Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  We in Canada wish to have leverage on world affairs, to work the reins as a respected middle power. We diminish our possibilities in these areas when we define our diplomacy with Washington primarily or only in relation to its Canadian domestic political consequences. If by our words and actions we instruct the Americans that, finally, we are not really serious about these matters, then they will, perhaps with some disappointment, conclude that we are not serious. That will have far greater consequences for us than for them.

  The ambassador more than hints that the two major issues—missile defence and the invasion of Iraq—where the Canadian government and its chief spokesmen gave confused signals, led the Americans to believe we would be onside. Then, both times we backed out and followed up with less than helpful remarks, either on the policy or on Bush himself.

  On Iraq, following the failed attempt to get a “second resolution” from the UN, Chrétien announced that Canada would not be joining the United States. The Americans were disappointed, but they were offered the mollification that, “although Canada would not participate as an active party in the war coalition, once the war began, our government would say positive things about the United States, and negative things about Iraq.”

  That assurance barely survived the time it took to phrase it. Chrétien, on the very day after the invasion, chose to implicitly rebuke the United States by saying that such actions as the invasion had to be authorized by the UN. And on the heels of Chrétien’s barb, National Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal chose to offer the public a personal assessment of George Bush as “a failed statesman.”

  Cellucci was very angry in both instances, and while he did not see the prime minister recanting, he thought the words of the minister merited a trip to the woodshed. It was not to be. “Mr. Dhaliwal’s insult to the President went unchallenged and uncriticized.”

  Meantime, just to appease the gods of irony, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein had sent a letter thanking the United States for “its leadership in the war on terrorism and terror.” For this, Premier Klein received “a stern rebuke from the Canadian government.” Mr. Cellucci comments: “Ralph Klein was not the only premier to publicly express his support for my government in Iraq, although he was the only one to receive a dressing-down from the federal government.”

  In both cases, what I take from Cellucci’s account is that, while the Americans were disappointed and even surprised at Canada’s decisions, and in the case of missile defence actually perplexed, what soured them and made them angry were the petty verbal pile-ons before and after the decisions had been made. Françoise Ducros, Chrétien’s communications adviser, had opined that Bush was “a moron”; Carolyn Parrish had a small franchise of witless anti-American insults and Bush-bashing; then Mr. Chrétien voided the understanding that he was to “say nice things” and Dhaliwal, a full cabinet minister, gratuitously degraded the American president.

  I suspect that in diplomacy, tone is as important as substance, and respect between leaders and nations more important than either. I take from what Mr. Cellucci has written that both he and his masters in the White House could live with Canada’s taking its own line, but were thrown off balance and genuinely astonished that representatives and spokesmen of their neighbour and ally were so liberal and earthy in jabbing the president and deriding his policies.

  Neither Cellucci nor the Americans are stupid. They know that occasional spasms of anti-Americanism, or “standing up to the White House,” offer an easy harvest of electoral popularity. Why did we stay out of the war with Iraq? Was it because we thought it wrong? Or was it because the Chrétien government could not, politically, contemplate going along with the Americans? I’d say the second was a more puissant recommendation than the first. Decorate the choice with a few anti-Bush comments, and you’ve hit the sweet spot of Canadian politics.

  But did the manner hurt us on other fronts? Mr. Cellucci, for all his professed candour, doesn’t oblige with a real answer. It is almost impossible to believe that, if the Americans thought we were gaming them on Iraq—depreciating the “legitimacy” of the invasion, avoiding missile defence, not on the merits of these cases, but on their “optics” for Canadians—they would not respond on other fronts. Softwood lumber, for example. We pay for our posturing, and anyone reading Unquiet Diplomacy will understand why.

  Did his message get through—that this is a changed world, and that the U.S. has elevated its own security to the status of an absolute and incomparable imperative?

  First, if it did not, it is not because Mr. Cellucci failed in delivering the message. He found ample occasions and eager ears, and he had the necessary manner. But did it get through to Canadians with all the force and priority Mr. Cellucci intended? I don’t think so. Mainly because there remains a gulf between the two countries—the gulf established by the cruel acts of September 11. They were attacked and we were not. We may have stores of empathy for the Americans, and the more imaginative of our citizens and leaders may have formed some idea of the shock the Americans felt. But there is an unbridgeable psychological distance between us and them: their country was hit, the empire was attacked; we were sympathetic witnesses. September 11 is another strand in the evolving myth of that country—it has contoured the imaginations of all its citizens.

  Which leaves a gap between us. The Americans have a greater intensity on matters of defence and, when necessary, aggression. They are not waiting for another blow to fall. Right or wrong, they are going to intervene in the world, and they will look both for allies to support them and, in our case, neighbours who, in matters of border security, defence and intelligence-gathering, will be as intense as they are. But we do not see things in an equally dire light. A majority of Canadians probably feel that the Americans are overreacting. And, occasionally, some Canadians will scold and even mock the Americans for the post-9/11 intensity.

  Which means not only will we at times not be on side, we will also at times be seen by them as posing, as haughty and preachy. And they will see that as hypocrisy—since, as Mr. Cellucci made clear in one of his early speeches on the topic of Canada and the United States post-9/11—they would take our fears at face value.

  They would automatically come to our aid.

  In the sense that Unquiet Diplomacy opens a window on U.S.-Canada relations, it is a naturally interesting book. Mr. Cellucci is on most things, I think, a straight shooter. You don’t have to decode his remarks. But having been a diplomat, he has learned the diplomat’s art of always holding something back, or allowing certain things to speak for themselves, or of supplying enough by way of tone or example to let readers form larger judgments than he himself is willing to supply.

  He likes Canada and he likes a lot of Canadians, and he loves the country itself. He survived Cape Breton and the Calgary Stampede. We could wish he were a better stylist, but not every ambassador is John Kenneth Galbraith, and perhaps that’s a blessing. Bon mots are best in after-dinner speeches anyway. This is a tidy memoir, mercilessly unembroidered and stuffed with home truths for both countries.

  OUR CAMP COFFEE | January 12, 2008

  Stumbling around the Internet, I came upon the delightful revelation that coffee, according to legend, was discovered by an Abyssinian goatherd who chanced upon his goats dancing happily around after their having eaten berries from a coffee bush.

  Encouraging as it is to learn that espresso macchiato has its Eden myth, and that Abyssinian goatherds, sages that they are, know a happy dancing goat from a sad one, the story cued me to the changing fortunes of our caffeine-fortified times.

  Is the sun setting on the Starbucks empire? Well, as the ancient maxim has it, there is always hope.

  There’s a memo Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz sent last February to the now-ousted CEO of the bean empire. Actually, it’s less a memo than a cri de coeur. Nothing as pathetic as this had been penned since poor, incarcerated Oscar Wilde, brooding on his ruin, wrote that immortal lament The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was Oscar’s concl
usion, rendered in highly melodramatic tetrameter, that “all men kill the thing they love.” The big guy at Starbucks doesn’t quite have Wilde’s gift for epigram and le mot juste, but the story he tells is the same: Starbucks is doing in Starbucks.

  Mr. Schultz is worried that, having gone “from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond” in ten years, the company had made “a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.” I don’t think that, when he speaks of “watering down,” he literally means watering down. He is really speaking of what he likes to think of as the aura of Starbucks—the “Starbucks experience,” as he charmingly puts it. The coffee, I suspect, is as strong as it has always been.

  He’s worried that some people may now be going to the yuppie salons just to get a cup of coffee. He reflects on Starbucks’ decision to bring in “automatic espresso machines” and notes that the choice was a good one in terms of “speed of service and efficiency.” But the machines displaced the La Marzocca models (which bore a passing resemblance to some of the alien spaceships shown on Star Trek, if you can imagine tackily drawn spaceships with three or four pump handles).

  Further, the new machines now blocked the “visual sight line” of the Starbucks customer, who could no longer see the coffee being made. Which (give my regards to Broadway) removed “much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines.” And, ultimately, led to customers no longer having their “intimate experience with the barista.” Well, pimp my grande latte!

  The memo reaches its crisis moment when Chairman (and now CEO) Schultz lets cry from out of the depths (cue the pan flutes): “I am not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee.” As the old epitaphs used to say, “Reader, stop here, or gently pass.”

  Now, speaking as one who can’t claim—and would go some considerable distance to deny—“an intimate experience with a barista” and who couldn’t distinguish a shade-grown, free-trade organic coffee bean from a turnip, I can’t honestly say I feel Chairman Schultz’s pain. Starbucks has always carried the aroma of a trumped-up exercise in lifestyle pedigree, hawking a faux pedantry over brews and beans, and overripe pseudo debates on the superiority of the Ethiopian product to its Moroccan congener. They’re beans, folks.

  I suspect that the wonderful success Tim Hortons has had over the years came, in part, from the rise of the lifestyle coffee chains such as Starbucks. Even though Tim Hortons may have begun earlier than most of them, it picked up some commercial propulsion and swelled its constituency by offering, so self-consciously, the very opposite of what the newer coffee lounges stood for.

  Tim Hortons is a lifestyle coffee, too, but Tim Hortons is, or used to be, aggressively unshowy. Line up, grab a Boston cream and a double-double, retire to the corner, slurp, and (in the good old days) smoke. Tim Hortons was Don Cherry: direct and unadorned. I’d guess a lot of people went to Tim Hortons as a way of saying they wouldn’t go to Starbucks. And a lot went to Starbucks to demonstrate the reverse.

  Lately, I wonder whether Tim Hortons, though with less torment than that exuded by the Starbucks memo, has forgotten what it’s about. The crowds are still there, the lineups interminable. But I sense it’s more the inertia of habit that’s drawing them now. And, alas, a certain campiness.

  It’s “in” to go to Tim Hortons—which is as much a contradiction of why people went there in the first place as the loss of “theatre” and “intimacy with the barista” is a reason for the Starbucks’ downturn. It’s enough to make an Abyssinian goatherd, dancing or otherwise, weep.

  For more on Boston cream doughnuts and the Tim Hortons experience, see “I’m with the Brand” (page 221) and the item that follows it, “Hands off Hortons.”

  HUMAN RIGHTS

  SAUDI JUSTICE | December 22, 2007

  It flashed around the world, with only minute variations, and has to be one of the oddest sentences ever written, as a headline or otherwise: “Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim.”

  You know you’ve entered a strange country of the mind when the same sentence contains pardon and victim as verb and object. But you have found a passport to some utterly arcane territory indeed—a mix or compost of the absurd and sinister—when pardon, the verb, governs (as used to be said in those now archaic grammar lessons) as object this most grim noun phrase: gang-rape victim.

  With victim we might associate verbs other than pardon: treat, sympathize, commiserate, care or pray for. These are the obvious candidates.

  Saudi king offers deepest sympathy to gang-rape victim—no one would start at that sentence. Or Saudi king pledges all possible support to medical treatment of gang-rape victim. I don’t think that would leap off the newspaper page as something extraordinary. The world would read it, very likely think a little better of that Saudi king, and then go about its business.

  But Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim. This sentence, as we say now, simply does not compute. We do not know a world in which gang-rape victims are the ones seeking or receiving pardons, from Saudi kings or other potentates either less or more exalted. We know instead a world where those who have been raped, and most especially those who have endured the near-unendurable torments and dehumanizing outrages of gang rape, inspire the most profound sympathy and concern.

  Not so, it seems, in the petroleum kingdom, where a gang-rape victim receives a pardon from her king.

  The headline springs from the story of a most unfortunate nineteen-year-old who was charged with the “crime” of being in a car with a man who was not a relative, when both were set upon by seven men, both raped—she most violently, for two hours, by all seven, and more than once. She was reduced to numbness, shock and near-suicide and suffered horrific psychological and physical trauma.

  But in the Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka meets 1984 world of Saudi Arabia’s sharia jurisprudence, the gang-raped nineteen-year-old had to appear before her Islamic judges and be tried for the crime of sitting in a car with a man. At first, her sentence was, by the standards these judges set for themselves, considered lenient—a mere ninety lashes and some months in jail.

  She—poor, tormented woman—seems to have had both the dignity and simple force of character to protest this monstrous verdict, and sought appeal with the help of a lawyer of some courage and resource. He—brave soul—protested the infamy of putting to the lash a woman who had already been gang-raped. For this noble and worthy exertion, he earned for himself severe reprimand and the threat of removing his right to practise law—such as the law is, and such as it is practised there—in Saudi Arabia.

  She, for the temerity of appealing a mindless and barbaric sentence, and for the publicity that was the result of her appeal, had her sentence increased to two hundred lashes. Sharia justice is very scrupulous of its own honour, and the tenets of Islamic law as it applies to the monstrous horror of a woman being in the company of a man not her relative, will not be mocked by appeals to mercy or sense. Hence, two hundred lashes and six months in jail—the six months presumably necessary to give the stripes from the whip time to burn into scars.

  The world at large found this excessive and, to be truthful, both odd and cruel, too, beyond even the odd and cruel bounds of the ancient codes that, sadly, still are imposed on so many of the women in so many countries.

  Through her lawyer, with the help of some genuine human-rights organizations, the case was not allowed to rest on the pronouncements of the three-man tribunal that upped her lashes from ninety to two hundred. I expect the Saudi king felt the wave of revulsion and contempt that followed on the world’s press coverage of this outrage, and thus it came to pass that a nineteen-year-old who had been raped, shamed and tormented by seven men was relieved of the further shame and torment of two hundred lashes and incarceration in a Saudi jail for half a year of her young sad life. But “King pardons gang-rape victim” remains, in my mind, anyway, an atrocious declaration, a simultaneously absurd and mean statement.

>   He has no pardon to give her; she none to receive from him.

  An apology, that is within his gift: for the fact that he presides over a kingdom where laws still exist to punish a woman who has been brutally raped, and where they multiply the lashes if she has the strength or character to decry such insanity.

  Such a king should be seeking clemency, not confusing himself with the delusion that he has the moral or political authority to exercise it.

  FLAGRANTLY ISLAMOPHOBIC | January 3, 2008

  Time was when “human rights” was a truly large and noble idea. I associate the concept with, and its birth out of, some of the great horrors of the past century: the bestial depredations of the Nazis, their “race science” and death camps, the horrors of unbridled totalitarianism—under which, the whim of the rulers was sufficient warrant to mutilate, torture and destroy lives, collectively or individually or send millions to arctic slave camps—and the debasement of internal exile and psychiatric rehabilitation.

  More currently, I associate real human-rights advocacy with the case of a young Saudi woman who was repeatedly gang-raped and then she—the victim—was charged and sentenced by a Saudi court to two hundred lashes and six months in jail for being in a car with a man not her relative. The sentence, after international protest, was voided—but that young woman’s case represents a real example of the violation of basic human rights.

  What I do not associate with this deep and noble concept is getting ticked off by something you read in a magazine—or, for that matter, hear on television—and then scampering off to a handful—well, three—of Canada’s proliferate human rights commissions, seeking to score off the magazine. This is what four Osgoode Hall law students and graduates—a very definition of the “marginalized”—under the banner of the Canadian Islamic Congress have done after reading an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone in Maclean’s. The complainants read the article as “flagrantly islamophobic.”