EclecticLip

There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

Saul enumerates some of our deepest failings in the past fifteen years as Canada’s transformed from deficit-basketcase to perennial surplus-runner.  (And with the global crisis, we’re now back to deficit mode.)

- the amputations to our medical care system, which have gone unreversed when we’ve had the public support and fiscal bandwidth to restore its vitality

- our abhorrent record on poverty (Saul supports a Guaranteed Annual Income, yay!)

- the abnegation in recent decades of our history of international leadership (like helping to found the UN, creating the idea of UN Peacekeepers; proposing the banning of landmines; the International Criminal Court…)

- our leadership’s utter and absolute lack of long-term industrial policy, leading to a situation where they prostrate themselves before foreign firms performing takeovers, while stifling opportunities for Canadian firms to merge into northern titans in their own right

- the idiocy of the proportionality clause for energy in NAFTA, and the innumerable other little ways in which we’ve traded independence for integration

- - - - - -

Saul returns to some more general points — such as the choice of Ottawa as capital was an astutely-balanced political decision and anything but Queen Victoria’s whimsy.  He notes that “Dominion” in Dominion of Canada references Psalm 72 (72:8 “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea”) — and points out how the remainder of the Psalm enshrines the kind of social empathy central to Canadian culture:

72:12 He shall deliver the needy when he [the needy] crieth, the poor also, and him that hath no helper.

72:13 He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy.

 72:14 He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight.

Indeed, even a secular person like me, can be movingly inspired by the social justice — indeed, the social contract — expressed therein.  And really, the above passages do encapsulate much of the Canadian social ethos.  (And to be fair, the ethos of other Nordic countries, where nature forces you to stick together.)

Saul notes our incompetence in Northern Affairs, and writes eloquently about interculturalisme in Quebec, but I’ll finish with a quote he draws from Leonard Tilley, one of the Fathers of Confederation.

“The time has arrived when we are to decide whether we will be simply hewers of wood and drawers of water… or will rise to the position, which I believe Providence has destined us to occupy.”

Too true. And one of the many steps towards fully reclaiming our destiny, is to help ourselves and especially our leaders rediscover our authentic heritage — like the fairy-tale peasant who discovers their royal lineage — as a Metis nation, and unblind ourselves from the limits of European paradigms and American worldviews.