I was in Barcelona on March 11, 2004 when Islamic extremists blew up commuter trains in Madrid in retaliation for the Spanish government’s decision to invade Iraq with America. People marched in the streets in record numbers not in protest, but in a collective call for peace. In the Spanish general elections three days after the bombing, the Partido Popular (PP), the government which sided with the Bush Administration, were defeated by the leftist Spanish Socialists Workers’ Party (PSOE).
Within one term the PSOE had withdrawn Spanish troops from Iraq, come to a ceasefire with ETA (a Spanish terrorist group), legalized gay marriage and set up special courts to deal with violence against women. One can see that out of the mouth of tragedy a song of progressive gains was sung. What created the electoral turn-around was not just the tragedy but how the population reacted: people came together and changed the trajectory of their country to one that they believed in. They didn’t know that the PSOE was going to be as good as they are, but they did know that it was going to be more of the same—or worse—if they stayed with the PP.
Four years later and an ocean away, we in Canada are fortunate to have no tragedy on our hands, but we do have an election coming up. In less than five weeks Americans will vote for a new president and the world will enter a new era—the post-George W Bush era. But before that, on October 14, we have a chance to vote in a regime change of our own. While our election it is not as sexy or exciting as the one south of the border it is just as important to those of us living here as the US election is to the entire world.
For Canadians, particularly queer Canadians, we cannot afford to not pay attention to this election; we might not survive if we are apathetic. If you look at Stephen Harper’s record you will see that while he is not explicitly homophobic, his funding cuts, his policies and his general attitude on where he wants to steer the country are narrow-minded, and have and will negatively impact queer Canadians.
The Conservatives under Harper have cut funding for AIDS, for the arts and for women. Harper has gone on record as bragging that the country has become more conservative, and just recently he has declared that he knows “ordinary Canadians.”
As a gay artist who works for an AIDS service organization, loves his mother, his sister, his grandmother and all his female friends, I can safely say that Harper does not know ordinary Canadians. As a queer man I am an ordinary Canadian, and I want to live in a Canada where there are as many ordinary Canadians as there are Canadians.
Across the country, coalitions (made up of ordinary Canadians) and individuals are working together to ensure that we do not stand idly by while Harper changes the fabric of the country.
See, with Bush it was easy: he believes in war and his vice-president shoots people in the face. In Canada it’s harder. So many of us run with the lies our elementary school teacher told us: that we are peaceful, that we are a cultural mosaic, that we are good. But we are a country that is fighting a war in Afghanistan, entering into a quiet war with other countries about the Arctic, have yet to make peace with First Nations—let alone begun to really understand multiculturalism—and we are no better or worse than any other country.
It is with this in mind that groups like Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton (PACE) and votesolution.ca are working to ensure that every vote counts as a vote against Harper. In Canada we don’t have a strong party or leader to say yes to, we don’t have an Obama that inspires hope that symbolizes change. What we do have in Harper is a Bush. A leader who, according to Margaret Atwood’s beautifully crafted essay in the Globe and Mail last week, is so afraid of art he has replaced paintings of past Canadian prime ministers that hung in the lobby of the Conservative caucus office with photographs of himself. Like Bush, he is trying in his own way to erase the past.
In the latest edition of Esquire there is a great article by Ron Suskind who writes on “What Bush Meant.” It is not his legacy of war, invasion of the privacy of citizens or even the Bush Doctrine that Suskind cites as being the long-lasting effects of his presidency—it is the fact, he says, that Americans “simply weren’t vigilant enough,” that the Americans who care about their country let down their guard for too long, let Bush go unchallenged for too long and did nothing to stop him even when they had the chance in the 2004 election.
Right now I feel as though we as Canadians are on the precipice of letting what happened in America happen here. As we saw in Spain—and I hope we see in America next month—we have a chance to change the conservative course that our country is on. If we do not, it will be a writer for the Walrus, not Esquire, who in a few years will be shaming their readers for what they did not do when they had the chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment