Into the West, Sun Cairn Hill, Metis

I am hoping many of you caught the tv program last night Into the West,  interwining  the lives First Nations medicine-man/seer Loved by the Buffalo and "mountain-man" Jacob Wheeler.

The juxtaposing of the Lakota's sacred circle (medicine wheel) and the wooden wheels of the white man's civilization is cool.

I was reminded of the book Canada's Stonehenge, Astounding Archaeological Discoveries in Canada, England and Wales by Edmonton professor Gordon R. Freeman, in which he proves that the Stonehenge and otehr archaeological remains in the United Kingdom and Sun Temple,  sacred circles "sun cairn rings" of the Northern Prairies of Canada are similarly arrayed to the equinoital days and the solstices, as if part of a "one-world" civilization.

He examines a sacred circle near Edmonton (30 km east of the almost-abandoned small hamlet of Majorville) and preceives that it was built 5000 years ago as a solar calendar (and is still revered by the local Siksika).

In the show, we also see some of the creation of part of the Metis race, the offspring of white male adventurers and Native women, prominent still in Canada (but less well-known in the U.S.). Metis are a "invisible minority" as their coloration, to speak racially, is not distinguishable from the founding races. One of the best-known mixed-blood Albertan, Peter Lougheed, did not make a big thing of his Native-hood, for example. His short-ness was a characteristic of his Inuit ancestry.

The Metis's survival in Canada has been recently affirmed by a court ruling that the Canadian government did not abide by its obligations that it had made when it acquired rule over the North-West. The British government that controlled the Hudson's Bay Company that had economic monopoly over the region forced the Canadian government to negotiate and make a bargain with the inhabitants of Manitoba, the metis who had rights of occupancy there. The govnment promised more than 1 M acres for the children of the metis there, but never followed through and delivered. The court found this was not a dead issue (despite the 150 year lapse) as the Metis still existed, and the Canada government still existed so the bargain was still enforceable.

Laurent Garneau, a Metis belonging to a line of ancestors dating back to1700s Quebec, fought alongside Riel in his 1870 rebellion. When the bargain was not upheld, and rampant anti-Metis racism made his family's life in manitoba unbearable, he and many others fled Manitoba and moved to the Saskatchewan River country in Saskatchewan and Alberta, Garneau settling in what is now southside Edmonton.

Edmonton was already an important centre of Metis in the western Prairies. Although only so many lived at any one time around Fort Edmonton, it is said that almost every Metis family on the western Prairies  lived near the fort at one time or another.

Socialism and A Rise of the Far Right, the NDP, Historical Repression and Canada's Exodus

Socialism and and A Rise of the Far Right, the NDP, Historical Repression and Canada's Exodus

Talk of the NDP debating its constitutional clauses of Socialism led me to write this blog.
First off, if the NDP is not socialist, is not in favour of wide-ranging social and econimc reform, how is it different from the Liberals, other than a matter of party history and present personalities. Who would join the party then decide to change it from what it is. Why not just join the Liberals?
Some may want to drop the NDP's socialist raison d'etre, in order to facilitate a coalition with the Liberals, while others say that the two parties are so close together why not make a coalition. So both processes feed off each other to the harm of the NDP's future and past. (see my blog on "The Risks of Political Co-operation Historically")
Secondly, the question of whether or not a socialist, or more socialist, economy and society is a worthwhile goal for the NDP.
one internet comment-or wrote that the problem with socialism is it is a system based on other people's money. To which I responded:
the problem with Capitalism is eventually working people realize that the rich got rich off their backs. Private control of the economy means that workers are paid less than they produce while working and very little when they are sick, disabled, or too old to work, and farmers get as little as agri-businesses decide to pay them, meanwhile much of the wealth produced by ther workers and farmers go to banks, the owners of large corporations, their shareholders, and private owners of workplaces, many of which are idlers, or at least unproductive in their activities, such as golfing
Socialism does work to the benefit of the public at large, just look at public roads. People use them as public utilities, they derive much convenience from them, while governments pay for them out of public funds.
That is one type of socialism.
Another type is co-operatives, common even in the supposedly pro-capitalist oil-heavy province of Alberta. The UFA co-op farm supply stores and the Co-op Federated grocery stores are common sights in the Alberta countryside, well patronized by rural residents.
Church organizations, benevolent associations (Kinsmen Clubs, etc.), the member-owned Alberta Motor Association, the non-profit Canada Welding Bureau and the Canadian Concrete Assocation that oversee the construction codes for their respective industries, credit unions, city, provincial and federal government services, such as libraries, health clinics, public schools, are also valuable socialist forms of activity.
Competition and selfishness do not have to be, and are not, the hallmark of all types of operation that provide goods and services.
But when people realize this, the powers-that-be have the choice of peaceably accepting the demand for change in favour of the people or fighting it with means foul and fair. Foul means would include putting unionists and political activists into prisons or concentration camps (such as Hitler's Fascists did in their initial time in power to weaken the forces against them); other means include undercutting socialist organizations and pushing them to change to become only mildly reformist groups, with political office, public prestige, large salaries as consultants, and ex-officio seats on boards of corporations, as the carrots for this change.
The moves to protect the SYSTEM increase obviously when the attacks are the strongest. And so we see that now when many people are holding "business leaders" up to disgust for the selfish behavoiur and socialist reform is being increasingly discussed - not in the mass media but on the internet - that the powers-that-be are pushing harder to weaken those who are pushing for socialist reforms.

The rise of the far-right takes little more than good people doing nothing, that is to say, for moderates (people unwilling to make critical decisions in the people's favour when needed) to rise to power. The term in the brackets may seem strong - but think that Premier Ralph Klein was recently described as a moderate by a pundit who was pursuing the theses that Canadians preferred moderates in power. Klein was (reputedly) popular so therefore must have been moderate. Klein engaged in radical changes to how government operated in Alberta and could only be described as a moderate as form of whitewash, anything pro-people is radical, anything pro-business is moderate.
For instance, Pierre Van Paasen,  in Days of Our Years, says Hitler came to power in 1933 due to the lack of strength among the leadership of "the powerfully organized bodies of the working class." The military would have acted against Hitler's 100,000 followers that crowded into Berlin if the moderates in government had called on them - and the moderates would have acted if they had the approval, or at least the ear, of the president von Hindenburg. But he was held out of reach by corrupt landed gentry in the government, and the socialists dithered, arguing late into the night, standing stubbornly against calls by Brandlerists and Troskyites for a "general strike, the immediate mobilization of a united Red fighting front, the creation of a workers' militia, demonstrations, barricades, anything!."

Van Paasen, in Germany  at the time as a foreign correspondent, hoped for a resistance to crystalize in the south and east, in Saxony and in Bavaria, where the Spartacist movement had had one of its strongholds, the Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic (April-May 1919). He went to Munich to observe events. There caught by police for aiding a leftist to flee to Switzerland, he was tortured and thrown into the Dachau concentration camp. After ten days of this hell, he was released, due to pressure by Press colleagues, and deported. (Van Paasen, Days of Our Years, p. 204-206) (He also mentions an uprising in a working class neighbourhood of Berlin in 1933 that was not supported by the moderates in government, and was put down.)
 

It is not impossible for the far-right to come to power through a "moderate" NDP or a newly-made-politically-attractive NDP-Liberal coalition. There are great incentives for a government, even a staunchly radical one, to tone down its rhetoric once in office. The dictates of assuaging the pride of those who own the factories, those who have highly paid skills that the society depends on (such as doctors), of balancing books and being fiscally responsible with public funds, the need to be free of accusations of corruption, real or rumourd, - it is easier to disprove a rumour of personal corruption if the government is respected for doing a good job in other ways, The government is pushed to favour the needs of highly-visible taxpayers over the needs of unseen public employees who work in the sewage plants, the basements of hospitals, the garbage dumps, etc.
 

If a government came to office, with all these pressures and felt the need to favour the upper middle class for re-election, a goal it wuold conceivably hold above all else including radical reform for citizens, it could easily unleash police hell on peaceful protestors, on the radical socialists within its party, on Natives rightly digusted at their life-situation, participating in the Idle No More movement.

 

There is a very slim line between the behaviour of such a government and that of a Fascist regime. it is said that Fascism is Capitalism plus murder, but I would clarify that - Fascism is monopoly capitalism grown strong and overbearing and using government tax functions to help itself. Usually this evokes a counter-movement, and at this friction point a Fascist govenment engages in murder and other repressive measures. I say usually because the Canadian people seem quite tolerant of undemocratic behaviour by their governments. In Alberta we have recently seen the provincial government extend the term of civic government from three years to four without holding a referendum by the people on the issue. (see my letter to the editor, in the Alberta Views magazine March, 2013) 

 

How could people stand for this weakening of their democratic control of their elected representatives? However they did, and a Fascist government would appreciate that tolerance and find it very easy to do whatever Big Business required at the expense of the people. So ther ewoud be no friction point and thus no murder or other repression. (The people would self-repress, to coin a phrase, if no one else has invented it yet.)

 

It is not impossible for Canada to slip into Fascism, despite its 150-plus year history of more-or-less respesentative democracy.

Chile, Argentina, Lebanon, etc. all were long-time bastions for democracy and moderation, until the fit hit the shan. It just takes a "moderate" (moderately-pro-business) government to be squeezed under pressure, to be put in a crisis situation, for the authoritarian, anti-people elements lying dormant in the existing political-social system to push the government to take extra-ordinary measures that deprive citizens of their rights, their livelihoods, even their lives.

In the 191-14 crash, and in the post-war recession of 1919-1920 and the "Great Depression" of the 1930s when the Canadian economy was repeatedly tumbling or collapsing, it was not unknown for radicals to die:

The 1914 death of IWW-supporter Hiram Johnson of Lac La Biche (see Schultze's work on the IWWs of Edmonton and Calgary)
the shooting of Ginger Goodwin

the 1932 death of Farmers' Unity League activist Carl Axelson,

those murdered by police at Estevan,

those who died in 1935 in the final suppression of the On-To-Ottawa Trek,
etc. etc.

 

As well, kidnapping and assault and battery on activists in those years such as:
tar-and feathering of OBU organizers at Drumheller in the early 1920s (noted in my book Protest and Progress),
repression of protests, demonstrations, G10,  etc.

Another example:

OBU activist P.N. Christophers (later Alberta MLA) was beaten up  at Estevan (a year before the police shootings there). he was then  kidnapped and driven across the U.S. border because the thugs thought he must have been from the U.S., apparently because no correct-thinking Canadian could wish to upset the apple cart.

(Now of course, Canadians, by reputation if not often in fact, are thought to be more progressive than their U.S. counterparts. But the evidence of  the U.S.'s drone missile attacks set against the high rate of Native incarceration in Canada, the little regard for third parties in the U.S. set against Canada's un-elected Senate, etc. makes an exact comparison difficult to master.
 

It is fair to say that neither country is a workers' paradise. Ernest Brown, one of Edmonton's most radical thinkers and writers (albeit unpublished), pointed out that if there had been built a wall around Canada's population in 1867 and no immigration or emigration allowed, through natural increase, Canada would have more people that it had with fairly open immigration. In the 1920s when he made the calculation Canada would have had  more than 10 million, a number it did not achieve until the 1930s.

How did this happen?

because Canada kept losing people to other places, most predominantly to the U.S. Sure, the Canadian weather, sure, the U.S. glitz and glamour, But Brown said, it was mostly the pro-monopoly, pro-Big Business, the anti-people policies of the government that drove Canadians away.

Just something to think about.

Thanks for reading.

 

the mathematics:

3.5 million in 1867

2 percent natural increase (compounded) means doubling each 36 years

so 7 million in 1903 (in actuality, 5.5 M)

14 million in 1939  (in actuality, 11.5 M)

28 million in 1975  (in actuality, 22 M)

56 million in 2011  (in actuality, around 30 million)

 

The Risks of Political Co-operation Historically

The Risk of Political Co-operation Historically

History over the last century gives us examples of the folly or opportunity of political co-operation between the NDP-Labour and Liberals.

In 1919, workers and farmers were angry about their economic situation - high prices, low wages, low prices for agricultural products (food), the lies of the federal Conservative/Union government and the party machine politics of the provincial Liberal government in Alberta. The general strikes in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, etc. were the most prominent signs of this anger. The creation of the Dominion Labour Party and other grassroots organizations of discontent were also signs of "Labour's revolt."
Hoping to undercut this opposition movement, the governing Liberal Party adopted a platform similar to the UFA demands, promising to implement it if elected. (Liberals, many would later say, act like NDP when trying for power and as Conservatives when in power.) It contacted the UFA and a veteran's organization to put forward a joint slate, but the UFA voted to stay separate from any other party, instead to put forward its own candidates. The United Farmers soon saw success in two by-elections: MLA George Moore and MP Robert Gardiner.

In the next general election, the UFA ran in a majority of constituencies and the UFA was elected to replace the Liberal government.

 

If the UFA had agreed to the merger, if it had been elected it would undoubtedly have been elected to the office but not to power, as the Liberals and the veterans' organization would have been, it seems, the "force behind the throne."

 

This trap was refered to by J.H. Coldwel, leader of the CCF in 1940s.

The article "Can Coldwell Lead the CCF to Power? in the May 31, 1941 issue of the   Liberty magazine has this remark. (It is included in Ernest Brown's collection at the Provincial Archives of Alberta (1965.124, 270h(i)))

The article describes Coldwell as a schoolteacherish, excedingly capable middle-aged man "...but the main thing is that the CCF is a revolutionary party opposed to capitalism and dedicated to knocking the props out from under it - that is within the realm of law and constitutional order. The CCF-ers are the mildest-mannered revolutionists in the world. They pray daily for the advent of the New Order that they espouse. but Coldwell will never be seen leading a band of bloodthirsty rebels at the barricades... [Progress for the CCF was slow in the Depression but with the war it has spurred forward]

Many factors are contributing to the party's growing prestige. the eclipse of the Chamberlain regime in Britain, the rise of British Labour in the Empire's wartime Cabinet, the almost daily broadcasts by J.B. Priestly who talks unendingly about the new order and the economic levelling-out that will follow the war - all those assist the CCF. Democracy and capitalism appear to have become separated in the public mind, and almost everybody admits today that a new order is coming...

[Woodsworth one year after his retirement is close to becoming a mythical figure,] Woodsworth said he hated war but firmly demied being a pacifist. ...fortunately for the sake of his value to the CCF cause, ill health caused him to retire shortly after the outbreak of war. He would not have been understood by the majority of Canadians, not even by his own followers.

one thing in addition to his personality and his sincerity Woodsworth has left to the CCF is a one-sentence politic creed: "Some day co-operation for the common good must replace competition for private gain."... Coldwell has the happy faculty rare among his followers of being able to present the CCF case as a lesson in pure logic.

On the war Coldwell said  ``as the war approached, Canada and the CCF and Woodsworth was isolationist, mostly because of who was in power in London.

After war's outbreak, the party adopted the policy that Canada should contribute to the war effort by organizing its economic life to supply all the needs of Britain without profit to this country."

On socialism, Coldwell said, the CCF was socialist - it believed in state control of public utilities, monopolies and big business. He said that at the CCF founding it was proposed that it come out openly as such and call itself the Socialist Party. This was rejected because of the unfortunate associations with socialism resulting from the misuse of the term in other countries, particularly by Adolph Hitler who termed his party National Socialist.

A part of the party's optimism is the fact the CCF has been successful in melding farmers and workers together. Coldwell said he thought this had been possible because the CCF had its beginnings among the co-operative groups made up of mechanized agriculturalists on the prairies who are actually industrial farm workers and who appreciate the problems of Eastern industrial workers. "The Western farmer and Eastern labour are oppressed by exactly the same economic system," he said.

Coldwell said the strength of the CCF lay largely in its groups of humantarian and intellectual people who have become associated in a desire to perform a public service. "Man for man, the CCF members have made greater studies of social and economic questions than the members of any other party, and that is the party's strength...

Behind them stand the power of the organized labour and farm and co-operative movements. However labour has not supported CCF as much as was hoped, in part, Coldwell said, because the labourers in the East still think they can rise up and become an employer. Not more than 20 per cent of all Canada labour is unionized today. Coldwell said the CCF has the support of no daily newspaper in the land, but, he said, the press has always given the CCF a square deal in its reportage although "it attacks us editorially."

He said optimistically but conservatively tht he felt Canada would drift into a two-party system with the rightist members of the Conservative and Liberal parties drifting together and the progressive joining the CCF. Then through natural rotation usually experienced by alternate political parties, the CCF would eventually rise to power.

And Coldwell said the party had already prepared what it would do in power.

First, abolish the Senate which was seen as archaic and substitute a form of revision committee in the single chamber along the lines of the Norwegian system.

Then nationalization of the banks. Banks ought to be instruments of national economic policy and should be entirely owned by the nation. He said he was not Social Credit and in the interview did not say how he would like it if the Social Credit, or from his standpoint as bad an outcome, the Conservatives, were returned to power and thus fell heir to these powerful economic weapons. [in truth, the Conservatives would probably privatize them to reward their corporate supporters, and thus deprive the CCF of easy use of them at least in the short term if the CCF should come to power again.]

In closing Coldwell said We beleive in an orderly and ordered program. We believe in a planned economy...We are not out to destroy; we are out ot create. In regards to the province of Quebec, we realize that the French -Canadian outlook is essentialy Canadian. As the rest of Canada becomes more Canadian and more North American-conscious which is inevitable asa result of this war, the differences between French and English Canadians will disappear."  [Nowadays it is justthe opposite English Canada, or atleat its privately-owned media and the ¸Harper-directed English CBC  is totally dedicated to the U.S., while any viewing of the French-language CBC will give you more international news than those all put together.]

Coldwell also said that the CCF would never be trapped as the British Labour Party was during the 1920s. "We won't take office without power." he said.

[It is very likely that in 2013 the Alberta NDP could fall into that trap if it attained office through a working truce with the Liberal Party. It is conceivable it would have government but would be held in a straitjacket by the Liberal Party, which would prove to be no friend of the NDP.

The abilty for a NDP govenment to aid workers, farmers, the old sick and infirm would be stritjacketed by the Liberals`` preoccupaton with keeping tax burden light on the middle-class, the class-less segment of hte populaton most taken with the Liberal`s laissez-faire philosophy.

The Conservatives know who their friends are - the rich - and the NDP knows if not where its support comes from, at least to whom its policies are targetted at helping - working stiffs, the old, the young, the sick, the infirm; while the Liberals appeal to the middle-class who do not, or think they do not, need unions, medical services, old-age homes, pensions plans,  etc. instead relying on their ability to use the system to get ahead personally and leave others behind, while holding on to the coattails of the rich who direct the system that works so well for them - a bit of a harsh judgement but judging by Liberal governments in times of financial crisis not unwarranted.]

There is no short-cut to the political climate that will give the workers, farmers, the old and sick, the children, the next generations, the social justice and economic security that is their due. Selfishness begets selfishness until it does not. Beggaring you neighbour works until you lfind you live in a slum then you begin to care more.
Living in a province where taxes are low but university fees are high, works until your children want to go to university, a society where taxes are low but care for old age is expensive works until you are old - the age that baby boomers are now approaching. Sheer demographics will shift Alberta voters' behaviour to the left, in time. It is important to present ideological alternatives that can capture the voters interest and support when the swing happens.
If the Alberta voters were that upset, they would vote the government down. As it is, the largest (single) section of them that take the energy to vote are happy with the government, or at least happy enough.
Unfortunately the progressive left is not doing all it can to expose the environmental damage, the short-sided economic policies, the human waste caused by the present dependence on the un-sustainable expoloitaiton of the province's resoeurces. Until they see there is a desperate need to change the politics, that they would be better off with a different govenment that is less tied to Big Oil, a quick grab at office will not have power, what kind of mandate would a government have, what kind of confidence would it have to make the significant changes that are required if the voters haven't woken up to the need for the changes. And if a reform government does not have the power/confidence to make important structural reforms, then it will be sen by those who work hardest for it, (and by those whose lives were dediected to that end for the last 90 plus years) then what would be the long-term result -- more time in the political wilderness.

 

The End