Fasting and Justice

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season. By Christian tradition, Ash Wednesday is  a day to contemplate the reality of our lives: our mortality, our faults, our weakness, and begin a process which, as we hope, we will move toward redemption, reconciliation with the world, the universe, and God who created it. 

By tradition, fasting is a part of that process. We speak of the Lenten Fast, and some of us speak as though Lent was the fast and little more. Long ago, the question of what to give up for Lent morphed into a humorous reversal: many of us claimed to have given up giving things up for Lent. 

The wrong man

Doug Ford is a people pleaser. His government works on that principle. He doesn't conceal the fact; indeed, he proclaims it. He is "for the people". If the people want to drink, he'll have alcohol, including  pre-mixed cocktails, available in corner stores. If people want to drive, he'll build a highway. If people want a spa and water park, he'll arrange it. If the people want entertainment, he'll lease out the waterfront venue to a promoter (never mind the promoter in question is a predatory monopoly).

That has made Doug Ford popular with an enthusiastic base. It also makes him extremely unsuited to lead during what look like the very hard times ahead of us. There is very little that is pleasing about our situation. Doug Ford will have very little to offer in the way of gratification if Donald Trump follows through on his threats. We don't need a premier who promises us everything we want; we need a premier who can rally us to stand together, even if the government can offer us nothing but toil, tears, and sweat. 

January 20, part 2

Just a few hours from now, Donald Trump will take the oath of office, and we will learn which of his threats, or promises, he intends to carry out.

In my last post, I wrote about the hazards of taking Mr. Trump's implicit promise to make Canada a state with caution; I believe that if we surrender before Donald Trump's economic aggression, we would find ourselves residents of a territory, not a state, and Canadians, or former Canadians, as we would be if we surrendered, might well find ourselves classified as US nationals, rather than citizens with voting rights. 

But if too many Canadian commentators have been mistakenly optimistic about our prospects should we surrender, we have been unreasonably pessimistic about our ability to face the kind of economic pressure Trump's government could or would bring to bear. 

January 20

On Monday, Donald Trump will take the presidential oath of office and the reigns of a president's very considerable power under the American system.

He's also set to be the first American president to seriously question Canada's sovereignty. Some Americans have always regarded Canada with an kind of uneasiness and suspicion, because we contradict their favourite narratives. If, as some American conservatives actually believe, Americans represent the pinnacle of humanity, if everyone aspires to American citizenship, then why do forty million Canadians fail, indeed refuse, to petition for admission to the union? Plenty of American pundits have expressed hostility to the idea of Canada. Most American presidents and lawmakers, on the other hand, have had a real degree of affection and respect for Canada. Even where US presidents have disliked our politics or politicians, the decencies of international relations have kept these sentiments out of official United States policy. Until now: Donald Trump has made it quite clear that, at least when it comes to rhetoric, he has no intention of abiding by the old restraints. 

Last year

 
The year 2024 was a year of profound disappointments for many people, including myself. In addition to the challenges and painful setbacks that made the headlines, more insidious failures have crept under the radar of much of the mainstream press, such as the grim news that more people than ever before have needed to resort to food banks. 

Over the year, many of our opponents have taken the mask off. Their arrogance, their conviction that only their money and power matter, once relegated to the fringe voices they could deny, is now on full display. Their contempt for the poor is unrestrained. Their determination to maintain the order they sit atop increases in step with the daily manifestation of its failure. Hoarders of wealth so great as to have no meaning proclaim the meaninglessness of all things. Where inequality renders the wealth of the world's richest so great as to be meaningless, it makes poverty and insecurity more and more miserable. 

On all sides in politics, positions have grown more and more sclerotic, with cultural choices fusing with politics. More and more of our daily choices, from food to transportation have been labeled political and made into measures of our consistency and fidelity to various positions. As our positions have become more and more fused together, advocating for specific changes in the name of justice has become increasingly difficult. Instead of calling for one measure of decent treatment for one community, whether the homeless and outcast people on the street or Indigenous people facing pollution and despoliation of their lands, we are expected to advocate for a portmanteau of causes. The same disease has afflicted conservatives, leading to political paralysis  and changing politics from a search for solutions into a zero sum power game. This sclerosis naturally produces profound inconsistencies in all political coalitions, which must be papered over with absurdities we are expected to accept on pain of ostracism.

Our country

 I am a Canadian. This is my country.

This is my flag.

There went out a decree

Sometimes I imagine myself transported back in time, as a haunting from the future rather than the past, to the dreams of Gaius Octavius, more commonly known as Augustus Caesar. I imagine myself appearing in an otherwise placid dream of a man resting between sessions of the Roman senate, from days of commissioning yet more celebrations of his own part in the history of Rome in numberless statues and bas-reliefs. In my daydream, the sleeping dictator understands I come from the future to haunt his dreams, and asks me how he and his achievements will be remembered. I answer him: after your death, a religious movement will arise in Judea. About eighty years later, members of this religious movement will record its beginnings, and one of these accounts will mention your role in ordering a great census of the empire. It will record that your decree sent millions in motion, to the cities of their birth, and that among them were two very ordinary Galileans, a man named Joseph with Mary, his very young and very pregnant fiancee. It will record that she gave birth in Bethlehem of Judea, and lay her child in a manger for want of a proper bed. And that, Caesar Augustus, is how you will be remembered by millions in the hundred generations to come. You will be the man whose decree sent an expectant mother to give birth to a homeless child in a stable.