I hesitate to post on this at all, for a variety of reasons. First of all, because I tend to think these things get more attention that they should, and therefore I hesitate to be part of that. Secondly because, as a person posting from the United States, such posts can come across as posted in the wrong spirit. Certainly I frankly find a lot of Canadian postings on American tragedies to nearly be in the nature of gloating and I don't want that to seem to be the case here.
Downtown Toronto, January 2015.
But I am a Canadian, even if I'm one who never has lived in Canada, so maybe I have a right, and perhaps as a Canadian living outside of Canada, who has always lived outside of Canada, I have a different and unique prospective. One that's both Canadian, of a sort, and sort of not, and frankly, one that's from the older, and I'd argue better in some ways, Canada rather than the contemporary one.
On all of that, I'm a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. My mother was from St. Lambert, Quebec (which as will be noted below, adds to what is perhaps a unique prospective). Her family had roots in Quebec that go as far back as roots can go there and, while she ultimately became a dual citizen herself, I think she was in her 70s when she did that, so for most of her life she was a Canadian and always identified in that fashion. So, she was not only a Canadian, but she was from Quebec which has a unique history, but she had also lived in Alberta, which also figures into this post below.
My mother, probably in the late 1940s or the early 1950s, Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre in Quebec in the background.
What's all of that have to do with this post? Well, let me put in a little history, as in the end, history always defines everything in some way.
Canada is one of the most urban countries in the world. It's much more urban than the United States. Shoot, for that matter, its more urban than the United Kingdom. Most Canadians live in cities.
But that wasn't always true. Indeed, it's only become true very, very recently.
Up until the 1950s, Canada was an incredibly rural country. It's undergone a process that has happened throughout much of the world following (and commencing well before) the Second World War of urbanization, but its transformation has been more dramatic and frankly, in my view, almost wholly negative.* Canada, going into the Second World War, certainly had some large and indeed, at least in Quebec, some very European cities, but the mass of its population was not city centered. Even Quebec, which had a Euro-Canadian population dating back to the 1600s, was principally rural in character.** Almost no nation that undergoes this transformation rapidly, and Canada did, does it really well, and Canada is no exception.***
This does not mean that its population was uniform in character, although it was much more uniform than that of the United States. Quebec certainly varied in that it had a large French population that was distinct in nearly every fashion from the rest of Canada.**** The country also had significant populations from the remainder of the British Isles, and then starting in the early 1900s it acquired, in some (but only some) locations a significant Ukrainian and Russian population. All the while it retained a significant Indian population. Having said that, however, the Dominion was distinctly British in character even while being distinctly Canadian.
Canada up until the mid 1950s was a nation that looked at itself and the rest of the world through distinctly different, quite British (and sometimes French), rural eyes. Like a lot of areas the English had been, in some ways, it was "more English than the English", although using that phrase to attempt to define Canada at any one point would be highly unfair.^ Nonetheless it was a nation that, in spite of its small population, was steadfast in support of nearly every English overseas enterprise up to the end of World War Two. Canada was left alone, for the most part, for most of the War of 1812 and had to fight against American invasion largely on its own, which it did very well. It nonetheless rose to the occasions of the Boer War, World War One and World War Two, although in each instance it was largely its English speaking population that did so. The French population opted to sit out, to the extent possible, all such English enterprises.
Memorial in Toronto to "Our Glorious Dead".
It's been almost forgotten by Canadians that this was the case. Canadian troops served under overall English command in three wars of fairly close succession in impressive numbers and with impressive valor. Other than internal wars against native populations, of which there were some, Canada's first war during which it was not part of an English army was the Korean War. Since that time Canada, which has served more overseas than people care to admit, has never again served as part of a British overall army.
That 1945 departure date, i.e., the end of World War Two, would prove to be significant in more ways than just a coincidental separation from the United Kingdom in a military sense. It proved to be a real bright line. People who are familiar with the history of Quebec like to speak of the "Quiet Revolution", but in truth the entire country went through the same process and it was simply Quebec that entered it last and with a different character, as it was different. Going into the war, Canada remained highly English in many ways. Coming out if it, much of that Englishness was yielding to a type of Canadianism, but in a form that was different from that which exists today. That conservative Canadianism dominated from 1945 into about 1960, when it began to crack and yielded the liberal Canada that we have today. . . which isn't as liberal as it imagines.
This same process played out in different forms in different former English dominions and colonies, and the entire process seems fairly closely related to it. Countries that had a distinctive separation from the United Kingdom prior to that time, such as Australia, were impacted much less. Countries that were very closely tied to British Empire England, however, even if they resented it (or not) were much more heavily impacted by their separation from the UK and that story still plays out today. The two most dramatic examples may be the Canada of today and the Ireland of today, both of which would regard themselves as now being long separated from the United Kingdom but which in fact, culturally, defined themselves with and against the British Empire so strongly that they continued to do so for some time after the Empire had actually fallen and they still are reacting to that today.
In both instances the countries were very conservative at first abut then began to experiment with a liberalism that in some fashions reminds a person of the occasional teenager that seeks to establish his or her self by being in total reaction to the values of his parents. In this case, however, ironically, the parent had so many problems and became such an entity back into itself that the reaction was hardly noticed much at all. In Canada, conservative political values yielded and are still yielding to increasingly liberal ones, as is the case with Ireland. Ironically, at the same time, much of the population remains deeply personal conservative even while not wishing to publicly acknowledge it. The entire thing is sort of a cultural house of cards that won't last.
Typical early 20th Century poster from Canada urging immigration for those who wanted to be farmers. Canada remains an agricultural giant today even if Canadians tend not to think of the country that way and interestingly enough it still draws European immigrant farmers, frequently Dutch, who sell their European farms to purchase larger Canadian ones.
At the same time a very British Canada was turning its back on being British, it was also urbanizing at a blistering rate. Canada had largely been settled as an agricultural enterprise in the first place, and it continued to focus on that for a time after World War Two. But soon after the war this changed and the country became highly urban. Canada is still an agricultural giant, but the overwhelming majority of Canadians live in urban areas and the country became both high urbanized and highly cosmopolitan. As it did t his it developed a new sense of itself, largely centered on the Canadian concept of Canadianess based on the urban Canadian's view. At the same time, however, rural Canada, while depleted, did not disappear and an urban/rural, east/west divide developed. All of this is true of the Untied States as well, but in the Canadian context the rural and Western divide is, if anything, stronger than it is in the US as its more extreme in nature.
Romanticized image of farmer in Canada in front of the first Canadian flag.
And that circles us back to this topic.
One of the features of the East/West and Urban/Rural device in Canada is that urban areas have become very powerful in terms of federal legislation and they have in turn proven to be extremely liberal post 1960. Indeed, Canada in some ways defines the Jeffersonian view about what concentrations of populations mean. Urban Canadians are not "liberal" in the classic Lockean libertarian sense but "liberal", or perhaps, "progressive" in the Social Democrat sense. Completely contrary to Americans, Canadians as a whole are much more accepting and even embracing of statism and government sponsored social control, although that will inevitably crack and retreat under the strain of the extreme lengths to which it has now been put. Typically liberals claim to espouse the ideals of liberty within democracy but Canadians have accepted real controls of speech and expression that nearly any sector of the American public would regard as absolutely abhorrent.
And urban Canadians, in the same spirit, have embraced very extensive gun control.
Rural Canadians have not and indeed much of what I have noted above has not been embraced by Western Canadians or rural Canadians. Canadian rejection, in rural areas, of gun control measures is known to be widespread even while at the same time urban Canadians are so ignorant of rural Canadian firearm us that urban Canadians will frequently claim that guns can't be owned in Canada. This citation is made by urban Canadians often in accusation against the United States, with it being claimed that there is no violence in Canada, more or less, because Canadians are not allowed to own firearms. In fact, this is completely false on both scores and shows a real lack of understanding on the part of people making the statement about actual laws and cultures (plural) in Canada itself.
Firearms most definitely can be owned in Canada and, like rural Mexico, simply ignoring more recent gun control measures is a widespread Canadian thing. Indeed, while Canadians have somewhat sneered at the United States for its lack of extensive gun control, at least the press is now reporting things honestly in Canada in regards to criminal firearms usage an not blaming it on the United States. It's known that most illegally used and owned firearms in Canada come into illegal usage through other Canadians, and indeed an entire lucrative black market has sprung up in which those who acquire firearms legally pass them into illegal hands at great profit. That same market once existed in a lot of American big cities but it has passed away over the years as restrictions on firearms ownership which fostered the black market, as all such restrictions on material ownership always do, went away. And there are lots of firearms in Canada, which up until very recently had firearms that were considerably more lax than those of the United States.
And what this has shown, as the Australian example also did, is that gun control really doesn't achieve anything. Indeed, Toronto just had another mass killing, with a van, just before this. As with the Western World in general, violence in Canada has continued to decline, overall, at about the same rate as it otherwise was. Horrific acts, however, still occur. The real impact of gun control has been to make life difficult for rural Canadians. In spite of this, the likely Canadian reaction, or at least that in Ontario, will be to boost the already existing calls for even stricter gun control.
And as with the United States, Canada is occasionally plagued with acts by those who are mentally impaired, as was apparently the case here. That does not, as far as I'm aware, happen with the seeming same frequency as it does in the US, but Canadian rates of violence were always lower than those of the United States, and no doubt for a variety of reasons. Toronto's rate of violence, for what its worth, has been climbing in recent years, which says something but its not clear what. The Canadian economy is in good shape so whatever is spiking it has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with gun access, and nothing to do with the United States. Something else is going on.
So what all can we learn from this? Well, whatever it is, we're probably not going to. But if we were to, it perhaps should give those from one country pause about lecturing another about following its own example, as all the examples are pretty flawed. Another is that restricting implements at the end of the day doesn't really accomplish much other than to burden people who are very unlikely to ever burden you.
What we might learn, however, if we learn anything, is that people can be violent and the mentally disturbed are more likely to be violent than others. People can imagine that they can legislate that away, but they really can't, or at least not by "you can't own" type of laws. That requires some other focus.
Well, there's been no "we're all Torontonians" movement. A random act of senseless violence just doesn't draw them like ones that can seemingly be politicized. But perhaps they should be, as those might say more than anything else.
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*In fairness, this process started with the Industrial Revolution, of which the Electronic or Computer or Information Revolution is a mere part.
**Quebec City was founded in 1608.
***The United States underwent the same transformation, it should be noted, but much more slowly and indeed much less completely.
****Except. perhaps, that it too was largely rural. Indeed, it was the French Canadians rural character, not the couple of large cities in Quebec, that allowed it to remain distinct over the centuries. Being primarily rurual in character, and supported by the Catholic church in every fashion including culturally, it withstood the solvent of English culture and administration. The same is true of Ireland. In both instances the culture would not even exist but for the Catholic Church.
^It's more fairly used to described New Zealand and what was Rhodesia.
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