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Canada Needs Land Reform (part 2): Rural Land Reform Lessons from Latin America

One of the most significant differences between Canada and the other countries of the Western Hemisphere has been not just what it has (or has not) done in response to the massive dispossession and oppression of Indigenous people during the European conquest but where that impetus has come from.

As I stated previously, most countries in the Americas have sought democratic political resolutions to land inequity through their legislatures. Candidates have run in elections on platforms of reconciliation, been elected and carried these programs out to varying degrees of success. The history of Canada has no such episode and recent Canadian history shows no real attempts.

In 1969, the Pierre Trudeau government put forward its white paper on Indigenous peoples, proposing termination, the legal doctrine the US had unsuccessfully applied 1894-1933 and which Mexico had tried 1857-1920 to similarly disastrous effect. Not only did First Nations leaders oppose this policy and rebuke the Trudeau government but so did many settler Canadian voters, not so much because they opposed abolishing Indigenous “status” and Reserve governments but because this radical rewriting of settler-Indigenous relations had not been placed before voters in the 1968 election.

Since Trudeau’s shelving of the doctrine of termination before the 1972 election, pretty much every significant advance in Indigenous rights in Canada has emanated not from parliament and the provincial legislatures but from the courts. As rehearsed in my essay last fall, this has produced a number of perverse and pernicious effects when it comes to resolving the land question.

With the exception of BC Premier Mike Harcourt’s proposed BC Treaty Commission, which failed to settle one single demand for land reform during its decade in operation, political leaders no longer go to the voters with plans for settling the Indigenous land question in the form of any discernible government program. Their essential message is that they will ape the language of the courts and follow the decisions of the courts because it is the judicial not the legislative branch of government that should decide the land question with respect to Indigenous peoples.

When it comes to the land crisis experienced by settlers, along with non-status, Métis and off-reserve Indigenous people, a completely different, unconnected, siloed conversation ensues. First of all, once treaties are off the table, the land question is thought to be a wholly provincial matter, or at least has functionally been so since (a) crown land south of 60 degrees was distributed to the provinces and not the federal government since the 1867, and (b) the federal government abandoned its guarantee of every Canadian enjoying a “right to shelter” when it defunded federal housing programs and enacted the Canada Health and Social Transfer legislation that untied provincial transfer payments from housing guarantees.

Shockingly, even though the vast majority of land in every province west of the Gaspé is state-owned “crown land,” governments have not come to the voters with land redistribution plans to alleviate unemployment or the housing affordability crisis. And in a divisive and perverse move, they have argued that because so much land is covered by flawed, corrupt and non-consensual “numbered treaty” system, treaties whose meanings are in dispute and often before the courts or, was simply seized by the state without a treaty, it would violate the rights of Indigenous people to redistribute land to settlers.

In reality, neither settlers nor any group of Indigenous people have meaningful, functional, stable access to the crown land near them, nor do they have any democratic control over its use, as it is typically under the direct control of forest, fossil fuel, bottled water or mining companies, or of provincial government departments responsible for selling water, minerals and timber.

The only programs remotely resembling what one might call “land reform” were some experimental pilot “community woodlot” programs in Western Canada in the 1990s, where some crown land was alienated to a local municipality or corporation with community ownership to be controlled for the limited purpose of producing wood for a local mill. Multi-use, non-extractive use, these forms of community land tenure are not even on the table, not even part of the debate.

Meanwhile in our cities and towns, the housing affordability crisis is being fobbed-off on the private sector in the same way the Indigenous land question is being fobbed-off on the judiciary. Provinces and cities rarely use their own land to solve housing problems; even when they decide to take public land and dedicate it to housing, the first step in that process is typically privatization, after which times, the failure of the land to provide what it was intended for is blamed on the free market.

This is a messed-up state of affairs but the good news is that it is uniquely Canadian. If we stopped seeing our land crisis as multiple, separate, siloed or competing land crises but as one, we could chart a different course. And if we saw our legislatures, not our courts or our markets as the place where our land problems are solved, we could chart a different course. Finally, if we looked to the rest of the continent at how to build majority coalitions for land reform, we could create the social movement needed to chart that course.

The Mexican Revolution was a complex, multi-phase, multi-faction process that effectively re-founded Mexico a century after its initial separation from the Spanish Empire in 1821. The basis of this re-founding was the restoration of something Mexicans call the ejido. Previously privatized lands that had been held by major landowners and foreign corporations were seized by the government and redistributed to rural cooperatives.

Eligibility for these lands was based on three main things: (1) the grassroots, inclusive and cooperative nature of the project, (2) the economic viability of the business it sought to create and (3) the material need for the land. In other words, the government redistributed land to the rural proletariat and peasants based on self-organization on the basis of class.

Of course, it went without saying that the primary beneficiaries of the ejido were Indigenous Mexicans because class and race function synergistically. Consequently, this policy proved very popular with Indigenous people. But it was also popular with the non-Indigenous rural poor because it did not walk back the reforms of 1857 that had abolished separatist race-based courts and race-based systems of land tenure. The fact the ejido equally available to settlers and Indigenous people located in the same geographical and class position.

The ejido proved the most popular and long-lasting of the many reforms of the Mexican Revolution but was ultimately destroyed as a condition of Mexico joining NAFTA in 1994. This attempt to re-privatize the ejido has led to an ongoing insurgency, the Zapatistas, in Southern Mexico for the past generation.

Between 1950 and 1953, Guatemala undertook a hugely popular land reform program very different from the Mexican one. There, the government expropriated private land the big fruit companies had left fallow for three or more consecutive years. This land was then parceled as family farm plots and distributed to families who had previously been sharecroppers on the fruit companies’ lands. The government assessed a market value and automatically qualified the landless family receiving the land for a mortgage with the government bank. Families began working the land and paying off their mortgages within months and Guatemala’s banana production actually rose; but much more importantly, kitchen gardens got a lot bigger and families were able to meet more of their food needs on their own land.

The program was so successful and popular with the peasants that the fruit companies convinced the Eisenhower Administration to remove the government in a coup and begin reversing the reform in 1954.

As in Mexico, the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries were Indigenous but, as in Mexico, the land reform was based on people’s class, location and financial need. And the reforms were popular because they benefited a broad class-based coalition from all three of the country’s main castes (i.e. races), indio, ladino and criollo.

Another interesting example of land reform was that of the Peruvian dictatorship installed by the Johnson Administration at the beginning of 1969. Whereas the Mexican and Guatemalan revolutionaries were anti-capitalist (despite the Guatemalan reform being a capitalist reform designed to move the country forward historically, in the style of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1980s China), the Peruvian regime was installed by the US as a bulwark against communism and an example of how even something like land reform is possible under capitalism.

Unlike the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the junta running Peru was constrained by its alliance with the US from engaging in uncompensated expropriation. But years of corruption and tax fraud allowed the government to purchase land far below market value because the owner had been paying property taxes based on land values artificially depressed by fraud and collusion between tax assessors and the landlord class.

Like Mexico’s land reform, self-organized cooperatives rather than family units were the beneficiaries of the reform and the types of cooperatives were evaluated based on similar metrics to Mexico but with greater sensitivity to the wide diversity of Peruvian ecosystems, commodities and the amount of processing required before goods were sold for further processing or sent to market. Whereas Mexico and Guatemala had already gone through a process of termination, eliminating Indigenous land tenure, Peru had not. This meant that the junta converted pre-existing Indigenous collective lands into land cooperatives, not dissimilar to the Alaskan reorganization that was taking place at the same time. In this way, land reform was the means by which Peru effected termination.

Yet, termination was embraced by most Indigenous groups because the new cooperatives were more dynamic, democratic and prosperous and meaningfully more land. Complications later arose with these Indigenous lands but the complications stemmed not from objections to the loss of traditional forms of land tenure and government but the tendency of small holders to function more as neighbourhoods of independent yeoman farms with only superficial economic cooperation.

As with the other examples, there is a common theme: reform was conducted based on class; settlers and Indigenous of that class benefited equally; the overall program primarily benefited Indigenous people.

I am not proposing to copy any of these, except with respect to one thing. Canada should embark on a project of land reform that is driven not by the courts or the private sector but by our parliament and legislatures. And that project should benefit and be supported by a broad coalition of Canadians needing land, rural and urban, settler and Indigenous. In the next piece, I will look at global examples of reforming and redistributing urban land.

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 1): We Are Not As Divided As We Think

One of the reasons the establishment has been so keen to import US-style cultural politics and the moral panics they generate into Canada is that keeping Canadians divided culturally grows more important every year as our material interests and needs become increasingly aligned. The growing disagreements in Canada about gay rights, women’s rights, free speech and coercive public health measures mask a broad convergence on the material interests of Canadians.

Today, there are virtually no ordinary, decent working people in this country who are not victims of Canada’s land inequity crisis. Most land in this country is owned by the banks or by real estate and development firms. Now, it is true that much of that land is technically held in the name of one or more individual Canadian “homeowners” but most of these individuals are functionally indistinguishable from renters. They must transfer a vast amount of money to a third party to avoid the loss of their home and subsequent eviction. In some senses, the average heavily mortgaged property owner has less housing security than the average renter because more legal protections exist against eviction that repossession.

For a while, this thing urbanites call “the affordability crisis” was largely limited to cities and resort areas but in recent years, all Canadian real estate, from un-serviced lots in Central New Brunswick to bungalows in the village of Valemount (despite the closure of its only sawmill and main employer), has massively inflated in cost and can only be purchased with the “assistance” of a bank.

Since Covid’s arrival on the scene, rents in rural industrial and agricultural communities have increased faster than those in resort and urban areas, almost catching up. That means that whether renting or owning, a home is an increasingly exorbitant cost and the largest cost in almost all household budgets.

Even among people who owe little or nothing to a bank, things are scarcely better. That is because as housing and land prices rise astronomically, property tax rates do not even need to increase for annual property tax bills to double in the space of less than half a decade. This is especially impactful because those who own their homes outright or almost entirely are typically seniors or people at the very end of their working life.

And because neither private- nor public-sector pensions have kept up with inflation, RRSPs grow more unreliable as the stock market in which they play grows ever more casino-like and our governments keep stripping away legal protections for private sector and union pension funds, not only are seniors incomes both volatile and in decline, they are caught in a double bind. They need their home to continue to appreciate in value so as to deal with rising inflation rates, declining income and declining income security by selling or borrowing against their home.

Finally, there are the Canadians who live on Indian Reserves. While these people’s housing is technically “free,” chronic shortages mean that not everyone entitled to reserve housing can obtain it or are forced into incompletely constructed, incompletely renovated or dilapidated housing. Furthermore, those who are unemployed (and on-reserve unemployment rates remain more than double off-reserve unemployment rates) typically have half or more of their provincial government income assistance withheld as it is categorized as a “shelter allowance.” And as we well know, a shocking proportion of those houses are connected to inferior or non-existent utility grids, often lacking in everything from reliable electricity to potable water to internet access.

Few reserve governments have been permitted by provincial or federal governments to levy their own taxes (the Sechelt and the Nisga’a nations being notable exceptions). Consequently, with such woefully insufficient and insensitive block grant funding from the federal government, reserve governments do not have a ready mechanism to fund infrastructure improvements, housing repairs or new housing. Urban reserves have increasingly turned to using their own meagre land holdings to conduct real estate megaprojects that they hope will produce a secure revenue stream. And rural reserves have been forced to accept “benefit agreements” from forestry and mining companies in exchange for endorsing industrial activities on their traditional territories.

In other words, young or old, rural or urban, conservative or progressive, owner or renter, Canadians are suffering under and trapped in an intensifying national land crisis. And a key part of the establishment’s trick in intensifying and profiting from this crisis has been to redescribe it as a set of unconnected, separate problems or, worse yet, a set of competing priorities canceling each other out in a perverse zero-sum.

Let me just list some of the most egregious and obvious ways Canadians are being divided on the land question:

Owners versus Non-Owners

Most Canadians who “own” their home are in one of two situations: (a) the bank owns their property and they need its value to appreciate because mortgage payments are so high, there is not room in the family budget for adequate retirement savings; they rely on constant appreciation to replace lost retirement savings and declining pensions; (b) they own their property almost entirely or outright but are now living on a fixed retirement income that is steadily declining against inflation and a finite number of RRSPs they will run out of in a few years; they too rely on constant appreciation as their sole source of new equity and income.

Non-owners are generally in two groups, lifelong renters and aspiring owners. Neither group is served in any way by the continuous rapid appreciation of housing. Rising mortgage costs due to appreciation and interest rates raise rents in the basement suites and laneway homes in which an ever-increasing proportion of our renters live, also driving up prices in purpose-built rental as basement suites typically occupy the bottom of the rental market. Obviously, constantly increasing home prices pull potential homes out of the reach of first-time buyers with the consistency of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every year.

As both groups’ financial desperation intensifies, so too does their polarization. Every years one group needs prices to rise even more, just as the other needs them to stop rising.

Landlords versus Tenants

A witty publication in my home town coined the term “artisanal landlording” last year. It pointed to the fact that a shockingly large proportion of people’s rental housing needs are being met in basement suites or laneway homes by landlords who are renting-out between one and three suites in order to meet crippling monthly mortgage payments. These artisanal landlords typically have full-time jobs and often children as well. In addition to being short of time, they often lack even the most basic building maintenance and repair skills and knowledge and often also lack the liquidity to engage tradespeople in a timely manner to deal with matters as urgent as blocked plumbing or malfunctioning heating systems.

Without any real control over rising mortgage payments, these landlords often lack financial wriggle room when provincial governments cap rental increases at a level lower than their costs have increased and are often one major flood or other architectural disaster away from their whole miniature real estate empire collapsing like a house of cards. For this reason, they often have an incentive to be slow and inattentive to repairs because, in most provinces, a landlord can only make major rent increases when switching tenants.

Tenants, consequently, face not just rents increasing as fast as legally permitted. They are dealing with increasingly incompetent, underresourced, overworked and harried amateur caretakers who will try to push them out of their home if met with a big bill or mortgage payment hike. Furthermore, tenants who live at closest quarters with their landlords and being set up to have the most acrimonious relationships. Worse still, these declining standards in the promptness and quality of maintenance and repair work in these isolated new units allow purpose-built rental businesses to cut back on their repair and maintenance spending.

Indigenous People versus Settlers

In both rural and urban environments, Indigenous people are usually the most underhoused, poorly housed and insecurely housed people. And most are associated with a “traditional territory” on which they have no title, sovereignty or rights of occupation, except at a theoretical, legal, unenacted level.

As I have long suggested, the “land acknowledgement” is one of the most odious woke racist humblebrags out there. Settlers stand in front of other settlers and engage competitive acts of weepy, emotional histrionics about how guilty they feel about doing whatever they want with the land they are standing on without, themselves, consulting anyone Indigenous about what they are doing.

In rural areas, land injustice is thrown into sharper relief than it can be in any urban environment. Tiny Indian Reserves sit in the middle of huge swaths of alienated public land, realms the size of European countries that have been alienated to pipeline, mining and forest companies. This technically public or “crown” land containing trap lines, spawning streams, sacred and historic sites and other sources of long-term sustenance, both financial and physical but it is under the sole dictatorial control of a single resource-extraction company that sees no value in other things the land produces. Indeed, it is in the interest of these companies to ruin things of value to other economic sectors as quickly as possible to reduce land use conflicts over precious things: destroy the biggest trees, most beautiful vistas and the richest sources of fish and game first.

But what many in Southwestern BC miss is that the settler towns are not in any significantly different position. Like many living on Reserve, many are of mixed Indigenous descent and have a variety of legal statuses with respect to their personal Indigeneity. Like many living on Reserve, they depend both on short-term jobs from the companies liquidating the natural capital on the land around them, and on that land not being liquidated so that it can provide recreation, food and a sense of place and belonging.

If one lives in the extractive belt from Timmins to Terrace, whether one is a settler, on-Reserve Indigenous person or off-, one enjoys no democratic control over the land around one’s community. Decisions are made by corporate boards or branch offices of transnational corporations in Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto, overseen by governments comprising legislators mainly elected in suburbs and cities far, far away.

The most demoralizingly extractive jobs, which often involve the physical destruction of places and activities with which one has grown up are, outside of white collar government work, pretty much the only family-supporting jobs in much of Western Canada’s rural industrial periphery. Consumers in the city demand wood, natural gas, pulp, etc. and then blame the workers who do their bidding for the environmental destruction they, themselves, have demanded they enact. Consequently, it is crucially important to prevent any multi-racial class-based alliance among the workers of Canada’s rural industrial periphery.

Dividing rural workers on a racial basis has been the strategy of the establishment in the West since the first cannery started paying a different wages to Chinese migrants, Anglo migrants, Tlingits and Tsimshians. But our current situation is best traced back to the 1980s and 90s when the combined effects of unsustainable over-cutting and mechanization thinned the ranks of Canada’s International Woodworkers of America from 40,000 to 8,000. The 1990s mining industry capital strike in BC and Saskatchewan produced similar effects in adjacent industries.

Whereas bush work had been largely racially integrated (even if the towns in which the workers lived often fell short of that mark with de facto restaurant, laundromat and other commercial business segregation), the layoffs were not. The minority who managed to keep their logging, mill and mining jobs were whiter than those who lost them.

Reserve governments are often as or more motivated to sign benefit agreements in order to guarantee jobs for unemployed residents as they are to gain a new revenue stream. Guarantees of a portion of new pipeline, mining or logging jobs, however temporary they may be are the best shot these communities have at resolving catastrophically high on-reserve joblessness. But those agreements are made in the context of a zero sum of bush work; every job gained by someone living off-reserve is a job that doesn’t go to someone who resides in a conventional municipality or regional district.

Similarly, court-mandated and government-negotiated land claims settlements are reasonably understood by those living off-reserve as endangering one of the few sources of non-government employment in the region. In other words, both the benefit agreements won by pro-industry reserve governments and the land claims made by traditional, hereditary governments are understood as either transferring settler and non-status bush work jobs to Indigenous people or annihilating them altogether.

A Call For Unity

But what if we swept all this aside? What if instead of pitting people against each other, we recognized that the real problem is this: forest companies, mining companies and banks have seized control of our land, the land of all people living in this country. What if we took our land back, together? What if #LandBack was not code for transferring title and sovereignty from people of one race to people of another? What if it stood for ordinary, decent, working people coming together to take our land back from the super-rich and the transnational corporations they control and use to extract the value of our land, of our work?

What if we realize that we were all being manipulated to fight each other, as a distraction by the bastards who have stolen our land and reap astronomical profits from it? The next several articles in this blog will be about how we might overcome the obstacles to building a coalition of settlers and Indigenous people, on-reserve and off-reserve, urban and rural, renter and small owner to take our land back together and all gain more land, more financial security and true political independence.

If We Are to Survive, We Must Re-learn the Meaning of Hope: A Movie Review of the Two Towers Twenty Years Late

This piece of writing would not be possible without the courageous work of American standup comic John Mulaney who, in 2012, delivered a damning, blistering review of 1990 children’s Christmas movie Home Alone in the style of a Def Jam comic in his comedy special New In Town. (“It’s a grid system, ya simple bitch!”)

So, in honour of this occasion, a decade ago, I am going to write a blistering, inexplicably urgent takedown of a twenty year-old movie nobody is really interested in talking about anymore.

I will never forget viewing The Two Towers from the front row of Vancouver’s old Capitol Six movie theatre on opening night in 2002. Next to me was the person with whom I had most wanted to watch the film, my dear friend Alannah. Better yet, Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf made a spontaneous appearance to introduce the movie, because he happened to be in town filming an X-Men movie and decided to give his fans an extra treat by introducing the film.

Following writer-director Peter Jackson’s risky, audacious yet successful changes to JRR Tolkien’s original narrative of Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in the trilogy, we were ready to see the definitive cinematic adaptation of the most dramatic and profound of Tolkien’s novels, trusting that whatever changes he made would only serve to amplify the big ideas and themes of the book.

Three hours later, we exited the theatre, ashen-faced, feeling like we had been repeatedly been beaten in the stomach with cricket bats. Every single change Jackson had made to the second book had made it worse, and yet the awfulness was not experienced as a death of a thousand cuts but as a single, massive, fatal gaping wound in the original story.

And that is because I do not think that the Peter Jackson and the audience to whom he was playing had any sense of what hope really was in the grand vision of JRR Tolkien. I have attempted to write this piece before but didn’t quite get it right, the way that progressive consciousness is especially corrosive to it, as is one’s whiteness. But I will go further today in stating that the second and third Lord of the Rings adaptations that Jackson filmed were a profound harbinger of the death of hope as a twenty-first century progressive idea and the rise of post-politics.

It took me a few weeks to even figure out why I hated the movie so much (as I still do, despite loving the first). But I figured it out. But also, here I must digress into the lateness of this post. I was posting with a decent momentum for a while, there but, following some additional real life developments, I found myself blocked in my efforts to write this piece. Not only could I not write it, I felt it was a betrayal or an admission of defeat I refused to make to write something in its place. But, after a month of wrestling the Devil, here it is.

What I found striking, twenty years ago, was that whether people saw Jackson’s changes as inconsequential or improvements or whether they shared my intense dislike of them, we lacked a language for describing what Jackson had done in adapting the books’ plot to film, something I will briefly describe here:

In the second book of Lord of the Rings, there are three polities that must act against Sauron, the Enemy, and the allies he has gathered to prevent the world plunging into an eternal darkness under his control. While the Enemy’s undoing is to be carried out primarily by a small number of people carrying out an absurdly improbable plan, these last great forces must spring into action on the side of good but are, instead succumbing to evil.

Rohan, led by King Theoden, has continued to defend itself but has made no move to counter the evil forces encroaching on it and its allies; instead, its fighting men have been under strict orders not to venture outside its borders for any reason. The reason for this is that, having lost his son in battle, the king has sunk into a depression and, bereft of his son, has lost hope. This loss of hope has been reinforced by his corrupt advisor who shields the king from any news and from the light of day, which the king has come to fear, for the news it might bring.

Isengard, led by Saruman the Wizard, is a fortification near an important crossroads. Instead of it being a sanctuary and rally point for the armies of good, Saruman has turned it into a rally point for orcs and evil men. He is attempting to carve out his own, superior faction in Sauron’s armies to seize a share of his dominion. The reason for this is that, Saruman became the heir to the Orthanc Stone, an oracular stone permitting its user to see across time and space. And, over time, Saruman ceased to be able to see a future in which Sauron had not won and so, he lost hope. He came to believe that with the victory of evil certain, things would only improve were he to join with it.

Gondor, led by Denethor the Steward, has continued to lead the forces opposing Sauron but, as its forces have dwindled, and its allies as well, its military moves have grown more resigned, more predictable, more of a staged retreat. Like Sauruman, Denethor has become ensnared by a palantir, a seeing stone like the Orthanc Stone and, he too has lost the ability to see a future in which Gondor has not fallen and will not inevitably fall. Believing the breach of its last citadel is imminent, Denethor attempts to murder his last surviving heir in a murder-suicide self-immolation.

JRR Tolkien is a didactic, moralistic writer. And his point about hope is never far from the main text of his writing. But while Jackson faithfully reports our hero Gandalf’s description of his plan for vanquishing Sauron as “a fool’s hope,” it is as though he is unable to see where hope structures Tolkien’s narrative unless it is so-named.

From the dialogue taken from Tolkien’s original text and that added by Jackson and his team, it is clear that Jackson didn’t understand how the loss of hope could, in and of itself, transform a person from being a powerful force for good to one of evil.

It is my view that this is because Jackson and most of contemporary Anglo American society has completely lost track of what hope is and by losing track of the idea’s meaning, lost hope, itself.

Growing up in a black family, and a well-connected one at that, I had the good fortune to grow up around people like Leon Bibb who is pictured on the cover of a 1965 Life Magazine singing a duet of Joe Hill with Joan Baez at the Second March on Selma. I understood that I was part of a struggle that stretched centuries back into the past and in all likelihood would stretch centuries into the future. And I knew from stories of the antebellum period and the Fugitive Slave Law, of Jim Crow, legal segregation and disenfranchisement that the struggle included a lot of losing, often for generations on end.

Our sense of hope was not attached to what victories we might expect see in our lifetimes; it did not live in a probabilistic assessment of the chances of the Freedom Struggle in vanquishing racist policies and people. Hope is not for the times we can see a victory ahead. It is not for the times we can calculate our chance of success.

Hope is for the other times, the times when we cannot see any path to victory, the times when it seems that darkness has fallen around us, when our powers of reason can no longer, on their own, chart a path forward. It is an ember that keeps burning, when the fire has gone out.

Hope is not, as we define it today, a reasonable belief that the things we desire can be achieved by us; rather, it is the thing we use to keep fighting for or believing in those things when their future occurrence has ceased to be a reasonable belief.

When we give up hope, when we lose the ability to see good in our future, a very particular kind of evil enters us, an evil our society is losing the ability to describe and to recognize. As a result, we have lost our ability to challenge that evil.

In the original Two Towers, King Theoden is presented as a man, old and beaten before his time. Deeply bereft of his son, Theodred, he has closed and shuttered all the windows in his throne room and sits in darkness all day, grieving for the death of his son. His grief has caused him to collapse into despair and, as a consequence, he refuses to hear news of his kingdom and the larger war gathering around it because he believes no good news will come.

Because he has lost hope, he has ceased to believe that his actions and decisions can make any difference in the larger war and so he has ordered that his soldiers not leave the kingdom’s borders but stay in a grim defense, awaiting its ultimate end, knowing it to be inevitable. And his only trusted advisor is an enemy agent, Grima, because he consistently confirms Theoden’s hopeless worldview.

In Jackson’s reimagining, Theoden is controlled by Grima and his master Saruman by way of some kind of spell that changes the king’s behaviour and appearance, controlling his mind through magic. In the film version, Theoden is suddenly restored to youth and vigour because Gandalf dispels Saruman’s evil magic.

In the original telling, there is a magical duel but the moment of transformation is when Gandalf opens the window and lets the sun into the throne room. When Theoden sees the sun, the horses, the plains of his kingdom, he is able to rekindle his hope and summon the riders of Rohan, not because his perception of his chances has changed but because he has remembered how much there is to hope not about but for.

In the original story, Saruman assembles his own armies of orcs and savage men to join Sauron’s alliance because he has seen, via the palantir, that its victory is both inevitable and total. And so he attempts to persuade Gandalf to join with Sauron so that they might hollow out some portion of the future in which they can do some good within the evil empire, in which their subjects might appreciate being ruled with a lighter hand.

Because Saruman can no longer hope for the defeat of Sauron, he joins with him, not out of loyalty or submission but as an act of mitigation. By creating a more orderly, humane, intelligent tribe of orcs, by tactically seizing as much territory as he can before Sauron takes it in his own name, Saruman understands his acts of murder and war not as acts of evil, themselves, but as the mitigation of evil.

Because Saruman has lost hope, his metric for evil has changed. If a good outcome, i.e. the defeat of Sauron, is impossible, then one should not compare his burning of Fangorn Forest or his attack on Helm’s Deep to the actions of the forest’s and fortress’s defenders but rather to what Sauron would have done in his place.

Denethor, similarly in the thrall of the visions shown him by the palantir, is plagued by visions of his kingdom’s capital, Minas Tirith, being destroyed by fire. Believing that this destruction is inevitable, he loses hope for his kingdom. Although Denethor continues fighting every day for his kingdom and ordering his armies to engage in an endless series of sorties and strategic retreats, the despair in his heart causes him to cease fighting, to cease giving orders when the Enemy finally breaches the gates of Minas Tirith. Instead, he orders the construction of a great pyre at the centre of the city where he plans to allow himself and his son to burn to death—thereby controlling the only thing his despair permits him to control: the cause of the fire that destroys him. If he cannot vanquish Sauron, he will deprive him of the satisfaction of burning himself and his heir to death by doing this himself.

In Jackson’s narration, Theoden, Saruman and Denethor serve Sauron directly; they become his stooges, his agents, his flunkies. In the original story, none of these men likes, admires or serves Sauron. They do things that help him, not because they support him but because their loss of hope has so altered their horizon of expectation that they become agents for evil, in and of themselves, often engaging in depraved or violent acts motivated by hatred of Sauron, not allegiance to him.

Most of the evil I see around me is of this variety. Are John Horgan and Justin Trudeau furiously approving more and more fracking sites, oil wells, pipelines and fossil fuel subsidies because they want to incinerate the planet? No. They are just men who have lost hope that we can do any better. Or, to quote my old pal David Lewis, “they have lost the faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.”

Hope may be an intangible, almost mystical force but it is also an absolute bread-and-butter necessity for human survival. Hopeless people do not have to embrace evil in order to carry out monstrous acts; they just have to embrace despair.

That is what lurks at the centre of the Woke and alt-right movements: the loss of hope, the idea that the window for working together for a better world is closed and all that is left are recriminations, revenge and grandstanding.

But because we understand the politics of hope and despair so poorly, we knoiw little about keeping the ember of hope alive within ourselves. But we must get better, and soon. Because more than greed or cruelty, what powers the evil we face today is hopelessness. And more importantly, we need to grow more skilled at making sure others do not lose hope and in building aspects of our community that can make that ember burn brighter in others.

And I realize that I have, to an extent, fallen victim to this. I have not exactly lost hope but I have become so overwhelmed by the betrayals, the madness, the despair around me that I have not put forward a positive political alternative in a long time. So, in the next post, I will.

Four Things Justin Trudeau Won’t Do But Should to Support American Women’s Reproductive Rights

Looking at Canadian Twitter today, the day the US Supreme Court formally struck down Roe v. Wade, and, consequently, limitations on the power of state and federal governments to fine, incarcerate or kill women for ending their pregnancies, I see that we are awash in the subject on which I wrote my last post, post-politics.

Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, and Jean Charest, the former Québec premier and no-hoper candidate for Leader of the Opposition were quick to their keyboards this morning with condemnatory words for the US Supreme Court and its latest egregious decision. Normally, when Trudeau and other Canadian progressives try to piggyback US news stories, like mass shootings, by staking-out popular positions with watchers of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, I just sigh and put it down to the post-political era in which we live.

It’s not like there is anything Canadians can do about American mass shootings or Floridian children being prohibited from sitting on library drag queens’ laps during school hours, or whatever the issue of the moment is. Canadian politicians sound off and Canadians who have given up on politics but still like striking a certain pose on American issues cheer them on.

But this is not the case when it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s not a choice between Canadian opinion leaders either taking to Twitter to offer harsh words and witty banter to score meaningless points in progressive image curation or declining to do so. American women’s loss of their reproductive rights is actually something to which Canadian public policy not only can respond but to which we should respond.

When I first started listening to the news on a daily basis, I was about eleven years old and I listened to the big CBC Radio news programs that were produced at the zenith of state-sponsored Cold War liberal journalism. As It Happens, The World at Six and the extended 10:00pm news before Book Time were staples of my day. The struggle against Apartheid looms large in those memories of the mid-1980s, as does the terminal phase of the Cold War; rivaling that were the Liverpool Ferry stories.

Back in the mid-80s, Ireland was still a conservative theocratic state and the centrepiece of its claim to being a Catholic nation was its absolute zero tolerance for abortion. No matter how young a girl was, no matter who had inseminated her, no legal abortions were available in Ireland. While there were decent underground abortion doctors in Ireland, they faced stiff legal penalties if caught and were, consequently, hard to find, especially for young women who were not plugged into the underground feminist networks and trust-based referral chains that could connect them with reproductive healthcare.

Consequently, the most rational solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy was for young women to board the Dublin to Liverpool ferry and have English doctors terminate their pregnancies. Liverpool has long stood as a champion of human rights, all the way back to the eighteenth century when its courts began conferring legal personhood on escaped slaves from Virginia and Georgia. And, even during Thatcherite austerity, Liverpool doctors and hospitals stepped up to help these marginalized young women.

As a result, Ireland began prohibiting pregnant women from leaving the country until they had carried their foetus to term. Police began surveilling the Dublin ferry terminal, sometimes setting up checkpoints and they began greeting formerly pregnant young women returning from Liverpool by clapping them in irons.

Ever since I became transfixed by these stories of girls, some as young as I was back in the day, I have understood that abortion is, like so many other issues connected to women’s bodily autonomy, an international issue about which bordering countries absolutely do have a role to play.

Canadians have a choice today. We can either grandstand and virtue signal or our MPs can head into parliament and start passing laws that make the kind of material difference to American women that the judges and hospital workers of Liverpool made for Irish women in the 1980s.

First of all, we need to amend our refugee legislation. American women who are currently pregnant and wish to end their pregnancies and women who have terminated their pregnancies in defiance of state abortion bans should be accepted as refugees from sex-based discrimination and persecution. Will there be diplomatic consequences to reconfiguring our policies in a way that recognizes the existence of refugees from the USA? You bet. But apparently, we feel strongly about women’s rights; so maybe we should be willing to pay a price for trying to protect them.

Second, we can be the new Liverpool for women in border states like Idaho, where abortion is currently illegal and where the governor and GOP legislative majority are planning to append abortion to the murder statute, literally meaning that women who don’t have a good enough excuse for their miscarriage will end up on death row. Canada should be inviting American organizations that want to provide reproductive health services to set up in Canadian border cities. We should roll out the welcome mat.

Third, whether they are applying for refugee status or just staying for the day to get some outpatient medical treatment, we should be waving women of reproductive age across the border into Canada, including making ID requirement exceptions for women who have not been able to secure expedited passports.

Fourth, we should refuse to share information with federal and state American government agencies that attempt to prevent or track the migration of pregnant women with a view to stopping them getting reproductive healthcare outside their state of residence. Privacy rights are central to the abortion debate; after all, Roe v. Wade was not a court judgement about a medical procedure but about women’s right to privacy.

Canada could take some risks, show some courage and make a material difference in the lives of American women of childbearing age. And any MP from any party could introduce legislation to do what I have outlined tomorrow as a private members’ bill. We could be as courageous in our defense of reproductive choice as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-1980s. But I’m not going to be holding my breath.

#LandBack, #DefundThePolice and the Hashtag Politics That Have Revealed Progressives As the True Conservatives: A Jeremiad for National Indigenous Peoples Day

This is the first of three posts that will bring together the two prior series and culminate in something I have not put forward in over two years: a positive idea about where Canadians might direct their energies to create a society with the resilience to save what we can and share the losses equitably as we face the Extinction Event. Two of these posts are dedicated to specific conversations I had in 2021 that challenged me and reshaped my thinking in productive ways. The final post in the series will be dedicated to Quaker writer Arwen Brenneman who asked me to write something in this blog that was not merely critical but aspired to a practical action or goal. This one I dedicate to Zionist geneticist Jonathan Sheps who helped to realign my understanding of what radical politics is and is not.

BDS and the Rise of Hashtag Post-Politics

I am a socialist who opposes the current practices of the Israeli state and finds the continuous acts of dispossession, disenfranchisement and punitive expeditions into the West Bank and Gaza strip unconscionable, and Israel’s participation in the wider Middle Eastern practice of using non-citizen residents as right-less labour deeply disappointing. But I have struggled to support the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) movement, not just because, as a university instructor, its demands were uncomfortably close to putting a “No Jews” sign outside my classroom. There was something more on which I could not put my finger.

And Jonathan explained it. By appending “right of return” and other demands it would be impossible to meet to its list of reasonable demands, BDS had rendered its program not radical but instead functionally impossible. There is simply no way to get to the spatial and demographic order of the Palestinian mandate in 1948 from our present location in space-time. There is no remotely humane way to reverse all of the shifts not just in who lives where but how land is used, how land is legally held, how local hydrology and physical infrastructure have radically shifted, etc. There is no way to undo three quarters of a century of intermarriage, shifting political views and shifting economic aspirations.

By staking out, not a radical solution, like the idea of a multi-confessional, multi-ethnic unitary state of Israel-Palestine that Meretz, the coalition of Arabs and Jews, greens, socialists and the original kibbutzim movement that sits in the Knesset is beginning to articulate, but an impossible one, BDS actually confers a kind of permission on the Israeli government to continue its oppression of the Palestinian people. Because it refuses to advocate something that could actually happen.

BDS, which began as a campus campaign, was one of those political movements that functioned as a vanguard for many upsetting new political developments that are often grouped under the broad category of “wokeness.” Incubating in elite liberal arts colleges in the US and then diffusing out through the larger university system, a new kind of politics emerged, a post-political politics.

Post-political movements are, in my view, fundamentally grounded in despair. They are founded in an assumption that we, as a society, have lost the ability to come together, agree on a program for improving our collective lot and using democratic power to challenge the powerful interests standing in the way of those aspirations. Having given up on the idea of actually doing politics, post-political movements have two main foci: (a) punishing malefactors (bad people and bad institutions) and (b) describing an aspirational political order that, while appealing, cannot be reached from where we are currently located in the space-time continuum.

The Neo-McCarthyism or “cancel culture” of Wokeness is how the first is manifest. Demanding that the “right of return” whereby everyone descended from an Arab lineage pushed off their land in Israel-Palestine since 1948 be permitted to return and seize the property from its present occupant and that those occupants then relocate to wherever their ancestors were in 1948 is not just the worst game of musical chairs ever imagined; it is neither possible nor desirable. It represents not so much justice as it does an additional layer of somehow compensatory injustice in the spirit of Monty Python’s Dennis Moore.

The essential conservatism of BDS’s agenda is that while it advocates causing harm to those it blames for the Israeli occupation, it defends the status quo by arguing, via the impossibility of its demands, that there is no alternative. While BDS formed the vanguard of this kind of post-politics (as distinct from genuinely radical politics, like, for instance, declaring the Jubilee), its innovations have helped to deform popular movements into a post-political form.

Take, for instance, #MeToo. First of all, it is no coincidence that the movements I will be offering as examples henceforth will begin with hashtags. Remember folks: social media platforms are the tools of billionaires who wish to promote post-political behaviour, not just because actual politics would threaten their power but because their social media platforms are where most of post-politics takes place.

#MeToo entailed thousands of women singling-out men who had been sexually violent or abusive with them and calling them out in the public square, attempting to inflict reputational punishment on them. But when Mia Kirschner attempted to intervene in this debate by talking about the structural, institutional and procedural changes that could protect women from sexual and gender-based violence in the workplace, no one took much notice.

Kirschner, by seeking practical reforms, like contractual stipulations and changes in the law to prohibit the kinds of behaviours in which monsters like Harvey Weinstein habitually engaged, placed herself and her ideas outside the discourse of #MeToo. That is because #MeToo was post-political; no one really held out hope that we could change our culture, laws and institutions to prevent a future Weinstein, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen from abusing his power. So instead, we settled for doing patriarchy’s housecleaning for it, clearing out the men who had lost the continence necessary to keep their abuses sufficiently private and replacing them with more continent men, at least for now.

When people defend the #DefundThePolice movement to me, the conversation always starts off funny. Almost inevitably, one of the first things its defenders say is “of course, we don’t really want to defund the police. It’s really irresponsible of the media to portray us as people who want to completely defund law enforcement.” I feel like I have already made my point but I will continue. Obviously, if you do not want the police defunded, you probably should not call your movement “Defund the Police.” Except the movement only sort of made that decision, it was mostly made by Twitter moderators paid to do the bidding of the investor class.

But, these valiant defenders aside, many people like Kwantlen University Criminology Professor Jeff Shantz do argue that we should simply stop paying the police and allow volunteers to take over. But does anyone really think that is possible or desirable? There are many organizations, including a number of local motorcycle clubs who would love to take over that file. In fact, there are so many groups of young men with guns that would like to take this job on as volunteers that the state’s monopoly on violence would soon be a thing of the past and groups of “volunteers” would “compete” in a free and open marketplace for control of our streets.

Surely, nobody wants that. Nobody really wants to relinquish the small amount of public control we have over the cops because they need us to write their paycheques, surely. What we want are radical reforms to law enforcement with respect to training, promotion, recruitment and command structures; we want a broader, shared, interdisciplinary, cooperative first responder approach with firefighters, child protection workers, etc. What is needed is a way to arrest and begin to reverse Anglo America’s police forces incremental transformation into fascist paramilitaries indifferent to our democratic institutions.

But because defunding the police is the most effective way to most dramatically intensify and accelerate that process, everyone can rest assured that it will not happen, that even the most fascistic among us do not want to go that far that fast. And, as a result, demands for reform, even minor reform are effectively shouted down by a demand for that which is either impossible or undesirable.

The Rise of the #LandBack Hashtag and the Racism That Lurks Behind It

Much like the Monty Python debate between the Minister for Home Affairs and A Small Patch of Brown Liquid (probably a creosote derivative used in industrial varnishing), Justin Trudeau seems bewilderingly proud of his record on Indigenous issues, having promised to provide potable water to every reserve that lacked it back in 2015. As we approach the one-year anniversary of his third election victory, seven years later, his government has fixed the toxic water systems of exactly zero reserves. Nothing has been done. Not only has nothing been done; work has not even started.

Following multiple multi-million-dollar commissions and inquiries by the federal and provincial governments across Canada into murdered and missing Indigenous women over the past twenty years, rates of murder, rape and disappearance continue to increase. And following the key recommendations of every one of these commissions, not to mention the scholarly consensus in the field i.e. cheaper, more available interurban transportation and the elimination of fly-in worker “man camps,” we have systematically cut interurban transit and increased the number of man camps across Western Canada.

We have also invested in a special unit of RCMP officers who are deployed to deal with uppity Natives who seek to protect their land from non-consensual development. These officers have shown, time and again, a willingness to run roughshod over civil liberties, to gratuitously and punitively destroy Indigenous people’s property, sabotage trap lines, illegally hold journalists without bail and treat peaceful protesters with brutality.

It is into this maelstrom of colonial racism that #LandBack has appeared as a hashtag, a kind of BDS on steroids. The idea is that we should return land ownership to the Indigenous people whose ancestors held it before the arrival of colonists. Such an idea is both impossible and undesirable.

Does anyone really believe that 2% of Canadians should own all the land inhabited by the other 98%, that the 320 members of the Semiahmoo Nation should own all the land and make all the land use decisions for the 100,000 people living in White Rock and South Surrey? Does anyone believe that, for instance, Afro-Nova Scotians should lose all their land to the Mi’kmaq people because they lack the requisite seniority to own land in Nova Scotia? What about the Doukhobors and Jews who fled persecution and pogroms of Tsarist Russia? Or Punjabi refugees who fled Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s extralegal killings of those who desired a Sikh homeland? Or just regular working white folks who have saved, possibly across generations, to hold a single piece of land to provide some small modicum of physical and financial security against the troubles to come?

Also, let us remember that the way Indigenous people held land varied from place to place and time to time. On BC’s coast, society was highly vertical; land tenure was not equally shared within most polities; aristocrats held the land on behalf of commoners and slaves had no land rights at all. In many of these societies, there was extensive, programmatic body modification, often from birth, so that aristocrats, commoners and slaves could be recognized easily.

And because all other institutions in settler society have abdicated to the courts the entire settler burden of dealing with the land question, this has necessitated Indigenous people presenting themselves in ways that will be viewed most favourably by the court system. As a result, it has become a material necessity to maintain or, even, to reconstruct these systems of aristocratic status in order to obtain whatever limited land justice our judicial system sees fit to dispense.

It beggars belief that so many socialists choose to align themselves not with the egalitarians and levelers in Indigenous communities but instead with the neo-traditionalists and aristocrats whom our courts compel to continue putting on this show. Such alliances make sense to me as an environmentalist but the there is nothing socialistic to be found there.

But last summer we saw something lurking under the #LandBack hashtag that goes beyond the conservatism of simple post-politics and demands for the impossible. Lurking underneath is a real rage, a real hatred on the part of Wokes for Indigenous people who refuse to put on the neo-traditionalist show, people who have decided that Christianity or mathematical excellence or a love of motorized outdoor recreation, trucks and guns is part of their Indigeneity.

Because the reaction to the most recent rediscovery of the residential school graveyards was a wave of successful and attempted church arsons specifically directed at churches attended by Indigenous people today. It is here that we see the essential conservatism of Woke hashtag politics intensifying into a kind of Bizarro fascism. The message was clear to people like my friend Nathan, who spent nights last summer sleeping in the church he loves, guarding it from white settler arsonists, just as his Assiniboine ancestors had once guarded their homes in the Red River colony a century and a half before. The message is this: if you do not want to be an exhibit in our white guilt settler museum, you will be destroyed by fire.

The parasites who cheered those arsonists on with their #LandBack rhetoric have no real material interest in living together with Indigenous people or co-governing our country with them. Because they trade on a false otherness they assign to Indigenous people. Their tirades against “cultural appropriation” are actually insulation against themselves and others using their imaginative empathy to place themselves in the shoes of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

They are leeches who need to keep open and bleeding the wounds of Indigenous Canada so that they can suck the blood of Indigenous people into their diversity and inclusion businesses, their endless government commissions, their “land acknowledgements” performed by white people for white people, all the while demonstrating their whiteness, the true basis of their entitlement to authority. Because to attain truly Anglo Canadian whiteness, you must wash your skin clean with those performative settler tears. And those tears will come less readily if we stop giving the children of Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning.

Rex Murphy Sings “Country Roads”: The West’s Brezhnev Era and Fossil Fuel Masculinity, Part VII of My Thoughts on the Trucker Convoy

From 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union from the zenith of its power and dynamism into its terminal phase, a tailspin so complete that none of his successors could extricate it. The Institute from Gremlins II studies, brilliantly characterizes public discourse in the USSR during those decades, “There are many eerie similarities between that time and our own – the government was largely run by a cadre of septuagenarians, wages had stagnated, yet all official narratives insisted that there was no alternative.  The horizon of possible futures was closed.”

During this time period, the USSR became increasingly dependent on petroleum exports for its economic viability. Although outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the USSR, like Canada (another non-member oil exporter of the 60s and 70s) benefited from the upward pressure on global oil prices that OPEC was causing through production cut agreements and other joint efforts to affect the pricing mechanism.

Over the course of Brezhnev’s time in office, the USSR became increasingly affected by the “resource curse” or “Dutch disease,” whereby the foreign currency garnered through oil sales functioned to de-industrialize the country. Wages remained stagnant while the country de-industrialized, meaning that there were fewer and fewer things to buy in Soviet stores as local secondary and tertiary manufacturing declined and global inflation and the Nixon shock currency reforms placed possible imports out of reach.

In other words, during the first half of the 1970s, the G6’s modifications to the world currency and trading systems did not merely lead to the ultimate demise of OPEC as an effective challenge to its hegemony; it sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin not unlike that suffered by OPEC member states. This was, politically, a wild and crazy time, when the state and its commissars still had money to burn but the populace lacked both the spending power and the access to non-essential finished products.

It was clear to the gerontocracy running the Soviet Communist Party that declining living standards, coupled with Brezhnev’s increasing infiltration and repression of Soviet civil society was making the regime unpopular. Action had to be taken. And this action was to make more steel. The USSR had already been producing more steel than any country on earth under Nikita Kruschev, Brezhnev’s predecessor. But under Brezhnev, the USSR went from producing roughly the same amount of steel per year as the US to more than 50% more annually. Soviet steel production went from 100 million metric tons annually to 150 million, even as the secondary and tertiary industries using steel shrank.

With local manufacturing in decline, much of that steel was never used. In some extreme cases, in the Soviet Far East, no real plan was made for it to be used following its manufacture, given the overproduction of steel in and west of the Ural Mountains, where Soviet secondary industry was based.

The effect was that, as Russia laid off industrial workers making finished consumer and industrial goods, it hired more steel workers. And this is precisely what the Brezhnev regime wanted. They believed that more effective than creating a personality cult around the Great Leader, the most effective way to save the Soviet Union was to manufacture the most important industrial good of all: Communists.

The Soviet Union had long held that not all industrial employment was equal and, despite the USSR having a far better record on the wage gap and reducing date rape and domestic violence than its competitors in the West, the best industrial work was the most manly. Since the days of Lenin, industrial, collectivized farming had been considered the least manly and least valuable form of industrial work, whereas nothing could be more manly that making steel, with all those big cauldrons, all that fire, and the roaring noise of the mill.

While the proletariat might be manufactured by any sort of coal-fired industry, from biscuits on up, the steel mill was where the workers most likely to be eligible for party membership (the 1% elite of Soviet society) were, quite literally, forged.

The thinking was that, while times might be hard, Russia, and the other nations under the banner of the USSR, would ultimately triumph as long as society contained enough loyal communists. And the single most efficient way to make them, more efficient and trustworthy than any propaganda campaign or personality cult, was as a by-product of steel manufacture. Except that even this interpretation ultimately came to be reversed: steel ingots became a by-product of manufacturing communists.

Following the Tiananmen Square and other coordinated mass mobilizations of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party adopted and, under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, intensified their commitment to this doctrine following the death of Deng Xiaoping. Despite being an importer of metallurgical coal, in the twenty-first century, China began to follow the Soviet approach to the steel industry. Hu and Xi shielded steelworkers from the stripping of industrial worker protections and wage guarantees that took place in other sectors, for as long as they could, and walked back some of these measures following major steelworker protests in the late 2010s.

The lack of repression, violence or even significant defamation of the steelworkers is just further evidence that China has bought its own propaganda, that the Central Committee, despite all its corruption and implication in the most retrograde forms of casino capitalism, has come to believe that the mills do manufacture communists and that, unlike other workers, these ones should be listened-to.

This kind of thinking arrived in Canada and the United States seemingly out of nowhere in the mid-2010s but it arrived with great force and for a different political purpose, as a tool of the fossil fuel industry.

What else can we make of Rex Murphy’s columns for the National Post about the extraordinary civic virtue of the people of Fort MacMurray and Lloydminster? The oil towns of Western Canada are not merely, for Murphy, rural communities meriting preservation; they are the Canadian Idyll. Only in Fort Mac, Murphy claims, can one see the kind of idyllic family life we associate with the Eisenhower Era, with its engaged parents enthusiastically driving their kids to hockey and playing catch with them on the weekend.

John Diefenbaker’s family-centred, civic-minded, law-abiding, respectful Canada does still exist, Murphy tells us, but only in towns shaped by the fossil fuel industry. Murphy and his ilk, because there is a whole faux journalistic genre dedicated to this kind of writing, are essentially making the same class of argument as Leonid Brezhnev and Xi Jinping: diluted bitumen and “natural gas” are mere by-products of manufacturing patriotic, virtuous Canadians.

It is the same rhetoric that Donald Trump used so effectively in West Virginia: coal is a by-product created in the manufacture of real, true, patriotic Americans.

And for a city like Fort MacMurray, the task of depicting it as the epitome of civic virtue and the last bastion of the single-income male-headed nuclear family is enabled by the city being one of an increasing number of communities I term “Jeckyllvilles” i.e. places where the patriarchal family unit is sustained by a man who lives far away from where he works, a violent, hypermasculine, encampment with a “stays in Vegas” ethos of stimulant use, violence and problematic behaviour absorbed by a typically Indigenous, isolated population. Many men in Fort MacMurray and towns of its ilk, the world over, find it easier to embody the mid-century self-controlled softball coach masculine ideal two weeks per month precisely because they live in bizarre remote atavistic compounds that vent their violence onto local on-reserve Indigenous populations the other half of the time.

I do not believe this nationalist rhetoric would have been so successful had it not been situated within a pre-existing struggle of competing nationalisms, if it did not locate and speak directly to captured nations within the US and Canada. The genius of the fossil fuel industry was in locating and patronizing the heirs to that “migrant worker culture” of the 1920s, the Métis and Métis-influenced peoples of Anglo America and dealing itself into and concurrently energizing a pre-existing socio-cultural framework.

The independent spirit of the Hillbillies of Appalachia, of the white trash of the Mississippi Delta, of the Northwest Rebellions—they are still there. But they are being distorted, changed by the energy source that is fueling their re-creation. By latching onto regional identities and grievances, the fossil fuel industry is attempting to construct a bulwark of loyal communities and workers. And it is then able to empower those communities to articulate an alternative nationalism that appeals not just in their core territory but across the country.

Having largely lost the hearts and minds of urbanites and progressives, the fossil fuel industry, especially its smaller firms, are investing in creating regional demographic bulwarks that will make it hard to assail their power, especially under the first-past-the-post electoral system of the US and Canada. And they have been highly strategic in find those that articulate an alternative national vision, not just a parochial, independence-focused one.

The adverse effects of this partnership are already evident. The practice of “rolling coal” is just one of a set of practices we associate with “petro-masculinity,” an effort to replace the ethos of frugality and conservation historically associated with these cultures with a politics of waste, of showing status through one’s personal abundance in resource that animates the region. With the combination of fracking and deferred cleanup, these shows of abundance are all the more necessary as soil contamination, deforestation and the corruption of water systems are destroying the sense of abundance that used to be associated with the hunting and harvest seasons of autumn.

Similarly, to the South the primaries in West Virginia have become a contest between the dream that no one’s kids would ever have to go down a mine because the mines would be closed, represented by Bernie Sanders and Paula Jean Swearingen, and Donald Trump’s promise to put more people down the mine than ever before. For the first time in more than a century, most West Virginian fathers see their son following them down the mine as a social good and not an evil to be averted.

The fossil fuel industry is not stupid. It has made an alliance with an interconnected set of cultures and peoples around Anglo America and is embedding itself in those cultures more thoroughly by the year. And urbanites and progressives and everyone else who mobilizes the “deplorables” discourse in writing off and stigmatizing the peoples it has chosen to patronize are doing its work for free. It wants them to know that they have only one powerful friend: the fossil fuel industry and that their alternative vision of mixed-race peoples co-governing the great nations of Anglo America rises or falls by oil and coal.

Louis Riel, in his final years, described himself as David to the Métis’ Judea. And today, the fossil fuel industry has decided to be Cyrus: the foreign tyrant who delivers a captive nation from suffering and persecution.

Was the Freedom Convoy the Start of the Third Northwest Rebellion? Part VI of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

This winter, as the Ottawa occupation wore on, many comrades of mine focused on the ways in which the participants in Canada’s Freedom Convoy were, in every way, handled differently than participants in protests I have much more actively supported, like the Shut Down Canada campaign in support of the Wet’suwet’en’s efforts to stop Royal Dutch Shell’s pipeline to Kitimat.

My friends on the Left very legitimately pointed out that, until the federal government proclaimed emergency powers legislation, the disorderly extended tailgate party the truckers and their supporters staged received an anemic response from law enforcement.

Not only was there no real attempt to fine, tow or arrest truckers for violating federal, provincial or municipal ordinances already on the books dealing with road blockages and illegal camping and parking but the normal tool for dealing with protesters on the left, the court injunction, was never utilized. Normally, logging and pipeline protests are shut down through the abuse of court orders, where the government backs a corporation in seeking a court order to prohibit “John Doe, Jane Doe and Persons Unknown” from doing something that hinders business or mobility.

These court orders are ubiquitous if you are a left-wing protester and have, if you are Indigenous, come packaged with escalating levels of police brutality and extra-legal property destruction. Furthermore, breaching a court order has no maximum sentence; technically, the courts can sentence you to death still, because the courts have ruled that parliament cannot abridge their sentencing power for the defiance of their orders.

This appears to have been driven by the social and class adjacency of the police to the truckers and a sense of identification police rarely if ever experience with Indigenous neo-traditionalists and environmentalists.

Consequently, progressives were absolutely correct in stating that, when it came to law enforcement, the protesters were treated with kid gloves.

But Canada’s political class and media elite are in no way trucker-adjacent and so, there was a way in which the protest was also treated with a severity with few precedents in spheres other than law enforcement, some of which I have already written on at length, and some of which I will recap here.

First, it must be understood that organized convoys comprising a mix of big rigs and pickup trucks incrementally forming up along a set of predetermined routes through a series of industrial towns in rural areas were already a phenomenon in Western Canada before 2022 began. These convoys, which began regularly converging on Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton and Calgary in the late 2010s were political in the sense that they were animated by a set of grievances organized around the participants’ identities as politically conservative rural industrial workers. The trucks and their occupants often had signage denouncing NDP politicians, carbon taxes, and similar fare, with mask mandates and vaccine passports added to the mix as the convoys entered the 20s.

The fact that the protests were more about saying “we are here. We demand to be recognized as an important constituency of people,” than about protesting a single issue was one of the excuses news media used to engage in what amounted to an organized blackout of these protests. When the protests were covered, they were more likely to show up in traffic reports rather than news reports. But I view it as real journalistic malpractice that protests comprising hundreds, sometimes thousands of vehicles and persons were essentially ignored, based on the flimsy excuse that they lacked coherent demands. Indeed, the absence of clear demands should have made these all the more worthy of investigation.

While this kind of “we are here and feel unheard,” convoy has not traditionally been a common kind of protest in Canadian history, it has a long and noble tradition south of the Rio Grande. Since the 1830s, groups of Indigenous and mestizo (the equivalent of Métis) in the Hispanic world have periodically converged on capitals in large numbers carrying the tools of their trade, often machetes and hoes rather than big rigs, pickup trucks and rifles, and simply occupy Guatemala City or Mexico City with many interconnected grievances but no clear demands. And then, after a time, heading home, satisfied or not, leaving a bunch of property damage in their wake.

Western Canada’s de facto media blackout of these mass mobilizations with unclear, organic and evolving systems of leadership made it easier for national media to characterize the “freedom convoy” as both unprecedented and impossible to understand.

This kind of tabula rasa gave the establishment legacy media greater scope to cast the protest in a negative light by attributing to the main body of protesters whatever the most absurd, extreme or unflattering view was that they could find. This was especially odious when a small minority of protesters arrived with Confederate flags and were told by the majority to either ditch the flags or go home. When this organic, democratic pressure succeeded, no mention was made of the sudden and equally rapid disappearance of Confederate flags from the protest. Instead of telling a story of the democratic, anti-racist spirit of the mobilization, media simply continued to show images of the flags and claim that it was all but the official flag of the protest.

The swastika, similarly, had faced immediate, grassroots organic resistance from most protesters, when it appeared on poorly drawn protest art placing it next to upside-down maple leafs with words suggesting that Canada had been taken over by Nazis. Instead of suggesting that this was an unsophisticated and extreme comparison, news media chose to offer their own exegesis of the protest signs claiming that the protesters were anti-Canada and pro-Nazi. Following this smear, grassroots participants worked effectively to get these signs to disappear too; but the media kept showing old footage.

As with any mass mobilization, like the Occupy movement of the late 00s, no matter who calls together a large group of unaffiliated activists and suddenly mobilized regular folks, the question of who the leadership is grows unclear over time. Again, news media were relentlessly agenda-driven in platforming the most extreme, the most unhinged, the most incoherent people who claimed the mantle of leadership as the occupation dragged on.

Instead of seeking out the most articulate people with the best arguments, as media sometimes do for environmental or Indigenous sovereignty protests, establishment media did the opposite here, trolling for “free men on the land” with whom to conduct interviews.

When protesters were falsely associated with local people unrelated to the protest attempting to burn down a local apartment building, media were quick to circulate unconfirmed suspicions and most did not correct these smears when municipal police and fire officials conclusively pronounced that the attempted arson was unrelated to the protest.

And then there was the debate around the Emergencies Act. While the government could perfectly easily have used the laws already on the books prohibiting illegal parking, blocking public roads, illegal camping and the like, they chose not to. They similarly eschewed their normal tactic of assisting private businesses, like the one that owns and runs the Ambassador Bridge, which was blocked later in the protest, with obtaining court injunctions. Instead, the government waited for the saner, more employable members of the protest to begin heading home before announcing that it required emergency powers.

No media or government rhetoric against pipeline or logging protesters that I can recall ever labeled my comrades and me as “traitors,” suggested we were “committing treason.” While we have also been called “terrorists” by government and media, that is typically for acts of sabotage and not for simply being physically present at the wrong place and time. Many in government and the Fourth Estate began comparing the protest to the January 6th, 2021 violent coup attempt in the United States and reasoned that because some protesters had called for the Governor General to fire the government if it would not resign that, by dint of saying the elected government was illegitimate, they were, simply by calling for its removal, committing an act of treason and perhaps deserved life imprisonment for doing so.

I have been part of a number of organizations that have called for the government to resign and for the Governor-General to step in and form a new one if it would not. In fact, I recall being part of a large crowd in Nathan Philips Square in Toronto in 2008 that listened to Stephane Dion who proposed to lead such an alternative government. I do not recall any news media or government MPs accusing our organic mass-mobilizations during the Prorogation Crisis of being seditious mobs suborning treason.

But, for me, the most disquieting aspect of the coverage was the use of the terms “invade” and “invader.” The truckers had “invaded” Ottawa and would not leave. It was therefore necessary to respond with emergency war powers. While there was also a set of complaints about “foreign money,” being donated to the convoy, the “invasion” rhetoric was weirdly unconnected to this.  

And there was one final major grievance against the convoy that I found especially disquieting: the anger that its members were proudly flying Canadian flags. Rather than seeing the proud and prominent display of the Maple Leaf as a sign of the truckers’ patriotism or loyalty, media began to suggest that the convoy had irreparably tainted the flag and had done something underhanded by appropriating it.

Citizens of a country had exercised their constitutional mobility rights to visit their own capital and had, upon arrival, flown their own flag. This, in the minds of the establishment and its friends in the media constituted “terrorism,” an “invasion,” “sedition,” “treason!”

Over the decades, my environmentalist and Indigenous neo-traditionalist comrades and I have been subject to a lot of media attacks and unfair coverage but nothing like this. But I nevertheless began to feel like I had heard this kind of language, this shape of discourse before. And then I put my finger on it: it was the language of the Anglo establishment press and politicians had used against Louis Riel and the Métis during the Manitoba Crisis and the Northwest Rebellion.

Riel, as rehearsed earlier in this series, was no Joseph Brant. He and his followers did not seek to create a separate, independent state, equal to Canada under the Crown. Their objectives were larger: they demanded co-ownership of the Canadian project. They did not seek treaty rights as Indigenous people but rather the co-equal control of Canada’s land tenure and ownership system, as Christians, as Catholics, and, most troublingly as Canadians.

Canadians progressives and their allies in the Laurentian elite have long been captured by a theory of diversity I have characterized as “neo-Ottomanism,” expressed in British imperial terms in the nineteenth century as “a place for everyone and everyone in [their] place.” Their vision of diversity is one of carefully policed cultural boundaries separating self-governing, racially transparent, culturally distinct communities, a vision that situates Indigenous people outside the Canadian project and non-status and non-neotraditionalist (i.e. the Christian majority) Indigenous and Métis people outside Indigeneity.

As with the Northwest Rebellions of the nineteenth century, many of those who participated in the convoy were not Indigenous by blood but were, instead, part of a larger Métis-influenced regional culture, similar to that of Alaska, West Virginia and the national US “migrant worker” culture of the 1920s. And like those rebellions, the convoy lacked coherent, stable demands because its central message was simple, “we co-own the Canadian project.” Canadian progressives and the Laurentian elite are rhetorically supportive of “self-government” projects, in part because they undermine Louis Riel-style politics.

What did not just offend but what threatened Canada’s political class more deeply about the protest than anything was its lack of “racial transparency” and its participants’ insistence that the Maple Leaf and the national project it represents belonged as much to each of them as it does to Justin Trudeau and his ilk.

What freaked out this nation’s elite was being faced with an emergent sectional nationalist movement, from Terrace to Timmins, that paired the power of the Maple Leaf with the power of the pan-Indigenous medicine wheel in its iconography. Such a movement, should it fully awaken and coalesce, should it become fully self-conscious, could offer the most serious challenge to the increasingly white guilt-centred, tone-deaf, histrionic ancestor-blaming nationalism being hawked by the likes of Trudeau. And that is why its participants had to be tarred as racists, Nazis, traitors and terrorists, not because of their demands but because of the nascent possibility of a different vision of Canada that they represent.

For those of you who think that I am romanticizing the incoherent mob that arrived in the nation’s capital and didn’t clean up after itself very well, I ask you to suspend judgement until you read the next part of my analysis. Because the forces that are reawakening the spirit of the Northwest Rebellion are anything but benign. The ghost of Louis Riel is driving the biggest rig at the head of the convoy, with a medicine wheel painted on one side and a maple leaf on the other but someone else entirely has pumped the gas into its tank.

Reaction Formation and Climate Denial: Why Wildfire Season Will Produce More Denialists If We Don’t Change Course

Ever since climate activists adopted the “no debate” policy with respect to climate denialists, and since the rise of the modern far-right, we have seen an ongoing decline in Canadians’ belief that anthropogenic climate change is real. Since around 2010, the number of Canadians who actively disbelieve that our climate is changing due to human activity has climbed to between 25% and 30% of Canadians today, trending upwards with other, adjacent beliefs, like Young Earth creationism.

But these increases have not been even or steady. The biggest jumps have been associated with developments like the “heat dome” that killed hundreds of British Columbians with extreme heat last year, the increasingly out-of-control wildfire seasons and, relatedly, the destruction of towns like Lytton and near-destruction of communities like Fort McMurray.

Similarly, increases in climate skepticism has not merely increased in reaction to extreme weather episodes; its increase has also been uneven geographically. Increased denialism is something we see as concentrated in the resource extraction periphery of the rural West, in a strip from Timmins to Terrace, taking in Lloydminster, Fort McMurray, Fort St. John and the other hubs of extractive activity.

Some might argue that as Canada increasingly realigns its cultural and politics to resemble that of the US, this is only to be expected as rural Westerners are swept up in the anti-intellectualism of the American Right. Others might argue that the region’s economic dependence on the fossil fuel industry for the government subsidies it can command is all that is driving this.

But I want to suggest that these things are as much effects as causes and that the primary cause is a problem far more daunting than the Americanization of Canadian culture or the continued swagger of Big Oil in America’s crankiest vassal state:

Climate denial increases when people are directly presented with evidence of the Greenhouse Effect, of the climate crisis, when it incinerates their home or that of their neighbours, when it incinerates the trees on which they were depending for work, when unexpected late and early frosts destroy the crops on which one depends. It also appears to increase when an environmental comorbidity becomes too palpable, too apparent, like the lack of mosquito bites on one’s arm or the lack of dead bugs on one’s windshield, the eerie silence of a bird-less forest. The people experiencing these things most directly are concentrated in the region where climate denial is greatest.

In cities where people spend their days in climate-controlled spaces, where the birds and insects were already mostly gone, where gardening is a bourgeois pastime that exists primarily to demonstrate control of scarce land, not provide food, where only the smoke arrives from the wildfires because the region is already so heavily defoliated, climate skepticism is actually less.

In other words, the relationship between firsthand evidence and belief is the opposite of what one would assume.

This news is especially troubling because the environmental movement has always subconsciously relied on the climate event doing most of the work of mobilizing people to stop it, the way Marxists used to assume that the ever-increasing alienation produced by capitalism would do most of the work of mobilizing revolutionaries. But contrary to David Suzuki’s predictions in 1990, the approach of the climate event is increasing disbelief.

Yet, strangely, climate activists are not merely unprepared for this reality; they are non-responsive to it. Because the movement embraced an “awareness” versus “conversion” approach to persuading the public, one so obtusely unwilling to consider how people narrate changes in their lives, it is especially unprepared and ill-suited to pivoting on this basis. But there are other reasons: most climate activists are especially likely to succumb to the psychological phenomenon we are witnessing, but in different areas of their lives, affecting different aspects of their political beliefs.

The phenomenon we are witnessing is called “reaction formation.” It is a well-documented psychological response to manage protracted feelings causing discomfort, usually in the form of fear. For instance, a fear of death may manifest as a vehement assertion of the existence and importance of an afterlife. The intensity of a person’s professed conviction is not powered by belief in that conviction but rather, by its opposite. In other words, the more a person fears death, and the closer they come to that death, the more vehemently they will propound their belief in the afterlife, because the main person they are trying to convince is themselves, as a means of controlling their feelings of fear.

Whereas fear of death has powered Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, fear of the climate crisis has powered “climate fundamentalism.”

I want to suggest that one of the reasons the adoption of the package of beliefs that are included in conservative American thought is so popular in Canada’s northwest is because evidence of climate change is more immediate and frightening. The chance that your home will be destroyed in a wildfire, the chances that your job will be destroyed by extreme weather events, the chance that you will become geographically isolated by a flash flood, the chance that your food security is on the line as frosts and hails become more frequent and unpredictable—these things engender a kind of fear nobody in Toronto or Vancouver is going to experience, because our physical safety is more mediated by capitalism and the urban built environment.

This is yet another reason that 1980s climate activist David Lewis (the firewood collector and giant, not the former NDP leader) was so far ahead of his time. He felt that the most important message the climate activist movement could deliver to people was that losses were inevitable but we would “share the losses” equitably and not leave communities behind.

But instead, we have chosen to adopt the Hillary Clinton move and decide that the people living in our rural periphery are “deplorables,” something that came into sharp relief during the trucker “freedom convoy,” in which Canadian citizens were referred to as “invaders” of their own country and smeared repeatedly based on falsehoods or massive exaggerations.

The more we let our rural brothers and sisters know that we do not see them as full citizens of their own country, the more we will intensify the reaction formation that extreme weather events are already causing and the more climate denial we will breed. This is something we cannot afford to do at this time. If our political system were not completely captured, Greens or New Democrats would be touring rural areas offering government insurance against climate events, talking not about the “transition” of rural communities but the preservation of rural life in Canada. But instead, the plan is to call frightened people cruel names and condemn them as non-citizen interlopers when they try to express their anxiety to us.

We must share the losses and we must develop a concrete plan for sharing those losses, not aspirational debt-leveraged nonsense like the LEAP Manifesto, claiming there will be no losses and everyone will get richer. The rural working class know what that’s code for: them getting screwed again. We must do this and do it soon or fear will grow in the communities that are being hardest-hit by the Greenhouse Effect and that fear will intensify climate denial.

What the Left Should Learn from the overturning of Roe v. Wade

It finally happened. Roe vs. Wade, one of the greatest pieces of liberal judicial activism of the twentieth century was struck down. For me, my comrades and millions of American women of childbearing age this is a tragic moment, another huge piece of the Cold War social democratic welfare state’s social contract sheared-off.

But this defeat was especially searing because, unlike P3s, a US-led global order, free trade, austerity and privatization, this was not a wind-assisted victory of an elite consensus. Because that is how people of the political left see those other losses: the establishment endorsed these things; they heavily bankrolled or Astro-turfed smaller or non-existent social movement groups to echo that consensus; they got pretty much all mainstream political parties, major corporations and the liberal media to present these things as not just beneficial but inevitable. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher said.

This win is different because the establishment was on our side and was, for the most part, against the movement that just won. While anti-abortion activists enjoy the support of some major corporations in America, they are not the majority; and while they enjoy the support of one of America’s major political parties, that support is not unanimous across jurisdictions. America’s extreme Northeast and Northwest still have pro-choice Republican parties. And it was not until the early 1990s that there was even one major mainstream anti-abortion media outfit, FoxNews. And it was not until the early 2000s that TV and movie dramas touching abortion, even on Fox, ultimately came down on the side of choice.

Finally, we must remember that, even in the religious sphere, most churches were not anti-abortion when Roe v. Wade was handed-down. The Roman Catholic Church officially and vehemently opposed abortion and so, partly to distinguish themselves from the largest single denomination (Catholics), most Protestants, including most Evangelicals used abortion as a means of distinguishing themselves from Catholics. Indeed, nothing short of a complete remaking of the American religious marketplace over the next four decades was necessary to create the near-consensus among regular churchgoers in the US that the state must regulate abortion. “Mainline” Protestant churches went from being the second-largest group of American churchgoers to a tiny portion comprising no more than a tenth; evangelicals pulled away from mainline denominations and joined with the rapidly-growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements; historically black churches soured on abortion; and churchgoing became a rural, rather than universal American pastime.

A grassroots movement, and one that does not enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, even today, conducted a half-century struggle and beat us.

Any person of any level of political seriousness must study this victory if they have any interest in beating the establishment at anything. Whether one agrees with the anti-abortion movement or vehemently opposes it, any person truly interested in a grassroots struggle against money and power should be studying this victory with a fine-toothed comb for years to come.

So, I thought I would offer a little bit of what I have learned, as an outsider, from my experiences of organizing with anti-abortion activists and the insights I gleaned, that other social movements would do well to follow.

In 1996, mathematician and political organizer Julian West and I decided to create a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations that would champion a provincial referendum on proportional representation. Early adopters who pulled in their organizations, and built our group, the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), so-named by Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s Troy Lanigan from the ground up. They included Troy, the BC Reform Party’s David Secord, the BC Marxist-Leninist Party’s Charles Boylan and the BC Family Coalition Party’s Kathleen Toth, among many others. As the organization evolved and took its various twists and turns, I worked with a number of anti-abortion folks on voting reform work, like Kathleen’s husband Mark, FCP candidate John O’Flynn, Christian Heritage Party leader Heather Stillwell, along with BC Reform Party pro-life insurgents Bev Welsh, backer of Wilf Hanni’s successful takeover of the party by the Christian Right, Wilf, himself and, finally, Chris Delany, the Bill Vander Zalm surrogate who merged Reform into the BC Unity Party.

In fact, my last speech as leader of the BC Green Party was as part of a panel on electoral reform the month after my defeat as party leader. It ended with a hug of appreciation for my work on the file from the Zalm himself.

ECCO’s sister, and later, successor organization was Fair Voting BC, founded by Nick Loenen, the Zalm’s seat-mate representing Richmond in the legislature 1986-91. Nick’s book on PR, the original bible of BC’s voting reform movement, A Case for Proportional Representation, was explicit in arguing that PR could be a vital tool whereby the anti-abortion advocates could wield real political power in the BC legislature and was crucial in piquing so much interest in PR on the Christian Right in the 1990s.
           

Most participants in our coalition were eager to try being in such a broad, disparate and diverse group but lacked cultural experience of this kind of work. And so it fell to those most experienced with this sort of thing to take the lead, and so our organization in many ways was imprinted with the style of coalition politics practiced by the anti-abortion movement.

Learning how to formulate complex communications, strategies and tactics with allies who disagree with most of one’s political views and find a significant portion of said views not just wrong but offensive is quite tricky. But this was a movement of Catholics who had persuaded members of evangelical churches that believed the Pope was the literal Antichrist to lock themselves to abortion clinic doors together.

A fundamental tenet of our meetings was that we needed to agree on as few things as possible; the more things we added to our list of points of agreement, the more likely the coalition was to fray, to collapse into arguments. Nearly every annual general meeting featured Canadians for Direct Democracy, a junior member of our coalition, attempting to get us to expand our mandate to include support for easier-to-use initiative legislation, binding referenda and other democratic reforms. Every time, CDD was voted down.

Because we learned from our Christian comrades that the strength of a coalition comes from its size and breadth and that every additional demand a coalition makes is one that makes is narrower, smaller and weaker, no matter how apparently small or intuitive.

We also learned how to have political conversations in which we could share stories about highly charged, highly polarizing political experiences by changing the kind of story they were. Stories of logging road and abortion clinic blockades ceased being stories about old growth forests and the human soul; they became stories about being the kind of person who does this sort of thing, the run-ins one has had with the courts and police. Kathleen and I shared stories about what it was like to be a beleaguered party leader in a small organization full of eccentrics and fanatics.

In this way, what we agreed on stayed small but what we could talk about was as much as any group of people thrown together possibly could. I especially savour the memory of one night when we went for drinks after staging our annual general meeting. Every year, we would re-elect Troy president and, as he was a member of the Taxpayer movement, we always counter-balanced this by having Charles, the Marxist-Leninist, give his nominating speech. That year we had got into quite a personal tussle with CDD, whose representatives had shouted “the president is a dictator! The president is a dictator!”

Troy was commiserating with us afterwards and said, “It’s like they think I’m some kind of Stalinist,” to which Charles replied, “I’m a big fan of yours Troy. I’ve got your back. But I consider Joseph Stalin to be just about the greatest human being who ever lived and I’ll be damned if you’re going to say another word against him.” We all laughed very hard after that, led by the CHP’s Heather Stillwell, if memory serves.

Another big thing I learned from the anti-abortion movement is that you can turn a media blackout into a kind of internal publicity and morale boost. A generation before one could share crowd photos and selfies on social media and be seen by thousands of eyes, North America’s anti-abortion movement trudged through a worse media blackout than any I have ever faced—and I sure have faced a couple.

In Canada, the mainstream media would cover nomination contests in the Liberals and Tories where anti-abortion candidates for office would fight it out at nomination meetings or, as the 90s wore on, suddenly find their nomination bids vetoed by the party leader. But this did not extend to other demonstrations of the sheer size of the mobilized anti-abortion movement. When abortion clinics were blockaded, mainstream media would assiduously ignore the confrontation, no matter the turnout, even when those blockades led to multiple arrests.

But the most extreme moment of the blackout would occur annually on “Life Chain” day in which anti-abortion protesters would link hands and form into incredible multi-block chains of as many as five thousand human beings at a single location. I even asked Kevin Evans, then-anchor of CBC British Columbia’s six o’clock news about this and he confirmed that not covering the Life Chain was a matter of shared policy among all major broadcasters.

Imagine Extinction Rebellion going years or even decades without a single word of their bridge and road blockages hitting the mainstream media!

But what I found was that the week after the Life Chain was the week anti-abortion activists were most serene. Rather than feeling cheated by the lack of coverage, there was a sense of purity, of power that came from being so intentionally and obviously ignored. The Life Chain imbued a sense of confidence, the sense that their adversaries had run out of ideas for stopping them but the chain was lengthening anyway, that the power they wielded was growing and nobody co-owned it; it was all theirs.

And the very absence of coverage, the media’s implicit denial of the movement’s momentum served as proof of the real momentum it genuinely possessed.

A third important feature that merits rehearsal is perhaps the most surprising to outsiders: standing behind female leaders and listening to women. Kathleen had risen to prominence as the last president of the Social Credit Ladies’ Auxiliary, succeeding its long-time head, Hope Wotherspoon, who had ascended to the presidency of the whole party. Social Credit was the last of BC’s political parties to hold separate (sometimes concurrent) women’s conventions. And as any man who has tried to interrupt an assertive Mormon woman knows, the best place to build strong leadership skills for women is in single-sex spaces.

Not only did the churches from which anti-abortionists hailed contain and defend single-sex spaces and single-sex leadership positions, the province’s natural governing party had refused to abandon the separate spheres model until the late 1980s. This meant that there were female leaders trained, tested and promoted in female-only spaces who could meet any room she entered authoritatively and command that space. Phyllis Schaffly was not an outlier; she was a type within the Christian Right, a woman who had learned to control a room, unmediated by male power.

Given that the first and most powerful interfaith organizations in Anglo America, all the way back to the WCTU, were female-led, there was an additional expectation that conditioned this organizing. It was expected that single-faith gatherings were clergy-led and therefore male led; but by the same token, it was expected that interfaith groups and other coalitions would be more appropriately led by women. And women seemed logically qualified because if there is one gender cliché of which progressives and conservatives equally partake it is the idea of the woman as social bridge-builder, peacemaker and fence-mender.

The last observation I will make is that anti-abortion activists shared something that used to be more universal among climate activists like me: a never-ending sense of urgency, the sense that lives were being lost, people were dying every day they did not win.

That kind of profound urgency actually keeps activists from working themselves to the point of burnout, because of the knowledge that one needs to be able to keep struggling every day, that one cannot give up until victory has been achieved.

But that sense of desperation also breeds a cold political calculation, one that is willing, on the large scale, to ride on the backs of the corrupt and godless Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, if that’s the only way to get to the Supreme Court. That desperation was enacted on the small scale every day, at the grassroots level.

Kathleen Toth and I didn’t just find a way to be joyful comrades because we were friendly people who love the other humans; we did so because we were desperate, so desperate as to not let some ethos of personal purity get in the way of making the deals we had to, to save the lives we understood ourselves to be trying to save.

If we really care about the issues that animate us, it behooves us to ask: (1) is our coalition broad enough, permissive enough? (2) can we build our power and momentum without needing others to recognize it? (3) do we have a pipeline that is producing powerful female leaders? and (4) if we are as desperate as we say, are we really doing all we can?

A Rising Tide of Racism Lifts All Boats, Part V of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

Before I started writing about the Trucker Convoy, I had been working on a long series about Indigeneity and the land question in Canada. These two series are now converging so I should probably urge those who joined us late to catch up by reading the first three parts of the series on the land question.

In one of the most successful uses of subversion propaganda in history, Indigenous people of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Anglo America hit upon one of the few effective ways of bridling European colonialism: appealing to the nostalgic and romantic sensibilities of colonists. As I have written elsewhere, historian Sam Gill offers a compelling case for Indigenous people adapting, modifying their demands and self-description to play on European sentimentality and romanticism about their own peoples’ experiences of conversion and colonialism.

Herodotus’s idea of “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods,” strongly informed how Britons thought about the druids and England’s Celtic past; it likewise informed Germanic thinking about the valiant resistance of the Saxons who fought and died to protect their sacred groves from Charlemagne’s armies. While this afforded Indigenous people more political purchase on the present, this rhetoric was and remains costly in innumerable ways.

For a start, it is moored to the idea of the Celtic Twilight, the sense that the old world of elves, giants and great men, while superior, is nevertheless inexorably fading, diminishing, giving way to a world of more numerous yet lesser men. This is one of the central thematic sensibilities in JRR Tolkien’s hugely influential Lord of the Rings; the elves may be better than us, closer to the earth, closer to the heavens, closer to the gods but they are fading and will inevitably be succeeded by “the world of men.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, this Indigenous propaganda coup coincided with another major realigning cultural event, “the closing of the frontier.” With the frontier closed and America filling with settlers, the Myth of the Vanishing Indian was born. Read any major encyclopedia or canonical authoritative text from the end of the nineteenth century and, it is clear that there existed a cultural consensus that to be Indigenous meant, axiomatically, that one was in a process of vanishing. If a person or a people were not vanishing, they were not Indigenous. If one was Indigenous, one was necessarily vanishing.

It is, in this light, that one might want to reconsider the “kill the Indian to save the child” rhetoric of conservative proponents of Canada’s Indigenous residential school system. It is, in fact, a statement that one does not want Indigenous children to vanish and therefore that they must be shorn of their Indigeneity. Imperialistic? Yes. Racist? Absolutely. Blinkered Western triumphalist? Sure. Genocidal—only if you think “cultural genocide” is more lethal than actual genocide.

Of course, Indigenous people were not naturally vanishing, despite the horrific consequences of the virgin soil epidemics. They were being made to vanish by the market, by public policy, by a host of forces arrayed against them.

Unlike the original progressives who were strangling the Indian to save the child, contemporary progressives love romantic vanishing Indians. The more Indigenous people seem to be associated with a noble, ancient, fading culture, the more “racially transparent” they are, the more progressives love them. Thanks to centuries of intermarriage, most Indigenous Canadians today do not have their Indigeneity unambiguously tattooed on the outside of their bodies; that’s why progressives like such folks better when their speech style and costume fill in any blanks left by their skin and facial features. Neo-traditionalist Indigenous people are the most racially transparent group of Canadians. More and more frequently as it engages in greater and greater patronage of self-tokenization as a public performance, the Indians progressives encounter at their events, giving the land acknowledgement have fashioned themselves to be, as Thomas King writes, “the Indian I had in mind” because that is the Indian they have paid to have arrive.

There are a million ways to be Indigenous in Canada and be fully Indigenous; there is no wrong way. Nathan, my (inadvertently) white-passing pipeline worker, Tory candidate and Catholic men’s group organizer friend is just as Indigenous as every other member of the Assiniboine people. There is a spectrum of ways of being Indigenous in Canada; from the non-status Métis people who celebrate Canada Day harder than anyone else and are most likely to enlist in the Canadian Forces to the late Splitting the Sky, the Mohawk neo-traditionalist radical who led the armed standoff at Gustafsen Lake as a member of the Sundance Movement.

And associated with these two polarities are opposing political demands: Joseph Brant’s belief in a sovereign, self-governing traditional Mohawk Nation with full independence within the British Empire, answerable only to the Crown is at one end; Louis Riel’s belief that the Métis people were the co-owners of the Canadian project, or at least the project as it existed in the West, a synthesis of its founding peoples and beliefs, ready to take their place among the nation’s leaders.

Both are legitimate strategies because only God can see all ends.

Yet what has happened in the past five years is that the latter strategy, what we might call the “Riel Strategy,” has become conflated, in both the US and Canada, with accusations of white nationalism. In fact, “white nationalist” has almost become a synonym of “white trash.” This might seem an extreme interpretation until we realize that, in the minds of progressives, the expression of white guilt is constitutive of one’s entitlement to experience true whiteness.

What has enabled this bizarre turn of events is the way in which progressives and conservatives have increasingly diverged in their theory of whiteness and the social meaning thereof. A common feature of what are called populist “white nationalist” movements around the world, from India to the United States to Brazil to the Philippines is the lowering of the Colour Line. For the Trump movement, high caste Hindus are white; whites from São Paulo and Rio di Janeiro are white; whites from Uruguay and Argentina are white; white trash are white; Alaskan Eskimos are white. Furthermore, the movement’s costume can be used to whiten an individual, even if they do not become fully white. The single most effective protection against police bullets for black Americans is not Kevlar; it is a MAGA hat.

We must understand that the genuine racism of these movements, their association with hate groups, including Nazis are politically possible because at the same time as they demand more discrimination, more bigotry against black people, Arabs, low-caste Indians, they are also engaged in democratizing whiteness, and offering it to more people. At the level of personal, individual experience, a nearly-white person joining a white nationalist movement is experienced as a reduction in the racism one personally faces, even if it increases the level of overall racism in society. The authoritarian right offers a path in which more of society is white but the consequences of not being white grow more dire by the year.

Progressives have, probably reactively, become increasingly committed to raising the colour line, offering incentives for people to identify as something other than white. And they are increasingly concerned about racial transparency; the worst race to be, for progressives, is unknown, without precise knowledge of someone’s race, how are they to be located in the Great Neoliberal Chain of Being. And whereas conservatives tend increasingly to construct race as a binary, white/non-white, in or out, progressives grow more committed to a neo-Ottoman racial hierarchy with a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Whereas too many conservatives now view a lack of whiteness as an insufficiency, progressives have returned to the nineteenth-century practice of seeing different races as possessing special, boutique knowledge and talents that are transmitted through the blood. However, as much as progressives purport to see their increasingly separatist, diversity-celebrating racial order as egalitarian, the reality is that they are slinging white superiority nearly as much as conservatives. It’s just that the rhetoric of white supremacy is very different.

One of the most horrid neologisms to come out of the alliance between Big HR and postmodernists is the term “logocentric.” The idea is that there are so many ways of knowing and all are equal. In fact, white people are supposedly cursed with being “logocentric,” i.e. they use reason and math to figure stuff out. Indigenous people are not “logocentric”—they have ancient, quasi-magical ways of knowing that are supposedly better than reason. Whereas progressives once thought that things like the Enlightenment and mathematics belonged to everyone, they now assert that they are the exclusive property of white people, in one of the most outrageously racist humblebrags of all time.

Another feature of progressive whiteness is compulsive ancestor-blaming for everything that has ever gone wrong. No African ever sold another African into slavery. 9/11 was caused by Europeans imposing “cis-normative heteropatriarchy” on the Islamic world, which had previously been a feminist paradise. What white progressives are really saying when they articulate these views is that our ancestors were amoral supermen in complete control of the engine of history, that only white agency exists in history, that white people do things and non-white people have things done to them. Only white people possess moral agency in history, another amazing racist humblebrag.

A final example is the discourse of “cultural appropriation.” Cultural appropriation used to refer to the events like those depicted in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, when American record companies recorded folk songs that had existed as a non-commodified shared good and converted them into their intellectual property. The conversion of shared, non-commodified cultural production into a thing that could be owned and commercialized used to be what this term meant.

Today, “cultural appropriation” has come to mean that the “right” to make certain kinds of art, certain kinds of music, certain kinds of food lives in the blood, that it is heritable and biological. Even acts of imaginative empathy to narrate the experiences of others is understood now as a violation of these rights. Right now, the government of Canada is in the process of creating a regulatory framework to prohibit the production of art and literature that one has not inherited the right to make. Soon, a white person telling a story from a black person’s viewpoint won’t just face loud condemnation from Woke Canada; it may soon be disqualified from state patronage in the form of grants, airtime and gallery space.

Of course, this “stay in your lane,” theory of culture is premised on a complete misunderstanding of what culture is, that central to the operation of culture is movement and exchange, that culture is a way you navigate difference, not a way to achieve separateness. Such an approach also saps our ability to actually love and understand one another because acts of imaginative empathy are now understood to be theft. Trying to understand people of other races, to see their world through their eyes was once the core of anti-racism; now progressives claim that it is the essence of racism.

And this should not surprise us because, just like the return of authoritarianism, rising white supremacy is a global, society-wide event that is leaving no one unscathed. So, we must acknowledge that the ascendant tendencies within both progressives and conservatives share a commitment to the permanent inferiority of non-whites. But whereas the new white nationalist conservatism thrives on the effacement of racial transparency, progressivism increasingly requires this.

Whereas conservatives offer non-whites an unequal part in their nationalist projects, white progressives do not include non-whites in their nation-building efforts; instead, they favour sponsoring parallel nation-building projects run by their tokens and surrogates at a remove in other communities. As an example of this, just yesterday, a BC progressive podcaster and opinion leader suggested that it was racist for non-Indigenous people to have opinions, to think thoughts, about massive development projects if they were being conducted by Indigenous people, even if that project is across the street.

For all their lectures about the evils of South African and Israeli Apartheid, progressives sure do love a good Bantustan.

In the next part of the series, I will apply the ideas I have put forward here, with specificity, to the Canadian Trucker Convoy of 2022, beginning with the provocation that, if Louis Riel were alive today, he would have been at the head of the convoy, in the biggest rig, with the Virgin Mary and a medicine wheel painted on the side.