The Point

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Our proud generation

I hesitate to use today's book to make a point, given my newness to the man it is centred on and my feeling that I can't use it to talk about everything I want to say, but it is a good starting point for a hard discussion I think we should have. Chester Brown's Louis Riel, a loose biography told in comic strips, should certainly spark a few levels of debate. At the moment, I am experiencing several circles of shame, frustration, and still optimism about where I am from. Maybe you've heard of one of the reasons.

Rona Ambrose should be an embarassment to the Edmonton-Spruce Grove riding she represents for the federal Conservative Party, and yet she sums up nicely the attitude of... of deferred--or complete lack of--responsibility our whole province seems to be under the spell of. Her complete unwillingness to take responsibility as bloody Environment Minister for Canada's continuing failure to take any tangible action on our contributions to rapid anthopogenic climate change is... well, typical.

Brown's Riel is more novel than biography, a method that allows him to draw something mysterious that speaks to us out of the Métis leader's life. His Riel is rational, devoted, and fiercely passionate about leading his people to stand up for themselves. Brown intentionally portrays figures like John A MacDonald and Gabriel Dumont with cartoonish zeal (Dumont reminds me a little of a surlier Captain Haddock) to clip out, enlarge, and sometimes sketch in aspects of Riel's life he wants to use to paint a portrait from a distance of a man who believed he was destined to lead God's new chosen people to their freedom.

What strikes me about this book is that when the Métis in the Red River settlement, and later in Saskatchewan, ask for Riel's help, the impetus for change, the sense of injustice, comes from the people themselves, not from Riel.

Last weekend I met a charming and slightly morose economist from the provincial government. We were at the Parkland Institute conference on energy and democracy in Alberta, so we were picking apart some of what John Ralston Saul had said at the keynote speech. Saul had tried to make the point that when economies became too based on being 'hewers of wood and drawers of water,' real, engaged debate among citizens suffers. He said simple economies based on one type of industry lead to simple governmental administration and consequently, oversimplification of issues. Explain, you say.

Here's a clip from an interview he did with a reporter from Gauntlet News when he spoke at the University of Calgary earlier this year:
G: With apathy becoming more prevalent in society, do you think it’s challenging for young people today to engage themselves in democracy?

JRS: Well I guess that Calgary’s the richest city in the country and the money’s really come out of the commodities. There’s a long tradition of places where commodities bring wealth and they also tend to bring a certain amount of apathy, partly because the engagement in the creation of the wealth is a lot less. Basically it’s there and it comes out of the ground, so obviously there’s some work to be done, but it’s not the same thing as manufacturing or service, or agriculture for that matter. There’s a risk, but it’s not that sort of one by one work. One always has to look when you’re in a commodities rich situation at what can happen. Argentina, in the 1920s and 1930s had a higher per capita income than Canada and as you know it’s been incredibly troubled for the last 30 years. But most of the explanations that have been written about this and a lot of it came from the sense of what’s ours is ours and a sort of sense of comfort that came from the fact that this money just kept appearing through the commodities. Out of that came a growing division between the rich and the poor and a growing sense of entitlement that those who could afford to should have better.
That sense of entitlement is palpable in Edmonton these days. So much money seems to be flowing around (for some, and I am one of the some) that our giddiness seems to be distracting us from planning beyond the next quarterly report. I'm talking mainly, I suppose, about the tar sands in our province. It's a dirty, expensive fuel to extract, but also one with a huge profit margin and a usefulness in our society that can't be ignored (although it is).

Money is flowing in from new construction projects. Every once in a while, we get $400 checks to convince us that our government is investing in our future. The international airports in Edmonton and Calgary are both seeing more demand and now you can fly direct from here to London again. But there's as little connection here between that economic wealth and where it comes from as there is between buying a banana here at IGA and the worker who picked it.

I listened (at this conference) to an elder named Harriet Janvier from a First Nation near Fort McMurray tell me her people were actually seeing more harm than good come from the Suncor and Syncrude projects near their reserve. The wealth supposedly flowing so freely around Fort Mac (and there's a lot of it) 'hasn't trickled down,' she said, and what's worse, those young people who manage to get jobs with the oil companies are expected to 'only stay for the first paycheck.' She said she believes the pollution from the oil sands developments is contributing to health problems like cancer and diabetes in her community (and she's not alone), and the water level in the Athabasca River, which they depend on, has gone sharply down in the past two decades.

Oil companies have been quick to jump on that last point, arguing that they're not a 'large user' of water in the province. But when elders are pointing out measurable declines in water levels caused by an industry that's using twice as much water as the city of Calgary at the moment, you have to wonder why there's been such a humiliating lack of planning on their part. You've heard of tailing ponds, right? Oil sands developments are not only in a practical way large consumers of water, they don't know what to do with the contaminated water after the extraction process use, so they're leaving it out in open (hopefully 'sealed') pits all over the northern half of the province. It's a good thing we don't have silly things like, oh, I don't know, geological instability anymore, and that all water systems have suddenly become separate and discrete, or else one could see that becoming a fairly large problem.

The reigning attitude here is that it doesn't matter, it'll be solved later, technologies will eventually emerge to tackle these problems, that we're entitled to our massive consumption of resources (and more pointedly, massive waste of them too). And the same holds true for the attitude of 'it doesn't matter who's in office' about the political process here. What's happened to our province?

Every once in a while I hear hopeful NDP supporters talking about the seismic shifts in political allegiance that Alberta has gone through over the past 100 years with a glint of optimism in their eyes. True enough, the Social Credit party had huge support before being trounced by the Progressive Conservatives (PCs), and the United Farmers had similar majorities for over a decade before them. But we are so politically disengaged that I find it hard to believe any political party in office is going to responsibly represent the long-term interests of people in the province at the moment.

PC members voted today to replace Ralph Klein as party leader and, consequently, premier. It was a long, slow wave goodbye for a man who by his own admission had no plan to cope with the province's economic boom (which is not to say any of his possible successors do either). Either tonight or in a run-off next Saturday one of the eight candidates is going to be declared our next premier, and I've heard a lot of talk about the federal Liberals finally abandoning the absurd delegate system of leadership elections in favour of a direct vote for each member along the model of the Alberta PCs. What seems to be missing here is a recognition that today, less than 200 000 people are going to be very directly choosing the political leader of over 3 million Albertans. And I don't mean until the next election, since Kevin Taft has no chance of taking the Alberta Liberals to a win over the PCs and Preston Manning doesn't look like he's going to come flying out of the wings to start a new party for the forseeable future. I mean, on a practical level, whoever wins this vote is likely to win yet another majority for the PCs out of sheer electoral apathy.

There's simply no connection in our collective consciousness between the governing of this province and the people who live in it. Politicians and everyday citizens alike seem to be under the idea that those who sit in Legislature are the only people who have any say in the direction a society takes, and that we are all somehow helpless victims of history, with no power to make decisions or take responsibility for our actions and their implications. I must, of course, put myself among them. Bob Dylan said, 'People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.'

Democracy isn't about getting along. It's about disagreement, discussion, arguments... a healthy society, with accountable representatives, doesn't admit it has no plan to handle the social, environmental, and economic impacts of this development. If it does, it gets resoundingly beaten out of office and representatives who do have a plan get voted in. And the citizens of said democracy don't stand by between elections and watch poverty and homelessness reach beyond the much reviled 'drunks and bums' into people they are forced to acknowledge because, well, they are a lot of them and hey, they're working too. Welcome to the way half of the world lives, my friends.

This all ties back to Louis Riel, it really does. You see, I was thinking of all this as I read Chester Brown's Métis react to the Canadian government swindling them out of the promises it had made in the Manitoba Act. When the Conservatives tried to appoint an anglophone, Protestant Lieutenant-Governor to represent all of the Red River parishes and all the good land in the south of the province started going to white settlers from Ontario, they didn't sit back and say 'Ah, somebody else is going to deal with it.' They organised a rebellion and demanded their rights. We are becoming a greater contributor to climate change with every new truck going up north and we're not recognising that wealth is more than a lot of cash for twenty years for those who can snatch some of it up. There is wealth in investing in children, in investing in infrastructure, in building sustainable societies our planet can support. They're not gods. They're our representatives.

South African politician Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, delivering a lecture on the health of South Africa's democracy, praised his fellow citizens' engagement in civil society, and their ability to stand up and disagree, as an absolute necessity for true democracy. 'When the minister says "trust me on Selebi",' he said, 'we should ask why? Why should I trust you, what do you know that I don’t know?

'Why should we reduce ourselves to silent idiots?'

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posted by Christopher at 12:28 a.m.

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