Canada is a nation of shared values. The awkward part of being Canadian is that those values are best defined not by what we do but what we don’t do.

If we have a religion, we don’t push it in other people’s faces. We don’t say nasty things about other races. We don’t fight wars; we try to talk other people into not having them. We don’t panic over snow.

Whoops, stop right there. Toronto repeatedly panicked over its recent heavy snow. “Why us? Why now?” was how Rick Mercer would describe the plaintive reaction to snow in February. But instead of throwing snowballs at a city hall that can’t organize itself to do the basics like plowing streets, Torontonians pouted and refused to shovel their sidewalks. It was a rotten month to be elderly or a parent wheeling a stroller. How un-Canadian.

Being un-Canadian

Panicking over snowfall is just the frothiest part of a growing Canadian tendency to let ourselves be un-Canadian out of sheer lack of vigilance.

We are slogging away at a pointless and costly war in Afghanistan to support Hamid Karzai’s government, which recently sentenced a young journalist to death for downloading an article on women’s rights. The Independent, which led the fight to save Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, reported that the article poked fun at Islam for permitting men to have four spouses, while giving women no such right. Tens of thousands of people worldwide, including me, signed a petition for the young man’s life but Karzai sounded bored as he told Westerners not to fret.

Remember, this wasn’t the Taliban that passed the death sentence, it was the pathetic propped-up Karzai government that Canadian soldiers are dying to defend, and that we’re throwing precious money at as a recession approaches. It’s odd. You’d think the Afghan government might want to back down but I suspect they despise Westerners who speak up for women’s rights. Afghan men with temporary power sit amid their rubble and snigger at us.

Of course those racist anti-Muslim cartoons were published in Canada, not just Denmark, so fair’s fair. In the old days, we didn’t let that Alberta teacher James Keegstra get away with anti-Semitic hate speech, but times have changed.

It was Stephen Harper who removed the word “equality” from the mandate of Status of Women Canada. Dislike of women is a cross-border matter. But I remain mystified by the Conservatives’ fondness for a military alliance with a dodgy Muslim government. Is it some mad desire to please U.S. President George W. Bush in his last days or just that “thrusty” feeling politicians get when someone like Rick Hillier lets them drive a tank?

Motives operandi

We’re looking at tangled motives, but that happens in any issue involving religion. One remark about funding “faith schools” lost the Ontario Conservatives an election and re-elected Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty. It also revived a buried anger against Catholic schools, an issue best placed in the category “Can of Worms.”

This week McGuinty said he wanted to “move beyond the Lord’s Prayer [in the legislature] to a broader approach that is more inclusive in nature.”

Sorry, but this is how the guy talks.

He wants to reflect “the diversity of Ontario, be it Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or agnostic.”

And the fight is on.

Didn’t McGuinty spot the gurgling sinkhole on the other side of his little plan? I’m an atheist. So is everyone I know, or maybe they’re being Canadian and refraining from mentioning their religion. Don’t poke atheists with a stick or we’ll want our own morning manifesto.

So will Shintoists, Buddhists, Santerians, the neo-pagan Druids and Wiccans, and of course Scientologists. The one thing religions seem to have in common is their treatment of women as lesser beings. Take a hard look at Muslim Shariah law, which was nearly allowed into fearfully polite Ontario. If religion makes bad law, why recite an ode to it in the legislature?

The only possible exit now is for the government to write a personalized prayer for everyone in Ontario, a project very much in the spirit of these self-regarding times.

Uncloaking men in cloaks

Religion has leaked into the House of Commons as well, with the weird private member’s bill, the proposed unborn victims of crime act, backed by religionists trying to get fetuses registered as human.

The Globe and Mail ran an online poll asking whether Dr. Henry Morgentaler should get the Order of Canada for his abortion rights triumph. A reader slipped me a Knights of Columbus mass e-mail urging members to hasten to the website and vote against it, which they did.

But I was puzzled. I had been under the impression that the K-C guys, whose halls were regularly rented for wedding receptions in the northern towns I grew up in, were affable Chamber of Commerce types. Hardware store owners, curlers, that sort of thing. They probably had their own bonspiel. Why would they care whether Morgentaler was blackballed again?

So I went to their website and discovered that I was sorely wrong. The Knights of Columbus is not Red Green’s Possum Lodge, but a huge Connecticut-based organization of Catholic men “defending the priesthood” with amazing feathery hats and cloaks, and a profitable line in life insurance, $60 billion US at last count.

And I do mean men. Yes, they do wonderful charity work but the key is manhood. The men are very big on being non-women, except for the costumes. It’s non-stop fraternal and paternal and Call Me Mister, with one alarming exception: Some of the raffle money goes to organizations that advise on what time of the month to have sex with the wife (whenever she’ll let you, basically, which sounds like never) and that offer a great deal of elaborate and frankly disgusting information about cervical mucus. Something to do with conception.

I’m a woman, and I don’t know what they’re referring to. I’m sure mucus can provide all sorts of unsavoury albeit useful daily information, but why put it on the website?

I wanted to think of you Knights as sweet goofy Old Boys. Now I can’t. This annoys me. Thanks, old-time religion.

See what these efforts to bring religion back into public life have wrought? We’re fighting for an Afghan pseudo-government whose values we despise, everyone in Ontario is sucking on a pencil and writing hymns to themselves on cocktail napkins, and I can’t stop thinking about informational mucus.

It is distracting, and tiring and distasteful. I blame the religionists.

This Week

Time Out’s 1000 Books to Change Your Life is another great collection from the British city entertainment listings company set up by Tony Elliott in 1968.

Unlike other 1960s creations like Rolling Stone magazine, it has maintained its youth and energy, and is credible and entertaining and, well, wonderful at everything it does. The 1000 doesn’t threaten the reader with the “before you die” element so popular in other list books intended to depress you into purchasing.

It is elegantly done, basing its list on Shakespeare’s seven ages of man speech from As You Like It. So there are books on babies, women in war, diaries, siblings, old age, death, etc. interspersed with mini-essays by writers naming their life-changing book. Jonathan Franzen chooses The Trial by Franz Kafka, “about the comedy of not knowing yourself.” Hari Kunzru chooses Gravity’s Rainbow, so now I’ll have to read it. I adore the guide and I credit Indigo with having the wisdom to stock it.

People give Indigo a hard time but it is more adventurous and admirable than they may think.