More Yerp than Montreal

I’ve been looking back at some of my entries and I’ve realised I haven’t done much on Canada lately.

The longer I’m here, the more society yields its underlying structures and the glue that binds them together to me. Nothing I knew about Canada was true. Granted, I didn’t know much, just a lot of socio-economic data that I had learned during the Workplace of the Future research period. All of which pointed to Canada being an environmentally pristine haven of post-world war two social protectionism and diversity management that sounded too good to be true.

And guess what?

The truth is that Canada’s quality of life and environmental indicators, while good on paper, don’t reflect the provincial realities, which are all quite different from each other. The good things in life are clustered in Ontario, BC and Alberta, which are wealthy in different ways. The rest of Canada is struggling to keep up.

For example, the main reason why Canada’s environmental indicators appear to be reasonable is because of the vast tracts of BC still under forest. These forests create carbon sinks that, when put against the impact of Ontario’s pollution, contribute to an inaccurate snapshot of the reality. So when you land in Pearson and start to feel the ache in your sinuses that I have only ever felt in Mumbai on a hot afternoon, you begin to wonder whether you are insane.

Then, when you get to the east coast and see what’s happening to the forests here, you realise the environmental indicators take no account of the vicious clear-cutting and unsustainable forest farming that takes place in Atlantic Canada. Because in data terms, a tree is a tree is a tree.

Except it’s not of course.

Atlantic Canada is a totally different animal to Ontario; Ontario is the financial and industrial engine of the Canadian economy, and Atlantic Canada is a resource-based low wage economy run by a coterie of big business families and the politicians who do their bidding. For example, a recent referendum on Sunday shopping was rejected here. I can’t prove it, but I bet the Codfathers (as these families are called) decided they didn’t want it. I know their research found that their shopping interests wouldn’t make any more money if they had to open 24/7. Never mind the fact that it would have created more employment and more financial churn in the economy. Never mind the fact that it would make life easier for working couples. Well, working mothers anyway.

So their invidious influence, which is applied through their stranglehold on the media (one family owns all of the media in New Brunswick for example), turned an economic question into a referendum on family values. Maritimers are traditionally a people who believe in family and frugality and the Sabbath, so they were manipulated enough to ensure the idea was thrown out.

Remind you of anywhere, boys and girls? No? Replace Sunday shopping with abortion information helpline.

There you go.

Queenie’s New World is extraordinarily Old World in some respects.

Frugality is such an ugly word, isn’t it!!! I found a fridge magnet that said that the other day. I immediately bought it and posted it to the woman of whom it reminded me. So it’s somewhere in the GPO now, languishing until the CWU come to their senses. The Irish postal strike should be interesting, shouldn’t it? I always think watching an over-paid, pampered low-skill service sector protectionist trade union strike itself out of existence is like watching a car crash, isn’t it!! Horrendous, but riveting.

Anyways, back to the New World.

Alberta is a petro-chemical/ rancher powerhouse that sucks Maritimers over to the oil patches or the forests every winter (‘going down the road’ they call it) to work the dirty heavy jobs Albertans don’t want to do. The Maritimers do it because they’ve been migrating to work since they were thrown off their lands in Scotland or Ireland or America centuries ago, and it doesn’t seem to occur to enough of them that there might be something wrong with a country that forces them to do it, even though they (literally) helped build Canada, invented Canadian democracy, created the Canadian concept of a free press (before they gave it away), and led the drive to feed and protect Europe during two world wars.

Many of them do realise the unfairness of it. Mostly the women left sitting at home by the phone. The men out there are too tired from pulling a hundred hour week to think about it. If I did anything worthwhile during my time here, it would be to politicise some of the women I’ve met here. Things would change rapidly I tell you, if some of them got their hands on the levers. That pseudo-Calvinist ‘benevolent patriarchy’ shite the Establishment Good Ole Boys go on with here would be hand-bagged into the Bay of Fundy for a start.

Sorry, I get upset when I think about it.

Anyways, back to Alberta.

The guy who runs Alberta is a divisive right-wing wannabe despot called Ralph Klein. He incites selfishness and separatism in Albertans by telling him it’s ‘their’ oil. For example this Christmas, rather than contribute some more to ending the inequality across Canadian provinces, he’s sending everyone in the province a prosperity cheque for $400.

As someone remarked in a letter to the Chronicle recently, it’s funny how it’s always Alberta’s oil, but it was Canada’s BSE.

And apart from all that, it’s probably the First Nations’ oil, if you want to assign an ownership to it.

More on Alberta next week, after my trip.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan are vast, Nordic-populated prairie economies with all the challenges that entails. Despite that, they seem to be run pretty well (maybe the Nordic influence), and we have a joke in work when we’re looking for ideas, which is WWMD (what would Manitoba do?).

BC is the so-called economic and cultural nirvana of Canada, although the growth of Vancouver and its poverty is a big challenge. BC looks west to Asia. It’s a million miles away from the Atlantic in every sense.

The north of Canada is as heavily funded as Northern Ireland is. Instead of the peace dividend, they seem to have a wind chill dividend. As with NI, the dividend seems to be as economically dynamic as a game of golf in Banbridge on a wet Sunday.

And Quebec…

Quebec is the Kerry of Canada. Impossibly beautiful. Incredibly corrupt. A nice place to have a summer house, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

So one of the things that I have learned is that, although there is a Canada and a Canadian stereotype, it really is just a big hessian sack of provincial cats, all spitting and hissing at each other, oblivious to the fact that they are about to be dumped into the river by their American overlords.

And the recent report on Liberal corruption – the Gomery Enquiry – is just another excuse to hiss and spit. God forbid they’d work together and figure a way to scratch out of the sack.

I’m not saying all this to be nasty. I love Canada and Canadians. Mostly. It’s just when you come from Europe and you’ve lived through the immense efforts everyone’s made to create a Union that transfers wealth from the centre to the periphery, and you and your education and your mobility are a result of that effort, you really want to get the Atlantic Premiers into a room and reiterate the need to use transfers to create wealth for everyone, not just the Sobeys and the McCains and the Irvings.

With the tyre iron.

Of course the fact that France is on fire again as I write this could undermine my argument. But I think that’s a separate issue.

Interestingly, although Nova Scotia is not very diverse compared to Ontario, say, or BC, there are a lot of Mediterranean Arab people living here. Which gives it that continental European feel I like so much.

Atlantic Canada is much more like Yerp (a pre-German integration Yerp possibly) than Montreal ever felt to me. Because as we all know, who are watching Paris burn with more than a little sadness, there’s a lot more to Yerp than café au lait. There’s thousands of years of Levantine trading and cultural fertilization for a start.