This is the continuation of a recent post, but its really a new beginning since I felt that the last post missed the point.
How does a bilingual Canadian, walking his dog in a park, say ‘Hello’ to a stranger? He has options, after all. He can say ‘Hi! Beautiful day, isn’t it!’ or he can say ‘Bonjour! Quelle belle journée!’ If he really can’t decide on a language, he can nod his head and smile.
My personal experience, as a bilingual Canadian who doesn’t own a dog but loves to go for a walk, is that one language takes precedence over the other. I live in Ottawa, so I naturally speak to strangers in English. On the rare instances that I cross the bridge to Québec, I immediately switch over to French.
If one defines the language of a society by the language in which strangers greet each other, the picture of Canada is very clear. Quebec society is French because everywhere in the province, with the possible exception of the West Island of Montreal, strangers say ‘bonjour’ rather than ‘hello’. The rest of Canada is English because even in the most multiethnic neighbourhoods, English is the common language that is spoken in the street.
There are currently one million French Canadians living outside Quebec. Most are scattered along the Quebec border in Ontario and New-Brunswick. A few more are in Winnipeg. The francophones of English Canada face a difficult situation by living in an English society. Since English is inevitably the language of their daily life, they are only be francophones at home. They cannot be true francophones; not as long as they greet strangers with ‘Hello’ rather than ‘Bonjour’.
(To be continued)
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Disappearing Communities
Canada is not bilingual. The province of Québec is exclusively French speaking. Everywhere else is English.
French survived in Québec because the provincial government protected it with laws. Laws made French the language of business and professional life. They also ensured the demographic stability of Francophones by making it impossible for immigrants to send their children to public school in any other language.
Canada outside Québec is an English country. People work and interact in English and consume a northern strain of American culture. There are only a million francophones. Most live along the Quebec border in Ontario and New-Brunswick. A few more are in Winnipeg and Edmonton.
Unlike the Québécois, these small French communities are not protected by language laws. Surrounded by English, they are assimilating slowly but surely, against their will.
(to be continued)
French survived in Québec because the provincial government protected it with laws. Laws made French the language of business and professional life. They also ensured the demographic stability of Francophones by making it impossible for immigrants to send their children to public school in any other language.
Canada outside Québec is an English country. People work and interact in English and consume a northern strain of American culture. There are only a million francophones. Most live along the Quebec border in Ontario and New-Brunswick. A few more are in Winnipeg and Edmonton.
Unlike the Québécois, these small French communities are not protected by language laws. Surrounded by English, they are assimilating slowly but surely, against their will.
(to be continued)
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Epistola sur le multiculturalisme
Le multiculturalisme, comme le hockey, est l’un de ses sujets dont les Canadiens débattent beucoup. Malheureusement, comme dans le hockey encore, l’émotion a tendance à dominer le débat. Quand les politiciens et journalistes s’en mêlent, ils y ajoutent la démagogie. Il est donc normal que beaucoup de gens aient du mal à s’y retrouver. Essayons de faire le tri dans les idées.
Le multiculturalisme est critiqué sur deux points principaux. D’abord, on lui reproche de ralentir l’intégration des immigrants en les encourageant à garder leur culture d’origine. Ensuite, on affirme qu’il porte atteinte à l’égalité des citoyens et à la laïcité de l’état en permettant à certaines personnes de contourner les lois au nom de la religion.
Sur le premier axe, il y a des bonnes nouvelles : la réalité sur le terrain, mesurée statistiquement, montre qu’il n’y a pas matière à s’inquiéter. Le Canada ne connaît pas les problèmes de violence raciste observés dans plusieurs pays européens. Nos grandes villes ont des quartiers ethniques, mais ce ne sont pas des ghettos puisqu’il n’y a pas de pauvreté endémique et que la concentration d’immigrants de même origine n’est jamais aussi élevée qu’on le croit. Dans la ville de Brampton, par exemple, qui est parfois qualifiée de «ghetto Sikh», 67,78% des habitants sont chrétiens et le revenu médian est de 27,187 $, par rapport à 25,615 $ pour tout le Canada.
Autre excellente nouvelle : Statistiques Canada indique que les immigrants du Canada et leurs enfants, loin de souffrir du manque de dynamisme qu’on retrouve par exemple dans les «cités» immigrantes de la banlieue parisienne, sont généralement ambitieux. En 2006, une étude révélait que 79% des enfants immigrants faisant partie d’une minorité visible comptaient obtenir un diplôme universitaire, tandis que seulement 57% des enfants nés au Canada partageaient cet objectif.
On ne peut donc pas dire que l’immigration au Canada pose problème. En fait, ceux qui font face aux plus importants défis, ce sont les autochtones. Notons bien l’ironie. Le taux d’emploi chez les autochtones hors-réserve est de 70,1%. Il est de 82,5% pour les non-autochtones. Dans les réserves, le Caledon Institute of Public Policy rapporte de 58% des jeunes de 20 à 24 ans n’ont pas de diplôme d’études secondaires. Le taux de suicide est cinq fois plus élevé chez les jeunes autochtones que chez les non-autochtones.
Le gouvernement fédéral a longtemps cherché à intégrer de force les autochtones dans la société canadienne anglo-saxonne et on comprend maintenant à quel point c’était dangereux. En cherchant à briser les liens des autochtones avec leur culture ancestrale, le gouvernement a créé un vide culturel qui est à l’origine de nombre des problèmes auxquels les autochtones font face aujourd’hui. Faut-il y voir la preuve du bien fondé du multiculturalisme, qui cherche précisément à maintenir ses liens? Peut-être. En tout cas, une forme de multiculturalisme aurait été souhaitable lorsque les colonisateurs européens sont arrivés en Amérique du Nord. Ce même multiculturalisme semble aussi bien fonctionner aujourd’hui, comme en témoigne l’état excellent des communautés immigrantes du Canada.
Que dire, alors, de cette deuxième critique : que le multiculturalisme affaiblit l’égalité des citoyens et la laïcité de l’état en permettant aux immigrants de contourner les lois au nom de la religion? Tout simplement qu’il n’y a aucun lien entre le multiculturalisme et l’application des lois. Le multiculturalisme, c’est simplement un engagement de l’état d’aider les immigrants qui le souhaitent à maintenir les liens avec la culture de leurs parents. Concrètement, ça veut dire que le gouvernement verse chaque année quelques centaines de millions de dollars à des associations ethno-culturelles et qu’il ne met pas les nouveaux arrivants dans des situations où ils se sentent obligés d’abandonner leur culture d’origine pour se faire acceptés, comme par exemple en leur demandant de signer un contrat promettant de souscrire aux valeurs de leur pays d’accueil.
L’idée selon laquelle le caractère multiculturel du Canada devrait permettre à certaines personnes de se soustraire aux lois pour des motifs religieux est insensée : il n’y a aucune contradiction entre le multiculturalisme et l’application égalitaire des lois. Depuis Locke, nous définissons comme principe démocratique fondamental que ce qui est interdit en société civile l’est aussi dans le cadre de la religion. Il y a aucune raison pour laquelle le multiculturalisme devrait nous poussé à revoir ce principe. Rien n’empêche d’encourager les immigrants à maintenir les liens avec leur culture d’origine –l’ojectif du multiculturalisme- tout en les obligeant à écarter les éléments de cette culture qui sont interdits par la loi.
Le Canada est officiellement multiculturel depuis 1971. Comme nous l’avons vu précédemment, l’immigration se porte bien aujourd’hui. Est-ce grâce, ou en dépit du multiculturalisme, qui sait? Certains pays officiellement multiculturels comme le Royaume-Uni et le Pays-Bas ont des problèmes important d’intégration et même de terrorisme. D’autres pays qui préconisent l’intégration immédiate comme la France, la Belgique et la Suisse, font face à une montée de la violence raciste. En fait, il n’y a aucun modèle qui semble fonctionner partout. On constate cependant que l’intégration se fait plus facilement dans les pays comme le Canada, les Etats-Unis et l’Australie qui ont été peuplé récemment par des colons et où l’écrasante majorité de la population, au fond, est immigrante. Tout ceci n’est peut-être donc qu’une question de mentalités : qu’un pays soit multiculturel, pluriculturel, uniculturel ou culturellement vide, le plus important, c’est d’être tolérant.
Le multiculturalisme est critiqué sur deux points principaux. D’abord, on lui reproche de ralentir l’intégration des immigrants en les encourageant à garder leur culture d’origine. Ensuite, on affirme qu’il porte atteinte à l’égalité des citoyens et à la laïcité de l’état en permettant à certaines personnes de contourner les lois au nom de la religion.
Sur le premier axe, il y a des bonnes nouvelles : la réalité sur le terrain, mesurée statistiquement, montre qu’il n’y a pas matière à s’inquiéter. Le Canada ne connaît pas les problèmes de violence raciste observés dans plusieurs pays européens. Nos grandes villes ont des quartiers ethniques, mais ce ne sont pas des ghettos puisqu’il n’y a pas de pauvreté endémique et que la concentration d’immigrants de même origine n’est jamais aussi élevée qu’on le croit. Dans la ville de Brampton, par exemple, qui est parfois qualifiée de «ghetto Sikh», 67,78% des habitants sont chrétiens et le revenu médian est de 27,187 $, par rapport à 25,615 $ pour tout le Canada.
Autre excellente nouvelle : Statistiques Canada indique que les immigrants du Canada et leurs enfants, loin de souffrir du manque de dynamisme qu’on retrouve par exemple dans les «cités» immigrantes de la banlieue parisienne, sont généralement ambitieux. En 2006, une étude révélait que 79% des enfants immigrants faisant partie d’une minorité visible comptaient obtenir un diplôme universitaire, tandis que seulement 57% des enfants nés au Canada partageaient cet objectif.
On ne peut donc pas dire que l’immigration au Canada pose problème. En fait, ceux qui font face aux plus importants défis, ce sont les autochtones. Notons bien l’ironie. Le taux d’emploi chez les autochtones hors-réserve est de 70,1%. Il est de 82,5% pour les non-autochtones. Dans les réserves, le Caledon Institute of Public Policy rapporte de 58% des jeunes de 20 à 24 ans n’ont pas de diplôme d’études secondaires. Le taux de suicide est cinq fois plus élevé chez les jeunes autochtones que chez les non-autochtones.
Le gouvernement fédéral a longtemps cherché à intégrer de force les autochtones dans la société canadienne anglo-saxonne et on comprend maintenant à quel point c’était dangereux. En cherchant à briser les liens des autochtones avec leur culture ancestrale, le gouvernement a créé un vide culturel qui est à l’origine de nombre des problèmes auxquels les autochtones font face aujourd’hui. Faut-il y voir la preuve du bien fondé du multiculturalisme, qui cherche précisément à maintenir ses liens? Peut-être. En tout cas, une forme de multiculturalisme aurait été souhaitable lorsque les colonisateurs européens sont arrivés en Amérique du Nord. Ce même multiculturalisme semble aussi bien fonctionner aujourd’hui, comme en témoigne l’état excellent des communautés immigrantes du Canada.
Que dire, alors, de cette deuxième critique : que le multiculturalisme affaiblit l’égalité des citoyens et la laïcité de l’état en permettant aux immigrants de contourner les lois au nom de la religion? Tout simplement qu’il n’y a aucun lien entre le multiculturalisme et l’application des lois. Le multiculturalisme, c’est simplement un engagement de l’état d’aider les immigrants qui le souhaitent à maintenir les liens avec la culture de leurs parents. Concrètement, ça veut dire que le gouvernement verse chaque année quelques centaines de millions de dollars à des associations ethno-culturelles et qu’il ne met pas les nouveaux arrivants dans des situations où ils se sentent obligés d’abandonner leur culture d’origine pour se faire acceptés, comme par exemple en leur demandant de signer un contrat promettant de souscrire aux valeurs de leur pays d’accueil.
L’idée selon laquelle le caractère multiculturel du Canada devrait permettre à certaines personnes de se soustraire aux lois pour des motifs religieux est insensée : il n’y a aucune contradiction entre le multiculturalisme et l’application égalitaire des lois. Depuis Locke, nous définissons comme principe démocratique fondamental que ce qui est interdit en société civile l’est aussi dans le cadre de la religion. Il y a aucune raison pour laquelle le multiculturalisme devrait nous poussé à revoir ce principe. Rien n’empêche d’encourager les immigrants à maintenir les liens avec leur culture d’origine –l’ojectif du multiculturalisme- tout en les obligeant à écarter les éléments de cette culture qui sont interdits par la loi.
Le Canada est officiellement multiculturel depuis 1971. Comme nous l’avons vu précédemment, l’immigration se porte bien aujourd’hui. Est-ce grâce, ou en dépit du multiculturalisme, qui sait? Certains pays officiellement multiculturels comme le Royaume-Uni et le Pays-Bas ont des problèmes important d’intégration et même de terrorisme. D’autres pays qui préconisent l’intégration immédiate comme la France, la Belgique et la Suisse, font face à une montée de la violence raciste. En fait, il n’y a aucun modèle qui semble fonctionner partout. On constate cependant que l’intégration se fait plus facilement dans les pays comme le Canada, les Etats-Unis et l’Australie qui ont été peuplé récemment par des colons et où l’écrasante majorité de la population, au fond, est immigrante. Tout ceci n’est peut-être donc qu’une question de mentalités : qu’un pays soit multiculturel, pluriculturel, uniculturel ou culturellement vide, le plus important, c’est d’être tolérant.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Media
Stéphane Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on December 2nd 2006. Few people expected his victory. He arrived at the Montreal leadership convention as the fourth placed candidate with only sixteen percent of elected delegates and his campaign spent a million dollars less than Bob Rae’s. On top of that, his convention speech ran over time and his microphone was cut off before he reached the end.
Dion won, it turned out, by being everyone’s second choice. Front-runner Michael Ignatieff was polarizing while Bob Rae was considered dead in Ontario. Stéphane Dion was a candidate everyone could live with. He was also a candidate delegates could feel proud voting for, because his personality stronger morally than politically. Choosing Dion was a slap in the face to all those like Jack Layton who had claimed a few months earlier that Dion was "a man of principle and conviction and therefore almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal party."
Stéphane Dion was not the first choice of Liberal MPs, the majority of whom supported Michael Ignatieff. His strongest supporters in the months leading up to the Montreal leadership convention were in the Press. Dion was officially endorsed by the Montreal Gazette and the Globe and Mail, who described him in an editorial as “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation.” Newspapers who chose other candidates all recognized his courage and integrity. Even Le Devoir, a Québec paper with sovereigntist leanings, wrote that “Dion is the candidate who, in the course of the leadership race, made among the strongest contribution of ideas.” Their only reason for choosing Michael Ignatieff over him was his sympathy to Québec nationalism.
In late January 2007, less than two months after Stéphane Dion’s leadership victory, the Conservative Party rolled out a series of now infamous attack ads portraying Dion as a weak leader. The ads featured clips of Michael Ignatieff and Ken Dryden criticizing their party’s environmental record in a leadership debate. Dion was shown answering “This is unfair!” and “Do you think its easy to make priorities?” The ads were unfavourably received. A Harris-Decima poll published on February 7th at the end of the ad blitz showed that fifty-nine percent of Canadians who had seen the ads found them unfair, while only twenty-two percent found them fair. The media were unanimous in their criticism. Even journalists at the National Post found the ads morally questionable.
Polling agencies detected a small shift in voting intentions from the Liberals to the Conservatives in the aftermath of the campaign. Nanos Research and Harris-Decima put the two parties in a statistical tie, while Strategic Counsel gave the Conservatives a slight lead. However, considering that the nearest confidence vote was at least a month away and that the Liberal Party still enjoyed higher levels of support than in the last election, if would have been difficult, at the time, to call the negative advertising campaign a success.
It turned out that the real effect of the ads was to redefine Stéphane Dion for the media. In a few short weeks, he went from being “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation” to a weak intellectual unable to lead his party. The Conservatives succeeded at creating a new Stéphane Dion that had little to do with the one who had been in politics for the previous ten years. Journalists, obviously, claimed that Dion had been redefined in the eyes of Canadian, but the public opinion polls mentioned above clearly demonstrate that they were the only ones whose opinion had been swayed.
From then on, everything Dion did was reported through the lens of “weakness” and “lack of leadership”. His refusal to make personal attacks in Question Period became a sign of his inability to lead. His attempts to put forward progressive public policy for debate, as he did with the 30-50 plan against poverty, were dismissed by the media as “too intellectual” and “difficult for average Canadians to understand”. Journalists started finding problems that no one had ever considered before. For instance, they decided that Canadians could no longer understand his English, even though they had managed fine in the ten years he spent as a cabinet minister. When Dion he published his Green Shift, that economists largely applauded, he was, predictably, decapitated.
All that time, Stephen Harper was acting like a bully and running into situations that seriously put in question his morality. Everyday, in Question Period, his party handpicked ministers to dodge questions and insult opposition members. In the short slot before Question Period reserved for MP statements about issues affecting their riding, Conservative backbenchers were instructed to read vicious statements about Dion to destabilise him. In May 2007, it was discovered that the Conservative Party had given all its MP chairing House of Commons Committees a 200 page handbook on obstructing and manipulating proceedings.
Yet none of these things did him much harm to Stephen Harper’s public image. Actually, his viciousness in the House of Commons, and, most strangely, his well documented control over the media, seemed to contribute to his image of “competence” and “strength”. Even when Conservative Party headquarters were raided by the RCMP at the request of Elections Canada, the media seemed to conclude that the any illegal scheme only highlighted the Prime Minister’s strategic intelligence and desire to win.
The hypocrisy is startling. Journalists never miss an opportunity to complain about demagoguery, the lack of decorum in the House of Commons, the paucity of intelligent political debate and the lack of a long term vision in government. Yet when the Conservative Party releases negative ads, they are the first to fall for them. When Stéphane Dion, the one politician who meets all their moral criteria, is elected Liberal Leader, rather than praising him and supporting him, they decide that Canadians will not understand him.
When Steven Harper, who is exactly the type of politician journalists claim to hate, acts like a bully in the House of Commons, they simply decide that it’s just part of his driven, strong personality. When his party’s shifty financing mechanisms are picked up by Elections Canada, or when Donna Cadman, one of his candidates, claims that his party offered a one million dollar bribe to an MP, journalists decide that these issues just demonstrate of Harper’s Machiavellian strategic intelligence.
The fact is that those in the media can say whatever they want. If they want Stéphane Dion to be seen as an aloof academic, they can claim that “Canadians have a hard time understanding him”. If they want Stephen Harper to be seen as an unethical politician, they can say that “Canadians find his posturing extremely distasteful” or “Canadians won’t be impressed by this blatant show of partisanship”. Journalists never know what Canadians are thinking, unless they use scientific opinion polls. Usually, they simply, speculate on what the public believes as if it were fact, and end up influencing the public.
It is clear that the media have a tremendous influence on the way the public interprets political events. On the night of the last election, a University professor actually demonstrated on Radio-Canada that the media weight of the various party leaders was almost identical to the score they received.
Since the media have such a large political impact, they also have a duty to cover politics in a morally right way. They should never let politicians get away with dishonourable behaviour in the House of Commons. They should never let budgets that are condemned by all economists be defined by spin doctors. They should work to explain to Canadians complicated political measures, rather than complain about the “30 second modern media culture” that they are themselves responsible for. The media, at the moment, claims to want honourable, sincere and cerebral politicians, but the way they cover politics encourages demagoguery. They are failing us.
Dion won, it turned out, by being everyone’s second choice. Front-runner Michael Ignatieff was polarizing while Bob Rae was considered dead in Ontario. Stéphane Dion was a candidate everyone could live with. He was also a candidate delegates could feel proud voting for, because his personality stronger morally than politically. Choosing Dion was a slap in the face to all those like Jack Layton who had claimed a few months earlier that Dion was "a man of principle and conviction and therefore almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal party."
Stéphane Dion was not the first choice of Liberal MPs, the majority of whom supported Michael Ignatieff. His strongest supporters in the months leading up to the Montreal leadership convention were in the Press. Dion was officially endorsed by the Montreal Gazette and the Globe and Mail, who described him in an editorial as “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation.” Newspapers who chose other candidates all recognized his courage and integrity. Even Le Devoir, a Québec paper with sovereigntist leanings, wrote that “Dion is the candidate who, in the course of the leadership race, made among the strongest contribution of ideas.” Their only reason for choosing Michael Ignatieff over him was his sympathy to Québec nationalism.
In late January 2007, less than two months after Stéphane Dion’s leadership victory, the Conservative Party rolled out a series of now infamous attack ads portraying Dion as a weak leader. The ads featured clips of Michael Ignatieff and Ken Dryden criticizing their party’s environmental record in a leadership debate. Dion was shown answering “This is unfair!” and “Do you think its easy to make priorities?” The ads were unfavourably received. A Harris-Decima poll published on February 7th at the end of the ad blitz showed that fifty-nine percent of Canadians who had seen the ads found them unfair, while only twenty-two percent found them fair. The media were unanimous in their criticism. Even journalists at the National Post found the ads morally questionable.
Polling agencies detected a small shift in voting intentions from the Liberals to the Conservatives in the aftermath of the campaign. Nanos Research and Harris-Decima put the two parties in a statistical tie, while Strategic Counsel gave the Conservatives a slight lead. However, considering that the nearest confidence vote was at least a month away and that the Liberal Party still enjoyed higher levels of support than in the last election, if would have been difficult, at the time, to call the negative advertising campaign a success.
It turned out that the real effect of the ads was to redefine Stéphane Dion for the media. In a few short weeks, he went from being “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation” to a weak intellectual unable to lead his party. The Conservatives succeeded at creating a new Stéphane Dion that had little to do with the one who had been in politics for the previous ten years. Journalists, obviously, claimed that Dion had been redefined in the eyes of Canadian, but the public opinion polls mentioned above clearly demonstrate that they were the only ones whose opinion had been swayed.
From then on, everything Dion did was reported through the lens of “weakness” and “lack of leadership”. His refusal to make personal attacks in Question Period became a sign of his inability to lead. His attempts to put forward progressive public policy for debate, as he did with the 30-50 plan against poverty, were dismissed by the media as “too intellectual” and “difficult for average Canadians to understand”. Journalists started finding problems that no one had ever considered before. For instance, they decided that Canadians could no longer understand his English, even though they had managed fine in the ten years he spent as a cabinet minister. When Dion he published his Green Shift, that economists largely applauded, he was, predictably, decapitated.
All that time, Stephen Harper was acting like a bully and running into situations that seriously put in question his morality. Everyday, in Question Period, his party handpicked ministers to dodge questions and insult opposition members. In the short slot before Question Period reserved for MP statements about issues affecting their riding, Conservative backbenchers were instructed to read vicious statements about Dion to destabilise him. In May 2007, it was discovered that the Conservative Party had given all its MP chairing House of Commons Committees a 200 page handbook on obstructing and manipulating proceedings.
Yet none of these things did him much harm to Stephen Harper’s public image. Actually, his viciousness in the House of Commons, and, most strangely, his well documented control over the media, seemed to contribute to his image of “competence” and “strength”. Even when Conservative Party headquarters were raided by the RCMP at the request of Elections Canada, the media seemed to conclude that the any illegal scheme only highlighted the Prime Minister’s strategic intelligence and desire to win.
The hypocrisy is startling. Journalists never miss an opportunity to complain about demagoguery, the lack of decorum in the House of Commons, the paucity of intelligent political debate and the lack of a long term vision in government. Yet when the Conservative Party releases negative ads, they are the first to fall for them. When Stéphane Dion, the one politician who meets all their moral criteria, is elected Liberal Leader, rather than praising him and supporting him, they decide that Canadians will not understand him.
When Steven Harper, who is exactly the type of politician journalists claim to hate, acts like a bully in the House of Commons, they simply decide that it’s just part of his driven, strong personality. When his party’s shifty financing mechanisms are picked up by Elections Canada, or when Donna Cadman, one of his candidates, claims that his party offered a one million dollar bribe to an MP, journalists decide that these issues just demonstrate of Harper’s Machiavellian strategic intelligence.
The fact is that those in the media can say whatever they want. If they want Stéphane Dion to be seen as an aloof academic, they can claim that “Canadians have a hard time understanding him”. If they want Stephen Harper to be seen as an unethical politician, they can say that “Canadians find his posturing extremely distasteful” or “Canadians won’t be impressed by this blatant show of partisanship”. Journalists never know what Canadians are thinking, unless they use scientific opinion polls. Usually, they simply, speculate on what the public believes as if it were fact, and end up influencing the public.
It is clear that the media have a tremendous influence on the way the public interprets political events. On the night of the last election, a University professor actually demonstrated on Radio-Canada that the media weight of the various party leaders was almost identical to the score they received.
Since the media have such a large political impact, they also have a duty to cover politics in a morally right way. They should never let politicians get away with dishonourable behaviour in the House of Commons. They should never let budgets that are condemned by all economists be defined by spin doctors. They should work to explain to Canadians complicated political measures, rather than complain about the “30 second modern media culture” that they are themselves responsible for. The media, at the moment, claims to want honourable, sincere and cerebral politicians, but the way they cover politics encourages demagoguery. They are failing us.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Trying Too Hard, Part 3
If many parents don’t insist on their children being with them for supper, they do insist on staying in touch. Cell phones are now being described as “the world’s longest umbilical chords’: a sign of modern parents’ obsession with keeping their kids safe. A priori, this is a good thing; the problem is that parents aren’t necessarily very good at it.
Every single thing a person does carries a risk. Lying in bed carries a risk because the roof can collapse. Getting out of bed carries a risk, and I actually know someone who broke multiple ribs and a collarbone after tripping on sheets while getting out of bed. Since we can’t avoid risk, the trick is therefore to manage it. Luckily, nature has given us some useful tools: instinct and the capacity to learn.
Instinct tells us that jumping off a cliff is likely to result in death. We know that, simply by being human. Learning is more complicated because it only works through experience. To learn that turning too sharply at high speed can make a car tip, it helps to start by tipping a tricycle. To learn that work done at the last minute is not usually very good, it helps to hand in a science project late in grade 7 and get a C-.
The danger of parents who try too hard to keep their children safe is that they stop them from experiencing life and thus make it impossible for them to learn to manage risk. This is very easy in a world where we are constantly bombarded with stories of boys and girls being kidnapped in residential streets or run over at crosswalks by drunk drivers, even if such events only have a one in a million chance of occurring.
Parents who try too hard only let their children get to school by their own means once they reach grade nine. Even by that age, they discourage their children from going through so called “dangerous” neighbourhoods and stay in touch constantly with the cell phone. They monitor internet use, censor emails and movies, and make sure that their children hang out with the “right” friends.
Unfortunately, the children of these parents miss out on countless opportunities to make mistakes. Because they can’t walk to school alone as ten year olds, they don’t learn that it’s dangerous to cross a street on a red light. Because they aren’t allowed to chat to their friends on MSN at twelve, they don’t learn how to self-limit computer usage and to detect scams and false identities. In other words, because they are being brought up in a bacteria free environment, they don’t develop antibodies.
This means that when the inevitable moment comes that these children find themselves without the guiding hand of their parents, they end up in unknown territory a make big mistakes. Because as children grow older and become, regardless of what their parents want, more independent, the stakes also increase. If, at twelve, the risk of being alone on MSN is that a child will use swear words are write nasty things, at fifteen, the risks are online gambling, cyber-bullying, identity theft, and others. These are the kinds of things that parents should really be worried about. After all, it’s not the end of the world if an eight year old injures his knee while biking alone in the neighbourhood. It’s more serious if a sixteen year old is rushed to hospital because he had never been out alone on a bike and hadn’t learnt that it was foolish to race with cars.
Every single thing a person does carries a risk. Lying in bed carries a risk because the roof can collapse. Getting out of bed carries a risk, and I actually know someone who broke multiple ribs and a collarbone after tripping on sheets while getting out of bed. Since we can’t avoid risk, the trick is therefore to manage it. Luckily, nature has given us some useful tools: instinct and the capacity to learn.
Instinct tells us that jumping off a cliff is likely to result in death. We know that, simply by being human. Learning is more complicated because it only works through experience. To learn that turning too sharply at high speed can make a car tip, it helps to start by tipping a tricycle. To learn that work done at the last minute is not usually very good, it helps to hand in a science project late in grade 7 and get a C-.
The danger of parents who try too hard to keep their children safe is that they stop them from experiencing life and thus make it impossible for them to learn to manage risk. This is very easy in a world where we are constantly bombarded with stories of boys and girls being kidnapped in residential streets or run over at crosswalks by drunk drivers, even if such events only have a one in a million chance of occurring.
Parents who try too hard only let their children get to school by their own means once they reach grade nine. Even by that age, they discourage their children from going through so called “dangerous” neighbourhoods and stay in touch constantly with the cell phone. They monitor internet use, censor emails and movies, and make sure that their children hang out with the “right” friends.
Unfortunately, the children of these parents miss out on countless opportunities to make mistakes. Because they can’t walk to school alone as ten year olds, they don’t learn that it’s dangerous to cross a street on a red light. Because they aren’t allowed to chat to their friends on MSN at twelve, they don’t learn how to self-limit computer usage and to detect scams and false identities. In other words, because they are being brought up in a bacteria free environment, they don’t develop antibodies.
This means that when the inevitable moment comes that these children find themselves without the guiding hand of their parents, they end up in unknown territory a make big mistakes. Because as children grow older and become, regardless of what their parents want, more independent, the stakes also increase. If, at twelve, the risk of being alone on MSN is that a child will use swear words are write nasty things, at fifteen, the risks are online gambling, cyber-bullying, identity theft, and others. These are the kinds of things that parents should really be worried about. After all, it’s not the end of the world if an eight year old injures his knee while biking alone in the neighbourhood. It’s more serious if a sixteen year old is rushed to hospital because he had never been out alone on a bike and hadn’t learnt that it was foolish to race with cars.
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