Category Archives: Reflections

A civics lesson

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A Canadian Member of Parialment discovered that a WWII veteran had not voted for him; the MP, Tom Wappel, wrote to the Veteran to berate him.  This was my reply.

 

Almost fourteen years ago I called the constituency office of my MP, then a Mr. Paul McCrossan, to ask if he could help me with my citizenship application.  I opened my query, rather sheepishly I recall, by saying that I was not even a citizen yet, and so I could not have supported the MP in the past.  Mr. McCrossan's assistant chuckled and told me, “Oh dear, it doesn't matter if you're a citizen or not, much less if you supported him.  If you're living in this riding, he's your MP.  Send us a letter and let's see if we can help you.”

 

I was a student of political science at the time, but those simple words were my first real life lesson in Civics — the words still ring fresh in my ears.  Four weeks after I mailed the letter to “my” MP, I got a reply, this time from the Secretary of State, then David Crombie, telling me that the matter had been brought to his attention and the issue had been resolved. 

 

I fell in love with Canada then.  Not simply because of the help – a simple question of timing that, though necessary and much appreciated at the time, ended up not being all that crucial after all – but because of the attention.  Here I was, an immigrant, a recent arrival; my adopted home owed me nothing, so far as I could reasonably expect, except a minimum standard of treatment as a human being.  And yet – my MP and his office had clearly gone through the trouble of making representations on my behalf; the office of the Secretary of State had made the necessary calls; and here I was, a newly-minted citizen, entitled to a passport and, more important, to vote.  As if to drive the point of the lesson home to me, Mr. McCrossan or his office was never solicited me for support because of that help; nor was there ever a letter especially addressed to me, saying, “Remember your citizenship application.”

 

A country that so treats its people, I said to myself then, deserves not just respect and gratitude, but my love and devotion.

 

In the past fourteen years, as I have learned more about my country and its history, my respect for and devotion to Canada have only deepened.  It is with pride that I speak to my non-Canadian friends of all that we, as Canadians, have achieved in the 134 years of our history.  Building and maintaining a country so vast geographically and diverse demographically is not easy; to do so while taking part in the great struggles for freedom and survival this century must have taken a heroic effort.  It is with awe that I think of all those who risked, and gave, their lives in those struggles, so that the country of which I am now a citizen can hold its head high in the community of nations with a just sense of its place in the world.  Whether standing before Soldiers' Tower at the University of Toronto, or the Vimy Monument in France, it has been an honour for me to present my respects, officially and personally, to the dead and the alive, who made my being here possible.

 

I have spent the last six years in the service of my country, in Canada and abroad (as a diplomat).  I am often asked why I do what I do (the financial sacrifice, truth be told, is considerable).  Well, you can trace this all to that first lesson in Civics, those two simple sentences uttered by the assistant to my then MP, fourteen years ago.

 

It is a lesson that Tom Wappel, a current MP, has yet to learn.

 

My dismay, indeed grief, about the episode is profound.  If it were possible, in Canada, to construct an antithesis of democratic behaviour by a public official, this would be it.  It would be difficult to find greater contempt for the electorate or indeed the Parliament short of promoting the dismantling of parliamentary democracy itself.  Forget Burke; this is Tammany Hall.  The Rotten Boroughs could not have produced a more rotten fruit.

 

Am I exaggerating? 

 

The secret ballot, lest we forget, is one of the most important principles of democratic government.  And I know something about this: my first voting experience was in Iran, when I was fifteen (which used to the voting age in Iran).  I still recall having to run from one corner of the voting room to another, trying to hide my ballot (without much success) from the curious eyes of the spies sprinkled around the place.  I had intended to spoil my ballot, truth be told (not voting was not an option, really), but ended up having to vote for the least offensive candidates. 

 

That, Mr. Wappel, is one reason I left my homeland and settled in Canada.

 

(In fact, the “secrecy” of the vote is so sacred a rule of political behaviour in Canada that it has become axiomatic in polite society: my best friend does not ask me how I vote.  It is simply rude to do so.  But I guess manners are not a prime consideration for the sarcastic pen of the Honourable Member.)

 

But if asking about someone's voting habits is rude, it is outright obnoxious for a public official, on public payroll, to refuse help to the public on the grounds of that vote – or, even more egregious, of the expressed desire to vote one way or another in the future.  Mr. Wappel is an elected representative and I merely a junior official; but we both are servants of the same master.  What would he say if, let us say, a consular officer refused to help a Canadian in distress abroad because of that person's anti-abortion or pro-capital punishment views?  Or, more to the point, if a female officer refused to help someone who, as did Mr. Wappel a decade ago, appeared to question the value of women's work?  Unthinkable; we serve all Canadians.  Well, I guess not unthinkable for the good MP.

 

All of this, of course, begs the question of the lack of judgement of a man who puts his contempt for the Canadian democratic tradition in writing, sarcastically, in a letter to an 81 year old veteran.  A politician this dense is on a political suicide mission.  The Liberal caucus should seriously consider giving him a helping hand by pushing him out into the wilderness, where he belongs.

 

The perils of reopening the debate on capital punishment

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This was an open letter to the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Reform <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Alliance party, first published in May 2000 in Toronto's The Globe and Mail.

I write to you not simply as a Canadian, but as an Iranian-Canadian.  This is the first time in the thirteen years I have had the privilege of being a citizen of this magnificent country of ours that I hyphenate my citizenship.  It is the first time in the sixteen years I have lived in Canada and under Canada’s benevolent protection that I find my cultural background of some importance in respect of the message I wish to impart.

You see, I write on the subject of capital punishment.  I write to ask you not to open this debate again.  

Twice in one generation Parliament has spoken.  Each time, the debate on capital punishment wounded and scarred the social psyche and pitted brother against sister, friend against friend.  Each time, it focussed our attention on all that was ugly and wrong in us and our souls, to the detriment of peace, forgiveness and charity.  Each time, it forced us to pit moral choice against principles of accountancy (does it cost more or less to keep a convict in prison rather than to put him to death).  Though the outcome was edifying, the debate was not.

I ask you not to open this debate again not only because a society can ill afford such repeated assaults upon its moral tranquillity.  The country is at peace, the crime rate is falling, fewer monsters lurk in the shadows of our society and even in the US, for heaven’s sake, they are re-examining their attachments to Old Sparky and its more humane progeny.

I ask this of you because I know something of state-sanctioned violence.  I know the violence it inflicts not just on the murderer to be hanged, but on the body politic, on justice, on equity, on humanity. 

This is why I write to you as an Iranian-Canadian.

When I left Iran in 1983, that country and its people were wracked by revolutionary fervour, a vicious invasion from without and civil unrest bordering on war within.  It was a society bent on exacting revenge – or retribution, the terms are in large part substitutable – for ills historical and recent.  It was a society whose only voice was of anger, whose only instrument was the bayonet.  It was a society where the spilling of blood – one’s own in martyrdom, or that of others in vengeance – had become a sacrament.  It was a society for which death imposed by the state was literally an Article of Faith.

That was the society I left behind.  From that environment, where violence had dominion, I came to Canada, where violence had no place.  And by that I mean official violence; state-sanctioned violence; state-sanctioned death.

No matter how much you limit the application of the death penalty, no matter if you insist on restricting it to a worst case scenario – a Paul Bernardo or a Clifford Olson – no matter if you put in place safeguards against the murder of innocents – and executing an innocent man is no different from murder – the moral principle at the root of punishment of death is the same.  For either a state accepts death as an instrument of policy or it does not.  The moral choice is as stark as that. 

I lived most of my childhood in a society in which that moral choice was in favour of death.  State-sanctioned death.  The thing is, once the moral choice is made, once the floodgates of official violence are opened, drawing a line in the sand will be as useless against the torrents of vengeance, of more violence, of more death as, well, a line in the sand.  Once it becomes acceptable for the state to kill, once society becomes inured to the daily reports of hangings, gassings, electrocutions and lethal injections (stoning and beheading considered outré these days), the inevitable question of “why Bernardo and not Homolka” will begin to haunt the executioners. 

For, why stop at pre-meditated murder?  Why stop at cop-killers?  Why stop at kidnappers and rapists and drug-dealers?  Why stop at those above 18?  Why stop at those with full mental faculties?  Why give murderers on death row the benefit of endless appeals, of constitutional protections, of “getting off” on technicalities?

Blood will beget blood.  The charity and forgiveness of this vast, pacific land of ours will give way to hardened hatred and base moral ugliness.

As it did, in the country of my birth. 

And I know something of state-sanctioned violence, the damage it does to the conscience of a people.  The damage it does to the conscience of each citizen.

Now, in Canada that moral choice was made twice in the last generation.  Twice the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled turned down death as an instrument of national policy.  Twice the Body Politic was convulsed and then relieved to find itself purged of state-sanctioned death.  Twice the country stared into that moral abyss of putting one of its children to death and thought itself better than the men whom it judged.  Twice in one generation Canada paid heed to the wise words of Churchill, uttered eighty years ago, that the moral strength of a people is to be found in how it treats its worst.

I ask you to respect that choice.  I ask you not to open that debate.  Leave the country at peace, as you would find it if you were to become Leader of the Opposition.  And if you become Prime Minister, bequeath a country to your children – to our children – that proudly checked the punishment of death at the door before entering the great community of civilised nations and refused to leave the room to retrieve it.

I ask you not to open that debate so that I can give my children the gift for which I left my birthplace: a society governed by laws and inspired by hope.  For in a society that chooses death over life, hope is the first casualty.