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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 25, 2009
The Canadian image
I am often asked, by my younger readers, to recommend books about Canada that will tell them something about our country as it was "before the deluge." By this expression, I mean, and they often understand: before the Nanny State and socialized medicine; before multiculturalism and associated racial policies; before the "human rights" star chambers; before the family law industry took hold; before the "gay revolution"; before whatever happened in Quebec; before the exodus from our churches, and de-Christianization of our public life; before the symbols of monarchy and heritage were stripped off public walls and government stationery; before several other interdependent bureaucratic and social transformations made the country in so many respects the opposite of what it once was. Or in short, before approximately the year in which Pierre Trudeau came to power.For the most part they have been taught in school that this old Canada was narrow and mean and ugly, and to celebrate the great progressive "nation builders" who led us out of the morass of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and the rest, into the gleaming paradise we now inhabit. Naturally, the more intelligent students ask questions about this -- as, Lord be praised, they always will, for the human spirit will not live a lie forever. There is a (mild) danger of over-compensating for the Big Lie, of course, with little lies about how good things once were. Things were never all that good in this country, or anywhere else on this planet; humans have always been making a mess of things; greed, bigotry, spite, and poor table manners will always prevent the achievement of Utopia. The single-volume Canadian history I usually assign is one not by a Tory UEL like me, but by an old Whig from Manitoba, W.L. Morton, The Kingdom of Canada: A General History from Earliest Times. I disagree with much of Morton's outlook, but the value of his book today (it was first published in 1963) is in its evocation of our lost worlds. It is a superb overview of a national tradition done immediately "before the deluge," when all the once-visible markers of what made "Canada" went under the water. But there is another out-of-print masterpiece, with fewer words and more pictures, that I have recently added to my list of supplementary reading: Winifred Petchey Marsh, People of the Willow (Oxford Canada, 1976). It is a modest portfolio of a few dozen watercolours by an artist who married an Anglican missionary to the Padlimiut tribe of the Caribou Inuit (I believe "Paallirmiut" is now politically correct), who ancestrally inhabited the great barrens of Keewatin, stretching from the coast across the flats north-west from Hudson Bay. She went out from England to join him at Eskimo Point (now Arviat) in the summer of 1933, remaining for life. The watercolours are painstaking, faithful depictions of Eskimo life and customs from the time when our Dominion government had not yet become the "federal government" and turned the aboriginal peoples into welfare clients, thus utterly destroying so many, morally and materially, while introducing the worst features of bureaucratic apartheid. There is character and beauty in every native face, and in a landscape that we might not otherwise appreciate. The text is Marsh's brief memoir of her life among these people, and testimonial to the work of her husband -- of what they did, and what they saw, while living for decades in poverty and hardship. As well as their Anglican mission, they provided the services of doctor and dentist, schoolmaster and schoolmistress, builders, cabinetmakers, undertakers, and all-round confidants and interpreters to the Inuit and wandering white trappers. Short as it is, this text is incredibly poignant, partly because it is so unassuming. The hard-rock Christian faith of its author, and her tough enduring love (till death) of the native people and their ways, is conveyed likewise in every gesture of line and lighting in the paintings. They are an invaluable ethnological treasure, as well as art of a high order. I believe most are now housed in the Yellowknife Museum. * The assertion in my Jan. 11 column, that the budget spent to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem is "several times larger than the combined UN effort on behalf of all the other refugees on the planet," has been challenged. In fact, UNRWA, the agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, had an officially declared budget of about $540 million U.S. for 2008; and the UN High Commission for Refugees an expected budget of about $1.57 billion U.S. I therefore should have inserted the adverb "proportionally." These UN numbers are not externally audited, and the UN has actively resisted demands for accountability from national donors, especially the U.S., especially over the administration of UNRWA. If one looks at the reality on the ground -- visible, broad welfare services, including permanent schools, hospitals and other facilities, for several million Palestinians in about 60 "camps," which are in fact towns or suburbs -- and then compares the modest infrastructure with which UNHCR currently serves more than 30 million real (that is, non-permanent) refugees elsewhere around the world, one may grasp the general point. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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