Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!tjhorton
From: tjhorton@ai.toronto.edu ("Timothy J. Horton")
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: Canada: one, two (or many) cultures?
Message-ID: <89Jul28.133422edt.10420@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Date: 28 Jul 89 17:34:52 GMT
References: <3190@uwovax.uwo.ca> <1989Jul27.092203.16418@xenitec.uucp> <28025@watmath.waterloo.edu> <1989Jul28.011505.25990@tmsoft.uucp>
Distribution: can
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Lines: 50

ead@tmsoft.UUCP (Elizabeth Doucette) writes:
>And Quebec is now being a cry-baby claiming they want more.  ...
>They don't appreciate what they have already.  ...

Are most provinces not exactly like this?

>Other parties supported Meech Lake ... because they know they could never win
>an election without Quebec's support.

So you want to trade Quebec for the Eastern seaboard.  Great.

>Give each province equal voting power and this nonsense would quickly
>straighten out.  I am so sick of this.

I think Elizabeth's ideas of "power" and "representation" are very strange.
Her solution is a bigger problem than she seeks to resolve.  It's more of
what she hates.

I, a person who happens to be living in Ontario this year, would have a tenth
the representation of someone living in PEI?  I am not a province, or a power
block.  Realistically her solution will never come about, but I wonder at the
things she perceives as problems, and the things she perceives as solutions.
There's an inherent tribalist tendency in the line of thought.  Tribalist shifts
are not solutions for tribalist-induced problems;  various divisions, based on
languistic or provincial or other boundaries, are precisely the source of what
ails the country.  If we could magically remove the subjectivity and
regionalism and such, we'd be much much better off.  But Elizabeth is instead
suggesting an inequitable shift to even more of what ails us, on the basis of
artificial divisions which serve us poorly as it is.  It's like diving further
into a sewer in hopes that things get better somewhere down there.

Provincial boundaries are historical accidents, not divisions dictated by some
wise political god.  If PEI and NS and NB and NF want to join into a single much
larger province, they could conceivably do so, and it might save them all grief
and worry and rivalry.  What Elizabeth seems to be implying is that systematic
machinations of *groups* are at the root the problem, and that it's a question
of disproportionate power among them.  But then she suggests a solution based
squarely on *groups*, and extraordinarily disproportionate power (I guess she
thinks provinces are the best "groupings" of Canada to even out the power
among).

Elizabeth proposes a fix on the basis that the solution is to eliminate some
problems she sees now.  Michael Tremblay proposes his solution on the basis
of problems he sees 200 years ago.  Fixing the problems that we perceive as
large isn't a reliable path to significantly fewer problems;  any honest
solution will have to aim at the real root.  Of course it's impossible to
solve the problems completely (politicos never seem to admit it, but it's a
truism, isn't it.)  But there are solutions that are problems in disguise,
and solutions that trade one bad problem for another, and neither of these
make sense as a viable solution.