Hopenhagen? Nottawa.

The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen could be the defining failure of our generation’s leaders. It is certainly the defining failure of Canada in the eyes of the world. The Conference has been mired in pathetic finger-pointing, buck-passing, denial, and cynicism—“Nobody’s going to live up to these promises anyway, just like Kyoto.” Canada has been conspicuous in trying to appear to be doing something while doing nothing at all, save garnering more and more reasons for the rest of the world to find our climate control policies impotent and financially motivated.

I find it staggering that there are still people in this country who doubt climate change, who still question humanity’s contributions to global warming, who really will tell you that what David Suzuki and Al Gore and thousands of scientists and activists are telling us is a bunch of hooey. There are those who are willing to trump up their own scientists and activists who attempt to disprove climate change.

Do these people actually believe that limiting pollution is a bad idea?

Have they seen the smog in our skies, the filth in our rivers, the garbage in our ditches? Are they saying it’s not okay to do what we can to limit the putrefying of our world?

We Canadians are showing ourselves to be the most short-sighted of the pollutant nations because we’re too mired in our own partisanship and regional biases to look at the big picture. I get most of my news from the radio and the Internet, and I rely heavily on the CBC for that. Many people where I live see the CBC as a Liberal, Eastern machine. I don’t agree, but if nothing else it remains the best source of national news in this country. On CBC’s website, you can read a story, and then comment on it below. You can even choose to AGREE and DISAGREE with comments a la Facebook. Commentary turns nasty quickly, usually ending up in name-calling and petty region-bashing. The blogger is attacked rather than the idea. Oftentimes, intellectual disagreements turn into shouting matches over hockey teams.

Regarding the Copenhagen Conference, lines are being drawn in this country separating West from East, Conservative from Liberal, because people are so foolish they think “a vote for Blue is a vote for the West.” I swear, there are morons out here who would become Holocaust deniers if they were told the East said it happened. This country is full of dangerously, passionately uninformed voters.

People defend the tarsands in Alberta and Saskatchewan—while the rest of the world correctly condemns them—because of some spectre of the NEP looming again, of the East horning in on our cash bucks; other’s defend Canada’s right to do nothing in Copenhagen because up until today, nobody else has done anything either. It’s just been a lot of posturing and hot air.

“We’re waiting to see what the Americans do,” says Jim Prentice, “so we can harmonize with them.” Didn’t this country used to be one that showed a little initiative, hell, even a little spine?

I can’t believe the short-sightedness.

One comment made this week on CBC’s website by a user named Forwardpass brought me to a stop: “Just say no Canada! We can’t take anymore (sic) taxes. The world will not end.”

There it was, the financial angle. Worry about nothing but your own money. That’s the tarsands way, that’s the Canadian way. Do nothing, get paid. What if we are talking about the end of the world, at least as we have known it? To many, that’ll never matter more than revenue. How sad.

Many Canadians feel we shouldn’t have to change until the U.S. and China do. But, today when the U.S. and China were the first on a list of countries to actually try to draft a policy, Canada was out of the picture, sitting back, doing nothing, as we have been for the entire conference. The prime minister—in between tea with the queen of Denmark and going to see the Little Mermaid—claimed we’re doing nothing because we’ve done so much already. He failed to expand on that. When you’re in the back pocket of Big Oil, you’ve got to be careful about how much interest you show in limiting greenhouse gases.

Canada, a country of only 32 million, is one of the twelve worst world polluters, along with countries that have hundreds of millions of people, two with over a billion. Per capita, we are the worst nation on earth for usage/emissions.

Here in the West, the tarsands are vehemently defended. “Where else will we get our money?” “We need to support our growing energy needs.” Greed and gluttony. I’m no Christian, but when your two main worries are money and consumption, you need to go for a long walk and a think. If you can’t see that what we’re doing to our world is harmful, that something needs to be done, and that making money for money’s sake with no other concerns for the effect that has on the world is a pathetic form of life, well, you probably stopped reading when I didn’t write oilsands anyway. Next it’ll be cashsands or jobsands or bursarysands.

So, we have a policy in place, one that our country did nothing to help create. And it’s a pathetic policy that most countries will find it extremely easy to ignore—much to our government’s relief. Our prime minister and environment minister have both stated that they don’t see us going for any serious emissions caps, and that the tarsands would be given a break anyway. What’s the point if huge polluter’s like this go unchecked? It’s like banning firearms but letting people launch missiles.

The best the Canadian public could do was bicker, mock the protestors, refuse to challenge the polluters, and continue to consume, pollute and waste. Regional pettiness and greed have kept us from uniting and pressuring our incompetent leadership into actually leading.

You’d think with our army all over the world media for prisoner abuse, and with the Olympics coming to a transient-purged Vancouver, we’d be doing something to make ourselves look a little more appealing. I mean, damn, I see how China felt in the summer of ’08. “Why is everybody always picking on me? Oh, right, because of all that crap I’ve been doing lately.”

I am normally patriotic to a fault. I love this country as one loves a parent that has made mistakes, but in the end, has given you your life.

Today, I am ashamed to be a Canadian.

Loving Saskatchewan Living in Alberta

I’m from Saskatchewan and I live in Alberta.

And suddenly half of you are breaking out in guffaws. Now why is that?

Let me say, this is not about the Grey Cup. I’m writing this before the game, but it’ll be posted afterwards, and regardless of the outcome, this is not about the game. This is about what I’m hearing about people like myself, born in that beautiful near-rectangle to the east. For in the lead-up to the Grey Cup weekend in Calgary—possibly because our team beat their team—the nastiness that is here all year got turned up a notch. I’d like to address it.

But, I’m going to address it without the “I know you are what am I” attacks. So let’s get this out of the way: I like living in Alberta. Seriously.

Do I miss the province of my birth? Dearly.

Would I move back there? To the right place, say Saskatoon or Shaunavon, yeah.

“So if it’s so great, why do you live here?” Because I like it, and I have a very good job.

When I moved out here, I had two interviews lined up, one for in Alberta and one for in Regina; Alberta offered first. I stayed because within six months I had met my future wife.

What always gets me is this condescension I get whenever I tell somebody I’m from Saskatchewan, like I’m the slow little brother who demands pity. Too bad.

You know when you travel and you meet an American and they pull that attitude—y’know, that “you’re not from anywhere interesting” attitude—on you? That’s how it feels. Guess what, you know that mix of pity and contempt you feel for the Yank then? Yeah.

See, I’m proud of where I’m from. I grew up on a farm and in a small town and I loved the area. I love farming, I love the space, I love the neighbourly camaraderie.

There’s that laughter again.

“Isn’t everywhere in Saskatchewan small, isn’t everything a farm?”

Yep, there are lots of small towns. But I challenge you to find a place with more community pride than Shaunavon, the place with less than 2,000 people in which I spent my youth. I mean, Strathmore has 11,000 people and the only civic pride we see is when we all unite to criticize the mayor and town council. When they berate us and attack us for questioning them because the only public works they do is housing development, and the only green-spaces we have are a slough that they want to see turned into duplexes, you have to wonder. Community pride? Shaunavon has this ambitious I ♥ Shaunavon campaign that really has gone to a lot of work to promote the place, while Strathmore spent its centennial arguing whether or not town council should be allowed to build itself a new town hall on one of our ball diamonds. Swell.

Oh yeah, I’m a bit blinded by nostalgia, but I’m sad too. I mean, I used to love it when people mocked my home province’s Socialist government, its lack of over-crowded, sprawling cities, its open space. Urbanites didn’t get it. People who view Calgary as a metropolis and a heart of all things cosmopolitan didn’t get it. Suited me just fine. But after I left Saskatchewan they elected a Conservative government worse than the Reform Party, and they opened up their own tar sands monstrosity. Great, Saskatchewan would soon be appearing on the world stage for all the wrong reasons.

Point is, I was glad people in Alberta didn’t get it, because then they couldn’t ruin it with their golf courses and their ready-made acreage communities and their five-dollar-coffee shops. But then we went and ruined it on our own by letting the people who wanted it to be Alberta take over. Sigh. Alberta works in Alberta, not in Saskatchewan.

Alberta has farmers, Alberta has flat prairie, Alberta has backwards moralistic groups. But that all gets ignored when given the chance to trudge out an old cliché about hillbillies or dogs running away.

What saddens me most is people actually believe that those of us raised in the beautiful green province really are dumb and uncultured. My mother has spent four fifths of her life on a farm, and you won’t find a more worldly, learned woman anywhere. Same went for her own mother, who grew up before women’s liberation and was married to an old-fashioned Catholic, spending nearly forty years raising kids. Most of my best friends from home have their Masters degrees, some their Doctorates. And like me, many have done homework in a grain truck at some point in life. CEOs, doctors, school administrators, lawyers, the running joke in any professional setting in Alberta is to count the number of us who grew up in Saskatchewan. These are hardly the doofi of the labour force here in Alberta.

Culture? You’d be hard-pressed to find a pair of more culturally-active cities than Saskatoon and Regina. But, yes, that might have something to do with their socially-conscious citizens. Calgary is having trouble keeping its art galleries open because half the city’s population thinks “culture” is spending oil money on an expensive sushi dinner. But I said I wouldn’t get nasty. Edmonton rocks, at least. But then it reminds me of Saskatoon . . .

I love living here, but I’m bored of the patronizing from people who’ve never even been to Saskatchewan.

Here’s the reality: we’re not proud of where we’re from because of some underdog sense of survival when wide-eyed in the big city. We’re proud because it’s a good place. People underestimate it because of their own prejudices (and to deal with their own insecurity when compared with Vancouver, let’s face it). You won’t take that away from us, no matter how you belittle us. I feel that I had a sound, moral, irreligious upbringing in a gorgeous, peaceful province where beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if an ocean of prairie, of unending sky and the whisper of summer wind is not for you, well, who asked you?

We’re friendly and we’re happy, and we’re treated like morons. But then, Newfies are the friendliest and happiest people in the country, and they’re treated like second-class citizens.

You’re right, we live in Alberta now. That’s because we’ve got good jobs and because it’s a nice province. Conservatives governments, the ultra-religious Right and tar-sand pollution aside, it’s fantastic. And I’d have all three if I was still in Saskatchewan. Those, and rats. That is, instead of the myth of a rat-free province (but don’t get me started on that silliness).

So thanks, Alberta. Like our grandparents generations ago who came to Canada from Europe, we who’ve moved to Alberta have to suffer the prejudices of those already here. We’ll bring our own culture and morals and intelligence and work ethic and we’ll be mocked for them. But the Newfies and us, we’re just going to smile, because where we’re from made us who we are, and we’ve brought that here. If this province is getting better, well, our influence has to be felt.

Don’t worry, we know we won’t hear it, we don’t need to. But we feel all the richer for being able to love mountains and prairie for what they are, different, but beautiful for all their own reasons.

Oh, and now and forever, Go Riders!