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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yul2GnFuxdk
Unicorn lawyer

I must confess: I consume a lot of CBC. I was raised on CBC radio, and even now look forward to Saturdays because it means nearly an entire day of quality radio over at CBC Radio One. I have been known to watch my share of CBC television as well, though that’s mostly news and Coronation Street (an old childhood habit, and I’m totally addicted) and not really any CBC original programming. From the ads I’ve witnessed in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder what’s going on with the network: as a 30ish white woman, I feel creepily like the network’s most targeted audience member, and am disappointed in the fare on offer:

Sophie: This show has the most potential to be like my life since I am a single mother like its title character, but the one episode I tried to watch annoyed me so much I couldn’t continue. First, the ads were so obnoxious: She’s got style; she’s got smarts (I forget the actual word here, but it was something akin to smarts); she’s got… another diaper to change?! They eventually changed the final sentence to She’s changing her life, one diaper at a time, probably because women like me found the earlier version highly offensive, as though being a mother is completely at odds with having style and a brain. The show features an emotional wreck of a white Torontonian woman battling through single motherhood and a career while seeking advice from her token gay friend as required. As with most Canadian shows, the actors seem all accustomed to stage acting and say all their lines in an overly loud, sing-songy “Aren’t I a clever ac-tor in this clever Canadian program?” Fail. Oh, and that woman has way too much unexplained child care time.

Being Erica: This is the newest show CBC is airing, and I can’t judge it beyond its ads since the premiere is on Monday, but this show is about another 30-year-old white emotional disaster of an urban woman. But this one gets to travel back in time to turn her life around so she can be less of a wreck! Hey, in the US, there’s a show featuring a 30ish (okay, more like 40ish) woman who is a little low on self-esteem and has a slightly pathetic social life. Know what it’s called? 30 Rock! That show is actually ABOUT something aside from a character concept. Plus, Tina Fey is smart and sexy. Erica? Not so much.

Heartland and Wild Roses: CBC’s attempts to reach out to the rural folk and the urbanites that dream of the country. I admit, I would have been all over Heartland as a 10-year-old girl: it’s got horses, for cripes’ sake. The show is obviously targeting tweens, and its lead character Amy is allowed to be whiny and confused, because she’s a teenager. But Wild Roses? Okay, it hasn’t debuted yet either, but it looks like Heartland for grown-ups. Grown-ups who go to New Kids on the Block reunion tours and who still dream of cowboys.

The Week the Women Went: Another attempt to represent the rural. I can’t believe this thing is going into a second season. Last year this reality show took place in some small town in Alberta or Saskatchewan, and this year it will be in Tatamagouche, NS. What happens: the women leave town for a week and we are supposed to laugh at men being inept with housework, cooking, and childcare; in the end, we realize how important women really are. All this show does is reinforce traditional gender roles and thus encourage sexism.

It’s important to note as well that all the above shows feature mostly white people. Oh, Sophie’s babydaddy is a Black man, but that feels more like a plot device than an actual attempt to represent real Canadians. And of course I can’t forget those amiable Muslims on the dreadfully unfunny Little Mosque on the Prairie making halal jokes. And the border, that has a lot of people of different ethnicities; oh, and it’s about terrorism. I just can’t help but think that CBC television is so sadly out of step with CBC Radio, where diversity is prevalent and the programming is actually often intelligent and engaging.

In a fake commercial spot, Rick Mercer really summed up exactly what I feel in an ad for Unicorn Lawyer. It’s not that far off the mark considering what CBC is actually offering. As a member of the target demographic for all this crap I have to go on record as being highly disappointed. Canadians should demand more from their public broadcaster.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVqqj1v-ZBU&amp

Watch this video to get some perspective on what Christmas should be about.

Another holiday season rolls around and again here in Canada everyone gets antsy about how to acknowledge the fact that most of us will be getting some time off work and school and will likely eat a big dinner or two with family and other loved ones.  Yes, “Happy Holidays” is the safest phrase to use if you’re a clerk at a retail store (although I haven’t recently seen a clerk friendly enough to give me any greeting aside from “Is that everything?”), but this week’s debate in Quebec’s National Assembly about whether or not to call the tree on the Assembly’s grounds a Christmas tree illustrates that Canada has really lost its way in trying to please everyone all the time.

True, in Canada we have a separation of church and state, so why have a tree at all?  Because holidays are supposed to be times of peace, happiness, worship and/or reflection, a time to step back from the quotidian and enjoy the better things in life, and the tree is a central symbol of just one of those holidays.  As much as I hate Christmas music blaring at me in stores the first day after Halloween, I have to admit that seeing little lights at night adorning trees and houses warms my heart and helps me recall how I felt celebrating Christmas as a child; the aversion to the former is rooted more with my disdain for excessive consumerism than any problem with the concept of Christmas itself.  I no longer identify myself as Christian and don’t put a tree up in my home, but I am not offended by other people celebrating this holiday or calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree, just as I am not offended by anyone practicing their religion in peace and happiness.  To be offended by a Christmas tree is the height of un-Canadian, intolerant thinking.  In our quest to accept everyone, are we so determined to erase all the customs of the people who founded this nation that we can’t even speak the names of those customs, let alone consider what those customs are supposed to be about?

A completely legitimate argument in this debate surrounds inclusion: why should the lawn of the Assembly only display symbols of Christian traditions?  I fully support the diversification of holiday symbols on the lawns of government building if that’s what it would take to call a Christmas tree what it is.  A Menorah isn’t a “Festive Candle-holder,” Ramadan isn’t a “Seasonal Fast,” and a Christmas tree isn’t a “Holiday Tree.”  To assign one religion’s symbol status to represent other holidays erases not just the goodwill supposedly central to Christmas; it also violates the meaning of holidays enjoyed by people of all religions.

The other day on the bus an old man asked me if I was Italian, even without knowing my name, which often misleads people into thinking I am Italian.  When I said no, he went through a list.

Greek?  No.

French?  No.

Portuguese?  No.

I always get a little uncomfortable when people ask me my ethnicity because I don’t know the answer.  I admit, as a garden-variety WASP Canadian it’s not a question I get a lot, since the unfortunate reality is that ethnicity in this country is so often defined by otherness from the white norm.  Every once in a while, though, someone asks me my “background,” meaning where am I from in the Old Country.  When I say I’m simply a Newfoundlander and/or a Canadian, it’s never enough: it’s as though I’m being arrogant for assuming that I’m Canadian while people who arrived here more recently are not.  I don’t think that at all: I just don’t know anything about my family’s history before this continent, and there are few, if any, records to shed some light on the matter.  So I give people the only information I know: that my family is traceable in one line back to Scotland.  Three brothers moved to Newfoundland – then its own country – not Canada, in 1873.

I’ve since spent several months in Scotland and if that’s supposed to be my “home country” then I feel exceptionally foreign there.  True, I look like I fit in, but I don’t sound like I do, and I am extremely put out by the lack of good coffee there and deep-fried mushrooms on my breakfast plate.  I never felt like such a Canadian as when I was in Scotland: I was desperately homesick for my adopted home of Montreal in a way I wasn’t when I visited other places.  I also resented paying the equivalent of $8 for a falafel.

Funny thing is, two generations ago, my family wasn’t Canadian: they were living in the British Colonies, in Newfoundland, and flying the Union Jack (not the Pink, White, and Green, as those on the Avalon Peninsula of the island would have it).  My grandmother was pregnant with my father when Newfoundland became part of Canada.  It was like a collective immigration, except Canada came to us.  Before then (and after) my grandparents worked hard to support their large families: the men spending the winters weaving fishing nets; the springs on ice floes for the seal hunt; and the summers fishing and catching lobsters; the women gutting and cleaning fish and game, cooking, cleaning, and tending to multiple children.  There are little to no genealogical records because who bothered to keep track of the poor?  That and there are all sorts of children of unknown parentage because of the need to stay silent about straying from the marital bed, or jumping into bed before marriage.

As a consequence of this mysterious past, I have often envied those who can neatly say they are something-hypen-Canadian.  Increasingly now, though, few people can simply define their identity with just two tiers.  We need to imbue the term “Canadian” with richer diversity or come up with a new term that acknowledges that Canadians are increasingly citizens of the world.  The next time someone asks me my ethnicity, I might say “hodgepodge” and see what kind of response I get.

Dr. Kwame McKenzie in his Toronto office

A new term for me today, brought to us by The Globe and Mail: cross-cultural psychiatry. British psychiatrist Kwame McKenzie is now practicing in Toronto, and he specializes in redesigning mental-health services for visible minority groups.  In an interview with Margaret Wente, McKenzie explains how minority groups may have mental health needs that are specific to experiences such as surviving trauma in their homelands or facing discrimination in Canada.

“Apart from the obvious issues of fairness and equity, why should we care?”

Because obviously, Ms. Wente, fairness and equity are not big enough concerns on their own; these words, clearly, are spoken by someone who has evidently never been on the receiving end of unfairness and inequity.  When Dr. McKenzie gives a very reasonable answer, Wente’s response is this:

“In other words, you’re saying that mental health is connected to much broader social issues?”

If there is a journalistic award for stating the obvious, Wente should get it.  I suppose in this case I can’t blame her, though, since the comment section of this story indicates the kind of anti-immigration right-wing yahoos that appear to be in scary majority in the Globe’s readership.  These people could use any opportunity possible to see the bigger picture regarding immigration in Canada.  Got a problem?  Get out of Canada is their answer.  Meanwhile I really think that if these people are so offended by the principles of socialized assistance upon which Canada is built, they should be the ones to go.  There are still two months of Bush left down south for those who believe in pulling themselves up by their boot straps.

WhoWeAre shot this video of Montreal’s own Audley Coley, an amazing dancer and performer. Audley also suffers from manic depression.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLpxFBTCi-w

Taken by DanJackson_UK, Flickr Creative Commons

Fresh on the heels of the Bouchard-Taylor commission is a new pledge that the Quebec government will require immigrants to sign. The pledge asserts “Quebec values” including French as an official language, gender equality and the separation of church and state. Link to the cbc.ca story is here.

This pledge doesn’t seem to have any practical application. What do they expect to happen: someone travels all the way here, refuses to sign the pledge, and Quebec manages to keep out those who don’t want to assimilate? Or, conversely, an immigrant signs and we can expect no cultural tension from then on in? The only real effect this pledge appears to have is to offend many and create further divisiveness both in Quebec and throughout Canada.

The comments on the CBC story are, as usual, more disheartening than the story itself: while some criticize the idea of the pledge, many do so while making fun of Quebec; others applaud the move as a good one to “protect Canadian culture.” Are we this insecure about Canadian culture that we think a pledge is going to protect it?

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