Category: Canada (vintage)

In Canada

I’ve been in Canada for the past 27 hours. What a breath of fresh air! I mean, to fly to a place (Toronto) where the airport book store puts out front of the store to attract readers a lot of books by Noam Chomsky and Patrick Cockburn already tells you you’re not in the US any more….
I had a bit of an embarrassment at the passport line there. The guy behind the counter said, “So when were you last here?” I wasn’t feeling very sharp and I’d been thinking about my kids a lot, so I recalled a family driving trip we made to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the (American) Rocky Mountains, back in 1993 or 1994, at the end of which we drove back east through Canada. So I said, “Oh, I think it was 1993 or 1994.” I had completely forgotten (1) a short visit I made to Windsor, Ontario, with my daughter Leila when she was living in nearby Detroit in 2001 or so, and (2) the visit I made to London, Ontario to speak to a conference in probably 2004 or so.
No wonder the guy looked at me as if I was dissembling. Forgetting is what I was doing… If I hadn’t been a White person, or if I’d been a person of Muslim origin, would he have been a lot less forgiving?
Anyway, I’m now in Victoria, BC, which is actually the capitol of BC. I had a bit of a chance to explore this morning. It seems like Wellington, New Zealand, in so many ways: Lots of water lacing in and out of the land-masses; great deep-water port; an important political capitol; bracing fresh air; fascinating attempts to come to terms with the past sufferings of the indigenous people; a very colonially “English” place in many ways.
Boy, did those British naval explorers of the 18th century know how to seize control of and develop great deep-water ports in so many handy places around the world!
I went to the Royal British Columbia Museum, which has a wonderful– and extremely poignant– exhibit on the “First Nations (indigenous peoples) of coastal BC.
It was so tragic, I almost couldn’t bear it.
One of the things that made it seem particularly tragic was that– as in the Te Papa Museum in Wellington– they had many black-and-white photographs of the First Nations people here, made in the second half of the 19th century.
Somehow seeing this very modern, and at one deep level quite “true” and irrefutable, representation of these people underlines in in an unarguable way the fact of their existence, the dignity and integrity of their existence, and the unspeakable tragedy of the fate they met from the White colonialists.
They even had a short moving-picture clip, taken in 1914, of three large Haida canoes moving over water, each with a costumed spiritual/dancing figure in front who danced on the boat while the canoeists beat on their seats with their paddles. Very eery, mysterious, and emotional. (Those must have been some of the very earliest moving-picture images ever recorded in British Columbia?)
The museum exhibited so many pieces of evidence of the cultural genocide enacted against these people, including a reproduction of a document many of them were forced to sign attesting to the fact that they had become “Christians,” would forever foreswear their traditional practices, and give no safe haven to anyone who continued to practice them.
… The main reason I came here, though, was to participate in the inaugural Board Meeting of a body called the Global Partnership for the International University of Iraq. It’s a group that I’ve been involved with for 2-3 years now. But only now– today, in fact– has the organization become properly constituted under (Canadian) law.
It is such a wonderful project! And it was a huge pleasure and honor to meet and sit down to work with the other people involved. I’ll tell you more about the people and the project, later. Let me just say, now, that it’s very important to me that it’s an determinedly international effort to work with Iraqis to build a university in Iraq (when circumstances permit) that embodies the highest qualities of academic freedom, great pedagogy, and socially relevant learning and research.
Anyway, I’m really tired. If you want to learn some very interesting things about what’s been going on in Iraq, I direct you Badger’s recent postings on his “Missing Links” blog and the latest offering from Reidar Visser.

Waterloo, Iranians & the Mennonite Dialog

On Memorial Day, American and Iranian diplomats finally managed to “talk” in Baghdad, Iraq — as we noted here with approval. The same day, by contrast, protesters forced the cancellation of public sessions of a conference on “spirituality” between Iranian Shia Muslim and Mennonite Christian scholars in Waterloo, Canada.
Since when is talking with Mennonites — that’s right, pacifistic Mennonites – such a perfidious affront that it needs to be forcibly stopped? Is this 2007 or 1527?
While I am still seeking documentation from both sides, perhaps this entry might encourage the protesting academics and conference participants to articulate their positions further, in the discussion below. (That’s an open invitation.)
Let me first try to recount the basic outlines of the dialog and the protests:
The dialog:
1. The conference in question was sponsored by the Mennonite Central Committee and by humble Mennonite Conrad Grebel University College. Conrad Grebel is affiliated with Canada’s University of Waterloo. While the conference convened on the UW campus, the larger University was not the sponsor.
2. The conference, entitled “Shi’ah Muslim–Mennonite Christian Dialogue III,” continued a series of exchanges between “North American” Mennonite scholars and Shia scholars from Qom, Iran. Papers from two previous conferences, one at Waterloo and one, in Qom, were published in the Conrad Grebel Review. Several Mennonites have studied in Qom, and several Shia have pursued theology Ph.D.’s in Toronto. Shorter-term student delegations have also been part of the mix, including with Mennonite Universities in the US.
3. The dialog has been hosted on the Iranian side for nearly a decade by the Imam Khomeini Education & Research Institute (IKERI). IKERI is reputed to be among the more conservative graduate seminaries in Iran, and its current director, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, is known as a spiritual adviser to Iran’s current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
4. The dialog itself may have been the fruit of the Mennonite’s “diaconal method” (from the Greek diakonia or service). In Iran, the Mennonites earned considerable good will for their sustained humanitarian responses to earthquake disasters since 1992. Such “good deeds” helped open doors to exchange of “good words.”
5. As a controversy emerged, Mennonite leaders tried to state clearly the conference purposes. According to Rich Cober Bauman, program director of MCC Ontario, the conference was

“an academic conversation between theologians and philosophers who may not always agree, but seek to better understand each other’s faith… We regard this conference as an effort to foster communication in a time when the refusal to demonize each other is sorely needed. We recognize that there are risks inherent in relating to groups some would label as our “enemies”. But our Christian faith calls us into these conversations which, rather than creating isolation, we believe have the potential to build real and lasting peace…”

Conrad Grebel President Henry Paetkau noted that from the Mennonite faith perspective, inter-faith dialog, particularly with a country that is portrayed in the west as the “enemy”, is a practical expression of the biblical command to be “agents of reconciliation”.
Jim Pankratz, Grebel’s academic dean, characterized the conference as “an important expression of open dialog and freedom of speech. Through such dialog we have learned to understand that all Iranians (like Canadians), and even all members of a single educational institution, do not speak with a single voice.”
The protests:
The protesters had a starkly different image of what the conference represented. I’ll try first to present accurately their concerns. (And I welcome additional material from any who think I misrepresent the complaints.)

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A word from Canada

Heck, maybe I’ll have to move to Canada after all. I can’t think of a single former US government minister with the wit, the wisdom, and the sheer perspicacity that Lloyd Axworthy displayed in this carefully crafted letter to Condi Rice.
The background is the general pique in Canada over (1) the Bushies’ extremely wacky and destabilizing decision to go ahead and deploy a wildly unreliable system of so-called “missile defense” that certainly impacts majorly on the security status of our northern neighbors, and (2) our Prez’s incredibly rude decisision to announce this fait accompli in public, in Canada, without having even thought to consult with Canada’s very friendly government first…
Axworthy, alert JWN readers probably recall, was the canny Canuck who spearheaded the coalition of small and medium-size states that made the Anti-Landmine Treaty a reality back in the mid-1990s. (Yes, yet another international treaty to which Washington refused to become a party.)
But I guess I hadn’t realized before that Axworthy also has a really stupendous rhetorical style… Maybe it has something to do with having practiced his politics in the cut-and-thrust of a parliamentary system, as opposed to the blow-dried-but-boring culture of, say, an imperial presidency…
Well, the whole of his open letter to “Dear Condi”, published yesterday in the Winnipeg Free Press is a really good read. But here’s a slightly shortened version:

    Dear Condi,
    I’m glad you’ve decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It’s a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.
    I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.
    But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can’t quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.
    As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we’ve had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we’re going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.
    Sure, that doesn’t match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a “liberation war” in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.
    Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government’s role should be when there isn’t a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.
    Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defence can be made openly.
    You might also notice that it’s a system in which the governing party’s caucus members are not afraid to tell their leader that their constituents don’t want to follow the ideological, perhaps teleological, fantasies of Canada’s continental co-inhabitant. And that this leader actually listens to such representations.
    Your boss did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defence in front of a highly controlled, pre-selected audience.
    Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one-party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire.
    If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don’t embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond…

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