EclecticLip

Like many Canadians, I regard the current Conservative government with a suspicious distrust; enough that after the 2008 election, I began donating money to the Liberal Party of Canada.  While my thinking leans leftwards of theirs, they remain the most viable less-conservative alternative in the near term — hence my “remittances of convenience”, to borrow from the marital phrase.

But the Liberals are stuck in a catastrophic polling funk – and their misery is continuing in respiteless fashion.  Furthermore, on a variety of issues, Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff seems about as conservative as Stephen Harper.  Born into the elite, Ignatieff doesn’t seem to connect with voters.  In contrast, the Prime Minister, hardly a man of charisma himself, seems to manage adequately, despite also being born into privilege (his dad became an oil executive).

As such, I wonder whether Michael Ignatieff is the John Kerry to Stephen Harper’s George W. Bush — a challenger indistinct enough from the incumbent, without the rapport / messaging advantage to pull out a victory.

Time will tell. 

Last weekend, we ventured to Salt Spring Island.  Though Canadian, it has strong American ties, having been a haven for American peaceniks in the 1960’s … but also a refuge for African-Americans escaping racism in 1850’s California.  Many Hawaiians also settled there in the 1800’s, all of which means it’d be the perfect site for a future Obama family reunion. 

Aya didn’t want to fly in a float plane, so we took the ferry.  We made landfall seven hours and five minutes after leaving the apartment, clocking up an average speed trip of… nine-point-five km per hour, or half the speed of the guy who won the Vancouver Marathon the other week.  On the bright side, I got to catch up on some reading — so much so, that I ran out of book before I ran out of time.

We stayed in Ganges, which, as befits any small town (the town centre could easily fit inside Metrotown) has some quirk in its character.  For one, our hotel had an attached farm.  No roosters, though, to our relief.    The Salt Spring Saturday market, which looked much the same as any other, except for the preponderance of hemp products on sale.  We perused the Italian deli, whose magazine collection included a few copies of Bakers’ Journal (”official magazine of the BC Baking Industry” or some such), and sticking with the Italian theme, one of the soap shops sold bath crystals as “body gelato” — a clever rebranding.  Maybe not as ingenious as when Marlboro’s went from women’s cigarette (”Mild as May”) to cowboy’s cancer-stick (”Marlboro Country”) but clever none the less.  Oh, and blue used to be a baby girl colour, too. 

The teenaged attendant at one of the tea retailers helped us select a couple blends they’d discovered at the World Tea Expo, held every year in that world-reknown tea capital, Vegas.  He then turned his attention back to what appeared to be Star Wars: Force Unleashed, dispatching some foes with bloodlusting gusto.

A few years back, some enterprising souls at the Chamber of Commerce came up with the idea of issuing a local currency, featuring the work of area artists.  So the Salt Spring Island Monetary Fund was formed, and issued a series of bills backed 80% by Canadian dollars and 20% by gold.  Essentially gift certificates, they figure it’s kept millions of dollars on the island, as tourists bring the bills back as novelties to show their friends, and never wind up spending them on the island.  I only got $10 worth, myself. 

Demand for the $50 and $100 Salt Spring Dollar bills comes almost exclusively from numismatists, or coin-collectors (correction: rich coin-collectors).  The SSIMF recently released a $50 half-ounce silver coin with a killer (whale) design, all the better to exploit those rubes (correction: wealthy rubes).     At today’s prices, that’s an entire eight dollars of silver.  Adding in two bucks of processing and other costs — surely an overestimate — and the SSIMF’s profit margin is a sweet 400%.

Ninety-plus-percent of businesses on the island accept the bills — even the banks (!) — meaning it’s a fully functioning local currency.  You can presumably use it on the island’s two taxicabs, and bus service.  (The latter consists of a bus.)  But lest any of you entrepreneurial types perceive a business opportunity in photocopying knock-off Salt Spring Island Dollar bills, they do in fact have holograms and the like.

The tar sands continue to (deservedly) attract condemnation.

Since I wrote earlier about Nippon Oil’s transformative plans to add major solar and fuel cells businesses to its petroleum core, I got to wondering what similar transformations tar sands miners could undertake.

The miners are under pressure from the Alberta government to reduce freshwater use.  What this effectively means is that instead of using fresh water from the Athabasca River for their chemical processing, the miners have to use the water from their tailings ponds.  In order to do that, they have to clean it, separating out the finely-dispersed oily residues.  Doing so is difficult, and is thus expensive.
But if the miners did develop a way to separate the water from the residues… perhaps they could get into the business of water purification.  Demand for oil may decrease as new technologies evolve, but demand for clean water should remain strong for, well, forever.
It would be nice to reassert Canadian primacy in the water-filtration field — just a few years ago, Ontario-based water-filtration company Zenon Environmental got assimilated into the Borg known as General Electric.  It was a terrible pity, considering that Zenon appeared to be first among peers in its field, the ‘RIM’ of its industry.

There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

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Part II of John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country is titled Peace, Fairness, and Good Government.

It’s a play on the phrase Peace, Order and Good Government which appears in the Confederation-enshrining Constitution Act of 1867.  The phrase — an eminently pragmatic aspirational ideal — appears in many Commonwealth Independence documents.

A major point of Part II is Saul’s argument that the phrase was originally and consistently Peace, Welfare and Good Government. That’s the welfare-of-the-people, as in the English wellbeing, the French bien-etre, the classical Greek eudaimonia.  Saul notes this spirit is reflected in First Nations expression of the common bowl — an earthier analogue to the English term of the ‘commonwealth’.

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Infovore that I am, I love reading over the holidays.  More so than being acquainted with unfamiliar facts, I treasure being shown their context, and how they came to be.  To paraphrase from my Facebook, I like knowing what; I love knowing why.

I finished John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: telling truths about Canada a few days ago — a thickly-enriching read, as he always is.  Happily, it was an easier read than Reflections of a Siamese Twin, his previous tome on the Canadian identity.  This may be because he spent less time on the decades leading up to Confederation this time around (a grey area in my schooling), or he drew that historical arc more tautly, or it may even be that I’m more familiar with that period now.  :)

Saul’s goal (as evidenced by early references to the work as “three new myths about Canada”) is to re-envision Canada as:

1. a fundamentally Metis civlization, not a European one.
2. a nation built on peace, welfare, and good government   (instead of the more familiar “peace, order and good government”)
3. a country set to flourish once its elites internalize the first two points, and reject the learned helplessness that has characterized their behaviour, first with the British and now with the Americans.

He richly succeeds with the first two points; hopefully, he will be shown prescient on the third.

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