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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1997-03-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19,1997 PAGE 5. We’ve come a long way, but what direction ? All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. Aristotle Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. Henry Peter, Lord Brougham Joanne Harris Burgess has been teaching Canadian Studies at York University in Toronto for the past 14 years. It’s a job that's become more, not less challenging with the passage of time, because with each succeeding year, the students signing up seemed to know less and less about their own country. Or did they? Ms Harris decided to find out. On the first day of classes last semester, she handed out a questionnaire to 100 K International Scene Protecting our culture We may be the best friends that the United States has but, when it comes to matters of the North American Free Trade Agreement, we are just as fair game as any other country when Washington thinks it can score points. So far we have won most of the cases that have come up for arbitration, but that has only made the Americans even more anxious to get the upper hand in at least one category. They got a boost in that direction when the World Trade Organization ruled that Canada's policy on split-run magazines was discriminatory. For those who might be a bit confused by that item, here is how it works. Take a magazine such as Time or Sports Illustrated. It is published in the United States, but a Canadian edition can be easily produced by using the same articles as in the American edition, or a vast majority of them. Al the same lime advertising can be sold to Canadian companies. In this way Time can reap the financial rewards of the advertising, but produce a magazine al a fraction of the cost of a Canadian equivalent. The Canadian government soon slapped a ban on such practices but, according to the WTO, such a ban is illegal. The Canadians are not the only country feeling the heat from American pressures. The French, for one, are of the belief that the U.S. is trying to ram American culture down the French throat. I can tell you very bluntly what the French think of American culture in general. A loose translation of their comments would be, "Il stinks!" I could go on but I want you to get the idea that we are not the only ones facing the American behemoth. Canadian Studies students. These kids were all graduates of Ontario high schools. They had ail chosen to lake a course with lots of Canadian content. Sample questions on the lest: What is the dale of Canada's founding? Name three Canadian painters. Name three Canadian novelists and the title of one of their books. Shouldn't be much of a challenge for sharp, interested high school graduates, right? Wrong. Sixty-two per cent could not name any Canadian authors. Only nine of the 100 students could come up with three names. And artists? Fifty-nine per cent couldn’t name a single Canadian painter. Only four per cent knew any artist beyond The Group of Seven and Emily Carr. As for the date of Canada's founding, well, we celebrated Canada's Centennial just 30 years ago...you'd think that might be a clue. More than half the students couldn't even hazard a close guess as to Canada's birthday. What the hell is going on here? What have these kids been doing for the past four years? More to the point: what have their teachers been doing? But perhaps that's unfair. Maybe the teachers have been slaving like Trojans and By Raymond Canon Well, you might say, didn't our Heritage Minister Sheila Copps say something about Canadian culture being protected under NAFTA. Sheila says a lot of things but not all of them bear scrutiny. You have only to look at her comments about the CBC to sec what I mean. At any rate Ms Copps mumbled something about precise protection of Canadian culture in NAFTA and we should have the same protection in such organizations as the WTO. That may sound good to voters and nationalists, not to mention people like myself who would not like it one little bit to see Canada overrun by what passes for culture south of the border. However, Sheila should go back to her office and read the NAFTA agreement very carefully. Fm willing to bet that she doesn't find any on culture since there isn't any. There is, on the other hand, a clause that States, if Canada discriminates against U.S. cultural industries, Washington has the right to take retaliatory measures. Wail a minute, you will counter. When the government was negotiating the agreement with the United Stales, we were assured by the government that our culture was being protected. I know that is what we were all told, but such statements were nothing more than a ploy to overcome our fears of the agreement in general. I have said on any number of occasions that, while most economists were in favour of the trade liberalization agreement, far loo much noise was being made by those who were either all in favour of everything or against all that the treaty stood for. Few people were reading the fine print, it seems, especially when it came to cultural protection. It must, therefore, have come as something of a shock when the World Trade Organization found in the American's favour Canadian high school skulls are just too thick to absorb esoteric information like Margaret Atwood and Robert Bateman and - you know - birthdays and stuff. Well, if Canadian students arc dumb, it's a relatively recent development. Here are a few sample questions from another questionnaire given to Ontario students: 1: Stale the most important facts about any TWO of the following: Company of One Hundred Associates, Battle of Waterloo, The Normans, Battle of Queenston Heights, Coming of Christianity to England, Taking of Quebec. 2: Give the names of: (a) Governor-General of Canada (b) Lieutenant-Governor of your province. (c) Premier of Canada (d) Premier of your province (e) Reeve of your township or town The last question by the way, was considered such a 'gimme' that it was only worth five per cent of the total mark. Both questions were part of an exam students had to pass to get out of Grade J 7 of Wellington High School back in 1927. We've come a long way in 70 years. Question is: which direction? and not in ours. However, all is not lost. While I think that some of our culture, at least in the English speaking part of the country, is little more than a pale imitation of what passes for culture south of the border, there is certainly enough that is originally Canadian to be worth fighting for. In this respect we do have some allies. The Europeans, above all the French, are also alarmed at American inroads and want to hall it before it gets any worse. However, they are not alone and, if we can line up enough countries who are concerned as we are about cultural protection, we might just have a chance. It has not gone unnoticed that the Americans are very adept at throwing their weight around, regardless of the merits of their case. Let's consider the WTO ruling as a call-to- arms instead of a resounding defeat. If the Americans want to gel pushy, others can too! Looking back From the files of the Blyth Standard, Brussels Post and the North Huron Citizen 1 YEAR AGO MARCH 20,1996 Blyth Reeve Mason Bailey made an impassioned statement regarding his opposition to amalgamation and the reduced representation of the people. The maple syrup season was in full swing with the crop being describe as "more like the old days." A Final Thought If a task is once begun, never leave it till it's done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all. The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Give me a sappy story Well, I finally saw Fargo this weekend, and, it's interesting, but I've never had such a good lime with blood and gore in my life. For those who haven’t heard about Fargo let me offer a little background at this point. The movie is purported to be based on a real story from 1988 about a spineless car salesman living in Minnesota, who arranges to have his wife kidnapped. The idea is to have his wealthy father-in-law pay the ransom, which he then splits with the hired thugs. With several Academy Award nominations to its credit, including Best Picture, I expected an unsettling emotional drama. What I saw instead was an off-beat comedy. It is an anomalous mix, tickling you at one instant with its cast of caricatures, then shocking your sensibilities with gruesome violence. Amongst the laid-back Minnesota folk are ax whackings, bodies disposed of in wood chippers and roadside executions. And it all plays out just wacky enough to be true. Lacking the taste to tempt you, you think? So did I, and I must admit that I spent at least the first hour trying to decide if I should laugh, then bemusedly doing so. Yet, the entire time, I couldn't help thinking how our concept of what's amusing has changed. Certainly, people have always found humour in violence. There are those who roar at Moe's attacks on Curly and Larry. Popular cartoons have often been touted as being the most violent shows on television. But in Fargo, butchery wasn't meant to make us laugh, it was just there; the comedy in my opinion would have lost nothing by toning down the shock factor. It bothers me, not slightly, how much messy aggression there is played out in movies. And for those of us who still suffer some squeamishness seeing senseless slaughter, our choices are surprisingly limited. What's even more troublesome, looking al the number one box office hits on any given week, it's obviously what the people want. A friend of mine was grousing recently about the difficulties in trying to rent a movie, not just suitable for her pre-adolescent child to sec, but entertaining as well. Yet, this same person, when I said that Sleepless in Seattle was perhaps my favourite movie, referred to it as "sappy". It sure is. And safe and sweet and entertainingly endearing. I had fun watching Fargo; there is no question about it. Il was entertaining, the performances were excellent and the story imaginative. But the movies that I keep coming back to, the ones that I watch over and over are sappy. They are stories of real people, who care more about kindness and caring, then about abuse. I've never thought that a bad thing, but amazingly these arc the movies that I have often had to defend. In a world where parents murder babies, greed distorts perceptions and people die on the streets, the movies I like may not be the true stories. But if entertainment is about escapism, why do we seem to enjoy seeing evil? Why accept a portrayal of violence al a level higher than may be necessary, yet scoff al a sappy story?