Canadians can only take so much Canada

CBC'S CEO SPENT MUCH OF 2020 HOLED UP IN A NEW YORK MANSION. — JONATHAN KAY

Isn't Canada a wonderful thing? Those who lead us may behave like sociopaths sometimes, but they are careful to do so in both official languages. In mid-December, the media criticism website Canadaland uncovered a pattern of pandemic border-hopping by Catherine Tait, the president of the CBC, who spent quite a large chunk of 2020 in a brownstone in Brooklyn that she owns. Brooklyn was in fact officially listed as her home at the time of her appointment to the job; Canada had to fetch her back from New York, or at least make a show of doing so, to run our public broadcaster.

We all ought to have known what would happen next. At the moment of the Tait controversy, the head of Radio-Canada, Tait's francophone deputy, Michel Bissonnette, had been at his condo in Miami for two weeks — and he took his time coming back, returning to Canada on Dec. 27. (Which is the same date on which Tait made her way north.)

The Post broke the story Wednesday, and an apology from Bissonnette to Radio-Canada employees soon followed, although their labour unions don't seem inclined to accept it with a giant hug. The Syndicat des Communications de Radio-Canada pointed out that a researcher for the network had lost her contract mid-pandemic for trying to work from home in the Gaspésie, Que., which violated a corporate rule that employees have to live within three hours of their office (in this case, the headquarters in Montreal).

Bissonnette gave a version of the excuse pioneered by MP Ron Liepert earlier in the hunt for sneaky border-crossers; he had to “tend to business” involving his American property in Miami Beach, Fla. (Liepert's refuge is in Palm Desert, Calif.) Tait had given an explanation for her defiance of the federal government's discouraging of non-essential travel, too. The CBC's press release defending Tait seized on Canadaland's wounding headline, The President of the CBC Lives in Brooklyn.

In fact, they pleaded, it's only her husband who lives in Brooklyn. He spent the year recovering from a medical procedure, preferring to do so in the horrendously virus-infested place where he lives, and she visited Brooklyn repeatedly — heroically unafraid of transporting pathogens — to help take care of him. Because he's her husband and that's what married people do. But where did anybody get the crazy idea that “the president of the CBC lives in Brooklyn”? Gosh, if she lived in Brooklyn, she wouldn't be eligible to be president of the CBC in the first place. QED.

It is up to you how convincing you find this — particularly that last, dizzyingly circular part of the argument. The fact is that nobody is going to hold it against either of them for very long. They can plead accurately that they broke no laws, and they say they were careful about avoiding exposure to Americans in places overrun with COVID. Other corporate leaders and affluent Canadians aren't subject to the same scrutiny as these public servants, and the statistics indicate that there are a lot of snowbirds and vacationers bopping back and forth.

If you've been shut up in an apartment for a year, you might be feeling cross — but you might also be wondering if you would have the strength to deny yourself a bit of sunshine in equal circumstances. It is easier to be austere if it suits your budget, isn't it? This isn't a story about CBC tomfoolery, really: it strikes deeper than that, pricking our self-conception as a country.

We must now take it for granted that Canada is a place that it is hard to resist fleeing for a few weeks a year, just as soon as you acquire the means. That's what our politicians and other affluent snowbirds are really telling us. It is not necessarily that flabby guidelines and recommendations apply to you and not to them, although the “I'm a property owner and gutters don't clean themselves” defence has that flavour.

It is that one inherent feature of being Canadian — the Canadian dream! — is aspiring to have a retreat somewhere else. The perfect amount of Canadian to be, calendar-wise, is maybe five-sixths. Or less. It only becomes something to apologize for under the perverse and exotic circumstances of a pandemic.

How many of us are really so Canadian that we actually want to die on Canadian soil, perhaps after a fall on a sidewalk, when Florida and Arizona make the process ever so much more pleasant? If you can't join the wealthy in places that have “Beach” or “Desert” in the name, maybe your children or your children's children will. Given economic progress, it is in fact virtually certain.

This has implications for the future of Canada we all envision, implicitly or explicitly: we still live with a sense that it is desirable for us to “fill” a land (whether with offspring or immigrants) that can't empty out fast enough when the sun decides to hibernate — a land that, moreover, is destined to be governed and controlled mostly by semi-demi-exiles. Those of us frozen to its vast surface year-round like Han Solo in carbonite must hope they guard our interests well from a distance. And that the carbon taxes don't bite too sharply …

ONE INHERENT FEATURE OF BEING CANADIAN IS ASPIRING TO HAVE A RETREAT ELSEWHERE.