Harper’s strange makeover for the Order of Canada
The wrong people are getting the Order of Canada, apparently, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has snuck $13.4 million into the federal budget to prod for nominations of the “under-represented.”
As the Ottawa Citizen’s wry Glen McGregor has suggested, it appears Harper is upset that the Ordered of Canada are thin on the ground in the West, positively clog up Atlantic Canada . . . and, yes, there are too many arts types, not just in the Order of Canada presumably, but generally.
The money will be spent over five years (though how can an online form cost so much?). It’s like a new gold rush, but Harper is panning for status.
Well, good luck to him, good luck in what Stephen Colbert used to devote a whole segment to: Who’s Not Honouring Me Now? “I never look for external validation and, for that kind of confidence, I should get an award,” Colbert said tearfully.
From MacArthur Genius grants to Teen Choice Awards, the man was shunned. Colbert made constant fun of our accents and ludicrously free health care, covered our Olympics with relentless sneering, and warped our anthem. Poor man, I thought, we should Orderof-Canada him out of spite.
Repairing awards programs is an ongoing job, like painting a bridge, and it never works out. In 2012, recipients of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, whatever that is, were selected by politicians and motley crews like local clubs and handed out to 60,000 people, including Conservative campaign managers, REAL Women, people in jail and my distinguished Twitter friend Stephen Lautens. Even my raccoons got one.
When they howl at night — the rac- coons, not REAL Women — I can see medals glinting on their fur. Next the coyotes of Alberta will be honoured. I often see our local coyote, a lean mangy creature in a fur bathrobe loping like a Lebowski. Go west, creature, I cry.
Prizes are about perceived status. Eventually everyone wins one because everyone accumulates a body of work or hangs around long enough.
But status anxiety has always tormented Harper, as it did Richard Nixon, the politician he most resembles. Who will flatter their Silent Majority? Shall they return to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonoured and unsung? (Yes.)
No biographer has been able to nail down precisely what happened to Harper in his youth that drove him from the University of Toronto and sent him to Alberta to nurse a lifelong grudge. But something gave him status itch.
In a 2013 speech in Calgary, Harper referred to “Canada’s unsung heroes”: cab drivers, farmers, foresters, fishermen, factory and office workers, seniors and other “honest, decent, hardworking Canadians, old and new.” What about accountants? Steve’s family was thick with them; what’s he got against accountants?
He does go on about the hateful “elites”: writers, artists, academics, public servants, Trudeaus, Atwoods. But Harper made senators of people with inherited wealth (Nicole Eaton, Linda Frum) so he doesn’t mind elites as long as they’re hard-right.
And then as I was hunting down names, a McGregor tweet flashed up from 2011: “Former Ottawa mayor and car salesman Jim Durrell also to receive Order of Canada.”
One wonders if the core of this complaint is Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin — there is no one Harper detests more — who chairs the OC advisory committee (but has no input on who wins). Awkwardly for Harper, McLachlin hails from Pincher Creek, Alta.
You see? There are elitists and then there are useful elitists, spot the difference. It is hard to hate people in groups but equally hard to run them through a sieve.
I’m studying the list of current Order of Canada holders and they look fine to me, if only because I recognize their names. Mark Carney (economics), Catherine Frazee (disability campaigner), a Richard Vincent Mercer (hey there) . . . they seem like Orderly people, what’s to resent?
Would it be so bad to give the award to Don Cherry? He’s ludicrous, but he never went to jail, as did Conrad Black whose Order was eventually removed. I don’t like the perceived Cherry-Atwood range, an idiot on one side and a Nobelexpectant on the other, the rest of us the amorphous in-between.
The rest aren’t middle-range, they are simply a random group, like your family. Some were born to greatness, some had greatness thrust upon them and some are your dodgy Uncle Lou who hung out with the Rotarians. You will not sit beside Uncle Lou at the Christmas dinner table, you will not.
But fine, he has some medal salad on his lapel. Pass the eye rolls, Uncle Lou.
“We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have,” writes Alain de Botton. “It is no coincidence that the first question we tend to be asked by new acquaintances is ‘What do you do?’”
“I do pretty well,” Uncle Lou says. “Got an Order of Canada.”
Would it be so bad to give the award to Don Cherry? He’s ludicrous, but he never went to jail, as did Conrad Black