Remembrance Day Is No Time To Fetishise The Armed Forces

People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling — all stuff — no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children — some for minor offences — many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.

- Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington; recorded by Lord Stanhope on November 11, 1831

How times have changed. The Iron Duke, who had a way with words not unlike Prince Philip’s, was famously contemptuous of his soldiers; in modern Canada, we seem increasingly inclined to put ours on a pedestal. To some extent, this is because of the quality of the troops themselves. Many of Wellington’s men really were drunks and reprobates, often recruited under circumstances that could be charitably described as dubious. Our men and women are trained professionals, and we should appreciate them – but on this Remembrance Day, it’s hard to escape the feeling that appreciation is starting to tilt into an unseemly hero-worship that seeks to transform veterans and serving troops into improbable caricatures.

A Canadian Remembrance: Shot Down In Germany!

This year, I won’t be joining my husband as he lays a wreath on behalf of our community at a Cenotaph in South Vancouver and I won’t be in my hometown, with its fulsome tribute to Canada’s war dead, each year the ceremony grows more elaborate. Hundreds of men and women and children line the streets. With the war in Afghanistan much in the news, remembering Canada’s fallen resonates with more poignancy. In honour of my country I interviewed a dear friend about her father, a Canadian immigrant-citizen. He came to Canada in the early 1950’s from England, joined later by his wife and their children, settled in British Columbia and never left. He supported their family, worked as an Industrial Arts teacher and rarely spoke about his role in World War II.

Only in his eighties did he start to speak of being a prisoner of war, shot down by the Germans somewhere over Holland.

Comparative Canada-U.S. Juvenile Politics

The governing Conservative Party has recently taken some heat for juvenile behavior in Parliament, particularly when it comes to women speaking in the House.  The touchstone for this controversy, was Conservatives heckling and shouting down Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett’s question about how swine flu vaccination impacted women.  The media took notice, and opposition MPs and leaders demanded apologies for the  infantile behavior.

Well, it looks like our neighbours to the south, also embroiled in a health care debate of another kind (health care reform, not swine flu) seem to have taken notice, with the Republican Party stealing a few plays out of the clever Canadian Parliamentary playbook (emphasis on play) with with Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives screaming and shouting down House members of the Democratic Women’s caucus speaking to health care reform.

With Canadians often wrestling with the question of government reform, such as adopting a republican system akin to the Americans, it’s pleasant to see that whatever the political system– parliamentary or republican– neither the Canadian nor American House speakers can maintain proper House decorum.

With Copenhagen Looming, Canada Is A Climate Laggard – But We Don’t Have To Go On This Way

We now have less than a month until the opening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009, to be held from December 7-18 at the Bella Center (for some reason they decided to spell it the American way) in Copenhagen. The conference is also called COP15 because it’s the 15^th “Conference of Parties” to something called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reflecting the diplomatic world’s penchant for cute little abbreviations that combine letters and numbers.

Copenhagen, Denmark, which looks like a lovely place to talk about climate change. Photo by Flickr user "jimg944". License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

The point of the conference is to work towards a treaty that backers of the process envision as a turbo-charged version of the Kyoto Protocol, the previous climate agreement that Canada has been enthusiastically ignoring for years. Under Kyoto, we were supposed to get our greenhouse gas emissions down to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012; for Copenhagen, numbers like 25% to 40% (again, below 1990 levels) have been bandied about as an ideal global target to be reached by 2020. As the Winnipeg Free Press reported, Canada’s emissions in 2007 were some 26% above 1990 levels, and were on the increase “thanks largely to Alberta’s oilsands, an increase in the number of vehicles on the road, and greater reliance on coal-fired electricity”. By international standards, this is a dismal performance:

Canada ranks “first among the G8 nations” for increasing emissions, the report notes, even though Canada had committed to cut them. It notes that while Canada’s emissions have soared, Germany chopped its emissions by 18 per cent between 1990 and 2006, and the United Kingdom slashed its by 15 per cent.

“We’re laggards and obstructionists,” said climatologist Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria who, like many scientists and environmentalists, has been urging the Canadian government to cut emissions for years.

Time To Congratulate Hamid Karzai, And Let Him Do His Job

Photo courtesy Flickr user "ChuckHolton."

The other day the European Space Agency sent up a new satellite, dubbed SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), whose “interferometric radiometer” is expected to provide all kinds of new information about how water cycles through the global environment.

The presidential election in Afghanistan, on the other hand, fizzled on the launch pad when Abdullah Abdullah withdrew from the second round of voting. This instantly made Hamid Karzai, the incumbent president and the man who had always been expected to win, into a victor-by-default.

At first there seemed to be a possibility that the second round would go ahead with only a single candidate, which would have been farcical under the circumstances: winter closing in, threats by the Taliban to disrupt the voting, and an Independent Election Commission whose independence from the Karzai campaign had been questioned by the good Dr Abdullah in any case. Fighting a battle against frost and militants to ensure the smooth running of a one-candidate election would hardly have been a sensible use of the all-too-limited resources available in Afghanistan, and one can hardly fault the Commission for deciding to simply dispense with the vote and declare a winner. So now we have President Karzai, once again, standing triumphant amid half-hearted congratulatory mutters from around the world. What on Earth is a well-meaning nation like Canada, due to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011 but deeply involved in the meantime, to do in the face of such shenanigans?