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December 23, 2005

Peace is made, not found

The Right Rev. Dr. Peter Short
Moderator, The United Church of Canada

In the season ahead, people of many religious traditions and of no religious tradition will feel the ubiquitous presence of Christendom and its Christmas — tarted up, distorted, and faded though it may be.

Good souls among them will see points of convergence with their own traditions of the sacred in the world. The less charitable will not.

In spite of all it has failed to become, Christmas is still hard to kill. The strange story of the sacred in the stable has lived on. It has outlived wars and the loss of loved ones and our growing up and our growing old. It has outlived our tattered dreams and our manifold strategies and our creeping hopelessness. Mysteries have a way of surviving even in the midst of established religion.

The ancient Christmas story tells of a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace.”

But where is the peace? If the mystery has lived on all these years, where is the peace?

I look for peace in the streets — it isn’t there. I look for it in the faces in the crowd. I look in the newspapers, in the schools, in the global village. I look for peace in my own mind, but I can’t even find it there.

The heavenly host may have been right about there being peace on earth, but they couldn’t have given us the whole of the story. I think what they left out was this: peace is here among us but it can never be found.

Oh, peace is very real alright, as real as angels. My friend Steve had a heart transplant a few years back. He says that at death’s door you are in the company of angels (as it turned out in his case) and that the angels are forever in your midst and you carry with you this sense of travelling to the paradise they occupy. But that’s not the same thing as saying he enjoys the benefits of peaceful angelic sentiments while travelling through the affairs of the day.

Peace is as real as angels and children’s dreams, but you can’t find peace. You can only make it, like a recipe. Sometimes when you are busy at the recipe, peace will find you.

You make peace when you get the ingredients of life in proportion. You make peace when you receive the sun and the rain on your field with thanksgiving for things you did not create. You make peace when by labour of hands and heart you nourish others and yourself. Peace is made in the household. Peace is made in the community and it is made in the world. Made, not found.

And one day while you are busy with the recipe, peace is standing just behind you looking over your shoulder. One day while Canadian soldiers on United Nations assignment are talking with children who have been taught to hate, peace takes a tentative step to draw nearer. One day while ordinary Canadians are deciding that the good life is not the same as the life of goods, peace can be seen walking toward them over distant hills.

Christians know that Jesus did not say “blessed are the ones who find peace,” he said “blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

Meanwhile, the Christmas rush is in full swing. It is really no more than a turbo-charged version of the state of anxiety in which most of these days exhaust themselves. You will see many searching frantically for peace. They will take off on cruises in search of it, and buy instructional CDs and invest in portfolios and surround themselves with security measures, and search many sites and attach themselves to the next guru and Lord knows what all.

But they won’t find it. Like God, peace is a shy presence, a sort of recluse.

Peace is not escape. It’s really just humble work; the giving and receiving; the finding of the proportions that sustain life in the household and in the planet; the knowing that gratitude is the test of all happiness. But humble though it is, “peace hath its victories,” as Milton said. The sacred in the stable is known and cherished in many religions. It is told in many versions. It is found in the hearts of many peoples. They are, religion or no religion, the peacemakers. My religion says they are the children of God.

December 16, 2005

A tale of two countries

This is a story of two countries. One of them, a country called Canada, signed the Kyoto Accord. The other country, the United States of America, rejected it.

The Kyoto Accord has a simple purpose: to encourage the people of the world to produce less carbon dioxide than they produced in 1990, by six per cent. Carbon dioxide is produced when you burn stuff, especially gasoline, coal, diesel fuel, or wood. You can’t see it, but it’s there. It rises into the upper atmosphere and gets stuck, keeping warm air trapped beneath it, like the glass walls of a greenhouse on a sunny day.

That’s why our springs now arrive earlier and our winters later. That’s why glaciers are melting and why ice doesn’t form until December in many Nunavut communities.

So did our country, whose government signed the Kyoto Accord around 1997, find a way to burn less stuff? No, we did not. Since 1997, Canadians managed to burn far more fuel than we burned in 1990. We now produce 24.2 per cent more carbon dioxide than we did that year, with no reductions in sight.

The prime minister who signed the Kyoto agreement on our behalf, Jean Chrétien, did much bragging about how Canada, the rosy-cheeked Boy Scout among nations, will do its part to combat global warming. So does his successor, Paul Martin, whose fake sincerity is even more convincing than Chrétien’s.

The truth, however, is that we Canadians have done nothing to comply with the obligations we undertook when our government signed the Kyoto Accord. And to this day, our federal government has produced no coherent policy or plan to meet them.

Instead, they put on a show. They hired a CBC comedian by the name of Rick Mercer, paying him $85,000 to appear in a series of television commercials produced by Environment Canada at a cost of $26 million. In them, we see Mercer prancing down a city street, shouting at us about something called the “one-tonne-challenge.”

A focus group survey conducted for the government by a polling firm reveals that few Canadians actually understand what the Mercer ads are trying to say. “None of the participants could articulate what the challenge is about or why it is important. They had no understanding of why they would want to participate or even what a tonne is,” the survey report said, as quoted in a news story published this past July by the CanWest News Service.

An earlier polling survey, done in the fall of 2004 by the Environics firm, showed that only 16 per cent of Canadians care much about climate change anyway, partly because many Canadians actually welcome the idea of warmer winters. “Climate change continues to receive almost no profile as an issue of national importance,” the Environics report says, as quoted by the CanWest News Service last July.

What about the other country, the one that rejected the Kyoto Protocol? In the same period of time, the big bad United States did better than Canada. They’re producing only 13 per cent more carbon dioxide than they did in 1990.

That’s a long, long way from the global target set out in the Kyoto Protocol. But given that the U.S. never promised to meet those targets in the first place, that’s not bad. It partly reflects the success of energy efficiency efforts taken by a variety of state and local governments throughout the U.S., which go forward in spite of the Bush administration’s hostility to the Kyoto Accord. In many cases, those efforts exceed anything that self-righteous Canada has ever done. New York City, for example, now runs one of the biggest hybrid bus fleets in North America, and is introducing hybrid taxis.

It’s actually not true, technically, that the U.S. never signed the Kyoto agreement. When he was president, Bill Clinton signed it, but knew it was a meaningless gesture. That’s because the U.S. Senate, by a margin of 95-0, voted in 1997 never to ratify a climate change agreement that does not include rapidly growing developing nations like China or India. (The U.S. constitution requires that international treaties be ratified by legislators.)

The Bush administration likely deserves much of the scorn that’s been heaped up on it for its opposition to Kyoto, but until the U.S. congress changes its position, George W. Bush’s signature would be as meaningless as Bill Clinton’s.

Nevertheless, it’s the United States that the Inuit Circumpolar Conference seeks to punish in its petition to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. The ICC has gained much publicity over the past two years simply by talking about this case. Now that their petition will be adjudicated, it remains to be seen how much of their legal claim will survive the scrutiny of the commission’s judges. They make a complex and unusual legal argument, and there’s no certainty that it will achieve any of the goals set out in it.

It’s ironic, however, that the country that has committed the most egregious breach of promise, hypocritical Canada, should face no consequences for its failure. JB

December 9, 2005

The dysfunctional dog team

Imagine this: you're the owner of a huge dog-team. It's made up of 19 slavering, ill-fed canines.

When you chose this team you did not choose well. There are four or five smart males, and a couple of fairly smart females, but they're outnumbered by those who aren't fit to run any more: a couple of old dogs too feeble to pull their weight, a collection of scrawny ones who let the others do their work for them, and three or four who spend way too much time with their snouts stuck in their owner's beer keg. Worst of all, there's no boss dog big enough to keep them in line.

It's been a bad year and you've got enough meat to feed only four or five of them. But their whining drives you crazy so you toss your meat at them anyway.

After a short, loud, free-for-all, it's over. The smart ones get enough to take the edge off their hunger. The small stupid ones get nothing. Tails low, the losers cower at the edge of the circle, whimpering, yelping, nursing dark thoughts of revenge.

That, in a nutshell, is how the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut functions during a budget session, especially a capital budget session, when MLAs get to snarl at each other over those highly-sought-after building projects and the highly-sought-after ribbon-cutting extravaganzas that go with them.

Meanwhile, the thing that causes most of that conflict went mostly undebated. And that's the Government of Nunavut's worsening financial state. As a result, the GN continues to get no direction from the legislative assembly on public policy and continues to flail about in all directions with no clear priorities.

The GN's brainiacs now figure on spending a whopping $990.7 million by the financial year ending April 1, 2006. Based on past annual rates of increase, you can count on the GN's annual budget to soar past the billion-dollar mark by 2007. Compared with the $610 million of spending projected in 1999-2000, that's a lot of cash.

Yet it's never enough. Based on the incessant complaints from MLAs, about infrastructure deficiencies in their communities, it's not even close to being enough. Though the whining of MLAs is sometimes irritating and ill-informed, it rests upon a core of truth. Water and sewage systems in many communities are falling apart and pose a huge potential environmental liability. Aging schools and nursing stations are in need of upgrades and replacements. The shortage of social housing units is, all by itself, setting off a social disaster.

And those are only the infrastructure requirements. The GN's year-to-year program budget for basic operations and maintenance is also strained to the limit.

You would think then, that in addition to thinking up new ways for the GN to spend money, MLAs would also sit down and think up some new ways to save money. If that's too hard, they could at least show some appreciation for the need to do so.

Among other things, that means evaluating all government programs to figure which ones work, which ones don't work, which ones should be kept and which ones should be dumped. Given the low quality of work that emanates from many GN employees, there's no doubt that such an evaluation would turn up a lot of expensive mush that could be squeezed out of the system. The Department of Finance did conduct a "program review" exercise within the life of the last government, but that work appears to have vanished into the ether.

It also means setting priorities: making hard political decisions about what the GN will do now, what it will put off until later, and to root out policies that either contradict one another or don't reflect reality, such as its approach to the fishery.

The Nunavut Economic Forum's recent 2005 Economic Outlook report pointed this out, but it doesn't look as if anyone's paying much attention. Keith Peterson, the MLA for Cambridge Bay, made a brave but likely futile attempt to point all this out, beginning with the lack of priority setting, in a series of member's statements made throughout the session.

But no one took him up on his offer to discuss the Nunavut's biggest underlying problem. It's a lot more fun, apparently, to fight, yowl and whimper. JB

Who's stigmatizing who?

You can't blame James Arreak, the MLA for Uqqummiut, for complaining in the legislative assembly about a Nov. 4 story in this paper revealing that the death of a Clyde River man earlier this year is related to the HTLV-1 virus.

That's because just about everything the Government of Nunavut has done in response to this situation has served to stigmatize the community and all those who carry the virus. This stigmatization of Clyde River by the territorial government has been reinforced further by those who complain about Clyde River's having been identified.

More than anyone, health officials ought to know that there's nothing morally wrong about carrying the HTLV-1 virus, or any other virus, in one's bloodstream. It's a fundamental part of nature, and so obvious that it hardly needs to be said. We all carry infectious microbes inside our bodies that, if transmitted in certain ways, could make another person sick. That's how we get sick from most infectious diseases, from the common cold to tuberculosis.

And that's why, in the past, territorial officials have released information about outbreaks of tuberculosis, RSV and other diseases in named communities, and no one has complained about it.

So if there is nothing shameful about carrying the HTLV-1 virus in one's bloodstream, why is the GN, and certain MLAs, acting as if it were shameful? In doing so, they are simply reinforcing the stigma, the false notion that it's morally wrong to simply carry a virus in one's bloodstream.

The people of Nunavut are adults. As citizens of a free and open society, they are entitled to be treated as adults. But their affairs, sadly, are run by a nanny government staffed by officials who believe that Nunavummiut should be treated like children, too immature and irresponsible to handle the truth. Like state officials everywhere, they hate the free flow of information, unless it's they who control it. In doing so, however, they contradict the very mission of the Nunavut government.

The silliest reaction to the whole affair was that offered by Tagak Curley, the MLA for Rankin Inlet-North. On Sept. 21, Curley got up on his hind legs in the legislative assembly to demand an "investigation" by either the justice department or the information and privacy commissioner, as a way of intensifying a GN witch-hunt aimed at revealing the identity of an unnamed government official who corroborated part of the Nov. 4 story. His demand included an allegation that somebody violated Section 59 of the Information and Privacy Act, which provides for fines of up to $5,000 for those found guilty of disclosing private information held by the territorial government.

This demand, however, is based on a grotesque misunderstanding of the Information and Privacy Act.

The privacy act is intended to protect the privacy of individual persons, not communities or any other collectivity. The act governs the practices of territorial government employees who, in the performance of their duties, must acquire information from people. It's intended to ensure that such information is used only for the purpose for which it was gathered, and is not disclosed to third parties without the permission of the individual persons who supply the information.

Curley's demand is based on an inane premise. Because if it were true that Clyde River's "privacy" were violated, then it is equally true that GN officials violated Nunavut's privacy when they announced the presence of HTLV-1 within Nunavut. And if that were so, then it would be impossible for officials to release any information about any disease at any time.

Of course, no private information belonging to any individual person was ever disclosed by anyone. For that reason, such an "investigation" would accomplish nothing, except to further intimidate officials within the GN's troubled health department.

That, however, hasn't stopped GN officials from forcing a long list of senior health employees into signing a document saying they didn't squeal to the newspaper. Those who actually read the newspaper story will, of course, learn that the principal sources for it are people who live in Clyde River - the community that is alleged to have been "stigmatized."

Certain MLAs may take pleasure in bullying GN employees. But in a department whose morale is already at rock-bottom levels owing to the departure of all their assistant deputy ministers and the impending departure of their deputy minister, this is a bad idea.

It's sad, but once again Nunavut MLAs have shown that they are incapable of mounting a serious discussion about health issues in Nunavut. For example, Nunavut's chlamydia rate is 14 to 15 times the national average, with hundreds of new cases reported every year. We cannot recall any MLA ever asking a question about this.

But if paternalistic officials, elected and non-elected, continue to act as if the people of Nunavut should be kept in a state of infantilized ignorance, the infantilized ignorance will continue. JB

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