What Canada Needs

As folks who know me have come to know over the years, I've almost always got a political opinion, and it's rarely a mild one. So I thought I'd write a bit of something about my beliefs - where they started and where they are today. But also a bit about what I feel Canada needs in terms of politics.

Anyone who knows me from Stellarton knows that I grew up in a household that was very deeply steeped in the Labour Movement and by extension the NDP. Hey, it was a coal mining town and we saw that even in the early 90s with the Westray Mine disaster (which was underneath Stellarton) that mining bosses treated their employees pretty terribly, and had very little regard for human life if it got in the way of profits. So as much as I think today that a lot of labour unions have overstepped their bounds and ask for too much, I also see very clearly that there are areas where unions are needed today every bit as much as they were needed 100 years ago. Indeed, in cases like Westray we see how little progress has been made.

So I grew up a strong supporter of the NDP. And even though I haven't voted for them in a decade, I had their sign on my lawn in the last 3 federal elections (along with a Green Party sign). That was mainly due to the fact that 3 elections ago Ed Broadbent came out of political retirement and ran in my riding - so I figured it was a tight toss-up for me between voting for him, and voting for the Greens. I eventually went with the Greens, but my decision was made in the polling booth, as it always has been for about a decade now. In the next 2 elections it was Paul Dewar running for the NDP, and while I was pretty sure I would not vote for him, I was not 100% sure, and I knew at least that he was a great guy worthy of my support.

So what happened to my unwaivering support for the NDP?

In the early 2000s my political views started to evolve. Maybe it had something to do with living in Ontario and the fact that there would often be 8 or 9 parties on my ballot - something you'd never see back in Nova Scotia. I decided to at least make rudimentary efforts to learn a bit about some of those parties to see if any of them might be worthy of my support. That is to say - I used my human capacity of free thought - I know - that's a novel idea in the political scene. The thing is that I started to see that blind political patronage was slowly but surely destroying our country. It does nothing but create division and animosity, where what we really need is unison and consensus-building. Then sometime in the early to mid 2000s was the final nail in the coffin for me and the NDP. We've all heard various representatives of the party rail on about "the rich". Well, a number of years ago one of their MPs actually put a figure on that tired old phrase, and that figure was surprisingly close to my annual salary. "So" I told myself, "now I'm the enemy, am I?". Hey, I know that on paper I'm "rich" by many people's standards. But being "rich" on paper and living in the lap of luxury are 2 entirely different things. We have trouble making ends meet sometimes, just like the next family. We've been married 12 years now and in that time have not once been able to afford a vacation other than going back to Nova Scotia. Just to give one example.

Anyway, I digress.

Basically I cut off any and all ties with the NDP because I figured it was pretty stupid of me to blindly support a party which had declared me as the "enemy".

But around the same time, my ideas were evolving, and I was beginning to see just how ridiculous this whole notion of "they enemy" really was. And this was happening even before I started to train in Aikido. I came to see that the blind partisan political divide was no different than McArthyism (anti-Communist), or more recently George W Bush's "terrorist". It's straight out of George Orwell's 1984 - creating an enemy for the sole purpose of dividing people and whipping them up into a fury against a common enemy. This mindset is precisely what is slowly destroying our country and the world.

Then I started to practice Aikido - which can be translated as "the Art of Peace".

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, said very clearly that "Aikido is first and foremost Budo". But what exactly does that mean? It's tough to determine that in English because "Budo" translates to "martial art". But there are several other Japanese words which translate to this as well. The main other one being "Bujutsu". Basically the "-jutsu" ending on a Japanese martial art (like jiu-justsu) means "system of battle", whereas the "-do" ending means "system of self-reflection and self-improvement". Quite a difference!!! That's not to say though, that there is not a great deal of fluidity back and forth between the two in any given system. One can certainly become battle-ready within a "-do", and can just as certainly learn a lot about self-reflection within a "-justu". But I believe that Ueshiba intended his system to be the former, not the latter.

Where am I going with this?

One of the things we learn in our Aikido training is that we should be taking the lessons we learn on the mat and applying them to our day-to-day lives. Aikido is a martial art of conflict resolution. It does not use force - it blends with the force of the attacker, and essentially turns the attack back onto the attacker, thus resolving the conflict. And even teachers who are extremely martially-focused like mine is, will periodically remind students that they should be seeking to apply the lessons on the mat, to their lives off the mat. And indeed, my instructor does remind us of this from time-to-time.

One of the key lessons we learn in Aikido is "never grab". Ok, "never say never". But almost never. When an attack comes in, if you grab hold of the attacking appendage, 2 things happen : (1) you have committed yourself 100% to a very specific course of action, thus making it extremely difficult to change to a different course of action should the the (martial) situation change, and (2) in grabbing, you alert the attacker to the fact that their attack is not going as they had planned, thus giving them a reason to want to change the situation (now go back and see (1)). Ideally when an attack comes in, we want to redirect the attack in such a way that it is not obvious to the attacker that their attack is not going as planned. Not that I'm very good at this at the moment mind you, but I know lots of people who are.

So, if we now take the lesson immediately above and apply it to everyday life, we can generalise it as "committing one's self to a very specific course of action is a bad thing because one lose's the flexibility to flow with the situation". Or to boil it down even further I think it is most commonly put by those who practise Aikido as "keep an open mind in all situations". Or it gets further boiled down to the notion of "beginner's mind". I would therefore argue that blind political partisanship goes against the principles of Aiki. And yes, I'm sure I'll take a drubbing on that argument from those readers who have been doing the Aikido thing a lot longer than I have :-)

In short, however, even before I started practising Aikido, I was trying hard to keep an open mind and view situations for what they were, rather than through the lens of some ideological "-ism". But when I started to practice Aikido, I learned that there are very good reasons for doing this, because when we grasp firmly on to one of these ideologies or "-isms", we do precisely the same thing as we do when we grasp hold of an attacker's appendage. We lose the ability to keep an open mind. What's worse, we willingly forfeit that ability.

Not that I'm necessarily a master at keeping an open mind, of course :-) Though I do try very hard, I'm still a work-in-progress. I know that from some of my recent posts it may seem as though I do nothing but bash Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, or cheer-lead for the Green Party. But this is not the case, and here is why.

First of all, I'm on record as supporting some of Harper's policies. I do try my best to treat each new situation with "beginner's mind" - i.e. no preconceived notions. During the recent election there was a big outcry about $45 million in cuts to "the arts". Rather than jump on the bandwagon and bash Harper - as tempting as that was - I tried to find out more about just where these cuts were going. And in fact I was able to find accounts for $20 million, and I happened to agree with those cuts. $5 million in particular was for sending Canadian artists on world tours to "raise Canada's profile". Give me a break! If Canadian artists need any "profile-raising" it's right here at home! I was not able to account for the other $25 million, but I did take note of reports that these cuts apparently took place within an overall increase in spending on Canadian Culture. I think that the people who cried out about these cuts were doing little more than looking for another reason to bash Harper. Blindly.

Then there is the Conservative Child Care policy - good old fashioned money in place of daycare spots. I've said from day 1 that this is the right policy on this issue! Though I have also said that the amount of money being offered is a mere pittance and should be a lot more.

And what about my Green Party cheer leading? Well, the biggest thing is that if you actually read through Green Party policies, much of what they talk about is precisely what I'm outlining in this note. For one thing, they are not left nor right wing. They say in their policies that good ideas are just good ideas, and have no left nor right. That's why their policies are spread right across the board from far left to far right. They also say they will never compromise their beliefs for the sake of votes - something that every other party seems to do in spades. But my support for the Greens is far from "blind". When it was being reported that Ms May was encouraging strategic voting, I immediately sent her a scathing email about how she has sold out every value the Party stands for. Of course it ended up blowing up in my face because in fact Ms May was not encouraging strategic voting - it turns out she was mis-quoted in the media. But just the same, I did not stand by blindly while the leader of the party I was supporting did something I felt went against party values. But the long and the short of it is that the Greens seem to be a party who is all about breaking free of the old ways of thinking about politics, and their ideas seem to be very much in line with my own ways of thinking which I am laying out in this note. Until they prove themselves to not live up to their own ideals, I'll support them. But not blindly!

In fact on election day I got into the booth and took a good deal of time to review all of the options on my ballot and consider the pros and cons of voting for each party. Hardly the actions of a blind follower.

This is precisely what Canada needs in my view. We need more people to drag themselves out of the doldrums of blind political partisanship, and to scrutinize our political parties and their policies with fresh new eyes. With "beginner's eyes" as we would say in Aikido. We need good ideas which stand on their own - outside of the artificial boundaries of "left wing" and "right wing". And we need people who do support a particular party to hold their party responsible for actions which go against both party values, and basic human values. For example, Stephen Harper is on record twice now in recent history as being a bold-faced liar. Once in his promise to Newfoundland with-regards-to equalization payments, and once caught in a lie with-regards-to the Chuck Cadman life insurance scandal. What our country needs is especially for Conservative supporters to speak up against these serious transgressions of basic human values. I punish my 4 and 6 year old children for telling such bold-faced lies. Yet for some reason we expect our politicians to lie to us. I'm sorry, but this cannot be tolerated anywhere, anytime. And what's even worse than silently sitting by and putting up with these outrageous actions, are the folks who actually stand up and try to defend them. Reality check - 4 and 6 year olds aren't allowed to lie. It's we adults who teach them that. Why should we adults be allowed to?

But while I do try to keep an open mind, at the same time I'll add that in the short-term at least the Conservatives have pretty much spent any good will from me personally, with this bullshit election of theirs. 250 million dollars pissed away on nothing more than feeding Stephen Harper's ego. 250 million dollars pissed away in the midst of a major global financial crises, when we can least afford to be pissing it away. And yes, the rest of the world did know before the election that we were in the midst of a major global financial crises - every other party was saying so. Only the Conservatives were denying it right up til the stock markets started crashing. Anyway, for Harper to stand up the way he did and proclaim that Parliament is not functioning only a few short months after the Conservatives were caught distributing handbooks on how to disrupt Parliamentary committees is nothing short of a slap in the face to free-thinking Canadians. If Parliament was not functioning, it was precisely because the Conservatives were sabotaging it for their own self-interest. This is unquestionably a matter of public record, not a matter of political opinion. And for Harper to taunt the Liberals the way he was for not standing up to him was nothing short of childish. He might as well have just said "nya-nya-nya, nya-nya-nya". This is the old politics of division. The old politics of whipping people up into a frenzy against a common enemy. And I think Canadians are getting sick and tired of these old ways of thinking. So if it seems lately that I'm doing nothing but bashing Harper and the Conservatives, it's really only because there has been such an abundance of backwards double-speak bullshit coming from them. I'm not Harper-bashing, I'm bullshit-bashing.

Our country is going to hell in a hand basket, and it's blind political patronage which is leading us down the path. And our electoral system isn't helping because it takes a meager 40-some-odd percent of the popular vote and turns it into a majority of seats in the House. This takes a minority of votes and turns it into what I call a "my-way-or-the-highway" majority of seats, which basically does nothing more or less than allow the party in power to ram their political ideology down the throats of Canadians. Then a few years later another party gets into power, and they spend the first year or two undoing half of what the previous party had done, then the next few years ramming their own ideology down our throats. So a good third of our government's time is completely wasted on this back-and-forth, back-and-forth. You do it, then I undo it. Instead of making real progress. Instead of taking 2 steps forward then 1 back, why not build a consensus before stepping forward, so that we don't have to take any back?

Canadians don't need "my-way-or-the-highway" politics. The reality of every single other aspect of each-and-every one of our lives is that life is all about co-operation, compromise, working together, and consensus building. Indeed, this is precisely what we all teach our own children from a very young age. I don't think there is a single other area of our lives where one could say that the right approach is to short-circuit any real debate or discussion, and to go with an ideology in place of a strong consensus. So why are we fooled into thinking it works in the political arena? The problem with ideologies is that they very rarely have anything to do with ideas. What Canadians need are ideas, not ideologies. The fact is that we are all sick-and-tired of the petty bickering that goes back and forth between our major political parties. And the fact is as well that the only way to put an end to it is to stand up to it. That means keeping an open mind, and most importantly, that means even - no especially - if one is a member of a political party, to hold that party accountable for their actions. Don't follow blindly. Call bullshit on something when appropriate, and do so loudly.

The fact is that majority governments are largely a thing of the past in Canada, and it's about time we learned to deal with the situation in a productive manner which moves this country forward, not holds it stagnate. The good-old-days are gone, and the last thing we need is the good-old-boys from the good-old-parties doing everything they can to cling to the past. It's time to move the country forward, not pine for the past. Fortunately, all the tricks in the book have just about been used up, and Canadians are starting to open their eyes to reality. Sure, chances are the Conservatives might be able to win a majority eventually. Maybe even the Liberals. But more-and-more Canadians are starting to open their eyes and see how counter-productive this old political system really is. More-and-more Canadians are demanding that our politicians do precisely what the rest of us do in our day-to-day lives : put the bullshit aside and work together - cooperate. There is no "I" in "teamwork", and it's about time our institutions started to reflect this reality.

Canadians haven't given a single political party a majority of votes in decades, and it's high time our system reflected the reality that what Canadians are saying is that we want our politicians to work together across party lines for the common good of this country!