The Menno Melange

There was a family gathering yesterday on my side of the family. I got to see my parents, siblings, uncles and cousins again, some for the last time before we leave for our trip. We talked a little bit about the climate and culture of South Korea, as well as the political stability of the region. The discussion turned to the Korean hostages in Afghanistan and we were jokingly asked if our faces would soon be appearing on their TV screens asking for help from Canadians to be released.

Both of the organizations we looked at working with have the same policy when it comes to hostage takings. If Ana and/or I were kidnapped the organization that employs us would not pay any ransom demands to have us released. This may sound heartless but it makes a lot of sense. Any money given to an organization willing to kidnap someone for it could only go to support more violence. Christian Peacemaker Teams has the same policy and refused to pay to have their workers released in Iraq.

I’m not sure if the Korean aid workers currently being held hostage felt that they would be safe because they were protected by God, because their cause was noble enough, or because the situation just wasn’t that bad. It would be interesting to hear if they had any sort of contingency plan for this kind of scenario. It is obviously a tragic situation, and it’s impossibly to know how one would react in their shoes, but I would like to think that I would refuse to trade my freedom for that of a terrorist prisoner. I don’t believe that every Taliban prisoner is a bloodthirsty savage, but it just doesn’t sound like a fair trade to me.

Like many Canadians, I was swept up in the buzz around the CBC’s recent programming creation “The Seven Wonders of Canada”. I had some favourites that were excluded (the sleeping giant), I was intrigued by and agreed with some of the inclusions (the canoe), but mostly I appreciated hearing about the various nominations called in from all parts of this country.

As much as I am a fan of this great country and its history, I thought that a fitting companion would be another one called “The Seven Blunders of Canada”.

I doubt the CBC would run it, so I’ll start it here on a blog that most people have stopped reading. Of course there are all sorts of biases involved here, but this is my list. I’d love to see people trackback to me with their own lists. Here we go:

1. Komogata Maru link
Leaving a boat full of perfectly legally arriving immigrants off shore without allowing them to land is a pinnacle of cruelty and intolerance.

2. Residential schools link
We wouldn’t be the first country to attempt to remove culture/religion from natives, but taking first nations children from their homes, allowing health to deteriorate as it did, not informing parents when their children had died, and all the other stuff make this part of our history even more unbearable.

3. Chinese head tax link
Imagine applying a tax on certain immigrants and not on others. Profiting from racism has made many countries strong, unfortunately Canada is included in this group.

4. Internment of Japanese Canadians link
Canadian citizens had their land taken away and sent into camps, almost like what our enemy was doing.

5. Renaming things
Imagine being a First Nations Canadian whose ancestors lived off of a river for centuries, when an insignificant and disoriented white man named Mackenzie paddles up and asks for your help and food. Later you’ll learn that they have named the mighty river after that man.

6. Not buying Alaska
Seward bought Alaska for almost nothing and now the US owns a piece of land that really should belong to us.

7. Not adding Bobby Hull to the Summit Series team
Okay, this one is a little less serious, but no matter how great that team was and no matter how great the accomplishment was, they weren’t the best available team. The NHL/WHA squabble meant increased salaries, an uneven hockey fan base and messed up team dynamics. There were great players in the WHA, and Bobby Hull could have helped make that team stronger.

There’s something heart-warming about hearing one’s mother tongue on the radio. During a news story on Mexican Mennonites, I heard some Low German being spoken in the background. The rest of the story was less heart-warming.

In the wake of new security measures, whereby Canadians flying into the US need to have valid passports, some Canadians are finding out that they do not have valid Canadian citizenship, and thus cannot receive new passports. Among this group are Mexican Mennonites, and their decendents living in Canada.

Citizenship issues are not new to “my people.” As an historical summary, Mexican Mennonites are generally defined as the group of people who migrated to Mexico and Paraguay from Canada (mostly Manitoba and Saskatchewan) in the 1920’s seeking a place where they could live out their religious convictions more freely. So before coming to Canada the most recent time (in the 1950s), my ancestors have lived in from Mexico (1920s-1950s), Canada (1870s-1920s), Russia (present day Ukraine, 1780s-1870s) and before that, what is now Holland, Belgium and northern Germany. Until recently, religious persecution has always been given as the primary reason behind their migrations. The more recent move to Canada was more economic in nature. With drought, land shortages, and repressive church leadership structures, Mennonites, like my grandparents began to move “back” to Canada, where they still had valid citizenship through their Canadian born parents and grandparents. That movement has continued to this day. A recent rule change by Canadian Immigration officials added more regulations and paperwork to the process or removed loopholes, depending on how you look at it. It was something about requiring those eligible for Canadian citizenship (mostly people whose parents or grandparents have Canadian citizenship), but living abroad, need to apply for it and move to Canada or else lose their eligibility. This affected those living in Mexico still.

Now, thanks to increased security measures from the US, more and more people need to apply for passports, and as a result of that process, all sorts of people are realizing other loopholes that exist because of old laws. The one that relates to Mexican Mennonites is that children of Canadian citizens born abroad out of wedlock are not eligible for Canadian citizenship. This is not as scandalous as you might think. Some of the Mennonites in Mexico failed to register their proper church weddings with the Mexican government, and subsequently, children borne of those unions are viewed as having been born “out of wedlock”.

See relevant article.

While the Mexico experience is far removed from my lifetime, my grandparents, all born in Canada, were married in Mexico, so if neither of those marriages were registered with the Mexcian authorities, I could be a citizen of no country. Weird. Rest assured, I do own a valid Canadian passport, so I assume everything happened correctly in Mexico. It probably helps too that I was born in Canada. That was close. For a second this morning, I thought I might not have been a Canadian citizen anymore.

While our prime minister is currently in the news for something else, I’d like to comment on something I saw him do a few weeks ago.

When the Leafs and Senators played in the season opener, one of the side stories was that Stephen Harper was in attendance, and cheering for the Leafs. I was distracted by the Senators’ win (one of their bright spots so far this season) and by the mention of the sale of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Hockey fans in Calgary could have been upset to watch the guy they voted in cheering for the enemy Leafs. Fans in Ottawa who have watched the new guy residing at 24 Sussex cheering for the provincial rivals. Political sceptics could have seen his allegiance as pandering to the big city vote. Even as a fan of the Senators and a sceptic of political posturing in every aspect of life, I saw it in a different light.

Sitting beside him was his Leaf jersey wearing son, who was genuinely excited to be at the game, hardly the ideal companion for a man pandering for votes. I once worked at a sports retail store where our manager was quite excited by the success of the Leafs during their playoff run that particular season, but his excitement was fuelled by the extra money he was making by selling Leafs merchandise. Now, while I don’t actually believe that the prime minister is a big hockey fan, I didn’t sense that kind of fake enthusiasm, but a real enthusiasm based on something else.

I grew up dreaming of attending an NHL hockey game, and when I finally did, my two companions were my equally excited brother and my dad, who didn’t know the difference between innings and periods. Neither I or my brother were fans of the two teams playing, but we were excited to be there. At every home-team goal, we were on our feet, and so was our dad, not because he wanted a certain team to win, or because he knew exactly what was going on, but because it was an exciting place, and we was excited to be there with us.

Stephen Harper was at a hockey game with his son, and who cares how or why he got his tickets or which team he was cheering for.

Maybe you’ve seen the same movie as me. A president is trying to appoint a vice-president. With a few notable candidates jockeying for position, and a few vocal critics speculate on who will be chosen. He ultimately choses a woman senator, and the movie takes off from there. Some speculate that he is trying to leave a progressive legacy, others simply think she’s grossly under-qualified, not to mention lacking moral fiber. She had an affair with her campaign manager, and, in digging into her past, the press and her opponents discover that she allegedly took part in a group sex session at a college frat party. All she would offer as a defense is that she fell in love with her campaign manager and subsequenlty married him, and that even commenting on the allegations would legitimize the asking of those kinds of personal questions. She claimed that there was a double-standard; nobody cared what was in the sexual pasts of male politicians, why should hers matter.

That’s the movies. Then I read the story about Tie Domi’s divorce proceedings, where his ex-wife alleged that he had an affair with Belinda Stronach. The next day there is a news story that Belinda Stronach is accusing this country and its media of having a double-standard.

Quoting her in a canoe.ca article, she says “I’d really like to say in a country like Canada that there isn’t, but I do believe there is a double standard,” Stronach said on Tuesday. “And it’s unfortunate for other women in this country that want to seek political office and to make a contribution.”

Until I read these statements, I thought this issue was about Tie Domi, a man, and his moral misgivings. Does she really think that men are exempt from public scrutiny? If that were true, wouldn’t Clinton’s escapades been ignored? If the entire USA goes into an uproar because of the concealment of oral sex, aren’t we allowed to be concerned about an extended affair that helps to destroy a marriage?

Now I generally don’t care about the private lives of public people. I’ve seen enough to know that there is a lot of broken families in the general public. With all the sacrifices celebrities and politicians have to make to attain success in their field, I even expect there to be more brokeness in their own personal lives.

So why did this catch my eye? Partly because I was already not a big fan of Tie Domi, and partly because I’m not a big fan of people hiding questionable activity behind their right to have questionable activity kept secret.

As far as the double-standard goes, I am convinced that as long as people can benefit from complaining about a double standard, they will, whether that double standard exists or not.

The first ever World Out Games have begun this week in Montreal. This celebration of sport and tolerance opened with a Conservative cabinet minister getting booed off the stage. Sadly for the organizers of the event, that fact is making bigger news than the actual scheduling and results of the games themselves.

Many complained that Prime Minister himself did not attend. While I don’t support everything the PM has said, I think his absense is understandable. Is there any reason he would have been given a better welcome than a native Montrealer in Micheal Fortier?

I insist that it is important to tread in places you might not normally be welcomed or appreciated, in order to build bridges, but I’m glad our nation was spared the embarassment of being booed off the stage in his own country. Reading how his actions were labelled by kd lang et al as being intolerant really disturbed me. Is a group of people who boo a person off of stage simply because of his orientation really the most appropriate group to say who is and isn’t intolerant?

If you’ve been following the news in Canada recently, you may have heard of BC’s STV. A while ago, a randomly selected group of 160 regular British Columbia citizens gathered to evaluate the method by which governments were elected in the province. They recommended that province change from the old SMP voting system (Single Member Plurality, commonly referred to as ‘First Past the Post’) to an STV system (Single Transferable Vote). It’s going to a provincial referendum on May 17 to coincide with their provincial election.

It’s a difficult system for some people to understand. Of those that do understand it, some don’t like it, and some think it’s the greatest electoral development in modern time. Before I weigh in with my opinion, I would like to declare that I am not a resident of British Columbia, nor do I direct my writing toward citizens of the province, and thus am not required by BC law to register as an election advertiser.

I really think that this is a fantastic development in democracy. It gives a better representation of the way people think, and will undoubtedly create more balanced representation in their provincial assembly, meaning that MLA’s will need to be more accountable to their constituents and less to their parties. For a government to rule automatically with the mandate of a majority government leaves the voters out of the picture for too long, and I think that what the STV system will give BC does that far better.

In a nutshell, STV is about vote sharing and redistribution. The voting map will change, and each new riding will elect at least two MLA’s. Voters rank the candidates by preference, and then using an algorithm, the candidates are elected from the results. The description gets a bit technical, but I think it’s not as complicated as the CBC has made it out to be. The first step is to determine the voting quota, the number of votes a candidate needs to be elected. The formula for that is [(total votes cast in the riding)/(number of seats available + 1)]+1. Then the votes are counted using the #1 ranking for all. Any candidates who have more votes than the quota are elected, or if no candidate has enough, then the last place candidate is eliminated. If a candidate is elected, any votes over the quota are proportionately redistributed using the next preference. If a candidate is eliminated, their votes get redistributed using their next preference. This cycle continues until the appropriate number of candidates are elected. This will really help fringe parties get the representation that their votes suggest.

I think STV will make governing more difficult, but I think it will require the government to be more responsible about it. I could make rural representation weaker, but that depends on how the new ridings are drawn up. I support STV, even though I can’t vote on it, and I’m not allowed to advertise to any one who is voting on it. For more information click on these links:
BC Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform
BC STV Electoral System
An animated explanation of the system
Elections BC
Why I can’t advertise my opinion

I wonder how many times that song was sung today on Ontario’s highways. Paul Brandt references aside, I would like to comment on today’s agricultural protests at Toronto’s Queen’s park. (Available reports, CBC Canoe)

Today, while tractors were driving down the 401 toward Toronto, I was on the 401, driving away from Toronto, toward London, coincidentally to the Indoor Farm Show. My brother has been a wannabe farmer for as long as he first pushed a die-cast tractor across our living room floor. He and I have both worked on farms near our parents home, and have often worked together. He still dreams of owning a farm, but our strategy of marrying farm girls and inheriting their land seems to have failed, and it is virtually impossible to buy land and make a go of it.

Because of my rural roots, I sympathize with farmers, moreso than with city folk who have their drive to work extended. I grew up surrounded by farmers, and many farmers attend the church where I pastor. Farmers are struggling, I see it all around me.

The trouble, most farmers would agree, is that their voice is not heard very often in parliament. This protest will make their voice heard in parliament, but I’m not sure it’s the voice they want to be heard. Among the protesters today were special interest groups, opponents to specific bills, and simply disgruntled folk.

The way I see it, is that everything in this province that happens to farmers, legislation, natural phenomenon, economic shift, etc., will always help one agricultural group and hurt another one. Since farmers and producers buy from each other, than one man’s struggles is another man’s profits. The greenbelt is only bad for a few farmers who want at some point not to be farmers anymore. The beef crisis sees farmers struggle with dropping value of their beef, but the producers sell for the same price, and laugh all the way to the bank. Subsidies don’t necessarily help the whole industry, just one particular group. There will never be a united farmer’s voice in parliament, because there isn’t a united farmers’ voice outside of parliament.

If a group could rise up to represent the whole of the agricultural community, they would provide a valuable service, but they would be despised by both government and farmers alike. Governments do need to give more support (subsidies, infrastructure, etc.) to farmers. The system in which farmers do business (quota, etc.) needs to be overhauled, and that wouldn’t happen without ruffling some old school farmers feathers. But then maybe this group would go too far, like modern day unions.

Things need to change for farmers, and we can help that by buying from local farmers as much as we can. Farmers’ markets and roadside stands are a great connecting point. It means carrying cash, and not having 24-7 convenience, but it feels good, and you meet some great people doing it. It won’t save the system, but it helps a bit.

A friend of mine is preparing to discuss and then author the summarizing document of a roundtable discussion on human rights. In his blog, he asks three questions, to which I submitted a response.

Here are the three questions:
1. Violating basic human rights: What is the risk to sustainable peace, security and development?
2. UN reform: can the UN adequately protect basic human rights?
3. How can Civil Society best strengthen human rights for enduring development?

I only answered the first one essentially. I guess that leaves me wanting as far as practical suggestions and extra research, but he wasn’t specific about what kind of input he wanted, so I chose myself.

Here is the text of my response:

Pat, I don’t know enough about the structure of the UN, or about the definitions of some of the key terms here.

What are basic human rights? A steady supply of food, clean drinking water, shelter from the elements. Over the course of history, people have voluntarily chosen to live with much less. Anything else that we can add to that list is either theoretical, or a need that has been created in our affluence: freedom of religion, security from war, economic opportunity, free speech, social welfare, Tim Hortons coffee. These are all great things, but how many of them are universally applicable, economically feasible, and relevant for me in my cozy University computer lab. I only know life with those things, but that doesn’t mean anything else isn’t life. No matter how much “we” give people, they will always want more. No matter how little I have, I will never understand what it means to have less.

Peace. Following the international definition of this word, I cannot give you a good answer. Peace as the absence of war or armed conflict leaves out so much. By my definition of peace (and according to the Hebrew word Shalom), the moment any human right is violated, there is no peace. When people need more, they will do whatever they can to get it. When people want something, they will do whatever they can justify to get it. By violating basic human rights, there is no sustainable peace. Why should I feel safe, when they still feel hungry? What is the point to development when people are being mistreated? Peace, security and development … I’m wonder how accurate it is to reword the question as, “how little can we get away with providing to make sure that we are safe, they feel safe, and we can turn a profit?”

So, in short, my answer to your question is that violating basic human rights negates sustainable peace and makes security and development irrelevant.

The only Paul Martin I want to hear talking about hockey plays for the New Jersey Devils. While the current NHL player lockout does put a damper on Canadian spirits, it is not a government matter. With this opinion, I was of course disgusted to hear that Martin commented on his role in the labour crisis during recent interviews. Then I heard the words that he actually said, and my anger turned away from Martin, and toward the media outlets.

It seems to me that Martin has done next to nothing to involve himself in the process, and careful wording on his part gave reporters enough to go on. From this article on cbc.ca, he said “‘There’s only a role for Ottawa if the parties want it,’ Martin said Tuesday.” To me, that says, “They haven’t asked for my help, and I haven’t offered it.” In the TV portion of the interview that I saw, he mentioned that he had not spoken directly to either NHL commissioner Gary Bettman or NHLPA president Bob Goodenow, but that he had contacted representatives of both sides about what could be done. Again, to me that says his people talked to their people, and nothing happened.

Paul Martin offered nothing, and neither Bettman nor Goodenow could care less, so why is CBC, and the various media outlets, making a big deal of this? Part of the frustration of the lack of hockey, is that hockey reporters now have to cover politics, and this kind of crap is the result of it.