Blog Archives

Canada's Apartheid ?

1/25/2021

Much has been written about the linkage between Canada’s historical Indian Act and the South African story of Apartheid. As the story goes, the South African government was exploring ways of developing and enforcing a kind of “separate but equal” system and visited Canada. They were inspired by Canadian officials and the Indian Act.

So prevalent is this story that it has worked itself into the lore of Canadian history. There are definite parallels. As former Justice Giesbrecht notes Both used status cards that classified people by race and both granted people of one race entitlements not given to others. And his insight has been amplified and diffused throughout Canadian journalism and academia.

The problem is that the evidence to support this actually occurring seems thin. I found a South African article that discusses, in part, this issue. It is entitled Terminologies of Control: Tracing the Canadian-South African Connection in a Word.

The article is more of a philological and deconstructive analysis of the term “apartheid” inspired by the work of Derrida and Michel Foucault. However, the author, Maria-Carolina Cambre does note that there is in the historical archive this specific mention. “At last, Bourgeault gives some indication of specific policy material being copied by writing: ‘The South African Land Settlements Act of 1912 and 1913 was patterned after Canada’s Dominion Lands Act (p. 8). He also adds that “the first of many pass laws were then implemented based on the Canadian experience (p. 8)”

Whether that is enough to construct clear historical evidence (and it would be interesting to see historians explore this question) of the relationship between Canada and South Africa with respect to Apartheid is a separate question from the fact that this kind of thinking was prevalent at the time. The author seems to find fault with not locating Britain as the main exporter of this kind of colonialism but I think that is a bit tendentious. Canada, at that time, was a British colony. The corollary between Britain and Canada, especially then, was remarkably strong. Besides, Canada had a much more analogous political context with the Indigenous of South Africa than Britain had in the UK and so, on a balance of probabilities, the evidence points to Canada primarily and not Britain.

I tend to think rather than looking for a smoking gun with respect to Canada and the practice of South African Apartheid, we should instead look at the broad historical practices of “separate but equal doctrines” that were part of the warp and woof of a wide array of colonial practices – then and now. The use of the term Apartheid is a signifier of a particularly odious form of governmentality and one that we rightly want to resist. Maria-Caroline Cambre makes that very point in the article linked above.

We can learn much from South African apartheid but to pretend that the mechanisms and underlying political philosophy that drove apartheid there was not present all over the Western world is naïve. And to position South Africa as a pariah nation is unfair scapegoating.

What we need to do is learn from our global, primarily Western European, collective mistakes in terms of public policy and craft much better inclusionary politics. In fact, our politics must avoid all forms of nativism that would target immigrants or racialized others in pursuit of national political objectives.

This is the very problem with nativist styled populist movements. I don’t think the supporters of the Trump movement should be painted with a broad brush but I do think that as a political community we do have to frame the contours of the kinds of governmentality we will accept and what lies outside of the boundaries of the kinds of democratic norms we wish to establish as a community. This applies, equally, by the way to the Quebec PQ party which has similar kinds of ethno-nationalist tendencies as Trump but without the bluster (think Bill 21 and the failure of the provincial assembly to support Joyce's Principle along with the ludicrous statement that systemic discrimination does not exist in Quebec). Again, I don't think the supporters of the party need to be painted with the same brush but the leadership needs to do some soul searching on this issue.

We do have to lay down some clear markers on dignified political rhetoric and policies and ultimately that is up to each of us as citizens. Leaders, too have an important role. As Nicholas Talib tweeted:

What did I learn from the Trump presidency?

No matter your message, your policies, your public, as an executive you must have *some* amount of decorum & abide by the following Roman virtues:

+ Dignitas
+ Gravitas
+ Auctoritas
+ Iustitia

in addition to the main one: Prudentia.

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The Case of Viola Desmond in Nova Scotia – Black History Month

1/17/2021

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I must confess that I was not aware of this case that occurred in the province of Nova Scotia in 1947. As the Canadian Museum of Human Rights recounts:

In November 1946, hair salon owner Viola Desmond went to a film at the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia… Unaware that the theatre was segregated, the Black Nova Scotian chose a main‐floor seat. When she refused to move to the balcony, where Black patrons were expected to sit, she was arrested and dragged out of the theatre.. In Canada, there were no official laws enforcing separation of Black and white Canadians. However, communities and businesses such as shops, theatres and restaurants made their own unofficial rules.

Then on “November 8, 1946, Viola Desmond was convicted and fined for defrauding the government for sitting in the wrong place at the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Although she offered to pay the difference between the upstairs and downstairs tickets, she was still arrested and detained” as Madison Veinotte writes.

Veinotte goes on to describe how the Supreme Court failed to take up the appeal on weak (in my view) procedural grounds. Nonetheless, Veinotte quotes that Justice Hall (part of the Supreme Court that denied taking up the appeal), “One wonders if the Manager of the Theatre who laid the complaint was so zealous because of a bona fide belief there had been an attempt to defraud the Province of Nova Scotia of the sum of one cent, or was it a surreptitious endeavor to enforce a Jim Crow rule by misuse of a Public Statute.”

While couched as a rhetorical statement, the answer is clearly yes. Enforcing a privatized from of Jim Crow is precisely what the manager of the business was doing. The case illustrates the insidious nature of racism and the limitations of using the court to redress wrongs. While the Supreme Court of Canada, post Charter, has written some landmark rulings and has set a solid foundation for human rights in Canada, this particular ruling of the Court is a blemish on its history in Canada. Further to the foregoing, while this ruling was pre-Constitution and Charter, it is, nonetheless, regrettable that the Court stood on ambiguous procedural grounds in its refusal to consider the appeal. Profiles in courage it is not!

This case underscores, however, precisely why human rights needs to be part of the consciousness of free people acting in a noble manner that upholds the dignity of every person irrespective of race, gender or gender expression, creed, sexual orientation, or class to name just a few.

The strategy must be both the heart, mind, and even body. Legislation and jurisprudence has its place – Martin Luther King famously said that while legislation will not change the heart, it will restrain the heartless – but work also needs to occur in our consciousness and this happens through education.

And part of that education is in Black History month beginning February .

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Stoicism - Ancient Wisdom for Modern Anxieties

1/8/2021

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Much unrest, anxiety and unease in the world today due to the ongoing Covid 19 pandemic, the events in the US capital, and apprehension about the future.

The Stoic philosophers can contribute much to helping modern people navigate turbulent times. Three of its most prominent ancient representatives come from diverse backgrounds. Epicetus (d. 135 CE) was a Greek slave, Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) was a Roman emperor, and Seneca (d. 65 CE) was a Roman politician. Each drew on something very important and one of the most important insights from Marcus Aurelius influenced CBT or at the very least is very similar to it.

Marcus Aurelius said famously that it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them. This is a profound quote and one that we will all have to contemplate in our minds. We may resist the truism of this quote in times of great distress, but, actually, this is profoundly accurate. Often events happen outside of our control and in this age of social media we are accustomed to feeling as though we need to somehow be disturbed or disrupted by them. Or even events in our own lives can rock and destabilize us. However, the height of conscious agency is to realize that the thoughts we form about those events and the narratives we create are just that - thoughts and narratives. Consequently, we need to cultivate the habit of being self-critical and not assume that our narratives of the event is useful especially if it disrupts our interior tranquility.

In fact, interior tranquility and freedom is the goal of Stoic philosophy (and I would add psychology). When our inner tranquility is challenged in some way, we need to step back and consider the source of that discord. That discord may be because we are not living in a way that is integrated and we may feel we lack integrity. In this case we need to take steps to become more integrated. Here, the Stoics do support a certain degree of asceticism both in terms of intellectual asceticism, emotional asceticism, and lifestyle asceticism. This kind of detachment is difficult but it is the way to become spiritually free. In this regard, one can see congruence between Stoicism and Buddhism.

But Stoicism also clearly influenced many forms of Christian spirituality and certainly monasticism.

Take time, therefore, to drink deeply and hear the muses of this ancient wisdom.

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

1/6/2021

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William Butler Yeats said it best and feels timely today

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Revisiting Adam Smith

1/2/2021

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Many on the left have as reflexive a reaction to Adam Smith and capitalism as many on the right have when they hear Karl Marx or socialism. But communism is as far from what Marx discussed as modern capitalism (sometimes called crony capitalism or globalism) is from Adam Smith.

This article by Dennis Ramussen in the Atlantic, The Problem With Inequality, According to Adam Smith is useful to read as a primer. Ramussen writes:

Smith states, explicitly and repeatedly, that the true measure of a nation’s wealth is not the size of its king’s treasury or the holdings of an affluent few but rather the wages of “the laboring poor.” In a passage that Obama quoted in his speech, Smith declares that it is a matter of simple “equity” that “they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.”

Immediately this should cue the reader into how far removed the conventional wisdom of economics, as reflected in media reports and politicians’ advocacy, is especially for those on the right. Often, we see the ticker tape of the stock market scrolled across the screen. We hear about the percentages on the TSE or the Dow Jones average or the Nasdaq. But this metric was completely the opposite of what Adam Smith envisaged in his famous work, The Wealth of Nations. Instead, the focus should be on the purchasing and spending power of the lower or middle classes. Although Smith places markets at the centre, this is misleading. What contextualizes the market is morality, values, norms, and social conventions. His Theory of Moral Sentiments preceded The Wealth of Nations where his market theory is expounded. The podcast below makes that point and it is an important one. Economics is an aspect of ethics and morality it is not simply a mathematical model superimposed amorally and abstractly on real groupings of people. Instead, economics grows out of, and is connected to the human community which itself is comprised of norms, values, and ethics.

For Smith, in terms of our collective meaning in life, it would be better for people if their attention was towards more spiritual or other pursuits than in trying to emulate and admire those with wealth (including Hollywood celebrities, Fortune 500 folks, etc.). He wrote his Theory of Moral Sentiments in line with thinking about questions of happiness and what brings happiness. On that point, Ramussen writes, Smith goes so far as to proclaim that the “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition” is “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Clearly, economics is an important marker and our politics should have a role in facilitating equity in society. In fact, Smith argued that a society cannot progress if there is a large gap between the haves and have nots. The right and the anarchic left are wrong on seeing the government as necessarily the enemy of the people - although it does need to be limited and circumscribed. History shows that government invariably becomes tyrannical. But that is different than saying it is not a co-created good. In another article, Lauren Brubaker writes that Smith’s solution to the problem of globalism and neoliberal ideology (aka crony capitalism).

(1) by limiting government to a few essential powers (defense, administration of impartial justice, and certain limited public works and institutions), and (2) by educating the public concerning the “folly” of attempts to direct the economy by legislators who, even if well intentioned, inevitably lack sufficient knowledge of local conditions and thus are incompetent to direct the economy to the ends they propose. These approaches offer the best chance to limit crony capitalism, its corruption of natural liberty, and its consequent undermining of benefits of free markets.

This tracks with Sam Vankin’s thesis that the marriage of the state with capitalism has led to the very major problem we are facing today with Neo-liberalism (that is the new aspect of liberalism - the marriage between the state and capitalism). The anarchists are correct that big, regulatory government is the problem as most citizens do not consent to the spending of government that does not, in turn, benefit them and instead benefits the classes that are aligned with the government that massively spends (this includes military manufacturers - military industrial complex -, health care technologies - big Pharma). All of this at the expense of the local economy and people. The right, although claiming to limit government, only means by limiting government - cutting spending to the vulnerable – rarely do they support redistribution in the form of infrastructure or stimulus or guaranteed income.

Brubaker continues, saying that Smith saw a definite role of government.

Smith, (in The Wealth of Nations) outlines his view of the duties of government with admirable clarity:

According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and public institutions.

She continues “It should be clear from this discussion that Smith is not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez-faire if that is understood to mean that “anything goes”—that the government has no responsibility to ensure justice or protect the least advantaged.”

What I take from this is that we need to change our system for sure! And it needs to be built from below! In so doing, we should take the best ideas from different thinkers. I do not agree with all of Smith nor all of Marx but as I write and think through these issues, I hope we can co-construct a community with a newer paradigm that will be more just and fair to more people. Adam Smith might have something to contribute to that conversation.

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My Pensées

The title of this blog is an allusion to the famous work of Blaise Pascal. This blog represents the variety of my interests and thoughts on any given day and are strung together, like Pascal's Pensees, in no particular order. I work in the field of mental health, education, and human rights. I write and am a human rights advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog.