perhaps when they come
with their cameras and straw
hats: sacred pink tourists from the frozen Nawth
Kamau Brathwaite, “Calypso”
∞
Real-estate agents, hardware store proprietors, small-town lawyers, feed merchants, actuaries, insurance-policy pedlars, and car dealers, all convinced that the True North, Strong and Free was going to hell in a multicultural handbasket. Why, you can now wear a turban in the RCMP or a dagger in your belt to high school if you’re a Sikh. Our kids are being dealt condoms rather than brownies at recess, and you can’t take them to a movie any more, all they show is screwing on kitchen tables and in elevators and airplane toilets. The National Gallery in Ottawa is paying zillions of our tax money for twenty-foot-high colour charts called paintings by conmen named Newman or Rothko, probably both Jews. Canada’s broke, but it’s a proven fact that rug-head welfare cheats are having cheques sent, under three different names you’d have to be a genius to spell, to their winter addresses in Florida. This great land that once gave the world Deanna Durbin and Guy Lombardo is now supposed to be proud of k. d. lang, a dyke and a vegetarian, even though she came from cattle country. You know what caused AIDS? God Almighty’s disgust.
Mordecai Richler (1993)
∞
Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French Canadians consumed by self pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy-store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper’s shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog.
Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here (New York: Knopf, 1990)
∞
Examined closely, what really exercises our two founding races today is the recent intrusion into this privileged and still largely empty land of so many southern Europeans and wogs from Asia, Central and South America, the West Indies, and North Africa. In Montreal, where the French are officially eager for more French-speaking immigrants, their bourgeoisie is unofficially fleeing the city—its schools contaminated by the children of Moroccans, Haitians, Lebanese, and Vietnamese—for the etiolated suburbs, say Laval, which is still purportedly racially pure. And out there in Vancouver the indolent natives, who once tied Chinese coolies together by their queues and tossed them over cliffs into the sea, are scared stiff of the many new and obviously astute arrivals from Hong Kong, certain to run circles around them before breakfast. And when the middle classes of both our founding races open their newspapers in June and see that most of the high school scholarship students have Asian faces, they tend to feel a chill, even as they once winced at the photographs of all those hot-to-trot Jewish prize winners with unpronounceable names. Hence the plaintive racial cry in the streets of Montreal of “Le Québec aux Québécois!” and out west the revolt of the nerds, that is to say, the sudden rise of the equally xenophobic Reform Party, and the emergence in Orangeman’s Ontario of APEC and screwy, paranoid books like Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow, claiming sales of 110,000 copies. Put plainly, the most insecure members of our two founding races—failed, according to Conrad Black, by their elites—have seen the Canadian future and grasped that it won’t work as well as the past for them.
Mordecai Richler, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)
∞
The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.
Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version (1997)
∞
Bloc Québécois MP Gilles Duceppe called on the leaders in English Canada and in the Jewish community to “join in denouncing this consummate racist with a totally decayed mind. Canadians must speak out. They either denounce his action or they are his accomplices”.
Michael Posner, The Last Honest Man. Mordecai Richler: An Oral Biography (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004)
∞
Québec has always had its own version of history, with heroes and villains, and struggle, and heartbreak, and God; God was a main feature until recently. But those of us in English Canada who went to high school when I did weren’t dosed with any such strong medicine. Instead we were handed a particularly anemic view of our past, insofar as we were given one at all. For others on more troubled shores the epic battles, the heroes, the stirring speeches, the do-or-die last stands, the freezing to death during the retreat from Moscow. For us the statistics on wheat and the soothing assurances that all was well in the land of the cow and potato, not to mention — although they were mentioned — the vein of metallic ore and the stack of lumber. We looked at these things and saw that they were good, if tedious, but we didn’t really examine how they were obtained or who was profiting by them, or who did the actual work, or how much they got paid for it. Nor was much said about who inhabited this space before white Europeans arrived, bearing gifts of firearms and smallpox, because weren’t we nice people? You bet we were, and nice people do not dwell on morbid subjects. I myself would have been much more interested in Canadian history if I’d known that our dull prime minister, Mackenzie King, had believed that the spirit of his mother was inhabiting his dog, which he always consulted on public policy — it explains so much — but nobody knew about such things back then.
The main idea behind the way we were taught Canadian history seemed to be reassurance: as a country, we’d had our little differences, and a few embarrassing moments — the Rebellion of ’37, the hanging of Louis Riel, and so forth — but these had just been unseemly burps in one long gentle after-dinner nap. We were always being told that Canada had come of age. This was even a textbook title: Canada Comes of Age. I’m not sure what it was supposed to mean — that we could vote and drink and shave and fornicate, perhaps; or that we had come into our inheritance and could now manage our own affairs.
IT’S MUCH LATER THAN YOU THINK™ 