Twenty five years ago and a phone call...

We know what happened twenty-five years ago. I then lived in Ann Arbor while Allison studied at the University of Michigan. Four memories of that living through that time as an alien on an American visa, time, not only the day but the weeks that followed it, stand out for me. I remember the Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor we attended, and the service on the Sunday that followed the Tuesday of 9/11. The pastor climbed into the pulpit and began his sermon with “Oh. My. God.” I remember calling my brother in Toronto to check in on him, and hearing from my sister in law that my brother was in New York. In fact, he had been at Bloomberg in midtown when the planes hit the towers, but that morning there had been a breakfast meeting on the topic of risk management in the insurance industry at Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower, and two of his colleagues had gone. One was late and survived; one was on time and didn’t.

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. 

One hundred and fifty years ago today...

the parliament of Great Britain passed an act uniting New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Canada (then Ontario and Quebec), under a single federal parliament and four provincial legislatures. The new country, called a dominion in deference to the phrase from the Book of Psalms: "dominion from sea to sea" would continue to have the British monarch as a head of state, and British diplomats would speak for it in international relations, but Canada's own legislatures would govern in all internal matters. Canadians greeted the passage of the British North America Act with modest celebration.

Rendemptive anger

Louis Riel

Last week, in one of the vicious but not exactly random assaults underlining the inequalities of life in a "western" urban society, an unknown person beat up the principal dancer in the "Buffalo Hunt" scene from the Canadian Opera Company's production of Harry Somers's opera Louis Riel. He and his partner, hurt badly enough to need hospital treatment, they suffered further indignities at the hands of the medical system; some of the people I spoke to clearly considered their treatment negligent.

This racist attack on a talented First Nations dancer, and the callous treatment in its aftermath, could have easily led to worse divisions and deeper mistrust in its wake. Violence of this kind divides and silences people, as the perpetrators and enablers often intend. In a production negotiating the tricky politics of staging a classic Canadian work telling a story involving First Nations, this attack could easily have poisoned the atmosphere.