Toronto’s secession talk is just nuts

Aren’t people of conscience supposed to oppose walling some off from others?

“This is not a crazy idea.” That is what a Toronto mayoral candidate said last week of an idea that is certifiably, institutionalization-level crazy. Crazy is in fact the kindest word one can use to describe the idea, a word that is kind enough to be inaccurate and inaccurate enough to be kind. Crazy at least sounds like a bit of fun.

What urban-planner-cumsecessionist-rebellion-leader Jennifer Keesmaat proposed is not fun: Toronto should separate from Ontario as a reaction to Premier Doug Ford’s latest petty revolt against democratic decorum. Her idea — not crazy, she stresses — would involve a change to the Constitution, the formal break-up of Canada’s largest province, and the creation of one more political entity that of late exists mainly for the purpose of boycotting wines and pipelines from other political entities. These are not fun things.

So perhaps she is right: Secession is not a crazy idea. It is an irresponsible idea, an inflammatory idea, an ignorant idea.

Anyway, I like it! I do not like many of Doug Ford’s ideas; if a proposal, any proposal, involves erecting a political wall between human beings and the alleged former drug dealer turned alleged inheritance thief, it has the reflexive sympathy of many of those who are wary of political shock jocks who suggest that kids with autism shouldn’t leave the house — the group house, that is. But to actually endorse the secession fantasy that may be enjoyable to silently sigh over, we must also enjoy the activity of not thinking.

Not least of all because of this: Aren’t people of conscience supposed to be anti-wall?

Looking back at where we went wrong in the vast expanse of the liberal democratic project, at what point did people start proposing to erect walls to keep out the sort of people who may propose to put up walls? For reasons concerning both the Constitution and common sense, even flippant talk of secessionist nonsense is bad, bad, bad, and lunacy of the bad kind to boot. But it also heightens the partisan divides that, if we’re being generous, we might assume this stark raving dumb idea intends to target.

“I have no intention of pursuing something that might in any way be divisive” — that is what the candidate said of her proposal to divide the country.

Politically dividing Britain from Europe; physically dividing the United States from Mexico. These are the divisions that have cleaved the Western world into competing factions of internet trolls, and so division has ostensibly become the political terrain of that which currently masquerades as conservatism.

These divisions are, after all, the most immediately obvious and harmful, supplied as they are courtesy of men with Tiki torches in the streets and demagogues with Imperial Russia-fetishes in the stadiums.

But we might recall that U.K. Labour Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn, a man to whom crazy is no stranger, seemed scarcely less hostile to the European Union than Nigel Farage. Democrat Bernie Sanders, like Donald Trump, has opposed much of NAFTA. Liberal Catalans have typically been associated with attempts to secede from Spain.

Division — formal, financial or physical division — tempts us all in ways that co-operation cannot. Negotiation, compromise, communication with those who seem to speak a different language and coexistence with those who seem to inhabit a different world: These things are not fun. We do not like them.

And so, when others become divisive it is only human to want to cut them off further. How unfortunate that what is human is so rarely wise.

As ever, the solution to this problem does not lie in the reproduction of the problem. I believe there is a word for claiming otherwise.