When fumes of American extremism waft north
I am so in love with being Canadian right now. I have a crush on my own country. Patriotism has always seemed a bit silly but in the Canadian nation’s 150th year, look at the American catastrophe and take a little comfort. Come to us, good Americans. We will welcome you. “We Could Have Been Canada” was an actual headline in the New Yorker this week, with Adam Gopnik taking regret to its very roots and writing an essay suggesting the American Revolution might have been a bad idea. Canada took the path less violent.
But of course that’s smug. The prime minister has been adept at coping personally with this mentally deteriorating president but the peace won’t last. Remember how relieved we were when 2016 ended? That was a thing. It is now dawning on us that the emergency will be continuous.
As well, Trumpism is infectious and Canada has already contracted the virus.
I can smell something in the open air these days, something I thought had been banned long ago, like leaded gasoline. It’s the fumes of American extremism, with Canadi- an misogynists and racists emboldened by President Donald Trump’s victory. Attitudes to women’s rights, money, race, any issue related to status anxiety, are very Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III right now. The dog is off his leash.
Look at the increasingly vile comments on CBC.ca. Is this Canadian public life in 2017 or a dirt road in Alabama in 1937? Some of these remarks are fit only for the wall of a gas station toilet. If comments can’t be properly moderated — and it is expensive to do this — it might be time for the principled CBC to admit defeat and kill the comments.
Public life has been coarsened too. What a shame to see American-style identity politics take over the landscape, with Canadians declaiming about the colour of other people’s skin in the U.S. manner, an angle of approach that is neither workable or polite in a multicultural nation.
It is now considered normal in Canadian journalism to use “white” as an epithet, just as commenters might use “native” or “Indian.” I dislike it, and not just because I am of mixed race. Instantly reducing all issues to race is simplistic, a gunshot instead of a conversation.
Copying U.S. battles over black and white, Muslim and non-Muslim, etc. has crowded out news about Canada’s indigenous peoples who continue to be tormented and brutalized. U.S. and Canadian racial inequalities are not identical. I sometimes wonder if we jump on the Republican race bandwagon because it deflects attention from our own national shame.
Equally, Republicans have a history of extreme misogyny that has burst into the open as if it’s suddenly been given an official licence. It’s like those weirdly trending YouTube “popping” videos of cysts being squeezed out of the skin, a repellent once-private task now trying for respectability. Republicans don’t have to pretend not to detest women any more. They have made their loathing explicit, and some Canadians are mirroring this.
Take abortion rights: On Thursday, the city of Ottawa allowed an antiabortion “March for Life” rally to raise an actual flag at dawn at city hall.
At a time when The Handmaid’s Tale is unspooling on TV and illegal protests right outside the doors of the Morgentaler abortion clinic near Parliament Hill are becoming intolerably intrusive, Ottawa encouraged this very American kind of rally, with young teens bused in and old men holding up signs with bloody photos plus attacks by name on clinic staff members.
The police and the mayor have essentially given them the keys to the city. “They are fearless, nonapologetic, aggressive, mean-spirited and relentless in the sense of self-entitlement that the city and the police department have created for them, and it will be near-impossible to claw that back,” says Shayna Hodson, the clinic’s director of operations.
People in Ottawa were startled and angry. City councillors complained in writing and some terrific NDP MPs showed up with pro-choice signs. Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson got the online complaints fast.
And in a matter of minutes, the flag vanished. Watson tweeted, “I am pleased to report that the antiabortion flag has been taken down. I have asked staff for a complete review of the city’s flag policy. My personal opinion has always been that women have the right to choose.”
What? I was genuinely shocked. After a year of watching male Republican politicians talk about the female reproductive system as if it were a colonial uprising, it was strange to see a politician openly admitting a mistake and doing the decent thing. He even said “antiabortion” instead of the absurd “pro-life,” and he has asked for legal advice regarding the flag and the ongoing clinic protest.
Here’s hoping he puts a stop to it. U.S. political life is so savage and immersive that it draws us in, making us forget its abnormality.
Trump tickles the bellies of foolish people and brings out their inner monsters. But not in Canada. Peace, order and good government is a declaration, a public statement that Canada is a foreign country. We do things differently here. hmallick@thestar.ca