3. Canadian Thought

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33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.

“Notwithstanding clause” of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

The cowardice of perpetual compromise, masked as the strength and force of tradition. If ever I were asked to sum up Canada in a sentence, that would have to be it. In the early to mid nineteenth century, having fallen into place like chunks of broken glass, the bits and pieces of Canada found themselves unwittingly tasked with the creation of a single, non-American state. English and French, Catholic and Protestant, European and indigenous, even royalist and republican, the jagged-edged divisions of the new country had to be smoothed away through quiet pretence and vacillating concession. To the French their own legal system, to the Catholics their own education system, to the Natives some half-hearted treaties and flexible promises. Anything for a quiet Canadian life. At all costs no dispute; no call for dreaded deputation. God forbid a founding national ideal. An agreement from the start to disagree on nothing by confronting nothing, standing for nothing, facing nothing, discussing nothing and in consequence, in the end, thinking next to nothing. The oft-heard boast that “Canada was built on compromise” rings utterly hollow. This was not an honourable agreement between principled gentlemen, with the implied bitter pills to swallow and heart-wrenching concessions to make. Rather it was the mentality of the refugee tent, that of disparate, disconnected people thrown together by circumstance, spiritlessly ragged, intellectually impoverished and anxious for the cosy complacency of some unarticulated status quo. From the elite classes of society this Canadian neutrality trickled its way down to the populace. It became endemic. That, and the psychological effects of the 1765-1783 Canadian Irresolution – the pre-birth of the nation through a flee from the fight and a shirking of the issue – combined with tremendous force to bend and wilt into shape that quintessential Canadian characterlessness that predominates to this very day. Whether it be ideological stand, philosophical stand, artistic stand or even ethical stand the taking of any stand is anathema to a people who, in intellectual terms, were born to hide. In my many years observing the Canadian workplace at close quarters I saw time and time again the lengths Canadians will go to avoid having to pass judgement on any issue of even slight moral contention. This weakness would be most glaringly exposed on some of the high-pressure international software-deployment projects to which I was often assigned. The case which sticks in my mind is that of one nameless individual who for reasons unknown began to habitually engage in adolescent and personally abusive behaviour towards his colleagues during an extended secondment at the offices of an important and high-paying client firm. Increasingly concerned that this person’s attitude was such that it could actually endanger my employer’s relationship with their customer our American, British and Pakistani colleagues onsite all demanded that swift action be taken to either correct his behaviour or, failing that, instigate his removal from the assignment. These concerns they outlined in detailed and increasingly urgent communications back to senior management in Canada, in full expectation that their concerns would be addressed. Alas, expecting Canadians to pronounce on a simple matter of right versus wrong is like inviting them to jump over the edge of a cliff. After several weeks of outright denial followed by maddening prevarication, management eventually resorted to the transmission of a generic, vaguely-worded email on corporate etiquette sent not solely to the offender but to the entire project team. In a follow up communication sent specifically to the complainants they explained this action by the “need to appear unbiased”. The problem employee’s behaviour only worsened; management’s cowardice in dealing with the matter increased in proportion.

This kind of inherent weakness – this lily-livered equality of blame-sharing was entirely typical of the manner in which internal disputes would be “resolved” not just in this company but in all of the Canadian enterprises I worked alongside or was employed directly by. But Canadians’ addiction to safe neutrality has had deeper and broader effects than Canadians themselves appear to realise. It is entirely logical that a society that lacks the backbone to pass judgement on types of ill-behaviour will begin to suffer a skewering of its moral compass – that is to say its very ability to distinguish right and wrong will actually be compromised, at least to a certain extent. You end up at a place where people genuinely aren’t aware that it is the height of selfish wickedness to stroll arrogantly on past a human being having a seizure on the street. At a place where – to allude to an especially startling case – the ongoing story of several hundred Native women missing, presumed murdered, something that would be a national scandal anywhere else, has for years been met in this country with a yawn of overwhelming disinterest; Canadians have allowed fall into place what may be the most amoral society on Earth. From their non-history came Canadians’ non-culture; and from their non-culture has come a suppressed humanity.

Some may suggest that I overplay or exaggerate these co-joined twins of the Canadian malaise – this deep-rooted fear of principle and the general atmosphere of moral indifference that results. Well, perhaps. But rather than regaling them with endless examples, let us instead cast our minds back to the early 1980s, well over a hundred years after the birth of the nation, when the Canadian people finally got to thinking about a Bill of Rights for their country – a written set of basic, unimpeachable freedoms granted by the state (Crown) for the protection of the liberty of the citizen (subject), one of the most basic instruments underpinning the governance of a people. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, signed into law in April 1982, was the end result of this process. For the most part it is a standard document of its type: section 1 introduces the Charter, sections 3 – 6 outline the rights and responsibilities of democratic representation; sections 16 – 23 deal with rights pertaining to the nation’s two official (and other) languages; the concluding articles speak to the Charter’s application and address other miscellaneous matters. But of particular interest to us are sections 2, which outlines the “Fundamental Freedoms” of conscience, religion, thought, expression, assembly, freedom of the press etc.; and then sections 7 – 15 which address the rights of life, liberty, fair and equal treatment before the law and protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Nothing remarkable about any of this, you might think, these are fundamental precepts underpinning any advanced, law-governed democracy. Perusing our way down this document, reading such staunch, unambiguous declarations we find ourselves reassessing our view of the country. Perhaps our earlier criticisms were unwarranted – or at the very least exaggerated... until then, out of nowhere, it comes! It could not have not come: the cowardly escape clause allowing for a slithery, surreptitious backslide should anybody start to complain about anything. Section 33 (1), quoted in full above, should be the infamous “notwithstanding clause” but alas – this being Canada – is I’m afraid the famous notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This clause, as it states, allows either the Federal or a provincial government to pass a law that actually over-rides any of the aforementioned sections 2 and 7 – 15. Let us be entirely clear what the implications of this are. If the government of Canada or the government of the province in which you live were to find, for example, the “right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination” (section 15(1)) a barrier to some legislation they were hungry to pass into law, the Notwithstanding Clause allows them to pass such a law. If everyone having “the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment” (12) was deemed by the government in Ottawa to be impeding the assuagement of some prevailing group-hysteria – such as our post-2001 fetish with so-called “terrorism” – then the dreaded clause, section 33, opens the door for them. Should “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression” (2(b)) seem at some point inconvenient to the powerful and the elite, the notwithstanding clause may enter stage-left yet again, and a statute assaulting these very rights could be passed. Now of course, you might say, we can all rely on a nice country like Canada, loved, admired and respected by America-haters the world over, never to actually employ this clause against the basic liberties inherent to a free, advanced country. But alas you’d be entirely wrong: Canadians have employed this cause against the basic liberties inherent to a free, advanced country. When the province of Quebec under an ethnic-French separatist government proposed a law to restrict the use of the English language in their province they self-evidently needed the “notwithstanding clause” to over-ride the “guarantee” of free expression “guaranteed” for Canadians under section 2 of the Charter. So they invoked the clause, over-rode section 2(b) and free expression, and passed their bill – the infamous Quebec Bill 101 – into law. To this day the use of the English-language is, by law, restricted in that province, a situation that must be utterly baffling to outsiders and, one would think, that should be inconceivable in a genuinely democratic jurisdiction. In the late 1980s the government of Saskatchewan, finding freedom of association (2(d)) irksome in the midst of an industrial dispute, passed a law forcing striking workers to return to their jobs. Less significant over-rides of inconvenient basic freedoms have been attempted by Alberta and the Yukon Territory. We wait with baited breath for the next assault on basic Canadian freedoms legitimised by the document defining basic Canadian freedoms; we can only imagine what form it will take and what its implications for the Canadian people will be.

Fortunately, we discover that the ability of governments to invoke the notwithstanding clause comes with an important limitation:

33. (3) A declaration made under subsection (1) [quoted above] shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.

That’s something to cling to at least. The get-out clause has a caveat of its own, whereby any act that supersedes the Charter of Rights and Freedoms may only do so for a period of five years. After which, thankfully, the specific right or freedom which had been overridden will come back into full force... we presume. And hope. Unless...

33. (4) Parliament or the legislature of a province may re-enact a declaration made under subsection (1).

33. (5) Subsection (3) applies in respect of a re-enactment made under subsection (4).

Why, naturally! The caveat of the get-out clause has an escape hatch, allowing for the legislation over-riding the Charter to be re-enacted once this five year period has elapsed. Once re-enacted, it is subject to a second five-year term limit, and which point it may be re-enacted again, and again, and so on in perpetuity.

So what in the final analysis are we left with? What does this magisterial document, this pillar of governance and jurisprudence bestow us with? It bestows us with the freedom of thought unless the government dislikes it, with the stern admonition that said dislike may last for five years only, unless of course it happens to be intense dislike in which case it can be held forever. So much for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: as Groucho Marx might have said: these are Canadians’ principles, and if you don’t like them... well, they have others. They took a century and more to come to the surface, only to prove free-floating and wishy-washy when they finally saw the light. The polite among we outsiders will be gentle as we point out that a principle which can be overridden or bent is, well, by very definition not a principle at all. But this is Canada, will come the retort: here, we don’t do definition. Spinelessness, you see, is not merely a comment on the vacillating nature of the Canadian people and their society’s innate aversion to concrete certainty and the strength and force of judgement. The situation, I’m afraid, is more serious even than that. It is quite literally the case that moral cowardice is enshrined in the Canadian constitution.

The great benefit of moral neutrality is that you are spared the character-building challenge of having to distinguish right from wrong on anything beyond trivial matters or day-to-day practicalities. The mental sloth that results becomes an end in its own right; people arrive at a place where they actually need and expect sclerosis of the intellect in much the same way that the obese are comforted by more helpings of fatty food. Subjectivity starts to seem anti-social or even threatening, while on the other hand naked vacuity comes to be mistaken for forensic objectivity. Clear, expressed thought, viewpoint or judgement cuts through the fog, demands a response and directly challenges the still-born orthodoxies of the thought-free masses. It is not a position that Canadians are used to being placed in.

In describing the interactions between a company’s Canadian and American employees, I alluded to the deep dread of argument – to the very concept of opinion – that I soon came to notice among the majority of my Canadian acquaintances. This strikes me as by far the most important manifestation of the nation’s tremendous aversion to difference. Difference in taste for fashions, foods or automobiles is comparatively absent as well, but these are superfluous facets of day to day existence. Canadian architecture – with the occasional spectacular exception, it must be said – similarly demonstrates Canadians’ preference for bland functionality and their horror at expressiveness – not to mention their high level of tolerance for outright ugliness. I possess fond memories of a weekend spent in Winnipeg – a city seemingly planned and built on the premise that civic pride is some sort of venereal disease – and of staying in a hotel building that, from the outside, bore a striking resemblance to an institution for the criminally insane with its ultra- brutalist masonry and slit-like, nervous windows. It was fairly typical of the architecture in that city and, to a point, in the nation as a whole. The public spaces we create, and desire created, speak enormously to the kind of people we are. In broader terms a collective or individual appreciation for form or beauty, for artistic achievement in the widest possible sense, betokens the presence of deeper thought. It follows that minimal to no appreciation betrays thoughtlessness – or at the very least a tendency towards thoughtlessness. It is undeniably the case that the question of a person’s intellectual individuality is closely linked to that of overall intelligence.

Opinion is merely formalised subjective thought. The actual expression of opinion takes us to a level of achievement: for many people, for the weaker or more mild-mannered, it can be an act requiring almost physical courage, especially in any social or group setting. It demands to varying degrees the power of articulation – the conversion of the thought into a coherent verbal statement in a given language. The opinion by very definition must in some way distinguish its holder from his or her peers. If the subjective thought, once expressed aloud, is met with universal or near-universal agreement then in many respects it ceases to be opinion and is instead orthodoxy. Thus does orthodoxy – the expression of orthodoxy – become a vital tool of social ingratiation. And orthodoxy, said the character Syme in Nineteen Eighty Four, is unconsciousness. It is a state of intellectual complacency denoting a greatly reduced level of mental activity.

The expression of opinion presents a psychological challenge because of the wide range of risks entailed. The disapprobation of one’s peers, over time a detrimental impact on friendships; possible damage to one’s career; among certain intolerant listeners and in a great many countries a threat to physical well-being or even to life itself. Canada occupies an extreme point on this spectrum of danger: what we might initially be tempted to call the extremely-mild end, though as with all forms of Canadian bland its pleasant, unthreatening appearance can be very deceptive. It manages to be ostensibly very benign but, as you begin to glean over an extended period of time, “Canadian mild” is its own pernicious form of fanaticism. A suffocating milieu of bland, opinion-free orthodoxy simply ends up replicating the evils it purports to oppose; it replaces the social discomfort of argument and dissention with a creepy intolerance for the very notion of philosophy. It is analogous to communism being proffered as the antidote to fascism.

The fact of riches and stability being handed to Canadians on a plate goes a long way towards explaining their great aversion to dissent. These gifts came (as gifts must do) with the deep misfortune – the hidden birth defect – of never having had to be fought for. A staggering abundance of natural wealth greeted the first European settlers, and with economic success provided by default alone the stable governance systems of France and later Britain provided a ready-made legal framework for organised resource exploitation. From before its own birth this has been a country offering one of the world’s easiest, least challenging and most agreeable lifestyles, and the psychological impact on its people has been immense. You must see how anything, literally anything that threatens deviation from the accepted milieu of effortless, thought-free peace and prosperity must be utterly alien to these people. How little it takes to frighten the horses in a society based on ice hockey, general thoughtlessness, mandated ignorance, tasteless beer and the idle barbeque. When such an Olympic-standard level of complacency becomes the accepted and expected way of life – when it has become the de facto substitute for a national culture and identity – the extent to which even the tiniest ripple on the surface will alarm the victims is fascinating and, as we will see, both sinister and frightening. The unit currency of discord in human interaction is verbal or written disagreement. And it is my own observation that the expression of any opinion – on even relatively mild, uncontroversial issues – can move the average Canadian to sensations of fear, often physically palpable fear – and that this can be the case whether they agree with the viewpoint expressed or not.

One day at a Toronto office I found myself in a boardroom with ten or so chattering colleagues as we waited for the start of a meeting. The conversation, if such it could be called, was typically emollient and idle. People made some light complaints about their work load and one or two mused on the weather and the timing of the year’s first snow-fall. At the corner of the table a girl from the Finance Department held up her new phone for us all to admire. Her boss mentioned his son’s high school report card. Another lady mentioned the local hockey team her husband was coaching. Chirped statements of the utmost fluff and banality circled the table in this same vein for two or three minutes before being abruptly halted by a newspaper landing heavily on the dark oak table-top. It had been tossed there by a Mr. Joseph Wilson, not his real name, one of our sales representatives from the Chicago office who had joined us in Canada for the week. Poor Joseph! He had been hired by our company’s U.S. subsidiary over a year earlier, but until now had never set foot on Canadian soil. Utterly naive about the anti-thought non-culture rigidly enforced in the frozen colonies, he proceeded to do the unthinkable and say the substantial:

“This columnist,” he jabbed his finger down at the broadsheet, “is talking rubbish on Iraq. She’s trying to justify that WMD fairytale even now. Pack of lies, the whole thing, huh?”

He grinned around at his colleagues. I stress that I use the word “substantial” in relative terms. By most standards Mr. Wilson’s contribution would not qualify as a particularly weighty analysis of the politics played by the Western powers in advance of the 2003 Iraq War. This view he presented some years into the conflict, by which time even the U.S. administration of President Bush was more or less admitting to the fraudulent premises of the war, albeit under the all-encompassing guise of “mistaken intelligence”. The point is that Mr. Wilson’s musings were utterly uncontroversial and universally accepted as fact, most certainly so in nominally liberal-leaning Toronto. For the slight irritation with which Wilson had tossed his paper on the table, his words had been spoken in a mild and even somewhat jovial tone. But nonetheless he had miscalculated. In repressed, intellectually-virgin Anglo-Canada his words qualified as an opinion(!), stated aloud(!) rather than whispered, and on a non-meaningless issue to boot. The anti-response his statement elicited was stark and immediate. Every Canadian in the room clammed up instantly as though a blast of arctic air, minus a hundred degrees, had just howled into the room. The physical palpability I have mentioned was clearly observable to the naked eye. People’s bodies froze and stiffened; they sat up straighter and many flung their arms into a tightly folded position, hugging their frames as though in physical protection from the threat. Wilson was instantly rewarded with the social standing of an incontinent skunk. Nobody made eye contact with the madman in their midst. The clientele were rigid with horror, trapped somewhere between their innate fear of speech and their shallow sense of decorum. They sat there purse lipped and wide eyed, thought-free rabbits in the headlights of consciousness, desperate to run but not knowing the way.

There was long and very painful silence. Wilson’s expression faded from open expectation of widespread approbation to eyebrow-arched bafflement at the funeral scene he had inadvertently built. The ghosts of Catherine and William Lloyd-Jones stood, one to a corner, in stern disapproval of such license. Opinion!? Expression!? Liberty!? Individualism!? Who could even countenance such republican effronteries! It was left to our Human Resources manager to release the tension. She glanced nervously around the room, then yelped:

“So what about the Leafs huh? I mean it’s pretty awful eh? Will they even make the play-offs this year?”

After a pause a colleague quietly concurred. He was joined, after a shorter pause, by another. Over the next minute numerous other vapourings on the performance of the local hockey team succeeded in slowly dissipating the tension. Under such circumstances, tension in Canada is prevented by the sheer density of the air from dissipating instantaneously. It oozes gradually away, politely and gently drifting out of the room so as not to cause offense through any swiftness of action. Catherine and William similarly faded from view, back to their Upper Canadian backwater – though leaving, as all ghosts do, no doubt they may return at any time if needed.

The above scene serves as a very typical illustration of Canadians’ natural aversion to openly expressed subjective thought. Now of course I can siren voices complaining that this conversation occurred in a place of work and business, and that mixing either with politics and current affairs is bound to cause discomfort in any situation in just about any society. To them I would point out that I have observed at close quarters workplaces in several, culturally diverse countries and that it is the sheer physiological extremity of the reaction which marks the Canadian response out. Social awkwardness can have varying specific causes, after all. Bemusement at the fact of an interjection (such as Mr. Wilson’s) occurring at a given time in a given setting. Irritation or even anger caused by the expression of a view with which one may disagree. Anger accentuated by the frustration of one’s immediate social situation preventing the expression of a response. Embarrassment at the knowledge of colleagues sitting alongside one being themselves discomforted. But fear, actual observable fear at the sound of mild and conventional viewpoint takes us to the very far end of the spectrum of reaction. It is in its own right a form of extremism, one made all the more potent through the device of being visceral and instinctive rather than ideological or otherwise thoughtful.

It is self-evidently the case that a consensus of silence, what I’ll call Canadian unspeech or Canadian unthought, must have consequences more sinister than mere social opprobrium of the sort described above. Prior to exploring these consequences let us first note a discussion on CBC Radio One, broadcast on 8^th January 2010 and presided over by a presenter who I shall not name but will politely describe as “well known”. The host brought together nominally conservative columnist Margaret Wente (pronounced to rhyme with plenty) then of the Globe and Mail newspaper, left wing activist and writer Judy Rebick, and a third guest – a Mr. John Cruickshank whose occupation we will attempt to reveal through his own words. This discussion was on the state of public discourse in Canada, and sought to examine whether or not Canadians are unhealthily averse to the exchange of ideas and opinions. The debate is striking as a rare example of communal introspection in Canada – that is, of a group of Canadians actually sitting down to study and analyze their own national traits in a public forum. Speaking first, Wente – by Canada’s fanatically moderate standards a “controversial” and “opinionated” commentator – affirmed her own experience that in places like Toronto viewpoints on matters as mundane as the efficiency of municipal recycling programs had the ability to shock, appal and horrify. Her musings with the presenter continued (the emphasis is mine):

Wente: “It’s as if we’re afraid. It’s as if we’re afraid to really get into it with each other, and I think that’s kind of a shame.”

Host: “And you say this from first-hand experience because, as you say in your book, pretty much everything you write elicits some [startled response]...!”

Wente: “Well not everything I write! A lot of people – in fact the best part about what I do – is that people often come up to me and whisper in my ear and say: ‘You know, I really thought that too but I was afraid to say it!’”

Host: “Right. So even when they agree they’re afraid to say it. You think we’re...”

Wente: “That’s right, because they might... you know their neighbours might think worse of them.”

Wente did not elaborate on why their neighbours would think worse of them, as they most certainly would. Indeed their neighbours could start to actually fear them. Wente merely observed this reality as a fact of Canadian nature without seeking to delve deeper into its underlying causes. Tellingly, the presenter did not press her on this central point, an omission which in its own small way neatly demonstrates the limitations of thought and analysis prevalent in Canadian society. Instead he turned to Cruickshank to ask if he accepted Wente’s thesis on the nation’s aversion to opinion and its resulting addiction to alleged “moderation”. Cruickshank gave a resigned smile, then whined:

“Do I feel that we don’t get provoked enough? You know, you’ve seen the latest, y’know, estimates of how long we spend in traffic. I mean, how often do we fight with our kids? Do we need more provocations out of life? I say no. No. I think, you know, life without provocation is, y’know, is a good life.”

Life without provocation – sigh! – is such a good life, sigh! On reading the above quote we may form a vague hope that Mr. Cruickshank was attempting some sort of joke, but alas a cursory viewing of the video-feed produced alongside the radio broadcast shows that he is very much in earnest. From the above statement you would assume Cruickshank to be just an average suburban Canadian, a hockey-dad with an early start in the morning, a demanding day job in the city and a tiring commute back to a frenetic teenage home. Argument? Idea? Discussion? God forbid ideology? Or philosophy!? Give the man a break, for goodness sake! He doesn’t need to be provoked by hearing an opinion he may disagree with or – far worse – actually agree with. He’s a very busy man: publisher, after all, of the Toronto Star, one of the highest profile newspapers in the country! Prior to that he was the publisher of CBC News, the current affairs arm of the nation’s English-language public broadcaster. He used to be publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times. He was Managing Editor of the Globe and Mail, one of only two national newspapers in Canada. He is also the former Editor-in-Chief of the Vancouver Sun, the major daily publication on the West Coast. Mr. Cruickshank, in short, has been one of the most influential figures in the Canadian media, responsible not only for the delivery of hard news but for the solicitation and propagation of a wide spectrum of views, observations, experiences and sentiments. If Mr. Cruickshank’s professed horror of openly expressed thought does not tell you something about the state of media and public discourse in Canada, and if that in turn does not tell you something of the wider society that produces and sustains such an insipid, enfeebled mental porridge, then in truth very little will.

The broadcast media plays its role in cementing and propagating some grotesque ideal of Canada as an intellectually spineless, idea-free wilderness. After having run through the day’s major news stories, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship evening news broadcast The National will frequently host panel-discussions on topical issues pertaining to Canadian politics. A two minute glance at even one of these alleged “debates” will be enough to convince anyone of my overarching point on the state of public discourse in Canada. The participants, usually three or four from among the great and the good of Canadian political journalism and think-tankery, will each of them speak for as long as possible on a contemporary issue while striving at all costs to actually say next to nothing of deep substance. The weightier and more substantive the contribution, the higher the likelihood of orthodoxies being challenged, and the greater the risk they may find themselves in disagreement with one of the other panellists and actually be compelled to defend their position in something akin to an argument. As a result the contributions are dominated by the meaninglessness of banal and statements of the blindingly obvious. Addressing long-standing host and heated Canadian corpse Peter Mansbridge on the question of whether the Canadian economy “is heading for good times or tough times?” and if correspondingly it’s “time to panic [sic] or relax” (his words, not mine), a well-known “economic analyst” might moan:

“Oh it’s not time to panic Peter, not at all, but it is time to be vigilant! And that’s because it is Fall and there’s change in the air, and that change is that interest rates are rising. I think Canadians have become so accustomed to the past few years of ultra-low interest rates but the party is over, the punch-bowl is about to be taken away, rates are rising and I think they have a lot further to go!”

Following this Nobel-prize standard pearl of wisdom, Mansbridge might – well, did turn to another contributor and ask for his views on what he, Mansbridge, termed “the panic-relax”. The dichotomy between Mansbridge’s status as the country’s most respected journalist and presenter, and the sheer illiteracy and disproportionality of his question did not strike any of the panellists as startling in the least. The response, from another of the country’s top economists, came:

“Likewise no panic, no party either! We’re kind of half-way through what I suspect will be a decade long funk!”

Turning to a third guest Mansbridge, perhaps in acknowledgement of his bizarre earlier choice of words, asked of the Canadian economy’s prospects: “All right, let me re-phrase it a touch then. Worried or confident?” The response of “Neither!” was met with raucous laughter from the host and other panellists.[i]

We can choose to either laugh at or be outright maddened by this standard of alleged “debate” or “discussion” and the fact of this kind of thing being heard, nightly, on what by a country mile is the North American continent’s most pompous and self-regarding broadcaster, convinced beyond help that it is God’s gift to penetrating journalism, cold objectivity, razor-sharp insight and the strident clarity of the English language. But the invariable shallowness of these discussions is actually a side-issue. What always struck me as fascinating was the protocol followed when one contributor on The National, in spite of some effort, would be unable to avoid stating something in opposition to one of the other speakers. This would always be done in a tone of extreme neutrality and a facial expression of near-inhuman inscrutability (both atop the atmosphere of mental quiescence prevailing to begin with), and, if possible, a characteristically mild, wit-free knot of humour thrown in just to take any hint of threat out of the difficult situation. The three or so panellists may not even be the same room – they’re usually video-linked in from disparate, far-flung cities – but the complete absence of claustrophobic intensity in no way dulls Canadians’ deep need for lukewarm irresolution. A Canadian without detachment is like a drug addict without his fix: confused, lost and utterly afraid in the big bad world – and we can’t frighten or startle the million or so viewers of The National with strength of belief and the barbarity of certainty. Considering other current affairs productions from around the globe, it is instructive to consider whether a programme like, for example, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Question Time could ever succeed in Canada. During that weekly broadcast, which has aired continuously from the late 1970s, a large studio audience gets to directly challenge guests on a panel comprising representatives from the elite strata of society – the powerful and the influential of government, politics, business and the arts. The great and the good are interrogated with a seriousness, directness, passion and intensity that would utterly appal Canada’s Lloyd-Joneses in their prim little homesteads. Indeed if such a format were attempted in the country shrieks of execration about “standards” and “decency” along with cowardly boycotts by the country’s weak-kneed politicians would likely kill the series off within a few short months.

Opinion is the sum of observation and sentiment. Its widespread absence denotes a failure, unwillingness or inability to acutely observe the world, as well as a lack of underlying emotion – that is to say a lack of initial, subjective feeling on any given question or matter arising thereof. Strong opinion leads to argument, and argument – being divisive – stimulates thought, undermines the complacencies of assumption and orthodoxy and in turn forces the honing of counterpoints. This boosts the pace and quality of cognition, thereby enhancing the standard of verbalised output in the vernacular, so improving the expressed opinion both in terms of its inherent logic and its persuasive force. The argument moves up to a higher level. The regular participants improve their intelligence, broaden their knowledge-base and greatly sharpen their powers of interpersonal communication. If Canadians could only come to revel in the joy and anger of argument! All argument – not just ideological; argument as a means of reaching decision and so as a means of improving decision: economic decision, workplace decision, design decision, strategic decision. So much of this country’s human potential, currently buried in a permafrost of mental tundra, could be released! The country could become a thriving economic and cultural powerhouse with a productivity that could actually outstrip America’s instead of languishing far behind; it could be a New World Germany of work, inspiration and improvement instead of a third-rate New Zealand of timber and gas and decrepit redneck towns. But as we stand, and in the face of a gaping cavern of national ignorance, simple-mindedness and intellectual sloth, John Cruickshank, back over on the CBC radio debate with Rebick and Wente, had quickly to find a cover for the cowardice of a people. He continued:

“Look, restraint is an important element in the Canadian character. And restraint is what turns gibberish, which is the state of the turrets[1] culture in American talk television right now, into reason. So I’m not at all uncomfortable with Canadian restraint. I’d say in fact that the mushy middle in Canada is richer and deeper and more nuanced than the bare polarities that you find in the States, where two people are yelling at each other and there’s no content, because nobody listens.”

Ah, politeness! That ghastly word again. Where would Canada be without the politeness Mr. Cruickshank craves? Richer, happier, more thoughtful and more compassionate, in all probability. There are several interesting points about Cruickshank’s attempted justification, not least his automatic reversion to the Canada – United States dynamic and his home country’s pride of place in Uncle Sam’s shadow. Even a senior figure in the national media, presumably among the nation’s intellectual elite, seems incapable of discussing his country without dragging America into the argument. But the true cringe of his half hearted alibi lies, to use his own phrase, in the “mushy middle”. Cruickshank seeks refuge in the alleged fact that Canadians, standing far above America’s perennial liberal-conservative mud wrestle, bestride instead a sort of royal court of intellectual hegemony. Like virtually all superiority complexes this is merely a psychological device for masking self-knowledge of weakness and failure. There is, at least in relative terms, no “middle” in Canada. There is a small coterie of left-wing protestors and an even smaller gaggle of right-wingers and Christian conservatives, but both of these groups are smothered out of the national consciousness by the unending sprawl of bedroom-belt with its don’t-knows and its who-cares – the worldview expressed through a shrug and born of excessive spaciousness and suburban parochialism. Politics, current affairs, social issues, serious issues do not seem to register in the minds of the mass of the Canadian people – in fact in all my years living in the country I cannot recall a single social occasion, except when in closed cocoons of very close friends,  when anything weightier than workplace complaints, leisure pursuits or prospective car-purchases came up in the general chatter. Indeed you are about as likely to overhear a serious discussion at a gathering of Canadians as you are to be served whale-meat at the Greenpeace annual dinner. Cruickshank’s use of the term “middle” is entirely specious: Like most of his countrymen he insists on confusing the vacuously apolitical for the solid political centre.

Is it the case that Canadians do observe and consider their community, their country, their immediate environment and their world; that they do consider humans, humanity and human behaviour; that they are constantly considering economic questions and the globalist versus nationalist dynamic? Is it a fact that they do develop strong worldviews and deeply held personal philosophies but are simply prevented, by sheer force of their natural reserve, from expressing them openly? It is an explanation I can hear even now being patriotically bugled by some among the Anglo community. But before anyone tries to hide behind this fantasy they would do well to consider the following passage from the seminal 1946 essay Politics and the English Language in which George Orwell identifies and details the irrefutable link between the verbal expression of ideas, and the process, form and standard of cognition:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due to the bad influences of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell bemoaned the state of the vernacular he was reading and hearing day in, day out in post-war England. It would have been fascinating to hear his perspective on a society where the symptom he describes presents at a far more advanced stage of the disease. It is not merely that Canadian society exhibits laziness and inaccuracy in the expression of viewpoint, it is as if the very concept of substantive viewpoint has itself been obliterated, or – as the nation itself – was simply still-born. When Canadians have little or nothing to expound in public on any matter of any substance or importance, this presents an unflattering index into what, and to what extent, they are thinking in private. Place a premium on silence and you build a prison for the mind. This is the epitaph that Canada writes for itself. One day I asked an intelligent, ostensibly well educated acquaintance what he thought of a significant issue, specifically a prospective move towards closer economic integration between Canada and the United States. He paused, shrugged and glanced out the window. After a long few seconds he stated laconically, “I’m just a software developer.” As he was answering the only discernible alterations in his bodily and facial expression were gently raising shoulders and eye-brows – invariable signs of retreat from the trenches of thought. This particular exchange has remained with me as epitomizing the bland faced, blank eyed, automatonistic society that is Canada East of the Ottawa.

This national dilution of expression must have consequences more sinister than those described. It is not merely a question of Canadians building an intellectually repressed society that places a dispiriting premium on vacuous sloganeering and wanton simple-mindedness. It is that the point starts to be reached where those people who are in the habit of speaking their mind, who do speak with clarity and lucidity on matters of weight and seriousness, become perceived as an actual threat to society – disturbing the prevailing orthodoxy of bland with their observations and denunciations. For the masses born and raised in such an environment the outspoken expression of viewpoint can, as we have illustrated, be deeply disconcerting. Where the governance of such a place is arrived at though advanced democracy then the apparatus of the state, being merely a reflection of the society from which it comes (the very definition of advanced democracy), will similarly come to view trumpeted, strident, non-conformist opinion with unease at best. Canada in its way provides what for now is a gentle demonstration of the fact that totalitarianism does not actually require an oppressive political regime to prosper and survive.

Now of course gentle, understated Canada is not the sort of country where the government corrals dissidents in gulags and has spies stalking the university campuses. Such horrors, to use the time-honoured phrase, “could never happen here”. But this gentle, seemingly permissive reality belies two important factors. The first is the straightforward truth that in Canada there just isn’t very much opinion for the state to worry about in the first place. And secondly, but crucially, the staggering ease with which the basic precepts of a free society can and do collapse at the whim of complacent, decadent New World politicians not fully accustomed to authentic free expression and wholly ignorant of the great sacrifices made elsewhere, and at other times, to defend it. It is a fact little known in the outside world that over the decades numerous cases of unfettered, untrammelled government power have stormed the suburban garden of Canada to roar and snarl at everything the country pretends to stand for. Of these the wholesale internment of Canadian citizens of Japanese extraction during the Second World War is undoubtedly the most significant. Various manifestations of anti-communist paranoia in the country in the 1930s are notable. The wholesale incarceration of peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders at a G20 summit in Toronto is a relatively recent example at the time of writing.[ii] [iii] But the so-called “October Crisis” is certainly the most striking case, occurring as it did during a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity in Canada; striking in part due to the extreme disproportionality of the state’s response, but most of all for the near-universal support the Government’s repressive actions enjoyed (and to this day still enjoy) among the bulk of the Canadian people.

On 5th October 1970 a small handful of criminals kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross from his home in Montreal. Five days later a small coterie of their comrades decided to join the excitement by abducting Pierre Laporte, the Quebec provincial-government’s Minister of Labour. As is often the case with incompetent, rag-tag gangs the criminals covered for their weakness by gracing themselves with a very grandiose banner: the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), on paper at least a militant group dedicated to Quebec independence through the “overthrow” of Canadian rule and, for that matter, of Anglo-Saxon capitalism to boot. Thus did the situation stand: two human beings being held against their will; two sets of friends and families fretting over the fate of their missing loved ones. But events had already started to take a surreal and even more sinister turn. Following the kidnap of Cross but crucially before the abduction of Laporte the Federal Government through its national broadcaster acceded to one of the gang’s demands by having an FLQ “manifesto” read out on air in the French language – a decision which can only have played a major role in turning in the minds of Canadians a local criminal outrage into something akin to a national emergency, in addition to greatly boosting the confidence and self-esteem of the kidnappers. The tirade discussed the need for the people of Quebec assume control of their own destiny; to attain complete national independence for the province; and to free the Quebecois people from the tyrannies of the “big bosses and their henchmen”, by which they meant the English-speaking corporate elites who generated the bulk of Quebec’s GDP. In his seminal documentary on the kidnappings filmmaker Robin Spry reported (the emphasis is mine):

“To the surprise of authorities, it [the manifesto] was very sympathetically received by the people of Quebec, who agreed with many of its eloquent aims and angers. For these reasons, it is a key to the crisis.” [iv]

Laporte was taken hostage the very next day. What can only be called mass hysteria erupted. Spry again:

“Stories of hundreds of armed FLQ terrorists, fighting in the streets, systematic kidnappings, and impending selective assassinations grow wildly, as the country holds its breath waiting to hear what has happened to Pierre Laporte.”

Many Canadians genuinely believed that with a provincial cabinet minister now being held as collateral, something akin to a coup d’etat was imminent in the French speaking part of their country – or at the very least that there were thousands of FLQ terrorists in Quebec, armed to the teeth and crouched waiting to strike. Something had to be done and the Federal Government moved with menace to oblige. On Friday 16^th October Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau activated the War Measures Act, incredibly the same law under which Canadians of unfashionable Japanese ethnicity had been rounded up and corralled in the 1940s. As the legislation’s title suggested, the extraordinary powers it conferred on the state were intended only for a time of war, and as the fate of the wartime detainees had shown the legislation provided for sweeping powers of arbitrary arrest with convenient suspension of habeas corpus – in very blunt terms legislative legitimacy for authoritarianism. Reaction from around the country was swift and almost unanimously in the government’s favour. Indeed some wondered why action against the imaginary enemy army had not been taken earlier. As large-scale arrests under the War Measures Act began, one man interviewed on television spoke for millions:

“Strange thing that these people who have been preaching revolution, and the government has known of it, are suddenly picked up when they could have been picked up a year ago on charges of sedition, and convicted on the basis of the statements they were making ... should have done it a year ago and we wouldn’t have had this revolutionary situation that permitted the kidnapping of these two innocent men!”

These knee-jerk totalitarian ravings were the work, not of some ignorant hockey-lout on the streets of Winnipeg or Hamilton, but of none other than the then-former Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.[v] He continued:

“I asked over and over again of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Regional Affairs about these Americans coming into Canada, preaching revolution. Blood, bloodshed, revolution! And the answer given me was, ‘That’s freedom of speech! As long as they speak to selected groups, if they don’t make it too public.’”

Revolution? Americans? What parallel news story gripping the fevered imagination of this man? Or had poor Mr. Diefenbaker still not reconciled himself to the British and loyalist defeat at Yorktown in 1783? What of the FLQ kidnappings? This was a purely domestic criminal situation and ongoing investigation. Did Diefenbaker actually envisage an army of French-speaking Americans slipping over the border from New York State join their comrades-in-arms in Montreal? The man was ranting, entirely detached from reality, utterly out of control. The government was. The whole country was. With an alleged enemy force to contend with on the streets of Quebec Trudeau, with massive public support from both the English and French communities, supplemented his legislative crackdown with relish by flooding the streets of Montreal and Ottawa, the federal capital, with hundreds of Canadian troops to “protect” prominent buildings such as the national Parliament, foreign embassies and consulates and the homes of political elites, and wealthy businessmen and industrialists. The sight of armoured military vehicles on the lawn of Parliament Hill gave some Canadians pause for thought – but happily for Mr. Trudeau, not very many. Soldiers threatened and assaulted journalists who attempted to photograph or film them; it was potentially dangerous to record the presence of Canadian troops on the streets of Canada in peacetime. With the police now freed from protection duties, they could turn their complete attention to arresting members and leaders of the FLQ before the fanatics could strike again. But now a pressing question arose. Who to arrest? With the imaginary legions of the terrorist army astonishingly well camouflaged in the fields and bushes of Quebec province, the attention of the authorities turned to the real threat, the enemy within that every Canadian in his or her heart knew then and knows now to present the true danger to their carefully constructed non-society: those who are in the habit of expressing opinions. Specifically, in the case of the events of October 1970, views or ideologies querying the desirability of Quebec’s constitutional position within Canada.

Kidnappings, it should be stated, had occurred in Canada before this time. In point of fact there had been rather a lot of them. They have also happened since 1970 – and as demonstrated by the horrendous Bernardo-Homolka case of the early 1990s sometimes with far more horror and violence than in the outcome of the FLQ situation, which was gruesome enough: within forty-eight hours of the Prime Minister’s de facto declaration of war, poor Laporte was found murdered in the trunk of a car. If the intention of the War Measures Act had been to terrorize the thugs into submission, it had patently failed. In the meantime over four hundred persons were rounded up – their private residences stormed in the early hours of the morning or late at night; the victims held without bail and interrogated about their supposed links to the FLQ. Of the hundreds subject to arbitrary arrest, a grand total of two would eventually be found to be FLQ members. Of the hundreds rounded up, not a single one provided a shred of information about the kidnappings. How could they? Suspicion of FLQ membership may have been the pretext for their detention but it was obviously not the true motivation. Instead, they had been fingered as likely opinion formers and – ipso facto in Canada – dangerous troublemakers. Very typical among them was Pauline Julien. The dangers she presented to national security were obvious: she was a singer-songwriter and known poet. As if this wasn’t threatening enough, she was also held to be a supporter of women’s rights and along with roughly half the Quebecois population – around two and a half million people at the time – she was suspected of being sympathetic to the idea of Quebec nationhood. Then there was the dark and foreboding figure of Gérald Godin. He must have been a dangerous terrorist: he was the poet’s boyfriend. He was also a supporter and possibly member of the Parti Quebecois, one of the largest political parties in the province (and the governing party by 1976). In fact thirty-six members of this mainstream, moderate party were arbitrarily jailed, in most if not all cases simply for being members of this mainstream, moderate political party.[vi] Godin was also suspected of holding some left-wing views, not least because he was in the habit of expressing them. Most damningly of all, he was a journalist – one of the classic hallmarks of the political dissident[vii].

Robert Lemieux, a separatist-leaning lawyer with a “penchant for publicity and overblown rhetoric” [viii] found to his cost that the Canadian definition of “overblown rhetoric” is remarkably similar to that of “verbally expressed thought”. He was hurled into prison.  Julien, Godin and the hundreds of other separatist-sympathisers – writers, artists, singers, lawyers, activists, poets, thinkers, philosophers, journalists, even local politicians – were for the most part released within a week or so of their abduction, having served a seven or eight-day prison sentence apiece for thought crime, under martial law, in supposedly civilised Canada, towards the end of the twentieth century. During their incarceration all contact with the outside world had been forbidden. Legal representation was denied. As mentioned habeas corpus had vanished – it had been snatched off the street in much the way as had Cross and Laporte (by common criminal gangsters), and hundreds of entirely innocent civilians (by the Canadian government, with the hollering support of the civilised Canadian people).

I’d mention in passing that these events did of course occur a decade and more before the passing into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but for the fact that in this the land of notwithstanding clauses and mandatory moral equivocation such a point would be entirely specious. I leave it to the reader to list the other countries that were jailing poets, politicians and writers in the early 1970s.

Three main features of the scandal accentuate its chilling nature and sinister ramifications. The first is the role of the somewhat-vaunted Canadian media. With the threat of some of their own colleagues being hurled into prison as political internees, you might have expected the columnists and editorialists of the nation’s great newspapers to have decried and vehemently opposed the state’s frontal assault on fundamental liberties. You might have expected them to have fulfilled through sceptical enquiry and thorough investigation their vital role as checkers and balancers of power in a democratic country. Alas not. Instead, the shadow of the self-censor – the most ruthless and powerful censor of them all – fell over virtually the entire media establishment. Writing in Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine on the tenth anniversary of the crisis, Morris Wolfe recorded the media’s response to Canada “being the first western democracy to suspend civil liberties in peacetime”:

Canada’s media were almost unanimous in accepting the imposition of the WMA [War Measures Act]. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald, which had earlier asked for martial law (“a military court does not have to concern itself with the niceties and the mores and morals of capital punishment, or the channels or frustrations of criminal law”), was delighted. The Vancouver Sun declared: “At last, government has armed itself to fight fire with fire and match ruthlessness with ruthlessness.”[ix]

Toronto’s nationally influential Globe and Mail was according to Wolfe “positively mealy-mouthed”. And he noticed a disturbing pattern of thought that had run through the leading articles he was reviewing ten years on:

Most editorials said the government wouldn’t have acted as it had without good reason. After all, as The Montreal Star put it, wasn’t [Prime Minister] Pierre Trudeau himself a civil libertarian? The Edmonton Journal accepted the situation because “we do not have the information available to the Government.” The Kingston Whig-Standard told its readers that the government is “obviously in possession of alarming information.” Le Soleil of Quebec City concluded that “if the authorities chose to resort to such extreme measures it is because they had good reasons.”

The circular logic is positively terrifying: the powers that be must have their reasons, therefore we responsible, patriotic citizens must support them without question; thereby allowing the power of authority to grow without restraint; calling in turn for even more obsequiousness and toadying on the part of the commentariat and their readers. There is something horribly reminiscent of the Stalin-era in such slobbering power-worship delivered on demand, without a hint of embarrassment or a pause for a thought, fuelled as always by the veiled cowardice of self-justification. Wolfe does say a nice word or two about the Toronto Star’s coverage – he points to a dissenting piece penned in that newspaper by James Eayrs.[x] Unfortunately Wolfe clearly missed the front page of the October 17^th 1970 edition which with its banner headline “Prime Minister Trudeau tells Canadians: WE ACTED TO PROTECT YOUR LIFE”, a sycophantic accompaniment titled “The agony behind Trudeau’s decision” together with the top headline “Marchand: FLQ has enough bombs to devastate Montreal” would have left Star readers in no doubt about the veracity of the fantastical, lunatic speculations underpinning the national hysteria; and so the deep and certain need for the government’s repressive and sinister response.

But the self-censor needn’t have felt itself alone. It was augmented in its role by the bald thuggery of state power. Let us examine the crucial role of the national broadcaster in all of this, related to us once again through Wolfe’s valuable essay “The October Crisis: Deference to Authority”:

Gérard Pelletier, secretary of state in 1970, phoned several important media figures, including George Davidson, then president of the CBC. ... it’s clear that after their conversation the CBC began censoring itself in what became the most shameful episode in its history. On October 15, a day before the WMA was brought in, Peter Trueman, then executive producer of CBC national news, was called into his superior’s office.

In his own memoir Trueman describes what John Kerr, Head of News, required of him:

Kerr gave me my orders in tones of the utmost gravity ... We were to avoid commentary and speculation of all kinds. We were not to use man-on-the-street interviews or shoot film of any public demonstration. We were to air no panel discussions on the October Crisis and were to avoid reporting speculation, particularly speculation about what the government was doing. I was told, still in hushed tones, that the policy had been adopted by the highest levels within the corporation. In effect, I clicked my heels, saluted, and returned to duty.[xi]

CBC staff, instead of maintaining their dignity and walking out en masse in protest at such an outrageous assault on freedom of the press, fell over their whimpering selves in their rush to comply, confirming Trueman’s subsequent admission that “there is an all-pervasive gutlessness about Canadian journalism”[xii]. In doing so they joined their private-sector media counterparts – superiors presumably also telephoned by Pelletier – to create a closed circle of rigid obedience, kneeling before officialdom. It is depressing to reflect that if Richard Nixon had been Prime Minister of Canada, and that if the Watergate Building had been located in downtown Ottawa, then the counter-democratic shenanigans of the Committee to Re-Elect could very likely have never come to light. Amid the prevailing squalor of cowardice and sycophancy among the nation’s so-called journalists, one and only one CBC television reporter sought to redress the balance. Door-stepping Trudeau at Parliament buildings on October 13th, Tim Ralfe confronted the Prime Minister in an off-the-cuff interview that has gone down in Canadian history, though, as we will see, for all the wrong reasons. Ralfe demanded justification for the menacing presence of troops at Parliament buildings in Ottawa, and directly challenged Trudeau to justify and explain his new-found disdain for the basic freedoms inherent to a civilised country. (This was following a partial deployment of troops, though prior to the imposition of the War Measures Act.) It begins:

Ralfe: “Sir what is it with all these men with guns [troops] around here?”

Trudeau: “Haven’t you noticed!?”

Ralfe: “Yeah I noticed them, I wanna [know why] you people decided to have them.”

Trudeau (grinning): “What’s your worry?”

[brief over-talking]

Ralfe: “I’m worried about living in a town that’s full of people with guns running around in it.”

Trudeau: “Are you! Have they done anything to you? Have they pushed you around or anything?”

Ralfe: “They pushed around friends of mine.”

Trudeau: “Yeah? What were your friends doing?”

Ralfe: “Trying to take pictures of them.”

Trudeau: “A-ha!”

Ralfe (incredulous): “Is that against the law?”

Trudeau (broad grin): “No, not at all!”

We may forgive Ralfe the weak phrasing of these opening questions; the poor man can only have been shaken by the sight of journalists being assaulted by Canadian soldiers at Canada’s parliament buildings, and who can blame him? The initial point here is to remark upon the Prime Minister’s smirking, joking, positively jolly manner as fully in evidence on the archive footage of the interview.[xiii] Is this a man weighed down by the seriousness and danger of the situation, and the gravity and ramifications of the decisions he must now with great reluctance make? Or are we presented with a vision of something altogether different – one of those ghastly moments in history when destiny, chance and circumstance conspire to land a lightweight poser with, however temporarily, his hands on the levers of absolute power? Ralfe again:

“But with your army troops you seem to be combating them [the FLQ gang] as almost as though it is a war, and if it is a war, is [sic] anything that they say have validity?”

Trudeau: “Oh no, don’t be silly, we’re not combating them as if it’s a war, but we’re using some of the army as peace agents in order that the police be more free to do their job as policemen, and not spend their time, er, guarding your friends [?] against some form of kidnapping.”

Ralfe toys with another half-question, then continues:

Ralfe: “But you have said before that this kind of violence – what you’re fighting here, the kind of violence of the FLQ – can lead to a police state.”

Trudeau: “Sure, well that’s what you’re complaining about, isn’t it?”

Ralfe: “Well, yes. But surely that decision is yours, not the FLQ’s?”

Our man is upping his game, now posing some challenging questions and making in the process some very pertinent points. Trudeau mocks Ralfe’s use of the term “war”, though as stated less than 72 hours later he would go on to in effect actually declare war through imposition of the War Measures Act. He so dodges Ralfe’s very incisive follow-up: namely that by escalating the crimes in Quebec to something akin to a war or internecine conflict, is not the government actually conferring a degree of legitimacy onto the gang and their actions? Do they not risk a situation emerging where, in the eyes of some at least, the aims, aspirations and even methods of the group would now warrant a second look? Ralfe then comes to the nub of the whole issue:

Ralfe: “... what you're talking about to me is choices, and my choice is to live in a society that is free and democratic, which means that you don't have people [soldiers] with guns running around in it. And one of the things I have to give up for that choice is the fact that people like you may be kidnapped.”

Trudeau [hesitantly]: “Sure, but this isn't my choice, obviously. You know, I think it’s more important to get rid of those who are committing violence against the total society and those who are trying to run the government through a parallel power by establishing their authority by kidnapping and blackmail.”

Lest this particular point have passed anyone by – that the abduction of a provincial politician and a low-level trade commissioner by half-organised hoodlums amounts to the establishment of a “parallel power” in Canada, in other words that these crimes, however serious on their own terms, did in fact amount to a coup d’état – Trudeau helps us by actually reiterating it soon after. The emphasis is his:

“I think the society must take every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which defies the elected power in this country and I think that goes to any distance.”

As you can see, one did not have to be a hysteric, detached old man like Diefenbaker to be in the grip of the prevailing fantasy. Trudeau, in full enjoyment, certainly was – and he was speaking for the country. After the conclusion of the interview, and with the camera still rolling, the PM turned back to Ralfe and remarked, “I see you’re playing Devil’s Advocate, but it’s a hell of a role.” His majesty neither expected nor appreciated being challenged on his government’s unprecedented actions by one of his journalist subjects. For his efforts Ralfe was severely reprimanded, in front of his colleagues, by Trueman who accused Ralfe of defying every journalistic standard that Trueman had ever heard of, no less. When Ralfe made plain his displeasure at his treatment Trueman went further and demanded that a formal reprimand be placed on Ralfe’s employment file.[xiv] His denunciation of Ralfe seems extraordinary when one watches the interview today and notes the reporter’s mild and measured tone throughout. Reporters and writers who dared stray from the official party-line were thus left in no doubt about the risk they were running. Authority, at that particular time, was absolutely not to be questioned by anybody. Truly had the freedoms of speech, thought and dissent died, for a time, in this most self-regarding of liberal democracies.

In his memoir Trueman, to his credit, expresses regret for his treatment of Ralfe and acknowledges that the interview had “for the first time revealed the extent of the Prime Minister’s paranoia about the FLQ”. This – paranoia – takes us to another aspect of the whole squalid episode worth mentioning. It is that in the final analysis the Canadian state deigned to be nothing like as shaken and scandalised by the actions of the FLQ “terrorists” as it had chosen to be when the crisis began. Having finally located Cross and cornered his abductors in a Montreal apartment in December 1970, the authorities all but genuflected to the criminal thugs, meekly granting them safe passage to Cuba in return for the Englishman’s release. These the generals and elite fighters of a supposedly fearsome army of fanatics, on the verge of a successful coup d’état in the minds of bureaucrat fantasists and politician megalomaniacs, quite literally strolled away into the sunshine, entirely unpunished, while at that very moment the law-abiding thinkers, philosophers and writers of Quebec knew that a thought out of place could land them in a latter day dungeon.

What is so chilling in the end – and what for us is actually the material point – is that the authoritarian actions of the government, and the fawning complicity of the media in supporting and glamorizing them together won the hearts, minds and admiration of the huge majority of the Canadian people. Opinion polls taken at the time showed overwhelming public support (80% at a very conservative estimate) for the implementation of the War Measures Act and the casual suspension of human rights directly implied.[xv] [xvi] To the Canadian people, the direct precedent of their ethnic-Japanese fellow citizens having been corralled for the crime of being the wrong race was not relevant in the least – indeed from what I’ve seen of Canadians and their patchy-at-best knowledge of their own country’s history, by 1970 millions of them were probably unaware that this had ever even happened. I mentioned that Trudeau’s interview with Tim Ralfe had attained iconic status in Canadian history. This is down to three immortal words uttered by the Prime Minister when Ralfe pressed him on just how far he was prepared to go in suspending the liberty of the subject in pursuit of the FLQ. Trudeau recovered from his hitherto mumbling, awkward demeanour to state with clarity and great arrogance: “Just watch me.” The great significance of these words lies not only in that they were stated truthfully and in all earnestness, and that this battle cry therefore amounted to a roar of something approaching orthodox fascism; it is not even that this in turn tells us something of the true, hidden nature of Trudeau – Canada’s apparently harmless, charming dandy. It is in the first place that this boast greatly boosted Trudeau’s popularity at the time rather than sparking universal outrage and, amazingly, remains entrenched in Canada’s national consciousness to this day, decades on, as epitomizing tremendous leadership at a time of national crisis – be that crisis real or crisis imagined. If you speak to any Canadian about the events of October 1970, “just watch me” will be one of the first things they will relate back to you. Indeed in many cases this incantation is the only aspect of the entire episode they are capable of relating. As they quote Trudeau’s spine-chilling threat they will often simper in nostalgic approval, showing their deeply felt admiration for the man and his government’s actions. In their own way the Canadian people so illuminate that darker side to our human nature which enjoys and is even comforted by the thought of men wielding absolute power over other men; which is in awe of and even aspires to a state of authoritarianism or, where it cannot be attained for one’s self, will rush to slobber and worship at the feet of the master, the monarch or the president-for-life.

In his retrospective on the events of 1970 Morris Wolfe soberly concluded that “we Canadians aren’t knee-jerk civil libertarians. If anything, we’re knee-jerk authoritarians”. The frigid horror of my office colleagues in Toronto is one day-to-day example to consider alongside the weightier actions of government. Another case I personally experienced, and find hard to dislodge, was at a restaurant in the city where a function was being held for a senior politician who was running for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. The nameless contender started out the evening by making one of those bland, all-things-to-all-men political speeches so eminently forgettable that you can’t remember a single word within ten seconds of its end. Then, accepting with a flashed smile the obligatory round of applause, he proceeded to stroll around the room glad-handing and platitude swapping with the party faithful – the obsequious power-worshippers and giggling autograph-hunters of Canadian politics, neither a viewpoint nor an ideal anywhere in sight. Ostensibly this “walk-round” (so termed by the PR men present) was to allow “ordinary party members” to question the leader-in-waiting on matters of domestic or foreign policy. But I could see as Mr. Bright Smile’s entourage moved gradually closer to my friends and I that in reality nothing of the sort was happening. The twenty and thirty-somethings who were pressing his hand and hugging his frame were solely concerned with the fluff and titter of celebrity. They were having their photographs taken, offering their best wishes and good lucks to his campaign and generally gazing starry-eyed into his charismatic face, simpering in the manner of lovelorn teenagers. A serious and rigorous exchange of views on party policy this most certainly was not. The man was one step away from the leadership of the opposition federal Liberal Party, that is to say only two steps away from being Prime Minister of Canada, and he was, it seemed to me, getting a very easy ride on this stop of the campaign trail at least. When he was within hearing range of my own group I distinctly recall one young woman, seemingly overcome with admiration, imploring “oh I so hope you win the party leadership, Mr. ________![xvii] The country really needs you!” She then covered her gaping mouth in the manner of a delicate 1950s debutante whisked off her feet by the hulking team captain standing before her. What aspects of his political ideology and general world-view were of deep interest to her? Not much beyond preferred brand of post-coital cigarette, by the look of things. Raised voices in the other part of the room prevented me hearing the great man’s gallant response, but nonetheless this was all too much: if nobody else was going to discuss politics with a potential future Prime Minister, then I was. I turned to my friends and announced my intention.

“I’m going to ask him about trade with China,” I said.

I say “trade with China” solely for the purposes of this narrative: I must state truthfully that I actually cannot remember the specific issue I was going tax Mr. Smile on – for the simple reason that I never got the chance to do so. The instant I made this remark to my friends their response was knee-jerk, petrified and outright vicious: “No way, man” breathed one, wide-eyed and afraid; “Don’t you dare,” hissed another – a friend of some years’ standing – with a level of vehemence I had never seen in him before. The others in my group stood rigid in horror, waiting to see what would happen next. The change from the relaxed bonhomie of a few seconds earlier to this new atmosphere, one of snarling menace born of visceral terror, was a remarkable thing to behold. It was as though I had just dropped a rattlesnake down at their feet. It was a scene similar to that faced by poor Joseph Wilson at that Toronto company-meeting, but with the crucial difference that this time the Canadians present were required by the nature of the situation to actually articulate their feelings: to if possible explain, in a very short period of time (Mr. Smile was now chatting to the group immediately adjacent to ours), precisely why they were each of them mortified at the prospect of politics being discussed with a politician at a political event. It was a task at which they were failing miserably – the emotive irrationality and half-baked literacy of “No way man” and “don’t you dare” was about as sophisticated as it was getting.

“He’s a professional politician,” I protested, “What on earth’s wrong with asking him a policy question? It’s important to challenge powerful people.”

“No, come on man, seriously... don’t do it,” a third friend implored. His tone was exactly that which a suicide-hotline operator might use to dissuade a caller from jumping off a cliff. This use of the word “man” as a substitute proper noun was enraging all by itself. In a way it seemed to epitomise the utter inability of these people to articulate (much less rationalize) their fears. I looked at my friend in bewilderment. Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead. His terror was absolutely palpable. I glanced back over my shoulder at the leader-in-waiting. He was now only one person away and would be upon us within seconds. The suicide counsellor gripped me by the elbow and made that most Canadian of final appeals:

“It’s not about challenging power,” he implored under his breath, “It’s about politeness. We need to be polite here, that’s all I’m saying.”

By this, of course, he did not mean “please phrase your questions and comments in a well-mannered fashion”, he meant “please don’t ask him for his views, since that may start one of those dangerous and threatening conversations where people may end up expressing differing opinions”. Maddening in its dishonesty, yet in a way impressive as a slice of pure humbug, and strangely the fact of his whispering this final appeal gave his words a power and a force that would not easily be overcome. Immediately I felt the cold hands of cowardice press hard down upon my shoulders. How easy it is to be forthright and courageous in the safety of the imagination, and how different a thing it is to face down peer-group pressure such as this in an actual social situation! I turned to face the candidate, now wrapping up a conversation with another buxom admirer, and could feel my bravado draining away. Mr. ________ shook the maiden’s hand, then took two or three steps towards our group, his entourage of simpering political eunuchs in tow. He cast a brief glance in my direction and held his stance for precisely one second. This was my moment. If there was a time to engage him in conversation, to offer my hand and press him on an issue – on any issue – that time had come. The final drops of my alleged bravery slipped quietly away. I hesitated a fraction of a second too long... and he floated smoothly on to the next group.

In my defence, the pertinent point about my capitulation is not that it actually occurred. It is not that to my shame and regret I allowed myself to be browbeaten and bullied into submission by the iron wall of censorship thrown up by my terrified friends. It is instead the startling and sinister fact of such censorship existing in the first place, enforced rigidly and, crucially, on pure instinct by educated, middle-class Canadians, people for whom anything approaching philosophy seems to thrust a blade deep into the very core of their souls. Indeed it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that for some it almost threatens their very sense of being – their entire way of observing and interacting with the world around them. The events I have described in this section, both personal and historical, stand testament to the innate dread that Canadian society engenders in its people when it comes to the free and democratic exchange of ideas, and it must again be borne in mind that the concept of “opinion” as I have employed the term here should be considered in the widest possible sense – not just the overtly controversial or divisively political. Opinion, as Margaret Wente said, on recycling. On sports teams. Hockey coaches. On holiday destinations. I’ve seen Canadians become discomforted by vague discord on the standard of a given car manufacturer. I refer in short to opinion on just about anything save the very extremes of fluff and triviality; opinion: as verbalization in the vernacular carrying the risk of distinguishing oneself even slightly from one’s peers. Imagine the sort of place where such a basic human impulse has been all but crushed. Under the weight of such a deep societal imperative – a tremendous unspoken pressure to at all costs psychologically conform – how can wider human emotions, beyond those aroused by acceptance or rejection of views and sentiments, really fare? The answer is very badly indeed. The ability to openly express fear, anger, happiness, joy, resentment, bitterness, love, hatred and so on and so forth has in (and by) Canadian society been blunted, dulled to the point of almost being drowned by Canada’s overweening comfort blanket of decadence and slovenliness.

By its very nature any brand of complacency will not announce its presence starkly or overtly. It takes a great deal of time – years, realistically – for the Canadian disease to seep slowly into the bones and begin paralysing the personality. I say this in answer to those who have made brief visits to the country and may think I am entirely misguided in my analysis of its societal constitution and cultural and intellectual atmosphere. But I’m afraid neither a week doing business in Toronto nor a fortnight skiing in Banff or Whistler will provide anything like the level of insight required for a comprehensive analysis of Canadian thought-retardation: like most lethal pathologies it does its work with a slow deliberation and patient ruthlessness; the bacteria grinds and drains and wears down its host over long and extended periods. You need to visit Canada to appreciate its good points, you need to live in it to know the bad, and while at a certain level this is a statement of the obvious applying, you would think, to just about anywhere it is worth considering that few of those who have yet to visit, say, Britain, America or Italy can be in any doubt about the negative aspects to life in those societies. Those who have made a long-term move to Canada from elsewhere – in many cases from relatively impoverished and unstable countries – often find in time that at a deep and barely tangible level there is something fundamentally wrong with the Canadian paradise. It was very striking that during the 2006 war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah the Canadian government found itself forced to prepare for the evacuation of tens of thousands of its own citizens from Beirut and other Lebanese cities.  Virtually all of these people were Lebanese-born who had spent several years living in Canada and had become naturalised Canadian citizens, or in other cases were the direct descendants of such citizens, or were Canadian-born citizens who had strong ethnic or familial ties to Lebanon. Whatever their back-story they, valuable Canadian passport in hand, had clearly decided that life in the political and ethnic cauldron of Lebanon, never that far away from another civil war, was somehow preferable to the Canadian alternative to which they had earned or been born with a lifelong entitlement. Why? Superficially the notion that Lebanon could be in any way a superior country to live in than Canada would appear to be ludicrous, utterly nonsensical. Yet those Lebanese-Canadians knew what I know, indeed what anyone who has spent a decent portion of their lives North of forty-nine knows: that in the land of cold fake politeness, prim insincerity, intellectual repression, spiritual retardation and Catherine and William Lloyd Jones the vast open air of Canada can come in time to be nothing short of suffocating. Surreal indeed is the society that surrendered the ability to consider, and with it, inevitably, the ability to feel.

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[1] Ambiguous on the recording used for transcription. May have been “Tourette’s” as in Tourette’s Syndrome, a disorder characterized in part by vocal tics, rather than turret (an elevated firing position built into a fortification). Cruickshank’s point is clear and does not change either way.

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[i] CBC’s The National, 11^th Sep 2013, ‘The Bottom Line’ panel discussion (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

[ii] Police violated civil rights, acted illegally, says scathing report on G20 summit, National Post, 16^th May 2012 (http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/16/police-violated-civil-rights-acted-illegally-says-scathing-report-on-g20-summit, retrieved 15^th Apr 2014)

[iii] G20 report slams police for 'excessive' force, CBC News online, 16^th May 2012 (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/g20-report-slams-police-for-excessive-force-1.1137051, retrieved 15^th Apr 2014)

[iv] Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (National Film Board of Canada, 1973)

[v] Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (National Film Board of Canada, 1973)

[vi] Chronology of the October Crisis by Claude Belanger, Dept. of History, Marianopolis College (http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/chronos/october.htm, retrieved 1^st Apr 2014)

[vii] Canada: A People’s History – Years of Hope and Anger (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000)

[viii] TIME Magazine: Canada: This Very Sorry Moment (26^th Oct 1970)

[ix] Morris Wolfe, The October Crisis: Deference to Authority. Saturday Night magazine, October 1980. As reproduced in Essays, New & Selected (Wolfe, Morris) online publication http://www.grubstreetbooks.ca/essays/essayscontents.html (retrieved 1^st Apr 2014)

[x] James Eayrs, Emergency powers are over-rated weapons, Toronto Star, 27^th Oct 1970

[xi] Peter Trueman, Smoke and Mirrors, The Inside Story of Television News in Canada (McClelland and Stewart, 1980) Chapter 2

[xii] Peter Trueman, Smoke and Mirrors, The Inside Story of Television News in Canada (McClelland and Stewart, 1980) Chapter 10 opening

[xiii] Uncut interview available from CBC Digital Archives (http://www.cbc.ca/archives/categories/politics/civil-unrest/the-october-crisis-civil-liberties-suspended/just-watch-me.html, retrieved 21 Apr 2014). A heavily edited version was aired on CBC Television News, October 13^th 1970 (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

[xiv] Peter Trueman, Smoke and Mirrors, The Inside Story of Television News in Canada (McClelland and Stewart, 1980) Chapter 2

[xv] Canada: A People’s History – Years of Hope and Anger (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000)

[xvi] Gallup poll, December 1970, as reported by Claude Belanger, Dept. of History, Marianopolis College in October Crisis (http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/readings/october.htm, retrieved 1^st Apr 2014)

[xvii] Not Justin Trudeau.

[xviii] CBC News: Evacuation of Canadians from Lebanon to start Wednesday (CBC News online, 18^th Jul 2006, retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/evacuation-of-canadians-from-lebanon-to-start-wednesday-1.579019 on 10^th Apr 2014)

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