones other than those of veneration about its high priests, such as David Suzuki or Al Gore, is to stir a response uncomfortably close to what, in previous and less rational times, was reserved for blasphemers, heretics and atheists.

But wherever we are on global warming, and on the models and theories supporting it, it is not yet the Truth, nor is it yet Science (with a capital S) as such. And to put a stay on our full consent to its more clamorous and particular alarms is not,
pace
Dr. Suzuki, either “ignoring science” or “complicity” in criminal endeavour. Nor is reasoned dissent or dispute on some or all of the policy recommendations that global warming advocates insist flow, as night follows day, from their science.

It’s worth pausing on this point. What global warming is, what portion of it is man-made, is one set of questions properly within the circle of rational inquiry we call science. What to do about it—shut down the oil sands, impose a carbon tax, sign on to Kyoto, mandate efficient light bulbs or hybrid cars—are choices within a range of public policy options that have to be made outside any laboratory whatsoever.

Global warming’s more fulminating spokespeople are apt to finesse that great chasm between the science and
the politics. They are further apt to imply a continuum between the unassailable authority of real and neutral science and their own particular policy prescriptions. (I notice late in the week that something called Environmental Defence has hailed the Alberta oil sands as “the most destructive project on Earth.” It goes on to say that “your desire to tackle global warming is being held hostage by the Tar Sands.” I’m not sure how they latched on to that “your” there. Is Environmental Defence elected? But let that pass; it is the tactic that is familiar.)

Global warming is the truth. So, shutting down the oil sands is also the truth. If global warming is primarily a “man-made” phenomenon, then what to do about it is a political discussion before it is anything else at all. If Environmental Defence or Dr. Suzuki thinks shutting down the oil sands is not a political choice, I advise both the group and the man to visit Alberta and acquaint themselves, while they are at it, with the history of the National Energy Program, and what its consequences were for the West and Confederation. Shutting down the oil sands would make the storm over the NEP feel like a soft rain on a sultry day by comparison. It would break the Confederation.

So, far from jailing our politicians if they continue to debate what should be done, I’m in favour of leaving them where they are for now. If that’s a soft stance, all I can say is that I favour discussion over imprisonment. Dr. Suzuki will surely agree that truth, like science, is not under the ownership of either any one group or any one man. To argue that
those who question a prevailing orthodoxy should, even metaphorically, be tossed in jail is radically inconsistent with the essence and spirit of science itself, the essence and spirit that Dr. Suzuki, in his better moments, so clearly reveres.

We are being tested as a nation. Winter has made its first strikes in a number of regions.

Poor Nova Scotia got belted early, and then Newfoundland got its first real smack. I know down home the weather in any season is a kind of test, but winter assaults mind and body with an almost conscious fury. A Newfoundland winter is an extended torment, mainly, I think, because Newfoundlanders never know when it begins or ends.

Snow on the 24th of May, the great mid-spring holiday weekend, is so regular as to be preordained. We have to
wait
for sunshine and warmth in Newfoundland.

And while we wait and grumble, elsewhere in what was once the great Dominion, flowers whose names I will never know are in blossom. Joggers are in their short pants for months, the Vancouverites—who are climate snobs—are out on the sidewalks, sipping decaf in March, the various
chinooks have given Albertans a stay against the long frost, but poor Newfoundland can be up to its (metaphorical, of course) ears in slush, with another blizzard lying in wait—in June.

Some of the weariness of winter, both at home and all over this frigid country, is dissipated by the defences we have built against it. Newfoundlanders of an earlier time were much given to the manufacture of their own diversions. I suspect that half the really good folk songs and all the great stories of my place had their origins by the heat of a kitchen stove, under the glow of a kerosene lamp, as singer or storyteller broke the siege of the winter months by spinning a yarn or honing a melody.

We were great ones, too, for winter concerts. Home-brew, a good violin, a few recitations and the use of the parish hall gave a little innocent (or wicked) entertainment, while the wind howled and the snow drifted high. And famously—at least, famously to us—there was “janneying” of “the mummers,” the cross-dressing pastime of the twelve days of Christmas.

Neighbours, in ridiculous or elaborate disguise, visited neighbours. The jannies or mummers were invited in; a guessing game over the identities of the visitors was the next part, and when all were spotted or revealed, a little singing, a little dancing and much rum concluded the visit. It was sweet sport.

Much of this, though not all, faded with the synthetic and vicarious amusements of TV. Sitcoms have quieted more
invention than we will ever tabulate. With each “advance” of our remorselessly entertained society—from CDs to GameBoys, Cineplexes to iPods—the urge or the need to amuse ourselves has been tranquillized.

The great national response to winter, and the greatest shield against its many glooms and ravages, was, of course, the invention of hockey. Hockey may be seen, in its earliest manifestation, as a means of turning winter against itself; of giving a very great number of people, who were definitely not masochists, a reason to look forward to the time when all the lakes and ponds were frozen and the wind chill bit the soul. Hooray, we’re freezing! Let’s play hockey!

I never had the skill, the grace or—truth to tell—the heart for the game, but everyone I have ever known, with the exception of a few as impoverished as I am of all athletic resource, played or were fans or both. From one end of the country to another, from north to south, hockey, played and watched, has insinuated itself into the very codes of the Canadian experience.

The advent of professional hockey was the (pun half-intended) crystallizing culmination of our adoption of the sport. In professional hockey, all those amateurs and fans who knew and loved the game just from their own ordinary experience of it got to see it as it was meant to be.

He who plays “Chopsticks” is not Vladimir Horowitz. But even a little acquaintance with a piano is the perfect passport to really appreciating the miracles with which Horowitz, wizard of the keyboard that he was, sprinkled
his every performance. It’s a rare delight, watching something you only partially understand and imperfectly execute, taken to its highest expression by a master.

Every boy or girl who has ever laced a skate and chased a puck knows something of that delight. Since there’s been a
Hockey Night in Canada
, our legendary virtuosi have been there for all to see and worship, from Richard to Lemieux.

Except, of course, now. We are heading into a Canadian winter minus the thrilling anodyne of professional hockey.

This cannot be a good thing. We are a fragile country. We cannot depend on Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire alone to keep us together. Or infinite reruns of
The Simpsons
and
Law & Order
, the new default Canadiana.

It’s going to be a long winter. We may, dear Lord, have nothing but the spare kindling of politics and Ron MacLean subbing as a movie critic to keep us warm. How far away—O June, how far away.

That the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada is, they’ve been telling us, just words, just symbolism, and, now, merely a “motion.”

Well, words are what we live by. They are the foundational marble of our intellectual, moral and civic existence. Some of them—“home,” “country,” “nation”—constitute
the deepest meaning in our lives. As for symbols, well, the flag is a symbol. Symbols are extremely powerful. They are concentrated meaning, the emblems of our deepest common passions.

And as for it being merely a motion, the parliament of the nation of Canada is the ultimate deliberative and legislative body of the nation of Canada. A motion passed with all-party approval in that parliament specifying one group of citizens, the Québécois, as a nation—well, that’s the highest imprimatur any words about Canada can have. So trying to brush off as “mere” words the idea of the House of Commons recognizing the Québécois as a nation within Canada is absurd.

The Commons hasn’t done anything as significant in years. This is of the utmost importance. It is changing the grounds on which we, all of us, understand our idea of Canadian citizenship, and the idea of the one nation to which we, all of us, give our fealty.

How important? Today a minister, Michael Chong, resigned. By the way, good for him. It’s refreshing to see so dignified a stand on a matter of principle and a politician willing to lose cabinet rank because he thinks something is fundamentally wrong. Mr. Chong deserves respectful credit. The motion itself is a train of mischief and ambiguity, as is the entire concept of nominating subsets of Canadians based on their ethnicity or historical associations or geographical boundaries or constitutional past—Newfoundland would be an example—as nations in their own right. But it
is particularly mischievous and ambiguous when it sets the Québécois as the community designated for nation status.