The Point

Friday, July 11, 2008

Frère fier

I'm a proud big brother today.

My dear friend Aurélie, whom I think I may rightly consider a sister at heart, is from Québec - Québec, the city with the Plains of Abraham and the world's best poutine (Chez Ashton, anybody?), that is. If I recall, my entire experience of the Plains of Abraham, the place where one of the most important battles in Canadian history happened, was watching a few kids toboggan down it and get a facefull of snow at full speed. If I recall correctly.

This month, of course, was the city's 400th anniversary, marking exactly four centuries since Samuel de Champlain (who, incidentally, made his way up the waterways all the way to Peterborough as well) stuck a sharp thing in the dirt and declared it the property of France. I'd say they've come a long way since sharp things in the dirt. And I just wanted everybody to see that Auré represented us Canada World Youthers in the classiest way possible at a ceremony CWY-JCM hosted to mark the occasion with the coolest woman in Canada in attendance, Michaëlle Jean.

That's right, guess who's ear is in that picture. Jealous? Thought so.

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posted by Christopher at 11:41 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

A good host


I want so badly to write eloquently about Carol Off's most recent book, Bitter Chocolate, but I just don't feel right doing it. Co-host of As It Happens on CBC Radio 1, she's one of the finest journalists in Canada today, and Bitter Chocolate is a surprisingly engrossing history of cocoa and the particular forms that exploitation in the cocoa trade have taken through the centuries. I haven't gotten a chance to finish it yet though - a friend borrowed it, and then a serious lack of free time intervened - so I've got the outrage from hearing her speak at the U of A last November, but not enough solid arguments or solutions to back it up. This has manifested itself in hilarious ways.

The other day, I was just getting off the phone with the second person who'd called in a matter of minutes when the doorbell rang. A sequence of events like this always seems like a coordinated effort to bewilder me, and I was appropriately confused to see a woman who looked extremely unfamiliar on the other side of the door when I opened it. She sort of half-smiled at me in a bewildered way, looking slightly passed my shoulder and said, 'How are you guys today?' I looked around, and sure enough, I was alone, so I said, 'I'm fine, thanks.' She didn't seem entirely satisfied with this answer, and before I'd taken a breath she asked, 'Wouldyouliketobuysomechocolate tosupport [organisation whose name fails me]?'

Personally, I've been struggling with this, but the pervasiveness of chocolate in our society does not give me great optimism for the impacts of an undirected personal boycott of it. There are places I just don't buy from because they make my neighbourhood smell like grease or I go crazy buying pants from them and can't stop thinking about how many little boys and girls went hungry because their 13-year old sister who stitched the logo on didn't make enough to buy food for everybody that week. But from what I know about the labyrinthine complexities of the international cocoa trade, deciding not to buy chocolate chips out of protest for the conditions under which the beans were grown will not only fail to provide any tangible benefits for the producers, it may end up drive down a few monolithic Swiss chocolate companies' profits just that tiiiiny bit that makes them decide to pay even less for the cocoa from the growers.

You see why I can't go shopping?

So as this poor woman is standing at my door (on an admittedly sunny, if brisk, morning) waiting to find out if she's going to make two bucks or if she should be moving onto the next house, these and several other, darker thoughts flip through my head, and I end up answering something along the lines of, 'Do you have any fair trade chocolate?' To which she replies, 'What's that?' and is summarily rewarded with a twenty-second briefing on international finance, commodity trading, and modern slavery.

She said, 'Oh. No, I don't have any of that.' And she left.

I'm telling you this to make sure you're not under any illusions that I would deign to even feign authority or unflappable certainty about the vast majority of issues. I rely heavily on tough journalists like Off and on impassioned speakers like Kevin Bales, who has been doing remarkable work with his organisation, Free the Slaves, to get some movement on this, to give me the greatest possible amount of information I can acquire about things like this, but I'm not going to lecture you about buying a Mars bar today. Quite honestly, I don't know enough about the way the industry works to say definitively one way or another whether your decision to buy or not buy Fry's Cocoa today will mean producers in Ivory Coast aren't enslaving the 12-year olds walking across the border from Mali and Burkina Faso to find work to make a profit when they sell the beans. I know the fair trade industry goes some way to addressing this.

But I believe strongly what Off said when she spoke in November. It's a wonderful luxury for us to be able to make a certain amount of political actions through what we buy, but we have much more power as citizens than as consumers.

Incidentally, when I related this story yesterday, it included the descriptors '24-ish' and 'shaped like a pear,' so I apologise if my description of the encounter seems sanitised, but I thought it better to avoid that whole conversation.

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posted by Christopher at 3:33 a.m. | link | 2 comments
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