4 - Sunday, February 9, 1992 - North Shore News Hey, Canada isn’t boring any more IT’S ALWAYS interesting to come back into the country after having been away, even if only for a week or two. You notice changes that might otherwise elude you simply because they were happening to you at the same time that they were happening to the country. We seldom notice changes in ourselves, only in others. Being a Canadian in 1992 isa quite different business from back in, say, 1962, which was the first time I got out of the country for any length of time. Went to Europe. Came back to Canada a year later, and it seemed as though nothing had changed. Today, you only have to be gone a week for everything to change. Or so it seems. By that, 1 mean one week it looks like the country’s going to be ‘‘saved,”’ the next it’s “‘doomed.”’ On a Monday, the recession is over. By Wednesday, it’s bigger than the biggest depression ever and getting worse every minute. When | first went abroad, it was partially to get away from the ennui of living in Canada, the most boring country in the world. Of course, back then, I was too much of a pup to understand that peace and economic stability are boring, no doubt about it. Canada was boring in the early 60s in a way that most of the world would love to be boring. High wages. Plenty of unions. A chance, still, to get rich. A na- tional pension plan. Medicare. Central heating. One of the oldest Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL parliaments in the world. More land per acre per person than anybody, with an incredible amount of wilderness intact. For writers, it was a drag. What was there to get angry about? The desperate situation facing a majority of the original inhab- itants of the land wasn’t the widely-supported liberal cause it is today. Few intellectuals were aware of the conditions that existed on the reserves. Native issues were mainly regulated to historical studies. That was about it. The media didn’t care, and therefore the pol- iticlans didn’t have to. The subject of Quebec's in- dependence was still quite exotic, unless you happened to be in Quebec. The great issues of the day were civil rights in the States, wars in the Mideast, the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis. Maybe because it’s so big, when you are inside Canada, it is easy to feel thoroughly removed from the rest of the world. Out in the world, however, locking back, you cannot help but notice that there is a context for Canada, just like there is for every other country. Sheer physical size doesn’t change that. The big difference between the early °90s and the early ’60s is that the context has changed in a way that few of us believed it ever could, short of an Armageddon- like war. The effect of this transforma- tion cannot help but be felt in Canada — especially Canada, you might say, a nation of im- migrant-occupiers. There is always some segment of our population that is linked to whatever battle is happening on a given day in a distant land, giving newscasters and papers a local angle because they can count on a demo at city hall, whether the issue is Croatia or the Kashmir. To think that the collapse of the Soviet empire isn’t going to have an impact on the shaky Canadian co-empire (French and English) is to bury your head in the drifting constitutional sands. What is going on here isn’t a “unity debate,”’ a ‘‘constitutional debate," or even as Joe Clark might call it, a debate over the to- tality of our acreage. It is a debate about in- dependence in the era of globalization. In other words, how do you achieve political autonomy in the face of economic integra- tion? Now that capital has been lib- erated from national agendas, is self-determination a thing of the past, or is it the wave of the future? The question being asked in Quebec, and now — finally — in the rest of Canada is a perfectly valid political question. Are our existing political institutions inef- fectual and obsolcte? Certainly they feel that way. Is there a better way of organizing ourselves? Or even just protecting ourselves? I don’t happen to buy into the “idolatry of giantism,’’ as economist E.F. Schumacher describes the worship of physical expanse as an end in itself. Cer- tainly, in the crunch, neither did very many people in the Soviet Union. I'm not suggesting for a mo- ment any comparison between the old Kremlin and Parliament Hill, except, maybe, that they both presumed to administer an area that was too big and diverse for any one centralized authority. My suspicion is that political FUEL INJECTION independence is a figment of fevered ideological imaginations nowadays. Globalization means each and every country has to bend its social agenda to attract and hold capital. This pits regions everywhere against each other. In a sense, it doesn’t really mat- ter if you think you're indepen- dent or not, the truth is that you aren’t. Schumacher made the point in Small [s Beautiful (you might want to look up your old copy) that ‘‘there is no such thing as the viability of states or of nations, there is only the problem of the viability of people ... You do not make viable people non-viable by splitting a community into a number of smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manage- able groups.” He added: ‘‘A Ict of the na- tionalism of small nations today, and the desire for self-government and so-called independence, is simply a logical and rational response to the need for regional developmeni. ” Canada isn’t boring any more. Its fate is up in the air. And its fate in turn is inextricably bound up in the fate of the resi. of the world. If nothing else, Canadians may congratulate themselves on not be- ing isolated any more. 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