Canada After September 11

John A. MacNaughton, President and CEO, The CPP Investment Board and Past President, The Empire Club of Canada; Peter Ashton, Senior Student, Parkdale Collegiate Institute; The Reverend Kim Beard, BA, Bed, Mdiv, Christ Church, Brampton; Anna Porter, Publisher and Chief Operating Officer, Key Porter Books; The Hon. David R. Peterson, PC, QC, Chairman and Senior Partner, Cassels Brock & Blackwell and Former Premier of the Province of Ontario; The Hon. Henry N.R. Jackman, CM, KStJ, Oont, BA, LLB, LLD, Chairman and President, E-L Financial Corporation Ltd. And Past President, The Empire Club of Canada; Bart J. Mindszenthy, APR, FCPRS, Partner, Mindszenthy & Roberts Communications Counsel and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Ethan Murphy, Student, Dennis O'Connor High School; Mary R. Byers, Author and Historian and Honorary Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Donna Hayes, President and Chief Operating Officer, Harlequin Enterprises Limited; and Jack H.B. Nederpelt, Managing Director, Heidrick & Struggles Canada.

Introduction by Bill Laidlaw

When I was very young my father felt it was very important for me to start reading the paper and watching the news. He felt that if I could get into these two mediums early I would get hooked. The paper was of course The Globe and Mail and the news was CBC.

I did heed my fathers wise counsel starting with sports and then politics and now I have become an addict where I cannot get enough news and views.

One of the leaders commentating on current events of the day is our guest speaker. I have been listening to him on the CBC for years and enjoying his articles in the Globe.

I must admit that when I first heard him I was amazed at how much he could say in such a short period of time. His thoughts, ideas and suggestions were spewing out so fast I could not keep track of them all. It was like getting a drink from a fire hydrant.

Now that I am accustomed to his presentation and his writing style, I find him and what he has to say even more fascinating. Coming from the grand province of Newfoundland that has produced so many fine orators and having that enchanting Newfoundland lilt certainly adds to my fascination of him.

All of us who are Rex Murphyites are much richer for having him with us so he can continue to entertain, inform and enlighten us. Rex Murphy was born and raised in Newfoundland. In 1968 he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. After returning to Newfoundland he established himself as a writer, broadcaster and teacher.

A noted political commentator, Rex is well known throughout Newfoundland for his biting comments on the political scene and his nightly television debates on the show "Here and Now," which has featured many prominent politicians including Premier Joey Smallwood.

His role in the political scene grew when he worked as an executive assistant to the leader of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland. He also went on to run for office twice in provincial elections.

Rex's broadcasting career is equally as diverse as his political one. As well as hosting "Cross Country Check Up," he also contributes weekly TV essays on diverse topics to CBC TV's "The National." He has also contributed to "Morningside," "Land and Sea," "The Journal," and written commentaries and book reviews for The Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen.

He has worked extensively with CBC over the years and contributed many items on current affairs issues. For "The National" he has done a number of documentaries including the highly acclaimed "Unpeopled Shores" which detailed the tragedy of disappearing fish.

Rex has received several awards for his work including national and provincial broadcasting awards and he was awarded honorary doctorates in letters by Memorial and St. Thomas Universities.

It is my pleasure to introduce to you today as our guest speaker the amazing Rex Murphy.

Rex Murphy

Thank you very much for the majority of that.

My own descent into the purgatory of Newfoundland politics is not the kind of thing you want to announce to a full room of people. My association with the Newfoundland Liberal Party, disastrous though it was, has some explanation. It was the result of a severe blow to the head. Fortunately the head in question wasn't mine. It was Brian Peckford's. Those of you with a retentive memory may remember at one point Mr. Peckford had a slightly extravagant fantasy at the cost of $28 million of forcefully making Newfoundlanders vegetarians of the cucumber order. Our province spent $28 million in an attempt to grow cucumbers in a climate that contains neither soil nor light and attempted to market that idea among the most relentlessly and proudly carnivorous people on the face of the globe.

I am rather pleased to get the invitation to be here. I don't get out very often. Certainly not by invitation. And of course it also suspends me from the normal noon-hour duty that is mine at the temple on Front Street just down from here. Normally at this time it is my task to trim the wicks of the candles in front of the shrine containing the statue of David Suzuki that we have in the lobby. The paraffin in these as you may imagine is entirely exquisitely natural so being exempted from that is in itself a bit of treat.

I was here a couple of weeks ago when Peter Herrndorf delivered an exposition on the state of the arts in this country and as you have already been alerted Mr. Snobelen is due here very shortly to give a treatise on bears. So I take it that I have been invited to fill the chasm. Between Peter Herrndorf on the arts and John Snobelen on bears evidently some breach is necessary.

I suspect it was thought by the managers of this symposium that Herrndorf on art and Snobelen on bears in tandem was a regular freight train of man the thinker. And not even an Empire Club could easily bear the weight of all that metaphysics without something of an intellectual or possibly even a moral holiday.

But maybe the chasm is not as deep or as threatening as I picture. The bears after all could be artists. Performance artists have taken some right turns lately. Maybe some artists could be thought of as bears-all fur and appetite heading for snacks and hibernation at the Canada Council.

In any event I am glad to be here at an institution that is almost, if I may dare say so, deliriously politically incorrect. I find it difficult to accept, let alone understand, that in this great steam bath of enlightened sensitivity, that we call our times, such a creature actually exists as an Empire Club. It is a startling wonder that you haven't been bludgeoned into oblivion by the Ontario Human Rights Commission or any other of those myriad beetles that wander the world salivating and horny to take offence--searching out innocent amusement or cherished tradition to wheel them off to the grinding of the grim teeth of the higher sensibilities. But before I lay down a hoar frost of digression and irrelevance, let us as Mr. Snobelen is bound in his turn to say, "Get down to the meat."

The storm waves of September 11 obviously still beat about us. How much the world has changed.

Barely over a year ago the great story of today in this country was the rapid decay (I'm speaking only political) of Joe Clark. The caucus was leaving him, the party chair man was heading for the lifeboats and the PC Party was the light in the empty fridge just before the door closes. I remember remarking at the time that Joe Clark seemed trapped in an unfriendly Agatha Christie movie. Every time he woke up there was one less person on the train. A year later and it is Stockwell Day who's attempting a comeback, maybe even more miraculous by the consideration that he never fully arrived in the first place. The NDP are off at Hogworts.

Against the great shadow of the news since September 11, these are items in a parlour game. I don't know the eleventh, as we now all say, changed the world or merely readjusted or corrected our understanding of it. The message of that explosive morning when temple and tower went to the ground is that things happen and they happen here. There are not two worlds--one in which politics and the action of politics is frequently war, murder, terror and grief and another one, mainly ours, in which people merely read and watch these outriders of mayhem and chaos as spectators.

I don't think that everything has changed. I think longer line-ups at the Air Canada check-up hardly strike me as a fundamental breach of continuity. Airports seem to satisfy as part of their nature the old catholic idea of limbo as a place where souls abide eternally without point or purpose, other than to avoid the even greater torment of a second eternity on the tarmac.

Everything hasn't changed. Everything has come back. The world is more likely to be a place of noise and pain and threat than it is likely to be one of calm and ease and harmony. We have been for such a long interval exempt from the predominant miseries of life on the planet that we have forgotten the exceptionalism of our condition. We on this swatch of the globe have been awakened to the contingent nature of our exemption from the dirty side of history. We like to believe that we are well off and safe and advanced and progressive as we undoubtedly are, and with no apology. But we like to believe we're all those things as a result of our own diligence, intellect and a certain providence that shelters democracies. The last century, the one just passed, should have told us what is normal in history. And the motto for every society that is enjoying a period of peace and tolerance should be the old injunction: "Watch and pray."

I like the words of an old master, not because they are bleak, and they are, but because they point with some melancholy and wisdom to how human beings keep balance and sustained hope. It also speaks to the way things are. Thomas Brown wrote: "To be forgetful of evils past and ignorant of evils yet to come is a merciful provision in nature whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days." It is our inability not to know the future and it's our ability to desensitise ourselves to some of the horrors we've done in the past that gives us the balance and the sanity to construct a proper kind of present.

Life and societies are fragile and tentative at the best of times. Our wealth and prosperity, when we are careless, act as a narcotic. The scale and shock of September 11 is not a consolation but it is a truth. It was a return to the domain of seriousness. The ride is over. It may be seriously questioned whether really there was ever a ride to begin with. In this country these things were a shock and a novelty and a trauma. One of the things that I think carries people's perplexity even further is the inability to understand the motivation of the particular individuals as opposed to general causes at bringing these things into being.

The second point that I'd like to kind of express is some idea of how these things happen. There's a line of Yates said at Easter, 1916: "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." I take this as meaning that even the ideal can corrupt, that the appeal of a worthy cause, even the initial necessity of responding to an injustice, when necessity is enjoined by a vigorous conscience, can itself become a form of blindness or hardness of those very sympathies and capacities of the heart which create the appetite for justice in the first place. I suspect as well that the cause offers an ecologically potent space for drying up other human sympathies, the sympathies that connect us all as human beings.

Identification too complete with one set of grievances to the point of passionate and total endeavour is a fertile chamber for building ferocity of partisanship, of idolising the particular and despising the common, of smothering all kinship and sympathy that is not exclusive and of cultivating an almost perfect even manic loyalty and passion to a single or singular goal.

Hence, to give you an illustration. When I recently saw the children going to school on the Fall's Road in Ireland and the partisans of one side of the perpetual Irish quarrel throwing rocks and hurling even more flinty verbal stones at the little kids, it could not be explained to me other than by the idea that those cursing and stoning had by a blind act of will excised sympathy. They had amputated themselves from the deep and permanent currents of human nature. Their attachment to a particular cause had amputated an essential core of humanity. As peoples deep from the furious rages of protestant union or catholic republican, they have crushed reason itself outside the quarrel and they have buried their better angels. For what is there politically that was worth this violence done upon children? For what were they fighting that had more value, more heart than the injuries to the children they were causing? Throwing rocks at children was a surrender of something much more precious than whatever cause they dreamed of being successful.

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." Well fanaticism is ultimately a form of selfishness and arrogance. In other words it is splendid egotism. The lives of all those strangers in the towers and the miseries of daughters and sons, wives and husbands, parents and friends do not mean anything to the fanatic. To the fanatic they are a line on some mad blueprint. So let them burn, jump, fall, be wounded and die. What is it to him?

The intensity of dedication to a type of cause that reaches such spectacular limits of committed action is something to which we have not been accustomed on our part and the intrusion of September 11 was a wild reminder that the tensions that exist on the planet can find their eccentric or singular or particular eruptions and none of us are closed to it.

Here in our country, if we are to have some sort of response, it has to be contingent upon our own understanding of ourselves and that's the last thing I have to say. I think it is the very contained, the very diminished, the inadequate understanding we have of where we are in a world that's become more busy and more threatening. It is incumbent that we know ourselves. We have shrunk our politics and our politics itself has shrunk to faction. The parties have shrunk to their own business and to their business only. We are a mightily un-idea'd political system. Look again at the business of the federal parties. The four main questions facing the Canadian citizen today are purely questions of motion or inertia. When is Jean going? Will Stock be allowed to say? Is Alexa still there? And is Joe ever going to leave? We don't need a Parliament for this. We need a good travel bureau.

In the common arena outside the party system we have a couple of notions that we re-circulate or inflate according to circumstances--the imperatives of an election or the studied ecstasy of Canada today--to give property or an air of insufficiency to our idea or ourselves.

Health care. Health care in this country is a doctrine before it is a policy. It is not the third rail of Canadian politics. It is the back-up generator of Canadian self-understanding. Health care is the surrogate or default mechanism of Canadian patriotism.

Quebec. It is said that if you oppose two mirrors with an intervening object you manufacture an infinity of regressing images. And since there are an infinite number of images it would take an eternity distinctly to look at each of them. The intervening object which multiplies to infinity in our political case is called a referendum. Staring into the double mirror is that peculiar coma we know in this country as constitutional reform.

While regions and provinces have sharp, deeply sketched and enduring characters nationally we have bundled a set of serviceable, commendable and not too flamboyant virtues and settled upon them as a signature of Canadian being. In short-hand again, backpacks with flags, mediators not competition, reserve in the demonstrations of civic display and the very chosen sense of satisfaction for the geographic providence of not being Americans.

Our nation is an artefact. It is something which takes its shape and keeps its very existence by a repeated exercise of self-conscious will and in good times imagination. It is only a slight flex of rhetoric that for this country to continue or flourish (and in that sentence those words are really the same) the country must be re-invigorated or renovated on a daily basis. The intensity with which we derive our civic satisfaction from the various components of this country should have some match on a national scale.

I'll hurl only one more quotation at you. It's from Sir Francis Bacon. He's talking about charity but it can apply to the sense of Canadian being. He says: "Charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool." The animation and the vigour and the identification of the Canadian civic sense is primarily expressed at the local level. This is the most natural thing in the world. But there has to be a residue of civic and national energy in order that the totality of the organisation to which we belong, the community which we are, has some momentum for its own achievements. We substract from the possibilities of our existence as a total community by not attending consciously to the national endeavour.

We have our usual counters, but the Canadian project aims at something that is rather difficult and therefore requires total imagination. We aim towards a host of intangibles. We aim at a certain flavour of social harmony that we've evolved and recognised as our own. We aim for certain reasonable interactions between citizens, regions and groups within the country. We aim also, as Peter. Herrndorf has hinted, at a certain kind of texture of life that is informed by historical memory, by the achievement of a great artist, but also by the daily business of each citizen in whatever sphere they happen be. It is an amalgamation of shared common and sometimes uplifting experience. The Canadian idea is linked to a set of intangibles and it assumes we recognise that it is not a given social policy but as much a sense of atmosphere and a self-conscious understanding of the things we value. It is a way of being. It is more self conscious and it has a vastly more animated sense than we currently allow it.

We do not bear the burden of our neighbours to the south. They have a mixed blessing. And whether they choose it or not, they have either to act as custodian or policeman or they have to retreat into their massive shell. We don't have that. The idea of Canada is that we are not here to rule but I do think however that we are here to exemplify.

In summary, it is impossible to contain all of the events that flowed from that particular moment of September 11, but if it does have some dividend to pay to us it should make us more vibrantly self-conscious of those things that are of deep worth here and strengthen our resolve to articulate what they are so that they might be protected and advanced. Harnessing the total energy of the nation on a common idea, a common Canadian project, is the greatest way to protect what it is that we are and to have something for which all citizens would widely agree to celebrate.

I suspect by now that the candles are growing dim in front of the afore-said statue. I thank you very much for your patience. It was a great pleasure to be here.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Mary R. Byers, Author and Historian and Honorary Director, The Empire Club of Canada.