t was November 26, 2009, and I happened to be in Ottawa with a few hours to spare; so, on a citizen’s whim, I decided to drop in on Question Period in Canada’s House of Commons. I was a small girl the first time I sat in the historic visitors’ gallery that looms over the rows of members’ seats on both sides of the political divide. My father was determined that his children witness what he thought were essential places and events, and the House was high on his parental to-do list. I was properly impressed by the sight of grown-ups debating across the parliamentary aisle, waving sheaves of papers at one another and occasionally jabbing the air with their index fingers. I was too young to understand what they were talking about, but Dad’s lesson sank in, and I’ve been attending Question Period intermittently ever since.In retrospect, I’m glad I visited the House that day, although I didn’t feel that way afterward. I thought I knew enough about our dysfunctional Parliament, but I wasn’t prepared for the dismay I felt as I watched Canada’s elected members challenge one another over one of the most critical issues to confront the country in a generation. The debate centred on the scandalous detainee transfer affair, which had once again exploded into public view. Richard Colvin, formerly a high-ranking diplomat in Afghanistan, had revealed that for seventeen months, starting in May 2006, he had informed his superiors in Ottawa that prisoners detained by the Canadian military, then transferred to Afghan security forces, were being tortured. His reports were consistently ignored, he charged. Worse still, he was ordered to stop putting his intelligence gathering into writing.
The implications of Colvin’s conscience-stricken revelations were potentially ruinous to the governing Conservative Party of Canada. As keeper of Canada’s vaunted commitments to human rights and the rule of law, the government stood accused of having wilfully ignored war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, which state unequivocally, “the Detaining Power is responsible for the treatment given to prisoners of war.” Equally injurious, this time to Canadians at large, the fallout from the detainee affair had the capacity to corrode our historical national values. Like all inhumane acts, torture alters and debases not only those on the receiving end, but also those who commit or facilitate it.
Colvin had been called to testify at the special committee on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, which was hearing evidence on the allegations of detainee abuse. But the Harper government was trying to suppress the flow of documents that might contain incriminating material. The Opposition argued that the Conservatives were subverting the right of parliamentarians to carry out their duties as defined in Canada’s founding Constitution Act of 1867. Rob Walsh, the law clerk for the House of Commons, had already confirmed the parliamentary privilege of the special committee to hear the evidence, but the government disagreed with his ruling. Furthermore, Colvin had received a cautionary missive from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade: “We trust that you will conduct yourself according to the interpretation of the Government of Canada.” He had also received a letter from representatives of the minister of justice, notifying him that the Justice Department would take legal action if he dared to file documents before the House committee. In other words, he might end up in jail.
The Harper government’s actions called into question the right to free speech; to freedom from obstruction and intimidation; and to institute inquiries, call witnesses, and demand papers — all of them essential to democratic governance.
The Conservatives had the right to defend themselves against the Opposition’s charges, but no one bothered to do so. Cabinet ministers were flippant, facetious, insulting. Their strategy was diversion. John Baird, the minister of transport, told the Liberal foreign affairs critic, Bob Rae, who had asked a substantive question, that Rae’s party was “politicizing a very sensitive issue on the backs of our brave men and women in uniform.” He added that General Rick Hillier, “a great Canadian hero,” had dismissed Richard Colvin’s claims as “ludicrous.” The defence minister, Peter MacKay, quoted a second general who claimed to be “mortified” at the very suggestion of wrongdoing. “I will take his word over that of the member opposite any day!” he told Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh. “Let’s get beyond the rhetorical flourishes. Let’s get beyond those who are in partisan mode.”
In whose name was this game being played? I wondered. Regardless of where one placed oneself on the political spectrum, it was impossible to believe that this served the interests of the country or the Canadian public.
or a very long time, Canadians have spoken of shared social values as a way of bridging our traditional French-English solitudes. Now I ask myself whether we might be morphing into two Canadas, each with a distinct world view. The more familiar Canada has promoted secular, humanist values, expressing them in a welfare society it took decades to build. The newer Canada is brasher, harder, and angrier. You may have guessed that the kinder Canada is the country I cleave to: it has been my heart’s home wherever I have travelled in the world. But I recognize change. And I am beginning to question how, and if, we can find common ground.Most Canadians can recite our traditional values by heart, even if we no longer embrace them in identical ways. They are, in a nutshell: moderation in civil discourse; toleration of dissent; support for human rights and the institutions of civil society; respect for the rule of law; a commitment to multilateralism abroad and pluralism at home; and a dedication to the public good, which includes a sensitivity to our uniqueness as one of the world’s most ethnically diverse countries. Canada’s expansive social legislation, the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, our internationalist stance in the world — all these were put in place during the decades after the Second World War. They derived largely from successive Liberal governments, although when the electorate favoured the Progressive Conservatives they in turn carried the ball. Now this vision of Canada is being dismantled.
My Canada began to lose its lustre after the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. As the United States restricted the civil liberties of its citizens in the aftermath, arrested many, and “rendered” them to lawless places that practised torture; as it built offshore prisons to evade its domestic laws in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, so too did our country begin to change. Imported rhetoric touting the “clash of civilizations,” “Islamofascism,” and the supposed superiority of Western culture gained credence. Maher Arar, an innocent man, was transferred from New York to Syria, where he was tortured and held for a year in a windowless cell — a “grave,” he called it. The Canadian fact-finding commission that was formed following his release concluded not only that senior officials had failed to prevent his deportation, but that they had been openly interested in the results of the interrogations he endured under torture.
We joined NATO in Afghanistan largely for political reasons; our national interests there were uncertain. But battling the Taliban insurgency has changed us, and not for the better. The day Conservative MPs called NDP leader Jack Layton “Taliban Jack,” because he had suggested that negotiations might help to end the war, my Canada slipped another notch. The day General Rick Hillier dehumanized Afghans as “terrorists,” “scumbags,” and “detestable murderers,” my Canada slipped again.
I do not mean that we are innocent, or too good for the battlefield when the cause is clear and just. I mean that the choices we make as individuals often propel us in new directions, and that the same is true for a country whose culture may be more fragile than we think.
he philosophy that characterizes the “other Canada” I saw evidence of that day in Parliament approximates an outlook more familiar to Americans than to Canadians, at least since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Its organizing principles are a powerful commitment to individualism, and to maximum freedom in every sector. Governments should be small, their powers limited, their taxing capacity curtailed. The market must be free and unfettered. Individuals are uniquely responsible for their failures, as well as their successes, and they cannot expect assistance from the “nanny state.” The critical distinguishing trait of this alternate lens on the world is a lessening attachment to the welfare state, which historically aimed at enhancing the common good — a sine qua non of the Canadian social contract for more than half a century.
