5. Canadian Corporate

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Despite its problems, Canada is no Rome with the Visigoths at the gate. Canadians are decadent no doubt, but it is their own peculiar brand of decadence, in its way subtly different from the mainstream form of the illness seen elsewhere and at other times. The Canadian condition is certainly not the listless arrogance of a once great power on the slide back down to the mud-hut; Canada could never follow the standard bell curve of civilizational progress – birth, development, attainment, achievement, wealth, power, hubris, nemesis, extinction – because Canada is fundamentally a colony. It is but an offshoot of another, parent civilization, after a time independent and entirely separate from it, and both for better and for worse generally spared the blood, the sweat and the sacrifices that built the construction up in the first place.

Instead the progress chart of Canadian history, if it ever gets around to being drawn, will much more resemble a flat line than a dramatic curve. A low, flat line delineating the stable progress of a cosy little society punching far below its potential but, thanks to the gifts of its imperial birth, still existing above the level of many other countries. Decadence is decadence, but there are numerous strains of the virus and not all of them are necessarily lethal – though I do emphasize the word necessarily. It is a fact that Canadians from time to time do see through the fog of their intellect-constraining environment. They can innovate, have innovated and even when the spark of creativity has been missing or redundant they have still, at times, shown the vision and ambition to conceive of great projects and see them through to their end. The Avro Arrow arguably represents the nation’s finest engineering feat. The CF-105 Arrow was an advanced fighter jet designed, prototyped, built and test-flown in the booming post-war Canada of the mid 1950s. Of course it wasn’t the first jet-propelled fighter aircraft – not by any means – but nonetheless the development of such advanced aerospace technology speaks to a great sophistication of underlying industrial base, and was and remains no small achievement for a country, as Canada was then, of only fifteen million people. Fiscal considerations ultimately brought the Arrow project down – but even this sad ending came with a noteworthy postscript: many of the Canadian scientists, designers and engineers who worked on the Arrow project went on to play important roles in the U.S. space program. This era also saw the realisation of a great Canadian ambition in national infrastructure: the locks and canals of the Saint Lawrence Seaway made possible the penetration of heavy shipping from the Atlantic Ocean all the way – incredibly – to the port of Thunder Bay, Ontario, directly North of Minneapolis, more than half way into the North American continent. Canadians still take justified pride in this feat, though the cost and effort of the giant construction project was obviously shared with the United States. On an interesting though smaller infrastructural note, twenty years earlier one of the world’s first autobahn-standard roads, the Queen Elizabeth Way, was built to link Toronto to the Niagara region.

Canada, more significantly, is predominant among the countries to have jumped on the bandwagon proclaiming the invention of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell worked on his creation while dividing his time between his farm near Brantford, Ontario and a laboratory in Boston in the 1870s. It could be said that the world’s first “long distance” (i.e. hamlet-to-town, and possibly building-to-building) telephone call was made by Bell in Brantford. He would go on to enjoy fame and success over the border in the United States and had been born, raised and – crucially – educated in Scotland, so Canadian claims to the invention of the telephone, though loud and oft-repeated, are challengeable in good part. Nonetheless no spark of genius can burn without the oxygen of its surroundings, and the milieu in which Bell found himself – largely Canadian, partially American – cannot have failed to play its part. The arguments he must have had, the dinner-table musings, the discussions, the debates, the thinkings-aloud and illuminating responses will all have contributed to the project as the momentous experiment in technological communication neared its triumphant end. Viewed from that perspective at least the Canadian claim to the telephone is not so unreasonable.

More recently we find the Canadian company Nortel, a corporate giant in point of fact distantly related to one of Bell’s earlier enterprises. By the late 1990s Nortel were sitting in a very dominant position in the global market in telecoms and networking equipment, not least in the field of VoIP telephony (the ability to hold phone calls via or over the internet) and the fibre-optic equipment and infrastructure required to support it and broader internet applications. Nortel’s world headquarters sat proudly among the warehouses, storage-depots, freight-companies and truck-stops of industrial Mississauga, immediately West of Toronto. Further West, down Highway 401, we come to the home of the BlackBerry. Research in Motion pioneered the development of this the first mass market so-called “smart-phone”. Virtually alone did this Canadian company drive the evolution from simple cellular telephones to comprehensive internet-ready hand-held computing devices. Their product was so innovative and so startlingly successful that – just as with many Nortel devices and equipment – customers throughout the world assumed it to be the brainchild and creation of the world renowned technology-wizards of Silicon Valley in California. Instead the BlackBerry was conceived, born and raised in determinedly unfashionable Waterloo, Ontario.

So the great fires of invention and vision, a near-puritan work ethic; and the great corporate power and wealth that can result from an alliance of the two have all been witnessed in the short course of Canadian history. Great things have been achieved. Success has been achieved. Is achieved. Canadian success... at which point, it happens. It happens, as in all brutal honesty it must: woe and alas the soft-underbelly of Canada will insist on wobbling into the room to flex its girthy flab! Just as Canadian civil and industrial engineering had decided to rest on its lazy laurels by 1980, the nation’s high-tech sector decided to sit back and relax around 2005 or thereabouts after a decade or so of success in the new Internet economy. Nortel cascaded into a heap of rubble and recrimination when the stock market’s technology bubble collapsed in 2000. Research in Motion spent several years congratulating themselves on the success of the Blackberry, failing to even notice the tidal wave of competition coming up from the American giant Apple, with the result that by 2013 the Canadian firm found itself teetering on the edge of extinction.[i] The Blackberry device had accounted for 43% of smartphone market share in the U.S. in January 2010; by September 2013 this had collapsed to 3.8%. The truth is that in the absence of the American hard edge, that cut throat capitalism that brooks no failure and rewards no loser, the slow killing cancer of Canadian complacency will all too easily set in. Success is very quickly assumed to exist as a matter of right, in a manner quite consistent with the underlying nature of Canadian society itself. In part it is also down to the insular world of a comfortable, relatively closed Canadian economy that seems befuddled by globalism and has yet to come to grips with its tremendous implications. The giant, taken-for-granted market to the South plays its role in reinforcing this sense of old certainties never to die – and is in an ironic way another of the numerous factors that help to kill off initiative once a Canadian enterprise has become well established. Idle, bureaucratic laziness and managerial short-sightedness and incompetence become the order of the day with a pace to match the dynamism and efficiency that is in the process of being lost. If, as have I, you ever have the pleasure of working for a Canadian corporation, and most especially in the fast changing field of high technology, it will not take you long to notice the symptoms.

There was or is a company, which for the purpose of this narrative I will call “ThinkWrite” and which I will anonymously locate in a large town in Western Canada. Let us say that ThinkWrite came to prominence in the 1980s offering what amounted to a personal digital assistant (PDA) – a then cutting-edge device allowing its owner, stereotypically a high-flying corporate executive, to digitally record his thoughts, ideas, notes, contacts and appointments for use while in transit or otherwise away from his office. The device’s small physical size and relatively large data storage capacity distinguished it from the numerous upstart competitors in the field, most of them Japanese. ThinkWrite reached the pinnacle of their success in the mid 1990s when they were awarded a huge contract to supply, shall we say, the entire civil service of the Spanish government. But even before the turn of the century various models of the by then ubiquitous mobile phone were tentatively starting to demonstrate similar capabilities. While the rudimentary note-taking and personal organising capabilities they offered were far removed from the sophistication of the feature rich ThinkWrite offering, one did not need to be a clairvoyant to see that in time – and probably not much time – the cell phone manufacturers and the spreading tentacles of the Internet would between them conspire to close this gap.

I joined ThinkWrite as a middle ranking computer systems analyst on a crisp autumnal morning one November around the turn of the century. On that very first day I was placed in a classroom with a dozen other new employees for what, we were told, would be a week-long induction course into the business. Ostensibly we were to learn about the company (our “new home”, we were proudly told), gain a detailed knowledge of its product line, and be educated on ThinkWrite’s “corporate vision”. We would be given profiles of competing companies. There would also be short introductory speeches by each of the senior executives, after which the various departmental heads would then get thirty minutes each to discuss the roles of their respective fiefdoms. But first – and, it quickly became apparent, foremost – there was to be an extensive series of lectures on ThinkWrite’s “work culture” and human resources (HR) policies. It was these HR courses in particular which struck me very early on as being something indicative of a pampering, nannying little nursery rather than a serious and cut-throat commercial venture – the sort of pointless, time-wasting employee exercise that only a deluded, money-frittering company could see any sense investing in. The whole premise of these courses seemed to be based on the fact that we, the students, being presumably as fresh and as innocent as toddlers, had next to no knowledge of behavioural standards or person-to-person interaction, and were equipped with next to none of the tenets of basic common sense. Courtesy of these classes we were enlightened with the fact that, for example, it is frowned upon to issue death threats in the workplace. We would learn that it is bad manners to racially abuse ethnic-minority colleagues, make fun of wheelchair bound workers or physically assault one’s boss. Issuing fake bomb-warnings and using the elevators in the event of a fire were also, we were assured, verboten; if you think I exaggerate the gold-standard imbecility of these injunctions, I assure you I don’t: to describe these HR classes as patronizing would not even begin to give their self-regarding designers and promoters the immense credit they felt they deserved.

Aside from kindergarten-like sessions on “health and safety”, there was central to these courses an education in something called “Emotional Intelligence”. I can state honestly that between introducing this term as I have just done, and writing the sentence you are reading right now, I have spent several hours pondering how to describe “emotional intelligence” to someone who has never before heard the expression. Is it a philosophy? A branch or facet of psychology? An ideology of some very vague description? A branch of “behavioural science”, if there be such a thing? Perhaps the second of those answers is the closest to the truth, though I say so with no confidence since throughout the entirety of the course presented to us it seemed to me that our instructors were themselves extremely vague as to precisely what “Emotional Intelligence” was supposed to mean, signify or aim for. Looking back I wonder if they merely borrowed the term – made fashionable by university night courses and Human Resources seminars – and used it as a sort of modish gift wrapping over their standard potty-training classes for new hires. Emotional Intelligence purists (no doubt somewhere, probably in Canada, such people do in fact exist!) would I imagine have been scandalised. That said from the moment the concept was introduced in our training courses at ThinkWrite, it – and the creepily Maoist enthusiasm with which our instructors presented it – gave me a distinctly unsettled feeling. The mere presence of the word “intelligence” alongside a derivative of “emotion” struck me as a mild attempt at dehumanization, since the latter is and must be kept apart and unrelated to the former, congruent with our basic human nature. Superficially at least it seems to imply that rationality of mind should attempt to usurp and perhaps even replace the instinctual. The undoubted benefits that implementation of such a dogma would bring would be rather outweighed by the totalitarianism of behavioural conformity it would create.

The variant of the beast presented to us seemed in the end to amount to a frivolous attempt to describe, categorize and label norms of human behaviour as though they had never previously existed or been heard of. Any number of academics make a handsome living by stating the blindingly obvious, and I don’t doubt that many a career, book-deal and tenured professorship have swum on the back of “Emotional Intelligence” or some similar drivel. The over-arching theme – to the extent that there was one – was a focus on what we might call anger-management: in short, teaching the squabbling little nest of ferrets we’ve just hired how to control their emotions and properly express their feelings while working under our roof. If you feel yourself getting angry at a colleague or during a meeting, it reiterated over and over in one form or another, then take a metaphorical deep breath and just let it all pass. In a way it seemed to me to tie neatly back to that founding precept of Anglo-Canadian society which mandates that here in the frozen colonies we don’t do argument, ever. But that the vibrant and even fiery exchange of ideas is actually vital to the health and well being of a successful and competitive business – not least in the technology sector with its reliance on visionaries with their lateral thinking and natural inventiveness – seemed to be lost on the owners, management and policy wonks of ThinkWrite. With company success having been achieved in the mid-1990s ideas, it seemed, were now surplus to requirements.

A “practical task” we were assigned summed up the shallowness and absurdity of the entire course, and with it the creeping sense of corporate drift that I and some others were beginning to detect only a few short days into our employment. We were split into teams of three and presented with an imaginary scenario to deal with. We were survivors of a plane crash, wrecked a hundred kilometers from our destination in the freezing Canadian arctic. We were presented with a list of items from the wreckage, from first-aid kits to a handgun, a bottle of whiskey, sleeping bags, torches, a box of matches etc. and asked to list these items in the order of their immediate, life-preserving priority. Following thirty minutes of huddled discussion and debate – during which the whiskey was promoted up our team’s list due to its “disinfectant qualities” – we presented our lists to the teacher (one of our assistant Human Resources managers) for the verdict. But rather than correcting or commenting directly on our answers, she instead initiated a “group discussion” on the imaginary plane crash, during which each team had to justify its list and explain the thought-processes by which it had been arrived at. At this point the teacher concluded the session by standing back several feet, spreading her arms, opening her mouth wide by way of earth-shattering statement to come and squealing that “the whole point of this exercise is to show that team work is more effective than, like, working alone!” The intensity of the emphasis she placed on “team” and “alone” demonstrated sheer awe at what was, for her, clearly an astounding revelation. A separate practical exercise, also aimed at propagating the virtues of team work, had us playing more or less the same game of charades I had learned in pre-school as a three-year-old.

Now, that people working towards the same goal should work together rather than apart would strike most people as rather obvious to say the very least. It is one of those pieces of knowledge that is probably innate to us: it is highly unlikely that post-Neanderthal homo sapiens needed a course in Emotional Intelligence to know that hunting in organised packs was more effective than attacking large mammals alone. Nor, as they started to form more sophisticated societies and then begin to build civilisations did they need to be told that essential decency in individual behaviour was central to the development of their communities – indeed, essential to the very concept of community; they knew innately as well as from experience that tolerance for brutality and coarseness represent the fast-track back to barbarism and cave-dwelling. But at ThinkWrite, in economically advanced Canada in the twenty-first century, such concepts apparently needed to be introduced and explained from scratch. Looking around the room at a dozen or so Canadian new-employees listening with rapt attention to hour after hour of such unpardonable tripe I could only imagine that their parents, in an enthusiasm to pass down hockey techniques or snowman construction skills, had failed at a rather more basic level. These were adults all; grown men and women, each of many years’ experience in the technology industry, being treated like early school-age children: being told how to behave, how to speak nicely, how to be polite, how to avoid confrontation, how (this being Canada) to avoid expressing any opinion of any type on any subject of any description, how to call the Police or Paramedics in the event of an emergency, how to work in a team and be “intelligent” with their “emotions” while dealing with “others”... why, I thought, why do they stand for being patronised and insulted to such an extraordinary degree?

Perhaps a clue to their character lay with our teacher. I turned my attention back to the top of the classroom. There she was, our instructor – a characterless, unsmiling woman in her late forties – and in Human Resource Management (or Emotional Intelligence, or some jumbled up combination of the two) she had found her religion. As she passed down to us the pearls of her alleged wisdom, I noticed that her eyes were positively glowing with the exaltation of evangelism – with the joy and power of publicly showcased intellectual prowess. She addressed us as though she were a visiting professor in ancient Greek, or the President of the Royal College of Surgeons. Her heightened posture, protruded breasts, projected voice and extravagant, emphasized hand-motions all betrayed her immense self-delusion in the importance of her so-called subject. The more banal the observation or injunction, the greater the stridency with which she imparted it. She squealed with joy on the improprieties of intra-office adultery, pranced around breathless on car-parking procedures and was close to orgasm on the question of cafeteria queuing etiquette. I felt like a sordid voyeur just watching her, though as with the proverbial slow-motion train-crash it was nigh on impossible to look away. As the hours and days of our induction course dragged on, as her eyes shone brighter and brighter in the rapture of her sermon, the course in vaguely defined “emotional intelligence” seemed to lengthen to the point of physical torture.

Watching this lady’s performance I was struck by the extremes to which people will go, in a society such as this, to dig for meaning amid national boredom and pointlessness. I must stress that “pointless” is not a adjective I use unadvisedly in this context. To be raised in English Canada is to be robbed of kinship – national, communal, ethnic, religious, ideological. It is to be deprived of a unique language and the sense of cultural grounding this provides; worse, it is to inherit a semi-literate, vocabulary-stripped stepchild of another nation’s tongue. It is to have whatever scraps of national identity that do exist crushed into the ground by the weight of the world’s only hyperpower, the country’s next door neighbour. These are the obvious facets of the Canadian ailment. Less obvious are the symptoms largely hidden from the outside world, the internal bleeding of vitality hidden from view; the anaemic lethargy that results to constrain cultural and mental development. The truth is that Canada is a place neither of the mind nor for the mind: Canadian society places next to no emphasis on reading for pleasure – much less than on actual literature. It demonstrates indeed at times almost seems to enforce near total ignorance of history, be that world events or those pertaining to Canada’s own past; in direct consequence, serious discussion of the present – of contemporary domestic and world affairs – shows a strong tendency towards shallowness and ignorance, and is invariably predominated by thoughtless sloganeering and vacuous headline-parroting. It of course is difficult to discuss a writer or his work, or literature in general – and outright impossible to muse on current or historical events without expressing an opinion, a prospect which as outlined at great length fills the average Canadian with sensations of the utmost horror. I recall one acquaintance who, helpfully combining his bafflement at the concepts of literature (however basic) and history, staggered me by breezily announcing in conversation, shortly after my arrival in the country, that he had no idea who Anne Frank was. Looking back with years’ hindsight my only surprise now is at my genuine shock then. The infamous Canadian reserve, with its deep and at times righteous aversion to posturing, finally seals the coffin on any great desire to learn anything important – aborting any attempt to become cultured in a manner which while not necessarily Canadian per-say in terms of literature, history and so on would at least be a far sight better than nothing.

So what is our beloved Human Resources manager to do? She comes from a country where people have no choice but to manufacture meaning – to leap upon something, anything resembling a philosophy, a “culture” of sorts or an attempt at individualism, with the resulting absurdities I have described. Her audiences are captive, and the inanity of her subject can not risk baffling her students or offending their constrained, ambition-fearing sensibilities. Human Resources, the religion that is her career, fits the bill perfectly. For this woman the day to day drone of her corporate life had become the substitute for a lived to its full potential, and as she whined and exclaimed her way to a howling climax that week it occurred to me that while rich, stable Canada may seem the best place imaginable for those amid the conflict and corruption of the developing world, it spiritually and psychologically can be a dreadful place to actually come from.

An important point to note is that the basic raison-d’être of human existence, the production and rearing of the next generation, is for most people demonstrably not sufficient as a condition for a fulfilling life. Our HR instructor (as I later learned) was happily married with two children. I recall a similar female colleague at a Toronto-based company telling me of her deep dread at the prospect of her teenagers starting university life. We were discussing work-related matters in her office when she suddenly broke off to make this observation. “Once they’re gone...” she said, “well... what then?” Unlike her compatriots at ThinkWrite she espoused the doctrine of “living to work, not working to live” and did not see any aspect of her professional life as a substitute for real contentment. To that extent I suppose she was an existentialist – at least in comparative terms – and certainly by local standards. As she repeated “what do I do then?” under her breath, she looked into the distance wearing what is probably the single most bewildered expression I have ever seen: open mouthed and with a frown of great intensity, as though she were observing some downright absurdity, like a tap-dancing polecat or dog with a man’s head. The full horror of her barren, dreary reality seemed to visit itself upon her just at that very moment. In hindsight I could have advised her to alter her life in a sudden and dramatic fashion simply by leaving the county and starting anew abroad. An international move presents a great and ultimately fulfilling challenge for any person, though for this baffled product of the most suburban of countries I suspect it would have been a bridge too far; nonetheless I’d encourage any Canadian in her position to at least give it a try. I politely suggest that such an effort is more important for Canadian women than for their menfolk, who take languid refuge in ice hockey, the NFL, cars, golf, barbeques and beer. For their wives the alternative would appear to be little more than a slow descent into a sort of respectable, half-concealed picket-fenced madness manifesting itself in extramarital affairs, pathological career obsession as described – and then, also, frenzies of desperate panic over the most trivial of local matters. On this last point I can report without the least exaggeration that, for example, a former neighbour of mine in Toronto would start letter-writing campaigns over my car being parked slightly out of sync with the kerb near her house. My local councillors, provincial representative and federal Member of Parliament all knew more about my own car’s movements than I did. Another homeowner would make a point of marching past our garden once a week in summer to make sure our grass – and that of all the other tenanted properties in the neighbourhood – was cut with the same regularity and to the same standard as that in the owner-occupied properties. If it wasn’t – and it usually wasn’t – she would rap loudly and on our door until someone came to assure her that our grass would indeed be cut. The prospect of even a slight delay in this task being completed would ratchet her ire up to emergency levels – on one occasion she threatened to call the Police if the job was not done by evening. I remember a third woman stopping me on the street one Autumn evening to express deep concern about the slightly excessive number of leaves blowing around in front of our house. What stuck in my mind was not so much the ridiculousness of her complaint, but rather the great earnestness with which she communicated it. She went to tremendous lengths to explain to me, an ignorant foreigner, the “Canadian way” of autumnal street sweeping. I mentioned extra-marital affairs; the carnally adventurous can of course enjoy this and similarly enjoyable ways to break free of the spirit crushing Canadian prison. Another female colleague of mine was once invited to a house-party in a street she and her husband had recently moved to. At the end of the evening, several glass of wine having been consumed all round, this conservative-minded couple discovered to their inconvenience and embarrassment that they were the only uninformed participants in a wife-swapping festival. They made a very polite, very surreptitious Canadian departure (out the back door, I was told) as the other guests began picking sexual partners at random by selecting, blindfolded, car-keys from a bowl. My colleague subsequently received the news, enthusiastically imparted, that among the spouse-swapping sorority her husband was generally acknowledged to be the best looking man on the street; subsequent party invitations received by this couple were politely declined.

I date my colleague’s relating to me this particular episode, at my office cubicle around a week later, as the moment when it first began to occur to me that in suburban Anglo-Canada we have a society where, to put it kindly, not all of the pigeons are quite at home. Despite their discomfort in the situation in which they had inadvertently found themselves, it was clear that neither she nor her husband had been particularly shocked by the turn of events. These bizarre antics, among grown and mature adults, were apparently just the sort of thing to be expected in the colourless suburbs of outer Toronto. How else were people going to pass the time over the weekend? No doubt most of the participants saw this miniature festival of adolescent horse-play as the highlight of their summer. Now of course people can and will conduct affairs outside of marriage or other forms of committed relationship – as a species we’ve been creeping around behind the backs of our sexual partners since before we were living in caves. But it is the peculiarity of the thing which strikes home – this kitsch vision of respectable, middle-class people actually taking the time to arrange a drunken harem, a time and place to howl, squeal and giggle as the rebellious, sexually hyperactive teenagers they would once have been, or perhaps wish they had once been. This is precisely the kind of diversion that people deprived both of challenge and initiative are reduced to – and Anglo-Canadian society deprives one of both. The teenage metaphor is apt: Canada as the well-off parent, languid in a quietly repressive way; her adult citizens the giggling, whooping, play-acting offspring constantly dreaming up ways to break the monotony of the cul-de-sac, their cultural and spiritual sub-arctic. While I mean to use the word ‘spiritual’ in the widest possible sense and not merely the religious, it is nonetheless interesting that whereas American suburbanites will frequently take refuge in Christianity, this option is more or less closed off to their Canadian counterparts. Canadians are too bored to be Anglicans, too prim to be Evangelicals and too English to be Catholics; not the Father, the son nor the Holy Ghost can drag this nation out of its permanent state of mental atrophy.

Over at ThinkWrite there was one youngish woman who came up with her own solution to the problem of Canada: she would with tremendous effort force herself to smile continuously from the start of the working day all the way through to its end, virtually without halt. This was a very particular kind of smile – not the wolfish grin of the power-hungry politician nor the sleazy slobber of the used car salesman. Instead it was the utterly forced effort of the fake and the flake, the lips stretched wide and kept tightly closed, dimples made severely pronounced by the extremity of the pressure being applied; the eyes creepily detached and wholly uninvolved. In its way it was a remarkable exercise in physical endurance: it was extremely rare to encounter this girl wearing anything other than this grotesque face-mask. And – apparently having constructed a personality to match – she would invariably greet myself and others with an enthusiasm of horrendously exaggerated proportions in the corridors or at meetings, screeching welcomes to the tune of “How IS your day going!?”, “Hey! How are YOU doing!?” or “Settled into your new role? Oh, that’s JUST GREAT!” The excessively high pitch she would put into these salutations, the great stress she would place onto key words, was a dreadfully cringe-making thing to have to listen to. It served to emphasize the depth of the void she was trying to fill – the fact that she was more or less wearing her psychological desperation on her sleeve. At lunch this behaviour seemed to intensify still further. Even from several tables away in our large cafeteria our conversation would be interrupted as she squealed absurd levels of gratitude on being handed her food at the cashier. “Oh THANK you SO much!” she would howl, acting for all the world as though she had never seen a square meal in her entire life. The poor girl was one ghastly, put-on fraud from top to bottom, strongly reminiscent of those brainwashed North Korean children paraded singing and dancing on state television to the greater glory of the regime. Had I not known Canada and its hidden horrors better – and had I not also been reassured to the contrary by some mutual acquaintances – I would have assumed her to be a manic depressive of some sort. But while ostensibly in dire-need of a personality transplant, it seemed instead that she had merely come to formulate her own solution to the Canadian conundrum. With true fulfilment impossible amid the shopping malls, the bowling alleys and the hockey arenas, she had decided to just invent it. And at a certain level you have to ask: why shouldn’t she? Happiness is happiness, and a synthetic, manufactured, unwholesome brand of the product is still a great deal better than nothing. And after a time even that shoddy foundation can become solid: since self-delusion is the most effective form of brainwashing, the lie will become truth simply though the act of being repeated often enough. If she manages to convince herself that she is happy then, by definition, she has become happy – in the final analysis a no less valid form of happiness than that attained through more authentically fulfilling means.

Now of course this particular individual – this caricature of a human-being forever yelping with made-up pleasure at nothing in particular, sits at the far end of the wedge of cultural abandonment: I emphasize that I point her out as a extreme case but not in any way a unique one; to a greater or lesser extent that empty kind of platitude-chirping is observable in a clear majority of Canadian women. The point is what this great need to probe for a deeper meaning in life – and if necessary to just create one out of thin air – actually signifies. It signifies the central importance of a wider sense of belonging to people’s sense of personal contentment and moreover, frankly, to their psychological (and psychiatric) well being. In the complete absence of a wider group with whom one may closely identify, the human mind starts to become unbuckled. Recalling my earlier observation on Toronto society’s evoking an archipelago of disconnected atolls – millions of people choosing to have little or nothing to do with each other – and my listing of natural Canadian reserve as the reason, it occurs to me now that on reflection it runs much deeper than that. People like this woman and millions of others, including for that matter the tens of thousands of mental-health cases who march the streets, howling, are all of them victims of the great Canadian dislocation: the cultureless, countryless, historyless, idealess, purposeless tundra onto which they have been dumped by God or by happenstance. And the point about a sense of history, specifically the national history, is absolutely critical – far more significant than most people realise. In its absence from the mind one is entirely deprived of a sense of continuity – again that feeling of belonging to something far greater than one’s self, something which existed well before us and will continue to exist long after us, to which we are inherently connected and a part of, and which we all in our very small way are helping to shape and forge through the strivings and efforts of our daily lives. Those of us raised in the more ancient parts of the world, not least in Old Europe, take this gift so much for granted that virtually none of us are even aware of it. It has been with us for so long that it has seeped deep, deep down into our souls and become as fundamental to our beings as blood and marrow -- if you doubt this then just consider Europeans’ invariable willingness to leap into orgies of slaughter the instant our nationalist protective-instincts have been threatened, or our patriotic urges thwarted. The great power of this psychological force, negative effects et al, in itself proves its – tribalism’s – central role in our psyches. Without it, we are adrift and in a way – no matter how many friends, no matter how close our family – we are alone.

Now considering the phenomenon of tribalism through the narrow prism of human conflict, it is easy to see that in many respects it is a good thing that Canadians are so utterly removed from its drives, emotions and passions. This is a position which unquestionably holds morally. Indeed from this standpoint alone globalism, the drive to steady elimination of national boundary and gradual weakening of cultural distinction, almost certainly stands as the single most inherently moral crusade since the dawn of human civilization. But what about the positive aspects of a solid ethnic or national identity? The private culture, and that aforementioned unique history with its visceral sense of continuity? Then that very strange sense of permanence – the unmistakable feeling, however irrational and disprovable, of belonging to a group whose customs, traditions and behaviours will someway and somehow persevere forever. Language I will discuss, and hopefully provide an insight into how alarmed the Quebecois must feel when they look immediately to their West at English Canada and observe the spiritual wilderness that awaits should French disappear from North America. Their colonial French culture is one of those inherently linked to language: without it they, as a people, effectively cease to exist. In the absence of a distinct tongue what else is there? Well, there is national revolution. The Americans demonstrate that a strong identity can be created and sustained for centuries on the basis of foundational political difference or, put better, a collective political ideal; a national purpose. Failing that even geography can come to the rescue. Despite having most of the same hidden birth-defects as their Canadian cousins – an unchallenging economic climate and ready-made systems of governance – the Australians have somehow forged a quasi-identity which revels in its sheer distance from the mother country and also, as it happens, in the hot climate. But all of the above pales to insignificance when we come to what is indisputably the most alluring and powerful draw of the tribe: the warm glow of ethnic kinship, that extended family which for all its internal squabbles and rivalries will always come together to defend its own in the face of an external threat.

Private, closed heritage; history and continuity; the security of permanence; a language; the inclusivity of natural kinship; a fixed, common purpose and a prevailing temperament which infuses a cultural identity but does not constrain individuality. All of these things are denied the Anglo Canadian and listed thus they are a price worth paying in blood for. Without them a nation, in the end, can be by no reasonable and objective measure be called a nation at all. It is little more than a disconnected mass of soulless, though-free amnesiacs, its people rootless and without tribe – the psychological equivalent of homeless; inevitably prone to psychological detachment with emphasis on triviality and manufacture of substance; in the end exposed far more than others to synthetic non-happiness and psychiatric disorder.

All that said, do not Canadians have a great and obvious advantage? Logically speaking it is those of us with strong national and cultural identities that have the most to dread as the tide of globalism encroaches daily more. It is we in Europe, not Canadians or other New Worlders, who have a great deal to lose – who are losing a great deal as the steady move to a single, global state eats away at our controlled, autonomous borders, throws open our countries and markets to the whole of the outside world and implicitly declares that this land, your land, is now the property of humanity and no longer the preserve of any single group. There is no disputing the righteousness of this: international frontiers are mass murderers – the habitual repeat offenders of the international community. For millennia we’ve been swimming in blood to defend and expand them. Yet without them the tenets of belonging as I’ve listed them will fade into history, must gradually be blended away into the great soup of common humanity. Europe is clearly at the vanguard of this movement; it is obvious to any clear-thinking person that within roughly a hundred years the era of nationalism and the nation on the European continent will have come to an absolute and complete end. No longer will Europeans self-identify as “Dutch” or “German” or “Spanish” save when describing their ancestors: as expressions of ethnic exclusivity, linguistic separation and territorial possession the writing is on the wall for such artificial designations even as we speak. Within the confines of the European Union internal borders have been all but abolished, and now it is just a matter watching the results: the death of the national culture and the growth to dominance of its globalised, Anglophonic mass-communicating usurper.

Identity, that blood and marrow of the old world soul, is being slowly and silently drained out of us. It is being drained out because economic and political imperatives demand it, and because morally there simply is no other course. Inevitably some feel very deeply threatened by these moves – witness the stuttering rise of various extreme far-right parties in Europe since the mid-1990s, groups who by their very nature probably attract five or ten times as much “closet” support as they do actual voters; though all things considered Europe’s retrenchment to the ultra-nationalist fringe has been surprisingly minimal under the circumstances of the continent’s accelerating political and economic unification. But, back across the pond, what of the Canadian people? By comparison, the demands globalism makes upon them shrink to almost nil. With none of those tightly-bound ties of communal belonging present to begin with – no connection to land or sense of heritage; absent the extrovert, ideologically-driven patriotism of their American cousins Canadians would appear to be in a uniquely well placed position to accept and adjust to the unfolding one-world reality. Indeed it occurs to me that amid the impersonal, multi-ethnic polyglot malls and offices of Toronto and Vancouver we may well be getting a sneak preview of the century to come, the twenty-first, that pivotal moment in the history of mankind when the united civilization on Earth will complete its course from League of Nations conception to actual, physical birth. But then again, Canada as the model for all this? Canada as the model for the coming world where guarded borders and cultural divides will no longer impede the forward progress of the species? That’s an idea that should give us pause for thought, to say the very least. We will need creators, geniuses and risk-takers to drive the human race forward in this approaching new dawn. Intellectual repression, aversion to thought and the shirking of challenge will need to be strongly discouraged if not actively stamped out. A world-state of Catherine and William Lloyd-Joneses should not appeal to us in the least. It would drive the thinkers into the psychiatric wards, suffer economic decline and collapse under the weight of its own complacent parochialism... though, conversely, even as I write these words it becomes as clear as day that anal-retentive, the nearest Canadians come to tradition, cannot possibly survive beyond the new horizon. America, Canada’s cure, lies over the still demarked boundary and in an open system – a globalised system of human mobility with its steadily diluting effect on the cultural and behavioural norms of nations it will be the American mindset that will prevail on this continent. It will be American optimism, American vision and American entrepreneurialism that will jolt Canadians out of their reverie and welcome them, finally, to the world beyond with its great highs and its deep lows; that baffling and mysterious place where treachery, drudgery and corruption sit solidly alongside gentleness and ostensible decency. A place that makes great demands of effort, of drive and of initiative and, while promising only uncertain rewards at best, does at the very least ignite the human spirit in the hitherto listless.

At ThinkWrite our Human Resources manager bowed her last after having lectured and pontificated for a full two and three quarter days longer than necessary. The concluding summary of her presentation at our induction week consisted of one of those self-important mini-speeches the sole purpose of which is to extract a round of applause at its end. This being Canada we politely obliged her, though in my case more out of great relief than deep gratitude. The novelty of I, a grown man, being told how to behave as a developed, socialised human being had worn off some time earlier – though glancing around it was painfully obvious that several of my new colleagues were overcome with admiration for the latter day prophet now floating gracefully out of the room.

Over the remaining days of our induction course we were introduced to various other managers and executives whose task it was to explain the company’s line of business to us. After three days being told how to be nice, we were now to have two days getting some insight into what ThinkWrite actually did, and by extension some idea of what our jobs might actually entail. Our largely pointless HR marathon had left me with an uneasy feeling. A strong whiff of complacency was hanging in the air – a nagging suspicion that in ThinkWrite I had signed up for a company with just a little bit too much time on its hands. Regrettably, the parade of executives and luminaries who came to us now did not go out of their way to undermine this impression. The Chief Technology Officer (CTO), for instance, more or less wore his obliviousness on his sleeve. Charged with overall responsibility for keeping ThinkWrite’s product-line in tune with the demands of the market, he appeared even at this astoundingly late stage (around the turn of the century) to be blissfully ignorant about the threat that ever more sophisticated mobile phones were posing to ThinkWrite’s digital personal organiser. He was airily dismissive when someone in the class pointed out that their own mobile phone included a simple calendar and appointments application. “Oh come on now, there’s hardly a comparison is there?” He spoke indulgently as though trying to soothe a truculent child. “The features on the PalmSecretary are so much more advanced than that! We support multiple simultaneous calendar and appointment managers, allowing the device to be shared among different staff members in a company, or alternatively making it easier for users who have numerous separate business interests. We can also store 150 megabytes worth of diary entries. And of course we have a full flip-out QWERTY keyboard which is large enough to use but still small enough to have the PalmSecretary fit in a big pocket.” He spread his arms and ended with what looked like an attempt at a rhetorical flourish: “Now your phone can’t do any of that, can it eh!?” Well, at that specific moment in time – well over 15 years before I’m writing these words – this statement was for the most part true. Unfortunately it also represented a complete abdication of responsibility. The great difficulty this man appeared to be facing was in grasping the precise nature of his own role, which should have entailed detailed, ongoing and above all dispassionate examination of the prevailing course of technological advancement in relevant areas. And dispassionate is the operative word: without cold detachment a slurry of wishful thinking and baseless optimism seeps into the analysis and pollutes the conclusions. This gentleman was merely projecting the current state of the market out onto the future as though the very concept of progress were nonexistent. To be fair his restrained, thinking-inside-the-box mindset was and is hardly unusual – in fact it is more or less the norm for the overwhelming majority of people. What immense difficulty we have in considering the possibility of change – despite the fact that things have changed and are changing all the time, all around us! As I write the U.S. military is controversially waging war with pilotless drones in the skies over Pakistan. Yet try telling somebody that within twenty or thirty years we will have pilotless commercial aircraft on passenger flights, and look at the airy, scoffing dismissal you are liable to receive. In attempting to extrapolate elements of the future based on existing observable trends our ability to apply the simple power of logic seems at times to be nil. Apply that logic and, for all the mockery, you’re a rare visionary. Fail to apply it and you’re a common nobody. And alas for poor old ThinkWrite their Chief Technology Officer – the third most senior person in the entire, two-thousand strong company – fell firmly into the latter of those categories. Back at our induction course another new-hire asked what with the benefit of hindsight was a brilliant and even prophetic question, but which at the time we all (myself included) found a little strange: could not the PalmSecretary device be upgraded to include a SIM card, miniature microphone, speaker and the circuitry required for wireless communication. In other words – couldn’t the device be turned into a mobile phone while retaining all of its other features? Looking back now the point seems so obvious that we actually have some difficulty imagining the vague stir of discomfort the suggestion caused around the room. Unorthodox suggestions, publicly stated, by their nature make an audience uneasy. And the fact is that back then, prior to the era of the ubiquitous smartphone, this idea really did sound a little outlandish. And tellingly the CTO, the one man in the building whose job it was to keep an open mind and think the unthinkable, chose without a moment’s thought to just share in the general bafflement. “Oh no, no, no...” he waved his hand gently as though declining a drink at a cocktail bar and made a statement of the blindingly obvious, “you know we’re just not a telecoms company here at ThinkWrite.” Well, indeed. But this bland little morsel of Canadiana typically failed to address the more fundamental point: under the market circumstances which by then were starting to become clear why was ThinkWrite not considering a move into the telecoms arena? When pressed on the fact that internal surveys showed that around four-fifths of existing ThinkWrite customers were estimated by that point to be also carrying mobile phones, he failed utterly to grasp the significance of the statistic. “Oh we’re ahead of the game on that one,” he smirked, “the next version of the PalmSecretary is being designed specifically to be small enough to make carrying it and a cellular phone quite convenient.”

Thus did ThinkWrite plan to power their business ahead into the new millennium. What was interesting however was that this man did seem to sense trouble ahead at a deeper, rather more subconscious level. This was evidenced by the fact that in deflecting and parrying our questions he was continually taking refuge in what he called “our legacy business”, by which he meant that the millions of existing ThinkWrite customers were so enamoured with their PalmSecretary devices that they could be relied upon to continue upgrading to newer versions of the device almost in perpetuity, no matter what. This, the unspoken implication went, represented a “guaranteed” revenue stream for the foreseeable future and discounted the need for further innovation and the exploration of new market segments. Wishful thinking was indeed ThinkWrite’s overall business strategy – the bland arrogance of “we’ll do very well because we’ve done very well” which boded ill for the morrow and while of course not unique to Canadian enterprises was nonetheless of a blend only a society like this could produce: vacuous presumption as an extra layer atop the innate, pre-existing languid of Canada; a thick coat of icing over an already soft cake – a mush upon mush that the competitive, the driven, the international and the cynical could cut right through without an ounce of an effort.

On his way out the door our beloved CTO turned to face us, waved, and gave his blatantly rehearsed parting shot: “Welcome to ThinkWrite guys, and remember: put on your sunglasses... because the future’s so bright!” No sir, you put on your sunglasses since you are so obviously blind – that, at least, is the witty response I wish I had given rather than clapping and whooping like a trained seal along with the rest.

The Finance Manager (Chief Financial Officer, the second most senior person in the company) joined us briefly to provide an “overview of ThinkWrite’s financial position”. Six feet, three inches tall and with classic horn-rimmed glasses this man had the gait, the bearing and the demeanour of the archetypal corporate stain – the consummate bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. I suppose all accountants need to conform to this type since an exuberant free spirit is not conducive to hours on end spent poring over taxes, earnings and revenue projections. But even still this particular individual seemed to be taking his position a little too diligently, revelling in his duties as though accountancy and pen-pushing were some kind of lifestyle choice, like Buddhism or veganism. With his lanky stature, tightly cut greying hair and unwavering monotone the man struck me as being sharply evocative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This observation took on some importance when this strange, intoning creature began his talk by unwittingly providing me one of those rare, almost exalted moments of clarity which cut through the noise and interference to bludgeon you with the starkness of a given truth: in this case just what Canadian society is capable of doing to its own people. This poor man began by opining very, very sadly that “Here at ThinkWrite,” – pause for a sigh – “we have zest for life.” The utter disconnection between this statement of joyous fact and the death-like tone and manner with which it was imparted – the fact that vitality as a professional virtue was being trumpeted by little more than a heated corpse – is something that will never fade from my memory. Even now I can see this horror sitting before me, eyes behind the glasses devoid of light and sparkle, funeral-director mouth curved down at both ends, voice a drone to inspire catatonic levels of boredom in the listener, moaning out an irony the immensity of which is compounded by its own speaker’s inability to spot it. Zest for life? This man had lost the desire for life. With great force it struck me there and then that here before me was the caricature of the Anglo-Canadian: in personified form the grotesque, accentuated, exaggerated picture of all that is wrong and dreadful with Canada; that retreat from animation, horror of thought, dread of discussion; most of all that utter defenestration of personality, the soul and inner-self exorcised – ripped from the skeletal-frame and hurled screeching out the window into everlasting oblivion. The result? The cartoon-style image on the picture-page before us? A humanoid coffin standing, angled slightly forward as though at a slump, stunted little arms hanging limply from its sides, a small window on the lid exposing the closed-off face of the ghastly cadaver within. This is Canada in character, the human funeral to stand alongside the pride, industriousness, ingenuity and freedom of colourful Uncle Sam.

I glanced around the room. None of my Canadian-born classmates seemed to be in the least bit surprised or perturbed by what had just happened. I glanced back at our guest. What other kind of creature could possibly sloganeer about “zest” for “life” while remaining so blatantly and solidly averse to optimism and joyfulness? Didn’t this man know that the simpleton’s phrase he was parroting bore precisely no relation whatever to his own (entirely voluntary) pattern of behaviour? Wasn’t he thinking about the words he was using? Did even occur to him to think about the words he was using, and why he was using them? Evidently not. Instead he merely intoned this phrase and others like it with precisely no application of thought or injection of emotion. At the very instant he had uttered this phrase he had in point of fact become non-human; every bit as alive as that computer programme that drones out automated security announcements at the airport. Am I being unduly harsh? I must say in my defence that my aversion to the dehumanised form of parrot-speak that has become so prevalent in the English speaking world – my hatred, I must admit – has been made so strong in large part by Canada itself. By years spent in that country among the practitioners of what I fear may well be the lowest standard of the English language spoken anywhere. Those work colleagues who would whine “Y’know, I’m, like, just not geddin’ such a warm and fuzzy feeling right now” in an attempt to communicate unhappiness at something. That roommate who started and ended every half-formed bastard sentence with the word “dude”. That frequently encountered habit of appending “eh?” onto sentences that form statements rather that questions. The appallingly stripped down vocabulary – those accusations of “showin’ off” or “dictionary [sic] surfin’” I would get for using words as mundane as “prevaricate”, “metaphor” or “ascertain”. And most of all that dreaded word “like”. A decade among Canadians with their adolescent, hyper-Americanised, Olympically illiterate use of “like” will infuse you with a deep disdain for the word, and scar you for life with a knee-jerk suspicion of even legitimate usage. “Let’s, like... go to the bar”, “I’m, like... thinkin’ we should go the other way”, “Like, just so ya know, the movie is nine’y minutes long”, “If, like, we can’t go to the game then, like..., what should we like... do?” How is “like” classified grammatically in this kind of context? Clearly neither a verb nor an adverb, certainly not a noun nor a pronoun, clearly not an adjective... in some instances perhaps a kind of conjunction according to the grammatical definitions before me now, though in most-cases it seems merely to be a sort of bridging word the main purpose of which is – not to link related clauses as a conjunction does – but rather to verbalize a mental block, to give its speaker some much-needed added time to consider the next half-clause in their unformulated non-sentence. It is in its own way one of many testaments to the slow-thinking, slow-speaking, slow-acting cultural and intellectual retardation that from the nation’s still-birth has been propagated down the generations by petty, huddled jealousy of American energy and success. Picture an educated, ostensibly intelligent adult person starting a sentence with “Like...” and then having to pause for a long second or two before continuing, wearing for that short time an expression so utterly blank it almost defies description. It is the death-mask of Canada, the world’s only lobotomised nation. And as I alluded to exorcism it occurs to me now that there are human specimens out there who would actually benefit from a half-murderous demonic possession, and most of them live in Ontario. With a screaming agent of Satan in full hijack of their bodies they would at least have something interesting and authentic to say – and moreover the energy, wherewithal and articulation to properly say it.

However the pertinent point about Mr. Frankenstein specifically was not so much his demeanour as it was his delusion. His “overview of ThinkWrite’s financial position” turned out to be nothing of the sort. We received no figures or data on sales for the recent business year, nor did he give any indication on the company’s performance on a market by market basis; he had nothing to say on costs and expenses and most tellingly brushed aside a question on profit levels: “No, no... we need to stay focused here,” he stated when the question was posed, just like the CTO before him smiling gently and waving his hands in polite rejection, “what we need to do is focus on the business, you know, the core of the business. The product we’re putting out there.” The inference was clear: in the face of growing competition from the mobile phone manufacturers profits had fallen, perhaps to zero, or less than zero. What possible other reason could there be for avoiding the issue? With most of my previous employers the senior managers could not stop boasting about profitability where it was present. Once again I could observe the reaction of my fellow new employees. Rather than responding with utter incredulity at the sheer meaninglessness of the CFO’s riposte, most of them were instead nodding and simpering in the dutiful manner expected of the eager-to-please new lapdog. I alluded to the school of wishful thinking that seemed to predominate thinking in the higher echelons, but it wasn’t until this moment that I could actually see the persuasive power of the creed. That the man being anxious to avoid questions pertaining to profitability really ought to have set alarm bells ringing in all of us – but for some reason it didn’t. It is interesting how even in the face of hard evidence people will still go to great lengths to fool themselves – and will almost invariably succeed. A cold analysis of this one, small interaction would have told us all we needed to know, namely that we the new employees had leapt enthusiastically aboard a sinking ship. But of course a fact as stark as that could not possibly have been contemplated by people in our situation – in many cases fresh from periods of unemployment – so instead we did what people often to do reality: we banished it from existence. This deluded form of optimism, the age old notion that “it’ll be all right on the night” even with cold truths speaking loudly to the contrary, says something interesting about our nature; individuals and the wider society they create would, I suspect, neither progress nor likely even function without this wilful blindness of faith. Mere hope is the fuel of endeavour, in its absence all human activity North of foraging and fornicating grinds to a halt. But all the same, can’t people agree that at the very least optimism does need to be actually based on something? Something tangible, measurable and clearly observable? It would seem that for most of us, apparently not – not least under the pressures felt in seeking personal financial security, and certainly not amid the ocean of simpering sentimentalism that for one reason or another prevails by default throughout the North American continent.

But the main thing about ThinkWrite, as I discovered once the induction course ended and I got properly to work, was the orthodoxy of dreadful, time-butchering pedantry that permeated every corner of the place. Within a month of entering into my new role it had become fully apparent. The fear of change, the everlasting hunger for the status quo, the visible squirming at the expression of idea... all had become the accepted norm in a company once famed for its bold innovation and aggressive delivery to market. Some years earlier several of the original co-founders of ThinkWrite had left for fresher pastures in Silicon Valley and their absence, it was clear, was not being felt anything like as deeply as it should have been.

My team-leader, Ralph, was a middling man in his late 40s and a typical prairie suburbanite – that is to say, the same breed as can be found in outer Toronto but with the hint of the added ingredient, largely unknown back East, of American-style Evangelical Christianity. Aside from the whiff of a bible, common in the libertarian West, he was the usual sort of laconic Canadian who is always vaguely good-natured without ever knowing the reason why. On my first full day of work he informed me that I was to join a small project to add something called an “automated-reminder” feature to the calendar application on the PalmSecretary device. The then-current version of the PalmSecretary, he explained, did not support this feature and so did not “remind” its users about their upcoming meetings. The result was that users were constantly forced to examine their electronic calendar manually in order to keep up with their daily schedule of appointments. With the feature added, the device would flash a message onto its small screen and also sound a “bleep” noise to call attention to an appointment upcoming within the next hour. But even back then ThinkWrite were, as he told me rather sheepishly, a “bit behind the times” in terms of considering this feature – and he was right. By then most of the major telecoms manufacturers had added this very small but important piece of functionality to the simple calendars available on their mobile phones, meaning less time spent browsing by the hour through calendar screens on their phones, thus boosting the ease and convenience of these budding rivals to the PalmSecretary. ThinkWrite, supposedly at the cutting edge of digitised personal organisation, had been very slow off the mark in emulating this and other useful enhancements. This was due in great part to the mindset radiated from senior management all the way down to the warehouse floor which found it almost impossible to even conceive of the mobile phone as a competing product. More than anything else it was this wilful blindness to a daily growing reality that was nailing the coffin of the obsolete PalmSecretary, slowly and steadily dragging ThinkWrite’s head deeper and deeper under water. Having carefully examined the existing calendar application on the PalmSecretary, Ralph and I agreed that the amount of work required to implement this “reminder” enhancement was small, and that between writing the new software and subjecting it to the rigorous testing and re-testing required, the total amount of time to complete the project would be five weeks at the very most. But just as we were agreeing on this estimate I got the first inkling of the trouble to come. Ralph shifted somewhat uncomfortably in his seat, looked down at the ground and began:

“Y’know, perhaps... well...” he paused, “it’s just that...” he paused again and then gave a long sigh of abject resignation. I was surprised. What was coming next? He gave the impression of being about to confess to some dastardly family secret.

“... well, we may need to triple that estimate just to be on the safe side,” he grinned rather nervously and glanced back up at me for my response.

“Triple?” I was bemused. “Fifteen weeks to do this thing?”

“Uh, yeah! Let’s say that, eh?” Ralph was still wearing that nervous looking grin, the sort of “nice doggy” face you’d wear to placate an angry Rottweiler. I wasn’t quite sure why – I was far too new at ThinkWrite to have the confidence to fly into a righteous rage, but I was certainly confused.

“I’m not sure if I fully understand,” I replied, speaking to the highest standard of my assimilated-Canadian politeness, “If we agree that the work required amounts to five weeks including testing, then where do the extra ten weeks come into the equation?”

Still that fixed, slightly worried looking grin.

“Uh, let’s just say that things can take a little longer than expected around here.”

I coughed. “You wish to budget almost four months for what is basically a one month project?”

“Sounds a bit strange, huh! But... yeah we should do that.”

At that point the phone on his desk rang and he swung over to answer it.

As one week became two, and as two merged into three, then four then eight then ten, I gained a full insight into the horror of trying to get something, anything constructive done at ThinkWrite. Here was a company operating in the cut-throat, high-paced, fast-changing world of information technology, and yet from corridor through sterile corridor, over row upon row of factory-farm cubicles there hung the most stifling atmosphere of frigid risk-loathing and petty paperwork addiction. It was almost as if the very air we breathed was made of solid Canadian concrete. The first task I faced was to produce a ten-page technical document outlining precisely how the automated-reminder feature was going to be developed. The exact contents of such a document would be of interest only to those in the software development industry; suffice to say here that with such a document in hand one of ThinkWrite’s computer programmers would have all the information they would need to program the “reminder feature” into the PalmSecretary’s on-board software. It was a “what needs to be done” manifest, a sort of detailed menu produced in advance to secure general agreement on the technical steps that needed to be taken. In-keeping with my duties and job-description, I produced a first draft within three days and submitted it to Ralph for his review and approval. Ralph sent the document back to me within a day, marked with his comments and suggestions. By Wednesday of the second week I had a completed version of the document with Ralph’s signature of approval, and was ready to discuss the technical requirements with the software development managers – the people who would oversee the programming work as it was being done by their subordinates. Very unusually for people in their position, their final approval was required before the project could proceed. I had never come across this before – software development managers having an effective veto over which projects were assigned to their teams – but at the time put it down to the vagaries of work practice one is bound to encounter from one employer to the next. In truth, this bizarre arrangement was another early warning-sign of the very deep malaise that had taken hold in ThinkWrite.

The next jolt came when Ralph told me that I would need to discuss my documented proposal with no less than five of these managers on an individual basis – four of whom, by definition, would not be working on the project since only one development manager would be needed. Why would I be wasting time showing my document to the other four? Didn’t they have their own work to be getting on with? Yet again that nervous grin, that strange half-breed of a smirk and a smile that I was to become so familiar with over the following months:

“When you’ve discussed the project with each of the five development mangers they’ll take a vote.”

They’ll take a vote? A vote on what?

“On whether to proceed with the project,” said Ralph.

He looked uneasily down at his shoelaces and held that position for several seconds. Poor Ralph! He could not possibly have been any more damned Canadian in his quivering dread of the truthfully spoken word! Like millions of his countrymen he swam in a day to day element of Mad-Hatter absurdity and easy, malleable hypocrisy, swam happily in that milieu, but still found it deeply disconcerting to have to state its rules and so-called methods out loud. Software development managers – in effect little more than senior geeks – deciding by ballot which projects they would choose to work on? This was analogous to drivers in a trucking company choosing by vote which routes they would perform deliveries on and for what customers, or pilots in an airline voting on which destinations their employer should fly to. Ludicrous beyond words and commercially suicidal. What sort of a company could possibly reduce itself to this kind of thing? My bewilderment must have shown, since Ralph – seeming to read my mind – hastened to provide the official explanation.

“Around three years ago the senior management here decided that more involvement in decision making would be good for people down towards the bottom end. Y’know, more democracy, eh? If people feel they’re more involved in the running of the company then morale will improve and the company will prosper.”

So, I thought, the workers take over the factory. Democracy? Perhaps, of a type. The unsentimental free-market? Certainly not: and love it or hate it that is the system under which the ThinkWrite’s of this world must operate. While we would be spending weeks exploring the merits and demerits of a simple feature that had been added to competing products some years earlier, those rival manufacturers – the mobile phone companies – would be marching ahead by the day, steadily transforming their clunky, relatively crude phones into slimmer, sleeker attractions with a feature and application set that was starting to grow exponentially. In contrast ThinkWrite, being dare I say Canadian, no longer felt the need to compete. They had achieved their initial success between five years to a decade earlier, and now prosperity and security were deemed to exist in perpetuity, just as oil is always under Alberta, wheat is always in Saskatchewan, cod always swim off the coast and fur, forestry and timber are limitless forever in the great Canadian Shield. There is simply no understating the stultifying impact a resource-based economy can have on its victims, the beneficiaries. For them the idea that wealth or success could just disappear is utterly alien, as difficult to seriously contemplate as a nuclear strike on Ottawa or a contemporary outbreak of leprosy. The natural aversion to harsh reality, called into being by that great fear of vocalised observation – opinion – seals the fate of hard-nosed pragmatism in a society such as this. Hard facts do not exist, or where their existence cannot be ignored they are assumed in some mystical way to somehow not matter. The spark of innovation asphyxiated by the cancer of plenty. Another hard fact in the late 1990s and early 2000s was coming to ThinkWrite in the form of Mobile Internet. Access to the burgeoning Internet, for all practical purposes hitherto restricted to desktop and laptop computers with fourteen to seventeen inch screens, was now technically possible from mobile phones. Indeed in Japan mobile internet had already been made commercially available. More glaringly, and much closer to home, Ontario-based RIM Ltd. were about to release their first Blackberry smartphone. If mobile phone users could in theory access their email and office network from their hand-held cellular, were not the long-term implications enormous for ThinkWrite and their personal organisers?

“Oh, god no! Not at all,” said Pearl, dismissing the thought as if it were self-evidently mad, “phone screens are too small for the internet.”

But weren’t they getting bigger? And – case in point – did not the PalmSecretary itself demonstrate the feasibility of a somewhat larger screen on a hand-held device?

“Sure, but not big enough for the Web! Ha, we’d need to stick a big laptop screen onto our device, and so would the phone companies! Try fitting that in your pocket, huh?”

There’s already internet phones in Japan.

“Meh, it’s a fad. The Japs are always playing around with technology. Heard about RIM too – they make pagers. This Blackberry phone they’re talking about won’t go anywhere. How are you going to fit a web browser or an email client on a tiny screen like that? It won’t be readable. No one will go for it.”

Hmm. Someone at the induction course thought that the PalmSecretary should get a SIM card, and in effect become a slightly larger type of cell phone.

“Eh? No, no, of course not. We’re not a telecoms company.”

Yes, we’d heard this response at the induction course, too. “We are not a telecoms company”. True, at that particular moment in time. But hardly a satisfactory response. In fact, nothing but an irrelevant statement of a separate truth, posing as a solution to a much greater challenge: in other words, propaganda. A very crude, unsophisticated and viscerally-produced form, but a variant of the animal nonetheless. And how easily people will be swayed by propaganda – especially their own propaganda, that which they don’t even know to be propaganda!

“So, about this document of yours.”

Pearl was holding my technical manifest, eighteen and a half pages of carefully produced A4, in a rather tentative fashion, as thought worried it might be infected with rabies. She was the first of the development managers I was meeting with, in her early fifties, had shoulder length blond hair and one of those prematurely aged, horribly weather-battered faces that are all too common among women in the plains and prairies of the Canadian West – the result, I suspect, of the region’s ferocious, desert-like aridity.

“A ‘reminder’, eh? So what do we need that for?”

“It’s come down from Marketing,” I said politely. I could already sense that for reasons likely unknown to herself she felt compelled to oppose the idea. To oppose it for the uppity bad manners of being an idea – and one suggested by someone other than herself to boot. “It’s come up in their user-surveys. The PalmSecretary will flash a reminder on the screen when there’s a calendar appointment due within one hour, or some other user-specified timeframe. Frankly it’s very surprising this isn’t already supported.”

Oh dear, an opinion about something. For that as well as for its actual content this last remark did not go down so well. Disgruntlement flashed across the hills and valleys of Pearl’s vintage features.

“Like what’s the point?” she spoke half way between a snap and a whine, “If people want to check their appointments they just open the calendar tool. No problem.”

“Well the marketing surveys seem pretty clear. It’s what people want.”

Pearl ceased flicking through the specification and tossed it onto the table. It was clear she hadn’t read it in advance of our meeting, as requested.

“What. People. Want.” she repeated to herself, scowling down at the carpet in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Ralph. After a pause she sighed and told me that before anything could proceed I would have to create a “work ticket” – whatever that was – before “things” could progress any further. From top to bottom she radiated cantankerous loathing of anything requiring thought, work, energy or effort – though even by that early stage I had seen enough of ThinkWrite and its host country to not even bother wondering what on Earth a self-respecting company was doing employing a hindered old harridan such as this. What was her problem? For some unfathomable reason I found myself glancing at her ring finger and wondering, unforgivably, if such a ghastly old lump of slouching and negativity could actually be married to someone. Apparently so, if that golden finger-band was anything to go by. Aloud, I wondered if perhaps her team of programmers were busy with other tasks.

“Meh, not really. Well, kind of. But this one could be hard. Y’know, take longer than expected.”

Which, she seemed to be implying, would be an excellent reason for not doing it. That a quiet life at all costs was not part of her job description was something that would obviously need to be explained to her.

Perhaps Nicolas, software development manager number two, would have a more positive attitude. We sat down a few hours after my encounter with Pearl.

“Good to meet you, Nicolas. Thanks for coming.”

“Ni-koh-la,” he haughtily corrected my pronunciation in broken English and a strong French accent, “Ni-koh-la with the silent s.”

“Ah, a French-speaker!” These first impressions were not encouraging but I remained jovial, trying to break the ice. “Canadian – or should I say Quebecois! – or European?”

“I come originally from just outside of Paris.”

He spoke dismissively and somewhat testily, not actually saying “j’aime rien, je suis Parisienne” but, it seemed to me, thinking it all the same. Small-talk was going to get me nowhere.

“OK, so you read my document? What are your thoughts?”

“No.”

There was a pause. The single word answer to a double-edged question had thrown me.

“No?”

“No I did not read it yet.”

I was nonplussed. “Er, how come?”

“I don’t have a ticket.”

“Ticket?”

“Work-ticket. I need one.”

It seemed to me that we were talking at cross purposes. Work ticket? He was jumping ahead of himself.

“I don’t quite understand,” I said, “We’ve got nothing to discuss until you familiarize yourself with the contents of my specification.”

“Yeah, I don’t know...” he shrugged in a thoroughly French gesture and directed his gaze out the window, then after a while repeated, “I need the ticket.”

“The work ticket for the project, you mean?”

“Oh of course, you’re new,” he said sadly as though he were hitherto unfamiliar with that fact, “Well, I must explain. You know we have this work-ticket system here.”

“Yes, Pearl mentioned it earlier...”

“Yes. So any project we start here needs a work-ticket. A work-ticket is an entry created in the online project-management system we have. So this gives the project a number, and allows to us manage the project, you know, assign people to its tasks, manage how long everything will take... calculate the cost of the project for ThinkWrite...”

I had worked with numerous project-management systems before, so this all made sense. But he was still several steps too far ahead.

“Of course, I understand,” I said politely, “but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This project hasn’t started yet. It hasn’t even been approved. You and the other development managers need to er, vote on the matter first.”

“Oh I know that,” he intoned with a deep whine and then, throwing his arms up, palms skyward in another distinctively French gesture shrieked, “but I NEED to see de document!”

His accent was thickening along with the rising temperature. I had emailed him my document several days in advance of our meeting. For the fool’s added convenience there was a copy on the table in front of him at that very moment. A feeling of irate frustration was beginning to build up in me. It was like trying to hold an in-depth conversation with a Martian. We were just on two very different planets. He needed to see the document? What could he possibly mean by that? The damned thing was on the table at that very moment!

“I sent you a copy a few days ago,” I said calmly, maintaining my professional composure against increasing odds, “and there’s a hard-copy on the table there.”

“Will take some time, eh.”

“It’s quite short – eighteen pages, ten of which are diagrams and appendices. You’ll get through it in fifteen minutes, no more. This reminder feature is a very small project. It doesn’t need much work.”

“So gimme de dicket number.”

“Obviously the project hasn’t been approved yet,” I repeated through gritted teeth, “Once it is I will let you know the ticket number.”

“Yes yes of course,” he snapped, “I’m not talk about de project, I mean de dicket for de document.”

“The ticket for the document?”

“Of course,” he barked, “for reading it!”

I sat there, looking at him, wondering if I had heard correctly. The penny was beginning to drop. Slowly.

“You mean... you need a work-ticket just for the mere act of reading my specification?”

“YEAH! Mais oui, of course!”

I could feel a certain heat starting to burn behind my eyes. In the ten minutes it would take me to create the work-ticket on the project-management (PM) system, this imbecile would be at least two-thirds of the way through my document. This would be lunacy, an absurd waste of time – akin to project managing a mocha at the coffee machine, or a trip to the urinal.

“I don’t quite follow Ni-koh-la,” I spoke quietly, thought not the nice kind of quiet – rather the brooding quiet of hatred and growing rage, the quiet before the storm or the stillness before the explosion, “nobody else seems to need tickets on the PM system just for the simple act of reading.”

“Well, I’m not ‘nobody else’,” sneered Ni-koh-la, a Gallic attempt at wit I perceived, “I’m Ni-koh-la and I need it. The ticket. I use it for everything. I want to keep track.”

I could only stare at this creature. Late thirties. Jet black hair. Norman skin-tone. French, but with a great assimilation of the local pedantry and small-mindedness. A horrible mix of Canadian repression and obstructionist French bureaucracy. He’d been living in Canada for a decade, I learned later. Married a prairie girl. Been working at ThinkWrite for nine years. Ralph had mentioned that senior management held him in high esteem. In the name of god why? His vaunted time-wasting skills? His Olympic standard pettiness? His hideous aversion to dynamism and action? Nicolas’ team specialised in internal security. They developed security solutions for the protection of ThinkWrite’s intellectual property. Nothing whatsoever to do with the PalmSecretary’s on-board calendar. No reason in the world for me to even be speaking with him, much less be enduring his obsessive-compulsive emotional problems. Time, time and precious time being frittered away on fluff and tickets and pointless procedures. Just look at this drivelling little man, I thought. Take away his pathetic work tickets and he’ll gasp for air or burst into tears.

“You look surprised,” he said, moderating his tone and relaxing his body language, “I just like to log all I do you know? Manage my work. So I need de dicket. I need it for everything. Everything that I do.”

I just stared. Partially open-mouthed. Everything? It struck me that he must be the least efficient software professional in North America. When Ralph had said that this seemingly trivial assignment could drag on rather longer than expected, he evidently hadn’t been joking. And this individual – Nicolas – was highly regarded? By the senior managers? If this was how ThinkWrite operated, striving and competing in the brave new world with the pace and energy of a garden snail, then ThinkWrite were quite simply doomed.

“I got to go,” Nicolas glanced at his watch and gave a strangely triumphant smirk, “Next dicket item to start.”

The days and weeks rolled on. Within a month of living and breathing at ThinkWrite I felt like I’d been there for a century, such was the retirement-home pace of change and progress in the place. In spite of its moderate size and comparatively recent beginnings ThinkWrite epitomised the worst kind of corporate environment – the corporation that has long since lost touch with its roots, shrugs off economic realities, has grown lazy, myopic and arrogant in its dealings with customers and all in all has come to a state where it’s existing for the sake of persisting. Not even for expanding so much, but just persisting as an stress-free cul-de-sac where incompetent senior managers and institutionalised stalwart employees hide from a real world in which, they fear – usually with justification – they would struggle to compete. The whole show is kept on the road by deluded investors and shareholders who see the company as a good bet more or less on its name alone. It’s a solid investment because, after all, for many years it was a solid investment. This is not so much what those people think as it is the logic of what they are thinking – and they put their hands in their pockets and act accordingly. As a species we are desperately slow to observe and assimilate any slow-motion form of change, and most especially when it comes in the form of terminal decline. That’s the type of trajectory that our wishful thinking will most effectively delude out of actuality. Thus there’s always a plentiful supply of dupes and idiots who can be relied upon to pour money into a busted flush by the potent power of name branding – and by the glossy investment brochures.

Now vast corporations, many times the size of ThinkWrite, almost invariably end up in this state. The IBMs, the Hewlett-Packards, even the General Electrics; to a lesser extent the Fords and the GMs grew from their quaint suburban or rustic roots to eventually become monsters so leviathan that nimbleness and dynamism came to be contrary to their very nature. It was all they could do to avoid imploding under the weight of their own gravity. I happened to experience life in a huge multinational company in the early stages of my career. I recall being shown a huge chart depicting the corporate managerial structure and following with my finger my own boss’ name all the way up the pecking order to the Chief Executive Officer. As I recall it was a non-linear route up along a web of superior-underling relationships, person A reporting to their boss, person B – but then also reporting in parallel to a separate superior, person C who themselves had a “dotted line relationship” to person D, meaning that D is not “superior” as such but may have “jurisdiction” over C “on certain matters”... and so on and so forth. The entire diagram, viewed on a large whiteboard from three meters back, looked like the street map of a shanty-town rather than an efficient, top-down managerial tree. How can decisions even be made much less enforced within such a mishmash? The sheer complexity of the organism prevents it from thriving. Surviving, certainly – surviving perhaps for a very long time – but not thriving. Internal governance becomes sclerotic, if not grinding to an actual halt. Gross, obese and immobile, the beast is confined to the sofa, too cumbersome to go out and innovate, reduced (especially in the case of technology companies) to gobbling up smaller, more energetic entities in the hope of assimilating their drive and ambition, though far from solving the problem this kind of gorging only serves to make the patient even fatter. It hastens, though nothing like fast enough, the day when cardiac arrest must come.

But with two thousand employees worldwide ThinkWrite was a small fraction of the size of the (largely American) monoliths to which I refer. By comparison its internal organisational structure was straightforward, in theory allowing for quick decision making and nimble adjustment to changing market realities. Alas, clogging the corridors, stairwells and meeting rooms was a form of corporate cholesterol if anything even more severe: the dreaded Canadian form inherited at ThinkWrite’s birth through the genes of its own parent country – the expression quashing, energy killing, exuberance-fearing DNA that has held this country back since before it was even born. The very worst thing about the workplace atmosphere this creates is the way it drags you down like quicksand, slowly and meanly and ruthlessly sapping the vitality from your bloodstream, drop by endless drop until you discover one day that over time you have gradually become them. Not merely a slave of the loyalist intellectual gulag you had at first vowed to resist, but much worse a willing slave. A proudly badge-wearing member of the spiritless drone-set, actually taking a perverse pleasure in petty negativity and default disgruntlement. Loudly whining things like “no, we really can’t do that” at software design sessions, “it’s like... too com-plex”. Or imploring “we really don’t need to do this” at product-idea sessions simply because you dread the work, mental-strain and effort “this” would entail. Or, all else failing, hiding behind the most bureaucratic form of bureaucracy known to man, Anglo-Canadian bureaucracy: the paperwork addicted, work-ticket hankering, document about document writing, meeting about meeting holding, time upon time-killing cobweb that makes for the Canadian people their impenetrable shield against inspiration, perspiration and the wickedness of achievement. Recalling the multiple scleroses of ThinkWrite brings a closely related thought to the surface after years in the subconscious. In mentioning the madness of bureaucracy as an end unto itself, I am led to the wider point of process as a surrogate Canadian-culture: the extent to which the form of procedure trumps the substance of result; in other words, pedantry as something worth living and striving for. Some years after my time at ThinkWrite my manager in Toronto – the female victim of the spouse-swapping party surprise – sat us all down to announce that “certain individuals” in her team were becoming slack in terms of following “the process” of producing technical specifications. For each project “the process” mandated we were to write both a “high-level design specification” as well as the usual “technical specification”. The difference between these two documents amounted to very little. Not doubting for a second that I was one of the unnamed “slackers” to whom she was politely referring, I gently pointed out that over ninety-five percent of the content of these two document-types overlapped. The one was to all intents and purposes merely a copy of the other. Weren’t we simply wasting time – adding almost a full week onto each project for the sake of writing what amounted to the same specification twice?

“But that’s not the point!” she shrieked, evidently dumbfounded that I could even think so blasphemous a thought. “The documents have some small differences. We have to have them both every time!”

Since the differences are so minute, I asked, couldn’t we just merge everything into a single document, so saving several days of work on each assignment?

“No no, we can’t do that.”

Why not?

“’Cause we just can’t.”

Why?

“It’s not part of the process.”

But why – I was getting bolder as my exasperation grew – why was it part of the process in the first place? It made no sense.

“Huh?” She was bemused. “What do you mean by that? It’s part of the process. We all have to follow the procedure.”

The point is that for her the very ability to query or analyze “the process” at a conceptual level, to examine its raison-d’etre from the foundation up, was something inconceivable. I may as well have been tasking her on the origin of the universe or the reason for the flow of the tides. “The process” was just there. It just happened. It existed to be followed and was to be followed because it existed, and the mere act of questioning this circular so-called logic – this kind of inherent absurdity – was something she instinctively shirked from. Her behaviour was utterly typical in this regard, by local standards not unusual in the least. And instinctive is the operative term: it strikes me now that the whine of “we can’t do that ‘cause we. just. can’t” could be a motto for Canada, emblazoning the coat of arms in place of A Mari usque ad Mare, bedecking the cover of the national passport and being carried with pride by Canadians the world over. When it comes to the threat of intellectual stimulation however minor, visceral retreat is the national caffeine – the social drug of choice to which the people of this country are heavily addicted. Without it they really would dread to get out of bed in the morning. And back at ThinkWrite Ralph, dear old Ralph, poor toothy, friendly, well-meaning old Ralph went out of his way to conform to the national type. A thin film of sweat would glisten on his forehead whenever I challenged, however gently, his slave-like adherence to the soul-destroying lunacies of ThinkWrite: the psychotic merry-go-round of make decision, approve decision, document decision; review document, re-write document, re-approve, re-consider, re-ject, re-decide, new decision, document decision, pick a decision, indecision, indecision, indecision. To Ralph’s credit he came close, though I suspect unknowingly, to an open acknowledgement of the love that had hitherto not dared to speak its name.

“We’re nothing without procedure,” he told me one day, shaking his head in worship and awe of the beneficent deity, “nothing at all. The company can’t function without our processes and rules.”

“Yes, but...” I coughed politely, “What’s wrong with at the very least looking for efficiencies in the way we work? You know, reviewing the processes to eliminate time wasting and unnecessary repetition.”

But Ralph was merely incredulous.

“Huh? Oh no! Why, if we keep just choppin’ and changin’ our procedures then by definition they wouldn’t be procedures, are they?”

Another innocent, toothy smile. There was no escape. The madness of the dogma lay in the blindness of its own enforcement; when the pointlessness of the bureaucratic delays was exposed naked for all to see not a single colleague would even dream of cutting out the redundant additional steps. To do so would be unconscionable – it would be an assault on the very fabric of anal-retentive. It was inconceivable that pedantry, the only thing protecting them from the teeth of endeavour, could be threatened in any way. And so it wasn’t. After a few months flailing around in this suffocating place I began to feel in danger of losing my mind. How any even moderately creative soul or independent spirit could hold on to their sanity in such a prison was beyond me. I recalled that ThinkWrite’s original innovators had left some years earlier. The stultified and repressive atmosphere their departure had created made ThinkWrite an unattractive proposition for the inventors and technological visionaries the company so desperately needed, so reinforcing the new non-culture of lethargy and pointlessness, in turn cementing ThinkWrite in its downward spiral. Living off its dwindling capital and producing nothing new, one would have thought that the pressure to reform would eventually become irresistible – that the sheer fear of collapse would rouse the Ralphs, the Nicolas, the Pearls and the Frankensteins from their robotic stupor; but instead, over time, things only seemed to worsen. The run-around of meetings about meetings about meetings and documents about documents about documents began to approach gushing levels of incontinence. It was as though having subconsciously divined the company’s ultimate fate, the staff decided in their own very Canadian way to “go down fightin’”: bureaucracy with bitter determination; pen-pushing with a clenched fist and a militant scowl, a fatalistic embrace of the very same cancer that was killing them.

And then there was Timothy. Timothy sat, arms neatly folded and lips tightly pursed, waiting for me to begin. There he was, on the other side of the table, sporting a manner of dress and particularity of countenance that for some unfathomable reason triggered a surge of hatred in my mind, such that it ached my brain. Hatred? I had never met this person in my life. I had never spoken to him, had never seen him nor heard anything about him save his job title. He had arrived in the meeting room before me and was patiently awaiting my arrival. I was five minutes late and he did not complain. And yet the very instant I met his eyes, the very instant I sized him up, before the unfortunate chap even had a chance to open his mouth, I found myself loathing him with a very great intensity. Why? Because by then I had seen enough of this company to know what was coming. I had met his ilk before: they are identifiable more or less on physical appearance alone. An enraging preppiness of attire: neat beige slacks with shiny, polished black belt beneath a uniform blue shirt buttoned, maddeningly, all the way to the very top of the neck. Over the shirt was sheathed the sort of horrible, patterned woolly sweater your eighty year-old grandmother might give you for your birthday: dark green with red, blue and white diagonal stripes. Very neatly cropped brown hair. Heavily rimmed glasses of a variety fashionable among English Canadians for some inexplicable reason. And, most dreadfully, an almost imperceptibly thin moustache curving slightly around a selfish, thin-lipped mouth. Creatures like this I had seen before and have seen many times since. These are the extremists, what you might call Canada’s loyalist Taliban, holding up the far end of the Anglo spectrum to represent the very worst of what this country has to offer. They are the most emotionally repressed. The most averse to freedom of thought. The most fraudulently polite. The most cowardly, selfish and disdainful. The most pettily anti-American and the most baselessly arrogant about the supposed merits of their own home country; an arrogance made far worse by the enormous cavern of general ignorance they never miss an opportunity to showcase.

They have a personality, of sorts, to match: which is in their case to say that the very concept of personality was neutered at birth. And then there’s the tone of the voice and the manner of the speech. It is the most whining Canadian whine, an evil backed up by a diction that utterly belies the respectability of dress and apparent education to somehow be worse than the already restricted continental average. As I took my seat polite Timothy ignored the courtesies of introduction and blurted out his complaint in precisely the manner to which I refer.

“So, like, I read your tek-neh-kal document here.”

Good lord, the moan with which the word “read” came out was by far the worst I’d heard yet, reaching a pitch which caused a strange buzzing sensation in my ear. It was actually quite impressive – blue-ribbon standard snivelling, compounded by the double-barrelled horror of the superfluous North American “like” and his deliberately broken pronunciation of “technical” in an attempt to feign sophistication. Already I wanted to strangle the life out of the officious little twerp. Late twenties, young to be holding a development-manager position. I could easily see how he’d slithered up the greasy pole so quickly, conforming as tightly as he did to corporate Canada’s vision of the consummate company man: morbidly cautious, no mind of his own.

“Well I guess this ‘reminder’ thing kinda needs to get done...” he said with the enthusiasm of a man contemplating his walk to the gallows. “It’s just that we’ve been doing so much work recently.”

Really? From what Ralph had told me things had been pretty slack over at Timothy’s team. That, of course, would have the effect of engendering laziness among him and his programmers and would explain his last remark. Or else Timothy was another of those fantasists, all too common in the high-tech sector, who live under the impression that capitalist enterprises like ThinkWrite exist as a sort of homeless charity for socially inept computer programmers, where the poor creatures can play at being geek to their heart’s content with no regard whatever for commercial imperatives. Programming is a hobby but software is a business – it’s a reality that many in the industry have trouble accepting. I made no response while Timothy flicked through my specification, page by already-read page. A minute or two of silence passed, all the while his closed, prim little features tightening into a purse-lipped imperiousness. What an unspeakable, disgusting little face this overgrown child had! I felt a growing urge to rip it off his skull. When he spoke again it was in the same tone as before – that never-ending lament which was doing nothing to improve my mood.

“Yah, looks like we’ll just have to do it. Do you have a ticket number?” But before I could answer he interjected, “Oh, of course, we need to approve the project first. Well... we’ll approve it, I guess.”

“Really?” I was sceptical. “Pearl didn’t seem so sure.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he waved his hands airily. “On the Project Advisory Board we always vote to approve everything.”

The Project Advisory Board. The pompousness with which this self-important little man dropped this name ratcheted up my ire by several notches.

“’Project Advisory Board’? That’s what you call yourselves?” I spoke quietly, a slightly mocking edge creeping into my tone – though Timothy didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh ab-sol-ute-ly,” he squawked, “and no development manager on the board has ever voted against anything – against any project.”

Ostensibly this was good news since it would surely mean a fast-tracking of the much needed reminder feature. But where it should have soothed my slowly simmering rage, it merely increased it. Project Advisory Board! The P-A-B for short, Ralph, beaming with pride, would later tell me. What a pathetically grandiose name for such a pointless group of people! And the carpet-bagging lunacy of it all – the utter waste of time and resources! How could the outcome of any vote on any serious or substantive matter always be certain in advance?

“Forgive me,” I said evenly. “But if you always vote to approve everything, that what is the point of voting in the first place?”

“Oh, it’s part of the process.” A self satisfied smirk.

“Why have this board at all? If it’s just a rubber-stamping operation then why does it even exist?”

“Like I told you,” he snapped, “it’s part of the process.”

His tone, now haughty and reprimanding, was beginning to make me see red. His smirk was tightening with every word. What a hateful, curmudgeonly little office-rat, I thought.

“Of course,” he continued, “we always approve but we don’t always actually do.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Just because we approve a project doesn’t mean we’re actually gonna do it, y’know?”

“Oh? Now why would that be?” I whispered though clenched teeth.

“Well, y’know, sometimes the process breaks down.”

“I see.”

“A lot of the time, actually.”

“I see,” I said again, my voice getting quieter and quieter as the final drops of my patience drained slowly away.

The rat picked up my document for another little nibble. Pretending to examine a particular page, his smirk morphed into a scowl as though through sheer force of concentration. Very appropriately, two buck teeth now emerged from his parted mouth. Then he tossed the pages back down onto the table.

“Well,” he droned, “assume that you’re gonna get approval, and create a work ticket now on that basis. Do you have access to the Project Management system? To create a work ticket?”

“No.”

“I can arrange that for you. Ask Ralph. I’ll arrange it through Ralph.”

“Through Ralph?”

“Yes, Ralph. Your boss.” His tone was somewhat fog-horned now, he was quacking rather like an irritable impetuous duck.

“I know who Ralph is” I whispered. “Why do we need to go through him?”

“Ralph will create the work-ticket for me, so I can give you access.”

It took a second to calculate.

“You mean, you need a work-ticket for the act of giving me access to the PM system?”

“Correct.”

“You need a work-ticket for the act of giving me access to the work-tickets?”

“You got there in the end, huh?” that tight little smirk was back. I swear that at this point patches of red truly were beginning to materialise in front of my eyes.

“I feel like I’m inside a lunatic asylum, Timothy.” Was I talking about ThinkWrite, or Canada? In a way I suppose I was referring to both.

“Say again? I can barely hear you.”

“I’m working. In a. Lunatic. Asylum. Timothy.”

“Don’t be silly. Why are you saying that?”

“One big circular, bureaucratic farce. Round and round we go, never arriving anywhere.”

“Oh no, no, no. It’s the process, that’s all.

“The process.” I could hear a clock ticking down.

“Oh yeah. The process is what makes us dynamic.”

“The process makes us dynamic?” Clock ticking faster now.

“Very dynamic. Y’know, we have real dynamism here at ThinkWrite, and... of course...” A pause, almost there, the tightest little smirk yet, rat’s eyes blazing with a strange, fierce joy:

“Yes?”

“We have zest for life.”

I exploded, lunging over the table on top of the man-child, pushing him back off his seat and forcing him to the ground. Grabbing his neck and shaking his horrible little head. Kicking and screaming and pummelling and strangling and roaring until once and for all the William. Lloyd. Jones was beaten and battered out of this charmless, gormless, characterless Canadian with his half-literate hick standard of pre-teenage English, the raped vocabulary, the thoughtless parroting, the sloganeering; the sickening fake politeness hiding the closed and mean self, the sanctimony, the selfishness, the disdain, the don’t cares and the who cares, the triumph of form. The defeat of substance. The fear of art, the arrogance of ignorance, the fake white smiles and the murder of mirth. I was screaming, violent, utterly out of control. An orgy of violence and oh, what an orgy! Such catharsis in frenzy, flowing demonic relief amid the blood, the dust and the hate don’t you KNOW, I bawled, don’t you KNOW what a drivelling, worthless, pathetic little person you are! FOREVER crouched in your parochial little mind-box! NO power of abstraction, NO ability to conceptualise, that HUDDLING little aversion to risk that HATEFUL sheltering in the shadow of routine don’t you KNOW the forces that are coming to smash your complacent Canadian certainties into a smouldering wreck, that in the century to come – the world to come you’ll have to COMPETE and STRIVE and THINK and ACT and MOVE and move FAST. My screaming at the rat had reached maniacal levels, I was a rampaging monster – utterly beyond the pale of human decency, civility, incivility as I rattled the teeth of the imbecile with pathological intensity I’ll never. Stop. Throttling. This. Man. Four. Powerful. Arms grabbed me from behind.

“Calm down,” barked a voice. “Calm down NOW.”

“’Cuff him,” ordered another; older, more authoritative. “’Cuff him and sit him in the chair.”

Handcuffs? I’d never been handcuffed before. I felt them clicking into place, and I really didn’t care. I was pushed back into the chair from which I had sprung and looked up, calmer now, into the eyes of a security guard, red-faced and burly. The door was open. A crowd had gathered from the corridor outside. The commotion had alarmed them. Others were staring through the office windows, windows I hadn’t even noticed until that point. Everyone was shocked. Silent. Open-mouthed. A fight? In an office? In Canada!? The other guard was kneeling over Timothy. Poor, defeated, dazed little Timothy. Prone on the ground, his glasses knocked sideways partially off his head, his face blank with shock. Blood trickling from his nose and mouth. He turned his head painfully to meet my triumphant, victorious, breathless gaze.

“Are you okay?” he quacked. That same haughty little quack, not altered in the slightest.

“What was that, Timothy?”

“Are you okay?” he repeated with emphasis.

“Yes, I’m fine thank you Timothy.”

“You seemed to be wandering there. Were you even listening?”

“I’m sorry Timothy, my mind was somewhere else, that’s all.”

“I was just saying that if Ralph gives me my work-ticket today, then I can get you access to the system.”

“Thank you, Timothy.”

“Access by the end of next week, probably.”

“Perfect, Timothy. Very dynamic.”

“Yes. No problem,” he smirked at his watch. “We’re done now, I think.”

“Yes Timothy,” I said sadly, “I think we are.”

“Okay, well...” he stood up, went to door, glanced back with another haughty glance and quacked, “Welcome to ThinkWrite.”

“Thank you, Timothy. I appreciate it.”

And he closed the door behind him.

Welcome to ThinkWrite. Welcome to Canada. Welcome to a productivity measure at least twenty-five percent behind that of the United States[ii], proof positive that the Nortels, the RIMs and ThinkWrites of this world are not exceptions to the Canadian rule, they are the Canadian rule.

Welcome to the nation’s complacent corporate leisure-cruise, passengers elderly and polite and mild and untroubled, sipping cocktails on the sunny deck, rich because they used to be rich, feeling successful because they used to be successful. Afloat and weak on the calmest waters in the oceans of the world, Canadian waters, and soon to run aground on the shifting sands of the great global economy; dragged by the tide towards the competitive perils of the new-world reality; dashed against the rocks of genius, endeavour and the indomitable human spirit.

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[i] Smartphone Wars: 5 Things BlackBerry Could Have Done to Stay Competitive, Business Insider Australia, reproduced at Entrepreneur Magazine - entrenpreneur.com - on 24^th Sep 2013 (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228549, retrieved 17^th Apr 2014)

[ii] The Conference Board “Total Economy Database: Output, Labor, and Labor Productivity, 1950 - 2013” (retrieved from http://www.conference-board.org/retrievefile.cfm?filename=TEDI_Jan20141.xls&type=subsite on 27^th April 2014)

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