Fantino to Public: Stay Out of Police Affairs

As if the death of Robert Dzienkanski at the hands of RCMP didn't put the public's perception of Canadian police officers in jeopardy already. Rather than admitting what it was -- a careless abuse of power -- and distancing themselves from the incident (however dishonest that would be), the RCMP have taken to defending it as a matter of due course. It is apparently part of officer training to interpret raising two hands in the air as saying "go to hell", as it is to assume that four officers can't restrain a man with a stapler without recourse to a weapon. Oh yeah, and Dzienkanski "directly disregarded a command", which begs the question of how someone who doesn't speak English is supposed to regard a command in the first place.

Now OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino -- whose dark imprint left on Toronto as the city's Police Chief can be seen here -- has taken to deriding the public for questioning the incident. He sneeringly dismissed criticism from those who "could never pass recruitment training", perhaps because ordinary people wouldn't be able to bring themselves to taser a confused Polish immigrant five times. The message is clear: issues involving police treatment of the public need to be handled within the force. Perhaps someone should tell Fantino that the concept of accountability and third-party monitoring is the backbone of a democratic society.

Canadian Hypocrisy on Khadr Case

The Canadian government continues to show an appalling lack of responsibility when it comes to the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian captured in Afghanistan at the age of 15.

In a gutless and incomprehensible article in the Toronto Star today, Rosie Dimanno suggests the fate of Khadr "should not be Canada's crusade" after, for some reason, going to great lengths to establish that, at 15, Khadr meets every international standard of a child soldier. She is apparently completely satisfied with Harper's claim that Khadr cannot be classified as a "child soldier" due to the fact that he "belonged to no recognizable army", whatever that means. One wonders whether the milita under mercenary Pachan Khan Zadran -- then a US ally but now considered a "renegade" -- who stormed the house where Khadr was captured would fall under the same considerations. How easily these pitiful little militant groups can gain and lose credibility as "recognizable armies" depending on whose side they're on.

After all, it seemed that Canada had enough of a role when they sent CSIS agents to Guatanamo Bay to offer up their own form of interrogation -- no they didn't use the same methods of torture that US soldiers favour, though they were complicit in the sleep deprivation and other forms of "preparation" Khadr received in lieu of the Canadian visit. Besides, what physical torture could be worse than the CSIS agent patronizing Khadr by suggesting he was being "well looked after", not to mention the crushing despair that he must have felt when he found out the Canadians weren't there to bring him back home, or even report on his condition, but actually freely contribute more "intelligence" for Khadr's trial?

The government says Khadr's case is "judicial" not "political", in which case perhaps they could have picked up on the fact that the "case" against him is a joke. From his initial interrogation at the hands of Joshua Claus -- yup, the same guy who pled guilty to allegations of abuse that led to the death of the innocent Dilawar (see Alex Gibney's excellent documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)) -- to the first tribunal which saw three Chief Prosectuors come and go, and the second tribunal where evidence was deliberately obfuscated that established that 1) Nobody actually saw Khadr throw a gernade at Sgt. Christopher Speer 2) Nobody saw Khadr with any kind of weapon, and 3) The gernade could have been thrown by another man in the house or the American soldiers themselves. Not to mention that "OC-1"'s testimony admitted to shooting Khadr in the back twice while he was huddled on the floor. "Murder in Violation of the Law of War" indeed. Oh yeah, the kangaroo court also stimulated the torture of another Canadian, Maher Arar, whose innocence is now without question.

The Canadian government wasn't always this irresponsible when it came to Khadr. When he was originally arrested in 2002, Jean Chretien ensured that he would receive "due process and proper access to Canadian officials". Perhaps the kind of "due process" that Brenda Martin, convicted of fraud in Mexico, received when the government shelled out over $80,000 to transfer her back home. Harper, who now faces an American government actually ready to shut down the embarassment that is Guantanamo Bay (an opportunity Chretien never had), is going to miss an opportunity to aid the reversal of this vast internationl injustice. Calls from UNICEF, Amnesty International and the Canadian Bar Association appear to have done nothing. It's said that the act of repatriating him would be largely symbolic, but the same can be said of the reasons for the government's refusal to act; the Khadr family's notoriety precedes him.

Most importantly, if Khadr does indeed fall under the international classification of a "child soldier" then it's up to the international community, especially Canada, to intervene. As if, at 15 years old, he could tell the difference between a "legitimate" army and a "terrorist" organization, even if such strict lines did exist. I can't imagine a soldier of any age understanding America's ever-changing, arbitrarily dictated "rules of war", let alone a teenager.

The Backlash Against All-Black Schools

This Magazine ran a recent article making the case for all-black schools in Toronto, and while I think the idea is risky (hence why the article proposed looking at it as a "test"), I find as more disturbing the constant arguments thrown against it based on principle.

Jonathan Kay's piece in the National Post takes as its basic argument the most obvious source of opposition: that the Brown v. Board of Education case ruled that "separate but equal" was inherently racist. But the argument completely divorces the fact that the case was about the rights of black children to attend public schools with whites; something that's not even remotely threatened by the concept of an alternative school. Ironically, the opposition seems to fall more in line with the history of the forces behind segregation, which has been more about telling black families and their children what they can and cannot do than black or white children (or any other racial groups) being separate per se.

It's odd considering the segregation which exists already on some level. Kay brings this to mind when he mentions "the negative correlation between the black population of schools and school-wide academic performance". This presupposes a rather dubious theory about education: that the primary goal of any school is the overall average academic standing of its students, rather than the quality of education they receive. Naturally, a school which in all likelihood is going to be receiving students who have struggled academically (the whole reason for the school in the first place) will receive lower academic standing. Surely this is more positive and constructive than the mostly-black public schools which have become naturally ghettoized over time. By consciously creating a black school, the school board allows for the city's best educators -- who otherwise might have been apathetic about teaching at a low-scoring school -- to potentially contribute to something that breaks the cycle of marginalization that already exists.

By concentrating on a school's overall performance record, Kay unwittingly points to something symptomatic about the majority of the widespread opposition against the school, which is an unwillingness to readily admit the racism that already exists in our public schools and in society at large. At the very least, anyone can admit that the legacy of racism is enough that something constructive needs to be done to counter the effect.

Kay's other arguments seem like window-dressing; piling up useless conjecture that ultimately has no necessary relationship to the proposed school. His claim that the school presupposes the a correlation between self-esteem and academic scoring -- something he dismisses based on evidence that black students statistically have higher self-esteem -- seems to suggest a compact, linear notion of personal well-being that doesn't exist. As if feeling a strong sense of self-worth (something which, at a certain level, becomes more a symptom of feelings of inferiority anyway) is the exact same as having an education that's relevant to your own history and culture; as if self-esteem and self-realization are the same thing. Other points Kay makes -- that Afrocentric schools teach "bizarre fairy tales", or that teaching everything in terms of race is reductionist -- assumes that all-black schools will necessarily by the very fact of their existence teach a certain curriculum.

Perhaps all these problems in black education can be solved within our current public schools, but the point is that it's a question that needs to be approached pragmatically, without all this idealistic baggage.

The Controversy Entrepreneurs

I thought this was a really good article. A good example of how free speech is made into an all-or-nothing argument.

Passchendaele (Paul Gross, 2008)

Paul Gross' Passchendaele occupies an odd place: on the one hand, it's a romantic WWI epic that contains so many familiar narrative touchstones that it's hard to believe the script wasn't penned decades ago. On the other hand, it's a certifiably “important” film, and not just because it taps out a larger budget than any other Canadian production. Rather, the massive loss of life for Canadians at the Third Battle of Ypres is a story that's been sorely unrepresented, even within our own country. But if it's true that stories of marginalized history need to be told with their own distinct voice, then Passchendaele's shortcomings go beyond awkward over-stylization and the usual limitations of doing a Hollywood genre with a (still, at only $20 million) sub-Hollywood budget. By staging the narrative around Gross' shell-shocked, cynical Sergeant Dunne, the film is hardly endorsing the war as a meaningful venture, but it's hard to think of a lot of films that do since All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

The film obviously sets out to illuminate Canada's specific role in the war, and to this end it can be informative. Certainly a number of Canadians are still unaware of the prejudice against anyone in the country with German descent, an ugly stain in our history that seems to have paved the way for the imprisonment of Japanese-Canadians in World War II. In the film this prejudice comes to the fore when it's revealed the nurse (Caroline Dhavernas) whom Dunne is in love with is of German descent and that her father joined the war on the side of the Central Powers. What could be a more thorough investigation of irrational prejudice turns out to be as much a plot device as anything however, with the nurse's naive, asthmatic younger brother David (Joe Dinicol), stirred by hatred of their father and a desire to prove himself to the wealthy father of his fiancee (Meredith Bailey), manages to wrangle himself a spot in the war. In one of the most contrived plot turns – a genuine concern given the story was based on Gross' own grandfather's experiences, and the historical burden the film has as a cinematic watershed – Dunne decides to re-enslit to be the milquetoast's personal babysitter.

The decision to return to the frontline is played as a priviledging of personal valor and dignity over patriotism, which would be a fine prospect had it not already become the last desperate grasp of nationalism in the face of a war whose rational justifications have long dried up. In fact, the only elements of the film to distinguish it from British or American war stories is a handful of awkwardly-placed diatribes on the perceived chutzpah of Canadian soldiers. While on an international level the sacrifice of Canadians in WWI has no doubt been unfairly blanketed under the contributions of the British Empire as a whole, anyone who's taken a high school history course in this country has been fed the “young nation comes of age” story ad nauseum. That the Canadian Corps managed to secure Passchendaele is an historical fact; more dubious is the implicit suggestion that this can be chalked up as a facet of our bravery and fighting skill at an individual level (as if that were something that could be measured anyway) as opposed to the decisions of higher-ups who rarely saw the frontline in the first place. The reality is probably a mixture of top-down and bottom-up organization, but wherein lies the origin of smugness on the part of Canadians? In the fact that our generals were heartless enough to send our soldiers into the trenches until every last one of them perished, or in the fact that our soldiers were willing to follow orders unconditionally for a war whose benefits were so drastically removed from their own lives?

Passchendaele wants it both ways: the final caption before the end credits is quick to point out that the town was recaptured only a week after Canada lost 16,000 men securing it, and yet still seems content suggesting that the individual sacrifices made were what caused Canadians to take newfound pride in their accomplishments. Whether or not the war gave Canadians a sense of identity distinct from Britain, it's still a confounding paradox that a “young” nation (as a side note, when America reached its 50^th year of independence they had already doubled the area of the country and waged war against their former colonizers, which goes lengths towards showing how “independence” is a measure of perceived rights and freedoms rather than actual ones) apparently gained its stripes by showing they were still willing to fight unequivocally for British interests. The burgeoning negative attitudes towards Brits is summed up in the ludicrous comic-book villainy of British recruiting officer Dobson-Hughes (Jim Mezon) whose one-dimensionality is best summed up in his sudden un-dramatic death that recalls the unaffected reactions to Kenny's episodic deaths after several seasons in the show South Park.

Finally (spoiler alert), Passchendaele is a war film about the virtues of personal sacrifice, with an ending so inevitable you could get 100% of the sentiment of Dunne's dying words even with the sound off. Much has been made about the film's Christian symbolism in the ending: a shell sends David careening out of the enemy's trench and entangles him on a piece of wood in an exact image of the Crucifixion, after which Dunne braves No Man's Land and drags him back to safety, cross and all. It's absurdity is palpable, but it also has a narrative purpose: earlier in the film a lot is said about how Germans supposedly nailed a Canadian soldier to a cross, which Dunne defiantly insists is propaganda. This final scene is presumably meant to substantiate this, since it's readily obvious that David is thrown onto the “cross” by freak accident. But it's an odd cinematic move that doesn't exactly work: the preposterousness of the claim that Germans crucified a Canadian soldier has already been established as part of the reigning Ally myth of Germans as “godless”. Gross' insistence on driving the point home not only strains credulity, but it also shifts the image's meaning from that of irrational anti-German prejudice to the actual deification of Canadian soldiers – whether or not it's the Allys own shells or the Germans that throw David's body up there.

Passchendaele's most redeeming quality may be that as it makes its rounds across the country, it's accompanied by a Legion presentation on Canada's war effort, specifically geared towards the contributions from each area in which it's being shown. Gross has admirable intentions in mind: illustrating the horrors of war

in a way which upcoming Remembrance Day ceremonies will only hint at. These horrors are obviously quite close to Gross, who witnessed the psychological damage in his own grandfather; it's too bad he was unable to fully disentangle the nightmare from the glory, the reality from the myths we tell ourselves to cushion the blow.