A sane person would ask: Have we no pride?

I spend a lot of time on the subway now. It zaps me across Toronto in great speed and comfort. It's that or a taxi or car ride with Attendant Irritation and not just in parking garages either. The number of smog-alert days has gone beyond shameful. If my lungs are going to be black just from car fumes, as a coroner once proved to me with great glee, I might as well start smoking and get in some pleasure before my premature and painful death.

But I don't smoke, and I take “The Better Way,” as the underground system slogan puts it, and since one's ability to feel public embarrassment rapidly declines after 40, I prowl the subway car picking up litter, yes I do.

The water shortages expected to result from the evaporation of the Great Lakes during climate change seem improbable, yet they will happen. I live a few streets away from one of the world's biggest lakes. Okay, okay, I'll turn the tap off when I brush my teeth.

But it's a fact that this is the year when oil reached its peak and when the amount of oil on the planet began its inexorable slide downhill. The killer is this: No matter how much this cold country decreases its oil usage, it won't affect the proportion of oil we are obliged to sell to the United States under North American free trade agreement. We have no control over the fate of our own oil stocks.

A retro-con would argue that access to the U.S. market was worth trading away the energy source that makes life possible in this country, but American greed, lies and sheer gall in trade disputes, in particular over lumber, mean that NAFTA doesn't work. The American government scorns fair play and sticking to treaties. This gives us a legal way to kill NAFTA.

Prime Minister Paul Martin won't do that because he's a coward. In many ways, he resembles the Brian Mulroney “revealed” in Peter C. Newman's book. The essence of Mr. Mulroney was his obsequiousness to the rich. He never met an American corporation he didn't like. He whines about the creature exposed via his own mouth, but wouldn't most people be glad to have their own nature revealed to them while they still have time to alter it? Not our Brian.

The reason I know Mr. Martin is a coward is that the damage has already been done. The thread that connects this country, the CBC, has been off the airwaves for seven weeks. Only a coward would have let a gang of Canada-hating bean-counters dribble away a great organization. The BBC defends its journalists. The CBC humiliates every last employee, and all for money, when profit is not the point of the CBC. Keeping Canadians in touch with each other is the reason it was born and the reason it was nurtured until the cowards took over.

Thanks to the CBC lockout, I no longer watch television at all, except for BBCWorld to see how Americans are at least buggering up their own country even as they damage the rest of the planet. For all that we mock Americans, we must wonder why they bankrupt themselves, kill so lavishly, turn their children stupid and keep black citizens at the level they were at just after the Civil War. It's in the interest of a relatively small group of rich Americans who tell other Americans, “You can be rich like us if you just shut up.”

We are starting to resemble those dreaming Americans. We let our national dream vaporize this fall without protest. We hand over our oil to Americans who waste it, leak it, blow it. They owe us $5-billion in lumber fees; they won't pay it; we don't retaliate.

The question a sane person would ask is this: Have we no pride?

Here's the type of human we're dealing with. I still don't know whether to believe this story, but it has been reported that the U.S. Navy is trying to recapture military dolphins that escaped during Hurricane Katrina. Such is the reluctance of sane Americans to join the military that the navy has armed dolphins with electrodes and harnesses for toxic darts and trained them to shoot anything in a diving suit.

Yes, Flipper. They couldn't have picked a nicer animal. Dolphins make appealing baby-like squeals. They have been known to surround human swimmers threatened by sharks and guide them to safety.

If a dolphin were human, it would be that cute kid in the class who always takes care of the slow learners and doesn't laugh at facial deformities, the one who was born with confidence and good looks and doesn't abuse the privilege. The Americans took that kid, distorted his brain and instincts, and gave him a gun. Now dolphins do the bidding of a giant military organization so despised that even its own citizens stay well away.

Does this remind you of anyone? Yes, Canada is America's dolphin. I was going to make a suggestion to dolphins kidnapped by the American military. What? Oh, I was going to head out to Wickaninnish in B.C. and paddle the shores, calling out, as in The Day of the Dolphin, “Ma loves Fa. Canada respects peace-loving American deserters. Slip off your harness and stay a while.”

But we're the biggest dolphin of all. We were naive. We were bad negotiators. Our leaders feared big bad American men with guns. I wonder if Paul Martin has an electrode planted behind his ear. I know Stephen Harper has one; I just don't know where it's planted.

But Jack Layton doesn't and I want him to speak up for Canada. We rescue dolphins; we peacekeep. We are not America's dolphin.

You know, if you hadn't silenced Peter Mansbridge, Canadians wouldn't be so angry right now.

Comments