What does it mean to be Canadian?

We Canadians live in a blind spot about our identity. We have very strong feelings about who we aren't but only weak ones about who we are. We're passionate about what we don't want to become but oddly passive about what we should be.--John Cruickshank

This question's been vexing me a little more than usual of late. It's always in the back of my mind; one of the stock definitions of a Canadian is someone who frets about his national identity. When's the last time you heard a resident of Spain musing on what it means to be Spanish?

Complicating matters, I belong to that tribe of people known as "proud Canadians". Many people, including many Canadians, believe my tribe doesn't exist...or if it does, it shouldn't. National pride is seen as a quintessentially American, and therefore distasteful, trait. Meanwhile, my tribe numbers in the millions. I'd suspect most people who hold Canadian citizenship are, on some level, proud to. Our pride is a quiet, measured thing. It lacks Yankee exuberance; it need not be shown publically to be deeply felt.

This bout of navel-gazing was first triggered by this weekend's NHL All-Star Game, or more specifically, the "SuperSkills" competition the night before. Eva, who doesn't particularly enjoy hockey, likes to watch this competition, and I've tuned in every year it's been held. This year, for the first time, they concluded the night with a "Breakaway Challenge": a quasi-shootout in which each attempt at a goal was judged for style and creativity. Basically, it was a license to show off.

I say "quasi-shootout" because, while hockey players are certainly encouraged to be creative, one thing they are never encouraged to do is show off, or show up other players. In this as in much else, hockey perfectly mirrors the Canadian character: we are an exceptionally tolerant nation, but something about showboating rubs us the wrong way.
And so we saw player after player break down the ice, most of them staying within the bounds of accepted shootout protocol. It finally dawned on the final two players that the whole point of this exercise was to hot-dog, and so they tried it. You could read their discomfort just below the goofy smile on their faces. It got me to thinking: the Canadian character isn't as modest as it appears to an outsider. We consider ourselves damned special, thank you very much. What makes us virtually unique in terms of national character is that we don't think ourselves any more special than anyone else.
As proof, we invite the world to come share the Canadian experience. Your colour, class or creed means nothing: all that matters is your willingness to accept that basic tenet: you're special, damned special...but no more special than anyone else.
We judge our celebrities harshly if they act like celebrities, if they bask in their fame and good fortune. We hated Brian Mulroney in no small part because of his perceived arrogance; most of us accepted or even adored Jean Chretien because he was so successful at keeping his arrogance (of which he had at least a Mulroneyful) so thoroughly masked, so utterly submerged beneath the facade of le p'tit gars de Shawinigan.
There's a Crown Royal commercial extolling "the noble spirit": long live the player who knows that an assist is worth as much as a goal. That's as Canadian as it gets.

As I write, the Toronto public school board is considering the establishment of an "Afrocentric" high school. This initiative has been dogged by controversy at every turn. Proponents note that fully half of black students in Toronto either fail or drop out, and surveys show they would be more engaged with an Afrocentric curriculum. Those against say that this is exactly the sort of thing Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, among many others, fought long and hard to abolish.

I see both sides of this...sort of. Actually, after a great deal of thought, I see one side and credit good intentions on the other.
What exactly is an Afrocentric curriculum? I can see how that term would apply in history class and in the literature component of an English course...and that's about it. How "Afrocentric science" differs from "Eurocentric science" mystifies me. Is phys. ed. any different if the students have more melatonin in their skin? How about mathematics? Does 2+2 equal something else in certain parts of the world?
Okay, history and literature. I'd be the first to admit both were whiter than sour cream when I went to high school. By the logic of those surveys, the overwhelmingly white students in my classes should have been fully engaged.
They weren't. Not unless they found the material intrinsically interesting. And when they did, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with the race of the people under discussion. (In fact, one of the few novels I can remember many of my fellow students really enjoying was To Kill a Mockingbird.)

I understand the objective here: to get more black students succeeding in school. I'm just not sure an Afrocentric curriculum would achieve that goal. Certainly having more black teachers to serve as role models would help. But an all-black student body? Isn't the whole idea to get the kid out of the ghetto?

A particularly Canadian compromise I'd suggest would be to broaden the curriculum for everyone. Certainly our geography and history courses could do with a little reality injection: the world is, after all, round. As for literature, I know of no better way to get into someone's head than through a well-written book. Interesting plots and characters have universal appeal.

Bringing people together. That's what education is about. And that's what being Canadian is about, too.

School Daze

Teacher, teacher, listen well
My lessons all to you I'll tell
And when my day at school is through
I'll know more than aught I knew.
--Anonymous

Today's the first day of school for many children of all ages. I'd know this just from a look around our neighbourhood, which has shed its summer torpor and become a bustling hive of activity and garbage generation. There are many tradespeople who live by this time of year (notably bread salesmen) and just as many who loathe it (at least I would if I had to stuff all this garbage into a truck!)

So begins another nine months of our driveway being used as a turnaround point for those parents who drop off their little darlings up at school and pick them up later, which is pretty much all of them. One of the things we hadn't bargained on when buying this house (and remember, this house was bought with children of our own at top of mind) was the sheer number of cars on this street at the end of every school day. When your arrival home coincides with the arrival of a long line of cars, some of which park so as to block any hope of entering your driveway, and whose drivers resort to middle-finger waving if you make any effort to access what is, after all, your property...well, it gets old pretty quickly.

We have only ourselves to blame, of course. It never fails to amaze me when people move next to an airport and then bitch incessantly about the noise from the planes. Did you, uh, look around at all before you moved in? We hadn't thought it out, true, but in our defense, we grew up in an age when a kid being picked up at school would have been called a mama's boy to start with and beaten up shortly after. Sometimes--well, okay, often--we forget that time has passed.

As early as grade four, I was walking about a kilometer (a little more than half a mile) each way to school. And yes, it was uphill both ways and barefoot through ten feet of snow. Seriously, though, in high school, that walk nearly doubled in length and I don't remember ever once complaining. No, wait a second, that's not true. The first time I ever had to walk to school--grade four--we took a long, meandering walk through the neigbourhood one evening before school started. My feet were killing me when I turned to my stepdad and asked if I had to do this every day. He laughed and said no, there was a much shorter route, which he then detailed out (walk down here, turn left, then turn right, then turn left again, turn right and you're there. "Picture it like stairs you're going down," he said. I've never forgotten that. To this day maps turn themselves into flights of stairs.
A ride to or from school was a rare thing indeed, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. There were times (when a girl was on my arm) when that walk was entirely too short.

At least the public school across the street from me still has recess, or the generation of kids coming up through the system today would be getting no exercise at all.



Last weekend we had a lovely time at our friends' cottage in Wasaga Beach. We got to talking about their child, who's entering grade two this year and who loves school. "Of course, the homework got to be a little much last year," the mother said. "We'd deal with it right away, as soon as he got home, so we could get on with the evening."

"Back up," I almost shouted. "Homework?! In first grade?!"

"Yep," she said. "He had to read a book a night. Now these were little eight-page jobbies, not War and Peace. But still, between that and the math problems and what have you, it could take up to an hour."

If my jaw had dropped any further I do believe a Mack truck would have come rumbling out of my mouth. I tried to remember the first time I had homework. I'm pretty sure it was grade four--and that wasn't a daily thing, not even close. It was more like occasional research projects. The first one I ever did was on Toronto and its history. Jeesh, but I was a little geek. Daily homework? Probably grade six or so. It wasn't until high school that an hour's worth of homework became unremarkable.

"It makes you wonder what they're doing while they're at school," I said, "when first graders are getting an hour of homework."

What they're doing at school is more of the same. I really do expect to see a large number of kids exhibiting all the symptoms of burnout before they graduate high school.

Here is an interesting article concerning, in part, a school in North Yorkshire, England that has abolished homework altogether. Neither the students nor their parents seem to have noticed an academic decline when homework was replaced with various clubs and activities.
This remains a minority view, however. According to the article, the British goverment deems homework "the equivalent of an extra year's schooling" and "an important home-school link."

To which I say, bollocks and poppycock. Homework may indeed equal an extra year's schooling (I had about that much in OAC Geography alone). But is that really such a good thing? As for the home-school link, point taken, at least for those few parents (bless you) who still care what their kids are doing in school. These days, it seems the only thing many parents of even university-age children (and I use that word deliberately) care about are their final grades, which are to be automatic A's, of course.

There is a widespread latent feeling, exploited quite successfully by the Mike Harris government in Ontario several years ago, that teachers live on easy street, what with their summers off, their supposed 9-3 workdays, and a "cushy" job, to boot. It's fair to say that people who feel this way are not, and do not know any, teachers and have forgotten any decent teachers they ever had.
If you think it's so easy to be a teacher, go try it for a week. You're in for a rude, rude awakening. Odds are better than even you'll be sworn at, possibly even assaulted, before that week's out. You'll find that cushy 9-3 workday is just the beginning. You'll discover that legions of parents demand you assume the roles of psychiatrist, mediator and, not to put too fine a point on it, parent while still making sure their little Johnnies can read and write. And you'll very quickly realize that most of those little Johnnies have not the slightest interest in reading, writing, or anything else you might have to say. That doesn't excuse you.

It is my view that teachers are in fact drastically underpaid, and should be compensated on a level similar to that of professional athletes. (I feel the same way about doctors, police officers and firefighters). In a sane society, your job would be called your 'contribution' and I must say teachers contribute a great deal.

Finally, slightly tangential to this topic is the whole 'back-to-school' commercial frenzy. There was one shoe store manager on television last night saying that the Labour Day weekend was the busiest time of the year for them. It's reported--with a straight face!--that parents spend somewhere between $800 and $1400 per child on back to school items...creating the expectation that all parents should spend that much.
I get the clothes, I guess--kids, especially younger kids, have outgrown last fall's apparel. There are ways to cut your clothing costs significantly. If they were my kids, they'd either be spending their own cash, or they'd have an intimate acquaintance with Value Village. The law says I'd have to keep them clothed. It doesn't say anything about Tommy Hilfiger.
And nowadays I understand kids have to buy all their own school supplies, even in primary grades. I'd really love to know how that came about. We used to get our own notebooks and pencils and I don't know what-all else. But okay, there's another cost.
But a new knapsack? If last year's is so worn out, you really have to get on your child's teacher's case about excessive homework. A new cellphone? Hello? Count me among that number of people who don't think children should have cellphones until--well, at this point I can maybe make a case for them in high school. Maybe. Generations of people survived without them, as far as I'm concerned, and there's no need for them in class--which is where your child is going, right?

Tory, that idea stinks.

.

I'm a lifelong Conservative. Raised in the Reform school, I've been getting progressively more, well, progressive the older I get. I almost voted for Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals last provincial election.

Almost. His platform looked pretty good, if I could get past that icky Liberal thing. What really impressed me was the (now infamous) quote "I won't cut your taxes. But I won't raise them either."

I can't tell you how shocked I was to be impressed by such a thing. I jerked my political knee right out of its socket a long time ago repeatedly calling (screaming, whining) for lower taxes. Now here was a politician actually announcing he had no intention of cutting taxes (at all! at all!) and I'm thinking of voting for him? That's like a quintessentially straight guy suddenly contemplating a gay lover.

In the end, I voted Conservative, but not out of any great love for Ernie Eves: I was really casting my vote in favour of my MPP, Elizabeth Witmer, who had done what I considered to be a commendable job. But to this day I remember my hesitation in the voting booth.

You see, McGuinty seemed so honest...

Cue guffaws of laughter. Has there ever been a politician less honest than Dalton McGuinty? He's broken practically every promise he made in that campaign. Some of them he's broken repeatedly. Every year, the date to close Ontario's filthy coal-fired electricity plants gets shoved back eighteen months, for instance. It'd be one thing if there was a plan, any kind of plan at all, to replace that power. Then Dalton could announce "there's been some delays in the construction of the new nuclear facilities: we'll have to rely on our coal plants until they're up and runnning." But there are no new nukes. Instead, we will make up that shortfall in power by purchasing from the U.S...from coal plants considerably dirtier than our own. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

The list of broken promises goes on and on. He was going to roll back tolls on Highway 407--they've gone up six or seven times. Highway 407 has simply got to be the most expensive toll road in North America. You can travel the entire Ohio Turnpike for less than the cost of traversing Toronto.

(High tolls may be a good thing, although gas taxes are supposed to serve that function. No matter: the promise was made.)

They promised balanced budgets, then promptly ran a deficit. They promised ministers would take a pay cut for running a deficit. Never happened. You name a promise, they shattered it. The biggie, of course, was that new health tax they brought in almost immediately, while simultaneously delisting (privatizing) several medical services--two broken promises in one!



But see, says McGuinty, that wasn't a tax, it was a "premium". I don't know, Dalton...whether you call it an anus or a rectum, it's still an asshole.



There's another provincial election FINALLY coming up in October. Ever since that first big promise turned out to be a lie, I've been counting the days until I could boot McGuinty in his metaphorical ass (rectum, anus). My wife feels even worse: she did vote for him in 2003. Between the two of us, we wish we could cast about thirty million ballots.



But what always happens to me politically is happening again. I really wish that just once, just once, I could unreservedly vote for someone, rather than having to vote against somebody every frigging election. I voted for Harper, despite some serious misgivings, because I just couldn't bring myself to reward Martin's Liberals for AdScam. (Actually, I can't believe anybody could convince themselves to trust that gang of thieves, but lo and behold many did.)

Now it's happening again. I'm not sure I like John Tory much.

Oh, he would have made a great mayor of Toronto, I think. Certain much better than his Blondness, union shill David Miller. But Premier of Ontario? I don't know.



Consider his latest: he wants to divert funds out of the public education system to fund faith-based schools.

This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. What I find most amazing is that Tory's actually lauding this as an inclusive policy. How's that again? We already have one too many religious school systems in this province. How does further segregation bring people together?
Parents who send their children to faith-based schools think this is great news, of course. They've been arguing for years that they're subsidizing, through their taxes, an educational system they're not using, and that they shouldn't have to pay twice. Which sounds fair--until you stop and think about it for, oh, half a second.
Nobody forced these parents to enroll their kids in religious schools: it was something they freely chose to do, knowing full well the costs involved. Having moved next to an international airport, do you complain to the media about all those noisy planes? Having accepted a job that pays a certain wage, do you turn around and strike for a higher wage?
(Wait a second. Don't answer that.)

My view, for what it's worth, is that in a country which claims to support the separation of Church and State, the State has no business propagating the claims of any particular Church, particularly not to its children who are too young to understand what they're being taught.

In other words: one public system.

This has nothing to do with my (admitted) disdain for organized religion. Religious faith ought to be a private matter between a person and his/her god(dess)(es). By all means, teach children about religion--it has been, and continues to be, one of the most important influences on society. But teaching one particular religion over another denies a child the opportunity to choose for herself what to believe. It also goes a long way towards preventing interaction between children of different faiths...surely not something a multicultural society ought to encourage.

It's sort of like politics, now that I come to think of it. Would you send your kid to Republican school? Hell, even if I was an ardent Republican, I wouldn't do that.

I believe the appeal of faith-based schools is rooted in fear...fear that your child might grow up to stand for something different than you. So long as that child has come to her beliefs honestly, why should that matter? I submit it doesn't...and I certainly don't think money should be stolen out of the public education system just because some parents disagree with me.