Justin Trudeau's pitch-perfect pratfall

For those that can't understand French - Justin tells how his father taught him how to take a tumble on purpose...just for giggles. The fun starts at 1:50 or so.

I think it's pretty great that a man with such lofty expectations placed upon him seems to be able to laugh at himself (I mean, just look at that Zorro/d'Artagnan moustache he's sporting for Movember!). Also, he sure seems to be able to speak a pretty decent joual - which is pretty unexpected.

Who knows if he'll ever fulfill those expectations placed on him, but I get the sense that if he doesn't he'll be just fine.

History of USSR for children

All history should be taught via stop-motion Lego animation.
"[Brezhnev] also had his moustaches. But growing above his eyes."


h/t Andrew Sullivan

"Structuralism v.Technological Determinism" or "How My Historiography Is Changing with the Times"

  I recently finished reading John Ralston Saul's biography of Baldwin and Lafontaine (another in the Extraordinary Canadians series - honestly, I cannot stress how amazing these books are. I fully intend on having a shelf full of them in the very near future). One small, almost throwaway point, has stuck with me. In his introduction Saul argues that the 1849 burning of Parliament in Montreal by Protestants angry with the Rebellion Losses Bill was Canada's equivalent to the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe. He offhandedly mentions that it was the advent of the telegraph that helped fuel the revolutions as they spread across the Continent. It was the brand new communication technology and it allowed local newspapers to report on the events in other countries almost instantaneously. While he doesn't come out and say that the telegraph was the 19th Century version of the Internet, he certainly implies it. Like the Internet (and the railroad), the telegraph effectively shrunk the distances between places and peoples. It's not something I had ever really thought of, the telegraph usually ranks pretty low on the list of revolutionary inventions of the 19th Century after the steam engine, the railroad, the breach loading rifle, the Gatling gun, mechanization, industrial uses for rubber and photographic film.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I think I'm becoming a bit of a technological determinist.

  Generally speaking, I've always been sympathetic to the structuralist interpretation of history. That is, the way a society was structured, and which social structures were present, goes a long way to explaining why a society (or nation) developed as it did. (the theory gets more complex - far more complex for me to understand. I stick with this very simplified version, it's treated me well). This is why I look towards the New England town meetings and the Virginian House of Burgesses to explain why the American colonies sought independence from Great Britain in the 18th Century and Canada didn't - America had far more experience with local (and active) governance than Canada.

     If you think this sounds vaguely Marxist, you're right. Structuralism (or how I interpret it) is heavily influenced by the Marxist historians of the early 20th Century (although for them the defining structures naturally revolved around labour and production).

   Lately though, like I said, I'm finding much to agree with Thorstein Veblen about. Technology isn't just something that affects our daily lives, it is in a very real sense the prime mover of history.  This is why I look to the printing press and the explosion of the written word to explain why the Protestant Reformation spread as quickly as it did, and why I look at the ungodly military buildup in the late 19th/early 20th Century to explain why the First World War was inevitable (instead of the alliance system story we keep telling our high school students). I don't mean to imply that technological explanations of history haven't been present before, they absolutely have - the two examples I just gave are well known theories. What I mean to say is that when all things are considered equal, I tend to defer to the technological explanation.

     I suspect this personal shift is part of a larger narrative - the reason why structuralism has become less compelling as an historiographical lens and technological determinism has become moreso is that in contemporary, developed societies, social structures just don't have the same influence that they used to and technology has come to define every aspect of life at the beginning of the 21st Century.  Unions simply do not wield the influence they once did, and the days of Tammany Hall and the Orange Order deciding elections are a distant memory. On the other hand, one only needs to look at how significantly social media has influenced the election campaigns of Obama and Rob Ford (to a lesser extent) to see how technology is becoming the driving force in society.

   Put another way, I suspect that my historiography is being influenced by the times in which I live. This of course is not all that strange - the times in which a historian lives have a dramatic influence over his/her historical analyses (not that I'm a "historian" in any stretch of the imagination). What I think is interesting is how rapidly it is changing. Structuralism made more sense in a world where Communist and Fascist governments actually existed and really did structure their societies  along strict organizational lines (Mussolini called it "corporatism").  Perhaps it is here where I can concede that the Fukuyaman end-of-history thesis has some validity (I can't believe I just wrote that - I might have to shower :).  It hasn't taken very long to move away from binary worldview and towards a more amorphous one. Likewise, technological determinism is far less rigid a historiography than structuralism is.

    Anyways, this is what I've been thinking about for the last little while. Thoughts?

Trivium

Eugène-René Poubelle

     Baron Hausmann's wholesale renovation of Paris during Napoleon III's Second Empire was undertaken in part to allow fresh air to move throughout the city - the thinking was that "miasma", or "bad air" caused disease, ill-health and epidemics such as cholera.  (It also was a concerted effort to widen the boulevards within the city in order to make it more difficult for citizens to revolt and set up barricades...ah, the French :).

     Shortly afterward, the city of Paris named their first sanitation commissioner - the handsome chap you see above. M. Poubelle was charged with cleaning the streets of refuse (human and otherwise). Prior to the renovation the streets of Paris were angled towards the centre with a trough running down the middle. This trough was water-fed and created a never ending river of refuse running through the street. This reality (apparently) is the origin of the phrase "taking the high road" - walking on the incline to avoid the muck.  M. Poubelle's solution to this problem was to insist that all buildings provide three covered containers to hold all the household refuse from the building which would then be collected by city employees and brought to the outskirts of the city. Within a very short period of time, his rubbish bins became known colloquially as Boîtes Poubelle...

which is what they remain known as today.

Great Moments in Polticial History.

Parliament Building, Montreal, Canada -  1849.

On July 26th 1849, the Tories convened in Kingston (the recently vacated capital) and voted in favour of annexation into the United States. What caused them to consider such a drastic measure? They didn't want to pay damages to the innocent Quebecois bystanders whose farms were burned down by the British military during an intimidation campaign in the immediate aftermath of the 1837 Rebellion. A similar compensation package for Upper Canada had passed without controversy five years earlier.  The bill so enraged the entrenched Tories that they fomented a riot that culminated in the burning of Parliament in Montreal (the fire brigade, which was controlled by English Protestants, let it burn unimpeded).  This measure was so offensive to the Tories (which included a young John A. MacDonald), that they would rather Canada cease to exist altogether.

Something to keep in mind the next time Harper's Conservative government calls some Liberal's patriotism into question or implies that a certain politician isn't sufficiently Canadian.

Last North American Tory?

I just finished reading David Frum's latest article in the New York Times, and while I certainly disagree with much of what he says - at least I can understand it. Much of the rhetoric coming from the right (the Glen Becks in the United States and the Blogging Tories in Canada) is very bizarre to me, and on a fundamental level, I just don't understand.  Frum seems to be coming from a classic Tory background, something we haven't really seen in Canada since Joe Clark shuffled off the stage.

Anyways, Frum's latest is an interesting read...which is something I never imagined I'd ever say back when Frum was Bush's speechwriter and coining the phrase "axis of evil". You should check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14FOB-idealab-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Art Corner

 

Socle du Monde - Piero Manzoni 1961

    I've always liked my art to be a little bit humorous/witty. Which is probably why I gravitate towards art created in the latter half of the 20th Century - there seems to be more of a sense of ironic detachment in the works than there is in earlier eras. The conceptual artist Piero Manzoni has always been one of my favourites. He's probably best know for canning and selling 91 tins of his own excrement - which when you think about it, is a pretty devastating critique of the art industry (people were literally paying good money for the privilege of owning crap).

      My favourite piece of his is Socle du Monde, which translates into "Base of the World". The piece consists of a metal box with the words "socle du monde" written upside down. The viewer needs to picture flipping the piece right-side up - which would mean flipping the world upside down and would thus make the box literally the base/pedestal of the world. It's pretty clever, and makes Earth a work of art (sort of echoes Hamlet's "all the world's a stage" too).

    Anyways, this piece has always made me smile.

My Case for Riel's Pardon.

    I recently finished reading Joseph Boydon's excellent biography of Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel, part of the "Extraordinary Canadians" series curated by John Ralston Saul. If you are at all interested in Canadian history, you should go out and buy some of these books - they're fantastic. I plan on writing a longer post about Louis Riel and how our perceptions of him probably says a lot more about us than it does about him, but for now I want to focus on one specific point.

     Every year, as the November 16th anniversary of Riel's hanging approaches, calls for his posthumous pardon increase. I suspect that this year, the 125th anniversary, we'll hear more about Riel than normal and the historical case for his pardon will be argued.  Whenever the topic comes up, his detractors often point out that Riel did in fact commit treason by setting up a provisional government at Fort Garry and he did in fact execute Thomas Scott; that regardless of his place in Métis/French Canadian history, he is a treasonous murderer and should be treated as such.  That is all well and fine, but the pardon discussed doesn't apply to that event. He was not hanged for his role in the Red River Rebellion of 1870, he was hanged for his role in the 1885 rebellion at Batoche Saskatchewan. For that earlier uprising (and the execution of Thomas Scott) his initial 1874 death penalty was subsequently reduced to a 2 year prison term for which he was granted amnesty in 1875 on the condition that he remain outside of Canada for 5 years. Riel remained in Montana until 1884, even taking the step of becoming an American citizen, so one can rightly surmise that he fulfilled the obligations of that amnesty.

   Riel didn't return to Canada until 1884 at the behest of Gabriel Dumont, the Métis chief who thought that the legendary Riel could help win the same concessions from the Canadian government that he so famously did in 1870. As Boyden and Chester Brown point out - Riel had very little to do with the armed insurrection that occurred at Batoche - by that time he was increasingly falling prey to the mental illnesses that had stalked him for most of his adult life. Upon his return to Canada, Riel was convinced that the Métis were the lost tribe of Israel and he was Louis 'David' Riel, the prophet who would lead his people from bondage. It is true that he formed another provisional government (this one really was treasonous as Canada had purchased Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Co while Riel was exiled), but his aim was always for that government to be a temporary tool to force Sir John A. MacDonald to take their claims seriously and negotiate in good faith. History shows that MacDonald did not. Instead of negotiating, he sent 5,000 volunteer soldiers and a Gatling gun along the still-unfinished Trans Canada Railroad to deal with the "half-breed problem". Dumont was far more prepared to use violence to achieve his aims (which weren't full-blown independence but the legal title to the land that they had cleared as well as religious/linguistic protections), and at the battles of Duck Lake, Fish Creek and Batoche it was Dumont, and not Riel who led the hundred-odd Métis irregulars against the Canadian military.

     Needless to say, when a man rides into the middle of a gunfight on horseback with a golden cross held high and takes time out of negotiating with the Canadian government to change the names of the week (because using the old ones is akin to worshipping false idols), we're not dealing with quite the military genius the Orange Order tried to make us believe.

[For those interested, Riel's weekdays were: Christ Aurore, Vierge Aurore, Joseph Aube, Dieu Aurore, Deuil Aurore, Calme Aurore, and Vive Aurore. He also changed the Sabbath from Sunday to Saturday]

     Was Riel actually guilty of treason for his actions in 1885? Boydon compellingly argues that he wasn't. Riel, as much as he may not have wished to admit, really was suffering from pretty severe mental illness. Add to this the fact that he was an American citizen (at a time before the concept of dual citizenship), and the fact that his judge, who ignored the jury's recommendation of mercy, was a member of the Orange Order, and Dumont, who actually led all of the fighting, was not allowed to testify, and you have a pretty strong argument that Riel should be posthumously pardoned.

    Riel's execution was in a very real sense the culmination of a 15 year propaganda campaign by the Orange Order of Ontario who never forgave Riel for trying to keep them from taking the farmland they saw as their Protestant birthright, and executing one of their own: Thomas Scott.  History has scrubbed the image of Thomas Scott - far from being the innocent government bureaucrat he's often portrayed as, Scott was a virulent racist who tried to overthrow Riel's provisional government twice and spent his time in jail hurling racist epithets against his Catholic Métis captors. It's not a coincidence that Scott was the only prisoner held by the Provisional Government that was executed.

     Also, one should remember what Scott was doing in Red River - he wasn't simply surveying the land for informational purposes. Those surveyors were dividing land that the Canadian government was about to purchase from the Hudson's Bay Co and would then sell to English Protestant settlers - regardless of who was living on the land previously. The Métis were keenly aware of what land surveyors meant - their life's work would be stolen from them by a foreign government.

    When Riel was captured in 1885, he was essentially being retried for his actions 15 years earlier. Those who argue against his posthumous pardon are doing the same thing.

Marginalia

Province of Alberta "Prosperity Certificate" c. 1936

     In the early 1930s, Alberta radio evangelist "Bible" Bill Aberhart became a convert to the Social Credit monetary theory which stated that the cause of capitalism's ills was simply that people didn't have enough money to buy what they needed. The answer therefore was to simply print more money and give it to them. They'd then inject that money into the economy and the Great Depression would be vanquished - not with socialism but capitalism. In 1935, Aberhart's Social Credit Party won the Alberta Provincial election but when he tried issuing Prosperity Certificates like the one above, Ottawa immediately declared them illegal.

    I've always thought there was a strong similarity between Keynesian and Social Credit economics. The former depends on the government to infuse cash directly into the economy through infrastructure spending while the latter depends on the government to infuse cash indirectly into the economy by printing more. Now that I think about it, there seems to be very little difference between prosperity certificates and food stamps - which are one of the most effective forms of stimulus available.

   It's sort of strange then that these Conservatives, which grew out of the Preston Manning's Reform Party, seem to abhor stimulus, (only agreeing to a program when their government was threatened with non-confidence in January 2009). Especially when one considers how deeply the Social Credit Party of Alberta  (led by Manning's father Ernest after Aberhart) were informed by it.

The Enduring Myth of Invasion or Your tax Dollars Busy at Work

    By now everyone is familiar with the story of the bomb aboard the Yemeni cargo jet that was ably escorted through Canadian airspace to JFK airport in New York by our CF-18s. Canada's small role in this peculiar case of terrorism (apparently the bomb's intended target was a synagogue in Chicago) was just that - a small footnote in a story that will soon be forgotten by most, further proof that in the struggle with terrorism, we actually seem to be doing pretty well (shoe, underwear, and ink cartridge bombers notwithstanding).

   This minor event has, however, had the good fortune of occurring at the same time that Ottawa is debating the wisdom in spending at least $16 billion on 65 fighter jets to replace our 79 aging CF-18s. For those not following, the Conservative government has decided to go ahead and purchase these planes without going through a bid/tender process - that is, these planes are sole-sourced. The opposition parties have, rightly in my mind, been asking whether this is the most effective way to spend $16 billion - why was the bid process skipped when even the Department of National Defense fully anticipated having one? Are we getting the best value for our dollar?

   So what does the one have to do with the other? Well not much really - any airplane at all could have escorted the cargo jet, and there was really very little risk of anything happening over Canadian airspace (remember, the pilots weren't terrorists - there was a bomb aboard a plane). Of course this is not how the current government is portraying the event. Apparently following the old adage to never let a good crisis go to waste, Dmitri Soudas, the Prime Minister's director of communications, said in an email:

“Whether it is the CF-18s or the F-35s, Canada's air force needs the right equipment to protect Canadian airspace, Michael Ignatieff's Liberals and their coalition partners would rather use kites to defend Canada than fighter jets,”

 This is, obviously, absurd. Nobody is, as far as I can tell, arguing that we don't need to purchase new jets - but rather that we should be getting the best value possible, and sole-sourcing the purchase is unlikely to achieve this. In other words, this is ridiculous partisan sniping. The sort of thing that litters the online comments sections of our daily newspapers. Here's the thing though, this didn't come from some anonymous crank online, this came from the Prime Minister's Office. That's an important distinction to make. The PMO is not an appendage of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), it is a governmental department - much like the Ministry of Transport, Department of National Defence or the Department of Finance. In other words, it is paid for by you, the tax payer, and not through donations to the CPC. This sort of partisan chicanery should not be emanating from the PMO, and in the past, it didn't. It is only under this current government that the PMO has become so politicized (it also has seen its budget balloon to over $10m a year, this is not a coincidence). The current government is, in other words, getting their advertising (both positive and negative) for free - it's being done on your dime. I think this is an outrageous misappropriation of funds and should be highlighted whenever possible.

     The other aspect of Soudas' quote that sticks out is how we need these top of the line fighter jets to "defend Canada", as evidenced apparently by a bomb intended for Chicago and a couple of Russian jets recently flying near Canadian airspace. Do you know when was Canada last invaded? That would be the Fenian Raids of the 1860s. The Fenians were Irish Americans whose goal was to invade Canada and hold it hostage in order to force Britain to grant Ireland independence. Needless to say, the Fenian Raids were not successful. Canada, therefore, has had a long history of not being invaded by foreign forces. That hasn't stopped us from doing all sorts of nasty things in the name of national defence.  The first time the War Measures Act was invoked was in 1915 when Robert Borden used it to justify rounding up and deporting or jailing Germans, Ukranians, and various Slavic Canadians under the guise of national defence.  Remember, this was around the time that we changed the name of Berlin Ontario to Kitchener, and started calling sauerkraut "liberty cabbage", so maybe we weren't thinking so clearly.  The next time we felt the need to use the WMA was during WWII, when we used it to justify rounding up thousands of Japanese Canadians, throwing them in prison camps, and selling off their property for pennies on the dollar - all because we thought their ethnicity made them a threat to Canadian safety. It would seem that whenever we're told that we're doing something to protect/defend Canada, the reality is that we're about to do something less than savoury (not that I'm comparing wasting obscene amounts of money on cool fighter jets with suspending civil liberties of ethnic Canadians, just that this sort of "it's a scary world out there" rhetoric generally serves to obscure less than noble intentions).

    These planes aren't for "defence", they're to fulfill our international obligations with the UN and NATO. There's nothing wrong with these reasons. In fact they're perfectly cromulent reasons to have fighter jets. For some reason though, our politicians refuse to say so, instead we get this sort of rhetoric  - the kind that is designed to make Canadians fear for their safety. When the reality is, that if we were actually to be invaded, it would be by the Americans...and 65 fighter jets wouldn't quite cut it.

    

Marginalia

Japanese Balloon Bomb - circa 1945.

I just found out about these things. The Japanese launched thousands of these balloons from Honshu against the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada in the final months of fighting during World War II. The idea was to use the existing air streams to carry them across the Pacific and have them trigger forest fires in the Northwest. They didn't really work, apparently they only killed six people in a single incident (a woman and five children in Oregon came across one while picnicking and accidentally set it off) and none triggered any forest fires. The Japanese abandoned the program in April 1945, 4 months before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Anyways, I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating - we tend to focus on the grand narratives of history, which is fine, but in doing so things like these slip through the cracks and be forgotten, which is a shame.

Max Bernier and the Constitutional Con.

   For most Canadians, the name Maxime Bernier doesn't mean whole lot. If prodded some might remember him as being that guy who dated that girl who was friends with the Hell's Angels and left important government documents at her apartment. After that bit of nastiness, he rightfully was stripped of his cabinet position and has been languishing on the back-benches ever since.

  Lately Bernier has been burnishing his reputation as something of a Canadian Libertarian and one of the more doctrinaire Conservatives (this, and the fact that he's openly disagreed with Harper on occasion has many observers touting him as a potential leadership rival should Harper fail for the third time to win a majority). I don't particularly care much for the Conservatives either in tone or ideology, but one comment made by Bernier recently particularly rankles.

    Bernier has been fancying himself something of a Constitutional purist of late - arguing that the Canadian government should do away with the complexities of 21st Century federalism and return to the true spirit of the BNA Act 1867. On his website he recently opined:

Clearly, our goal should be to bring back the balanced federalism envisioned by the Founders. It should be to restore our federal union, as Wilfrid Laurier and most people understood it back then.
This would be done by putting an end to all federal intrusion into areas of provincial jurisdiction. Instead of sending money to the provinces, Ottawa would cut its taxes and let them use the fiscal room that has been vacated. Such a transfer of tax points to the provinces would allow them too fully assume their responsibilities, without federal control.

     There are more than a few problems with this proposal - not the least of which is conflating Wilfrid Laurier with a Father of Confederation - something that would have been news to old Wilfie! But mainly my objections to this line of reasoning is that it is fundamentally misrepresents Canadian political history and is intellectually dishonest.

      For those who haven't been following the story so far - the constitution agreed upon by Sir John A MacDonald and The Gang in 1867 was a highly centralized one where the federal government would be responsible for all of the important levers of control - currency, trade, transportation, taxation, immigration, defense, and international relations. The provinces would deal with more local concerns, most notably in the areas of health, education and social welfare (that these traditionally fell under the purview of the Catholic Church should be noted - provincial control over these areas was central to getting Quebec to agree to Confederation). This makes sense from a 19th Century viewpoint - nation-building was the order of the day, without a strong federal union it was thought that the Americans, who had just finished fighting a bloody civil war, might turn their gaze northward.

     Of course it goes without saying that the world has changed greatly since 1867 - we're no longer worried (too much) about the Americans unleashing the full force of their military might upon us, and healthcare, education, and social welfare have become extraordinarily important portfolios.  Healthcare has become especially important - it being widely regarded as not only a governmental responsibility, but also a defining national value.  Of all the provincial responsibilities, healthcare has been federalized the most. And this makes sense - there is a dramatic disparity in affluence between the provinces - and a basic sense of fairness and decency would dictate that a Canadian should be able to access similar levels of healthcare regardless of the province in which they reside. Since not every province has the taxation base to adequately ensure similar levels of care, the federal government, through the Canada Health Act, sends transfer payments to the poorer provinces to make up the difference. In other words, the Canada Health Act can, and should be, seen as a unifying force in Canada.

     What Bernier is proposing is to take the federal government out of the healthcare game altogether. I know he doesn't mention healthcare specifically in the quoted text, but make no mistake, that's what he's talking about. You'll notice that he characterizes transfer payments as a "federal intrusion" into provincial jurisdiction, and that he thinks we should become more "balanced". The implication is clear - that the modern way of doing things is fundamentally at odds with the intentions of the Fathers of Confederation (as an aside - I kind of hate this phrase). The reality is actually the opposite. If we actually want to honour the vision of Sir John A MacDonald, then we will keep these "federal intrusions" into provincial jurisdictions. As I noted earlier - these transfer payments are essentially in place to strengthen the ties between provinces. Contemporary Canada is far more decentralized than Sir John A would ever have wanted. By loosening the moorings of the defining national ethic (publicly funded healthcare), Bernier would effectively make Canada more far decentralized than it already is.

    Actually, one wonders what Maxime Bernier would think about MacDonald's fondness for disallowance and reservation. MacDonald's vision of a federal union was so strong that he often used this power to over-ride decisions made at the provincial level. Think about that - in the 19th Century, the premier of Ontario (for example) could be unilaterally over-ridden by the Prime Minister for no reason other than the fact that he felt like it. Somehow I doubt our libertarian MP would be comfortable with such authority. An authority, I might add, that still exists, it was never formally revoked.

     Bernier's proposal is not only historically blinkered, but it also is fundamentally dishonest. The actual, unavoidable, result of such a policy would be to bankrupt healthcare and usher in more private ownership of it. As it currently stands, healthcare costs account for roughly 30% of a given province's budget. That percentage is astronomically high - which is a big reason why one never hears of any provinces outside of Quebec (for different reasons altogether)  demanding the federal government take their hands off of healthcare - it's too important and too popular to play the jurisdiction game (incidentally, the jurisdictions are nowhere near as water-tight as the Berniers of the world would have you believe). Bernier knows this. He may be many things, but from what I can gather, a dummy he isn't.  But by framing the argument in such a manner, he's hoping to obscure the obvious outcome (end of public healthcare) with pseudo-intellectual historicism.  The reason why is obvious, it would be political suicide to come out and say "healthcare should be privately run". If he did that, he wouldn't win a seat east or west of Alberta :).

     In many ways it reminds me of Lord Durham's report of 1840 - if you recall, that report called for Upper and Lower Canada to be united into a single province with equal representation. What sounded like egalitarianism was really an attempt to render French Canadians irrelevant - it was widely assumed that the English Protestant minority in Montreal would always side with the English Protestant majority in Ontario and thus render the French majority impotent. (it didn't work out that way - mostly because Baldwin and Lafontaine were awesome, but that's definitely a post for another day)

     In a sense, I can understand why Bernier would want to position himself as such - Libertarianism has never been a strong current in Canadian politics, but it certainly has been for our neighbours to the south. The much discussed Tea Party movement (who look surprisingly like Ron Paul fans from 2008) are heavily influenced by libertarianism (and nativism, but that's a story for another day). Many of the Republican candidates favoured by the Tea Party - Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Joe Miller, Sharon Angle - have positioned themselves as something they call "Constitutional Conservatives". I suspect that Bernier is hoping to appeal to Canadians who view those politicians favourably.

While it might be tempting to think of a proposal from a Conservative that doesn't include adolescent pot shots at the Leader of the Opposition as refreshing, in reality this proposal from Bernier is nothing more than a dishonest appeal for radical free market capitalism and the dismantling of the modern healthcare system.

Baseball Follies

   Being a huge baseball nerd I generally make a stop over at Sports Illustrated to see what's up with the national pastime. This time of year most baseball writers are busy compiling their lists for who deserves to win the various awards; building their case for why one player deserves the MVP or the Cy Young over the other candidates. SI's Tom Verducci recently published his list and in it he made of the more pernicious arguments that frankly never made any sense to me. See if you can spot it:

    Verducci selects Toronto-born Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds for the NL MVP stating "Votto wins easily because he was the best player on any of the NL playoff teams." Later on he chooses Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners to win the AL Cy Young, arguing that "Hernandez will win this award fairly comfortably...He was exactly what it says on the award: the most outstanding pitcher in the league. Just ask any hitter."

     Did you spot it? The MVP is dependent on how the player's team performed overall, whereas the CY Young isn't. Perhaps I should mention that Hernandez' Mariners finished with the worst record in the American League 61-101 (.377 winning percentage). This has never made much sense to me - why  is the one award, for all intents and purposes, limited to those players who happen to play on a winning team while the other is open to all teams? Only twice in recent history has the MVP gone to a player from a losing team: Andre Dawson of the Chicago Cubs in 1987 and Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers in 2003. Pitchers from losing teams win all the time, in 2008 Cleveland's Cliff Lee won, and they finished 8th in the American League - 7.5 games out of the wild card.

    In practical terms what happens every year is the baseball writers (those who vote for the major awards) basically take a look at the 4 playoff bound teams in each league and pick the best player of that lot. And I can't, for the life of me, figure out why. The impact one positional player has on a team's record frankly isn't that much - the image of the Herculean slugger metaphorically lifting the entire team on his back and willing them into the promised land just isn't very accurate. And yet, every year we're subjected to the same process of selection.

     It's one of the reasons why Toronto's Jose Bautista likely won't receive a single 1st place vote - Toronto simply wasn't competitive enough. If he played for Tampa Bay or Minnesota, his obvious short-comings would be rationalized away and he'd be a likely favourite to win the MVP. I'm not suggesting that Bautista is the legitimate MVP, he isn't. I'm only saying that he wouldn't have been dismissed quite so readily if he played on a winning team.

     Everything else about this sport is scientifically analyzed to the minutest detail, that the most prestigious award in the sport isn't, is not only confusing, it's absurd.


p.s. Go Doc Halladay!

The Seventh Defenceman Paradox

   If you open up tomorrow's newspaper to the sports section you will find a short list of all NHL transactions that happened today. Beside Montreal you'll see "Alex Henry (D) assigned to HAM (AHL)."  If you are the extremely curious sort, you might go to the internet and look up Mr. Henry. There you'll discover a player who has played all of 2 NHL games in the last 5 seasons, and scored all of 6 goals in the last 3 years in the AHL. He is, by all measures, a journeyman defenceman and career minor-leaguer. In other words, exactly the sort of name you'd expect to see on the transaction wire during the final days of training camp. If you are a Montreal Canadiens fan however, Alex Henry is currently the single most debated player on the roster - his demotion means that he is no longer Montreal's 7th defenceman for the upcoming season.

    I have this pet theory that the single most discussed/lionized/loathed player on any hockey team is the 7th defenceman. That the reaction he elicits is completely and utterly out-sized compared to the relatively insignificant contributions he makes during a game. In general, NHL teams use 3 pairings of defencemen during a game. However, they will usually keep one extra defenceman on the roster in case of injury or the flu or what have you. This is a guy who often does little more than watch most games from on high sitting in the press box enjoying free hot dogs and soda and looking dapper in a suit. In other words, he is somebody that no one should worry all to much about. And yet, as Alex Henry, and his predecessors Marc Andre Bergeron and Patrice Brisebois can attest, no other player (save the goalie) will engender as much vocal debate. The difference between the 6th and 7th defenceman is quite literally the difference between winning the Stanley Cup or missing the playoffs entirely, or so they'd have you believe.

     As many of you know, I'm a fairly huge Montreal Canadiens fan. I firmly believe that making his son, born and bred in the GTA, a Habs fan was my father's cruelest joke. Regardless, here I am - having hit that magical age where my default Christmas present is something with a CH logo on it. And I'm totally okay with that. One of the great/terrible things about the internet is how easy it is to find information about happenings in places other than where you live - and then find a community of people just like you who also care deeply/irrationally about these happenings. Until a few years ago I was blissfully unaware of this, but now I'm all too cognizant of the fact that I can go online and find literally hundreds of websites populated with thousands of people opining at great length about the state of the Montreal Canadiens. I now know why people read the gossip pages - these websites, and their patrons, are like crack - I want to stop, but I can't. They're the internet equivalent of a trainwreck...you simply cannot turn your head away. You know how they say "fan" is short for "fanatic"? Well these guys (and they're almost ALL guys) seem to go out of their way to prove that idiom. No seriously, I once saw a guy who went through every goal scored against Montreal to see where the respective goalie's weak spots were - how long would that take?

     Guess what has them aflame of late? The demotion of Alex Henry. Who will now be the 7th Defenceman? Was he a better option than Ryan O'Byrne? Or even Alexandre Picard (the projected 6th and 7th Defencemen)? Who had the better training camp? Which player has more career potential? And what about their respective salary cap hits? This position will be discussed  for the length of the season. Pro Henry, Pro Picard and Pro O'Byrne camps will form, almost organically, and both sides will listen attentively to every utterance by the head coach in hopes of divining what he, and by extension, the team, thinks about their chosen 7th defenceman. Back to back loses are easily explained by the 6th defenceman. If the 7th defenceman was in his place they'd certainly have won.

     Lest you think this is isolated to Montreal, whose fans are, to be frank, completely insane,  Toronto has often been just as enraptured with the 7th defenceman. This year's debate has been somewhat muted as most have been discussing the merits of Nazem Kadri, but right behind that topic of conversation is the future of Jeff Finger, Brett Lebda, and Matt Lashoff. A few years back you couldn't say the name "Aki Berg" in this town without enraging all men within earshot.

     What accounts for this obsession? I think in part it's because holding the position requires no evidence. It's simply enough to say "if player X was in the lineup instead of Player Y, then things would have been different" and it's almost impossible to refute. You see the same thing in football with the backup Quarterback - when the team loses, the outcome surely would've been different if the QB was different (which of course doesn't account for the fact that the opposing defence would change their strategy to counteract the different QB, but I digress). I also think that fans are nowhere near as savvy at judging talent as they think they are. You never hear about 1st or 2nd pairing defencemen because, well, they're good, and talent is far harder for the layman to recognize than deficiencies (at least at the Defence position - one that is notoriously difficult to judge).

Whatever the reason, you can be certain of one thing - the effect the spare defenceman has on your team of choice will be completely blown out of proportion by those who claim to be their biggest fans.

Man, I missed hockey :)

Trudeau, The October Crisis, Campus Marxists, and Social History

     This October 5th marks the 40th anniversary of the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross by the FLQ, which set off a series of events now cumulatively known as the October Crisis, surely one of the strangest autumns in Canadian history*. By now the details of the October Crisis are well-trod territory - confronted with a home-grown terrorist organization not only threatening to destroy the nation, but also forcing it to listen to their fevered, adolescent ramblings in the form of a "manifesto", Prime Minister Trudeau told the nation that bleeding hearts should go on and bleed and to just watch him (seriously, that interview is still one of that all-time greats. Hollywood couldn't have written it better). When the smoke cleared the War Measures Act was invoked, thousands of (mostly) French Canadians had been incarcerated, Minister Pierre Laporte was found dead in a trunk of a car, and the perpetrators were exiled to Cuba where they could continue to play-act the role of romantic freedom fighters to their little hearts' content.

     The implications that month had on the Separatist movement are well known and well covered, the actions of the Chenier cell signalled the ignoble end to the use of violence as a means to achieve political goals in Canada - we're far too genteel for all of that nastiness it would seem. Seeking a legitimate outlet for their grievances, those dreaming of independence turned to the Parti Quebecois, led by the eloquent and charismatic Rene Levesque. Six years later his Parti Quebecois would win the provincial election and by the end of his first term in office, Levesque would force Canada to witness its first referendum on secession.

    I don't want to really talk about all that though. Instead the upcoming anniversary reminded of a conversation I had in undergrad with some strident Marxists in the Sid Smith foyer. I was going to U of T when Trudeau passed away in 2000 and naturally his role in shaping Canada was being discussed at great length. Leaving my Intro to Art History class one evening I was nabbed by two Marxists who asked me what I thought of Trudeau. I gave what I thought was the standard answer: The Charter of Rights, Multiculturalism, Official Languages, Bilingualism etc etc. They nodded and then asked me what I thought about the October Crisis. Again I thought for a second and told them that it could be seen as an important step in Canada's growth into a proper nation. The Marxists, obviously waiting for this moment, bombarded me with information about the mass arrests during the Crisis. Their feeling was that it was all part of an organized plot to rid Quebec of leftists and the trade union movement. This piqued my interest and eventually I got them to admit that maybe the reason so many leftists and trade unionists were arrested was because significant numbers of them were also seperatists. I let them continue for a while and even bought one of their newspapers (seriously, The Worker's Vanguard is easily the funniest thing in print since the Weekly World News went online only. Do yourself a favour - go to a university campus nearby and buy one. You won't be disappointed), and went on my way. Ah, undergrad.

   For some reason that conversation has stuck with me. Not only because those Marxists were entertaining as hell, but also, upon further reflection I think my off-hand remark about the October Crisis has merit. The development of Canada from a British nation to a North American one is something I find endlessly fascinating. Students of Canadian history (or anyone who took Grade 10 history really) should be familiar with the touchstones: Statute of Westminster, Waiting a week to declare war on Hitler, Expo 67, Immigration reform, Patriation of the Constitution, Free Trade Agreement. By the time America was invading Iraq, Canada had reached the point where they not only turned down overtures from the United States but also England - something that would've been unimaginable 40 years earlier. I think the October Crisis has its place in this discussion.

     I think in a very real sense that the October Crisis can be seen in the same light as Expo 67 - both served to help Canada mature - in two different ways I think. First, I think a nation can be united in celebration as well as in conflict. The October Crisis was a homegrown crisis that had linked Canadians across the country in ways that few earlier events had. My French Canadian father was in the Navy during the crisis, and he was prevented from taking shore leave in Vancouver due to concerns about anti-French violence. This certainly wasn't an issue that was isolated to Quebec and maybe Toronto. I think the advent of television has a lot to do with this. Peruse the CBC archives and I think you'll grant me the comparison between this footage and the images from Vietnam our American neighbours saw on the nightly news. Television came along, and shortly thereafter Canadians were presented with the image of armed soldiers in the streets of Montreal. This was happening at home, in Canada, not halfway across the world. I would argue that this had as much a role in shrinking the size of Canada and lessening the impact of regionalism (or provincialism) as the more widely accepted (and decidedly happier) events of this era - Expo '67 and the Summit Series '72 did. After October 1970 it became much harder for a Canadian to think of themselves only as a British Columbian, or an Ontarian, or a Nova Scotian.

   Second, that October was Canada's experience with the decolonization movement that swept the globe in the 1960s. Not to suggest that the French experience in Canada is on par with Algeria or Mozambique, perhaps the Basque situation would be the best comparison, but the armed insurrection against colonial overlords was certainly part of the cultural zeitgeist. That Canada had its own such event connected it to the rest of the world, in a way that more formal international events (like the Pearson Solution to the Suez Crisis) never could. Acts of violence have a way of connecting the world - I'm thinking specifically of the international response to the September 11th attacks, that formal agreements never can. I think that the October Crisis brought Canada into the contemporary community of nations and made it a little more difficult to think of Canada as that British colony in America.

     Anyways, back to my original point - I think my offhand comment to those two Marxists was probably truer than I realized when I said it (I think at the time I was probably making a connection with "just watch me" and the bravado of Churchill or Kennedy). But I think that for Canada to become its own nation and not a British or an American one, it needed to see itself, and be seen, as an independent entity. The October Crisis was one of the key events that allowed that to happen.
 
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*actually now that I think of it - there's been a couple of strange autumns in Canadian history. The referendum in October 1995, King-Byng Affair in Oct 1925, Proroguement 2008, the Khaki Election of 1917. Not sure what that says about Canada - but surely it's something poetic.

Welcome to Everyday Arcanist

ar·can·ist

noun

a person professing special secret knowledge concerning ceramics, esp. concerning the making of porcelain.

 

Back in high school I remember looking up the word arcane to see if I was using it correctly. Turns out I was, but directly underneath the definition of arcane, I found the definition above. It always struck me as completely, wonderfully, absurd that there exists in the English language a word to describe somebody who knows an exceptional amount about making porcelain, but refuses to tell anybody about it.

Everyday Arcanist will be the place where I park all those random thoughts that may or may not be of interest to anyone other than myself. I expect the majority of my posts to revolve around one of my three major interests - sports, history, and Canadian politics.

I hope you find something to enjoy.