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On Further Reflection: Nolo Contendere

With minor revisions, as originally published via THEMUSEUM’s CultKW online magazine on October 6, 2021

Dove, lithograph on paper by Pablo Picasso, 1949 – wikipedia. 

I’ve been trying to abstain from debate.  

It’s not easy. I like to jump into the fray now and then. Fighting with words is my preference — words carefully and deliberately chosen, so with forethought, not in a face to face, spur of the moment confrontation.  

This combative bent has served me well. I was invited to join the Waterloo Regional Arts Council after denouncing, in caustic language, their proposal to revitalize my city’s ailing legacy civic and business district by putting up giant heritage murals, just like Welland, Chemainus and scores of other desperate towns and cities from coast to coast. 

I was invited to write weekly commentary on the regional arts, culture and heritage scene for our daily newspaper after submitting a sequence of op ed pieces expressing my utter contempt for the rhetoric and the actions emanating from Queen’s Park under Premier Mike Harris and his Common Sense Revolution wrecking crew. 

This was a “Second Opinion” piece ridiculing a proposal from one of the global consulting firms to reconfigure our KWS into an Ontario Symphony Orchestra that convinced the publisher to invite me to make a weekly contribution to the paper, which I did for the next 22 years.  

So in a very real way, my belligerence became a gateway to how I ended up earning my bread and butter. And now I’m trying to give it up. 

This is a direction I’ve been leaning toward for some time. It stems from a growing uneasiness with stereotypical partisan stands. I do have convictions, preferences, hopes, loyalties, aspirations and sensitivities. I have learned, however, that taking an aggressive stand diametrically opposed to the convictions, preferences and sensitivities of someone else can backfire: Opponents become more deeply entrenched in their positions, or get drawn into positions that contradict what they originally stood for.  

I have also become aware, lately, of how easily we can get drawn into simplistic pro or con, yes or no, us or them, either/or stand offs. Sometimes we’re enticed into such positions deliberately, to set us against one another, to confuse us, to distract us from what’s actually at stake. But it mostly happens by force of habit.

The idea that political discourse takes place in a kind of arena, with Habs vs Leafs, red-shirts vs blue-shirts locked in endless combat, has become part of how we think, how we try to make sense of our world and our place in it. Watching from the stands can be wonderfully entertaining, and personally participating as a contestant can be a healthy exercise for the body and the mind. But in terms of actually solving or learning anything, gladiator-style debate is usually inconsequential. It can also be deadly dangerous. The issues we’re facing today are of grave consequence. Partisanship has become an obstacle.        

Trying to hold back my pugnacity is not a turn towards a friendlier, more tolerant approach. I haven’t resolved to turn the other cheek against noxious or deceptive ideological positions. On the contrary. Part of the motivation is the realization that we’ve reached the point where certain varieties of wrong-headedness have become an existential threat to all us creatures here below. We can’t afford to treat dangerous perversions of truth with “both sides” politeness or a sporting fair play any longer.

I touched on this subject in two “musings” written for CultKW.com a while back: Beyond Opinion, and Further Beyond Opinion. These pieces began as part of an experiment in refraining from confrontational debate. Both deal with controversy over proposed developments, two high rises and a mega-warehouse; the stories were all presented in the press as parochial opposition to change –  Not In My Back Yard – NIMBY fights.

The point I tried to make is that these are not two-way debates, in which decision makers are expected to choose between a “yes” and a “no” side. What we’re involved in here is a collective deliberation exercise, not a stand-off between opposing forces. These are broad, many-faceted issues. There’s far more at stake than a neighbourhood trying to protect its stability, preserve its character, and the right to quiet enjoyment of their space under the terms that were in place when their homes were initially rented or purchased. The outcome will impact everyone who lives here, today and for generations to come. 

Civic deliberation is best served by avoiding two-way standoffs, and turning, instead, to broadening the range of what warrants being taken into account, thereby complicating the picture. To be effective, inclusive and meaningful, civic deliberation needs to move “beyond opinion”. 

A genuinely civil conversation is, essentially, a learning process: The basic question, as Waterloo Architecture professor Rick Haldenby asked in relation to the condo boom in the older parts of Kitchener, is “What kind of city are we building?” What would be the best possible result, taking every factor into consideration? 

“Where there is much desire to learn,” John Milton famously wrote in Areopagitica, “there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” But opinion from misguided gladiatorial types, including the deceivers and the deceived, is hate, fear, ignorance, schism and violence in the making. 

Stumbling upon a noisy display of hard-hearted opinion can be infuriating. The impulse to flip such offenders the bird, as Uptown Councillor Tenille Bonoguore did back in June, can be irresistable. It is wiser, however, to respond as one would to a highly contagious disease: apply the antidote (good-heartedness really does beat hate, always), but from a distance, with the best personal protective equipment available.       

From Op-ed → Guest Essay 

This new resolve to avoid confrontational positions coincided with the recent announcement that the New York Times is retiring the term “op-ed“.  I was interested to learn that “op-ed”, a term the Times introduced just over 50 years ago, means opinions published on the page opposite the editorials in a traditional newspaper layout. The change is driven by the shift toward accessing the paper’s content online, beyond the physical page. Opinions from outside the Times editorial structure are now called “guest essays”.

I have mixed feelings about this. I think of essays as structured arguments, probably because of the role essay writing had in my high school and post-secondary education: You begin with a thesis statement, and support it with logic and evidence. The goal is to produce a cogent, convincing composition. 

Opinions are softer propositions: the Latin root means from “conjecture, fancy, belief, what one thinks.” When you say “this is my opinion,” you’re saying “I suppose… ,” not “this is absolute Truth” or “here I stand, I can do no other.” 

The word “essay” can also mean trial, attempt, weigh, test, so the distinction may not be as stark and clear as I first thought. But it’s important to see that there is a difference. (These musings, incidentally, are offered as the softest, most free-wheeling of opinions. Let’s stir things up a bit, but playfully, not to make more trouble, of which there is plenty to go around).    

The opinion pages have always been my favourite section of the daily newspaper. This is usually the first place I look. After that, anything with local/regional relevance is of interest; the rest is mostly chaffe. There are many sources for quality news and commentary about Canada, the U.S. and the world at large, but on the local front, the daily newspaper has, until recently, had little serious competition.   

Almost every day, I come across something that widens my perspective, complicates my understanding, and opens possibilities for further thought and action. Increasingly, this tends to be material that reaches me through a friend or someone I follow on one social medium or another, primarily in text form. My own posting and sharing of material has increased in frequency and length throughout the 18 months I remained isolated in my “coop at the co-op.” 

The social media behemoths have been blamed for fostering partisan division, serving as platforms for disseminating what I call “truth splinters”: narrow, partial or perverse views that are readily transfigured into lies and used to foster fear, resentment, judgement and hate. What gets left out can be more significant than what finds its way to our respective feeds. 

Online sources of information offer an hitherto unimaginable wealth of material. With so much food for thought readily available, mostly at no cost beyond what they charge for Internet access, the editorial aspect becomes increasingly important. And it pains me to say it, but right now, my Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and the people I follow on Twitter are doing a better job sorting through the Whole World Wide web and directing my attention to material that can be of practical value for learning, imagining and doing things here in our neck of the woods than what our beleaguered regional daily and weekly papers are able to do. 

When I first encountered the term “editorial product”, it sounded repugnant, partly because it was in something Conrad Black had said. But when I subscribe to — literally, underwrite — the local paper, that’s precisely what I’m supporting: An editorial product, put together by people I can trust to sort through all the material available, and select what can be of good use to me as an engaged citizen of my city and region: Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo, Grand River Country. 

When I subscribe to a newspaper or a certain kind of magazine, I’m also underwriting a learning institution. The way Milton explains it, what he calls opinion and I’m calling civic deliberation begins with a desire to learn. When we really want to learn, we open our minds to perceive, proffer and receive knowledge and wisdom. The objective is not to triumph, but to create and recreate something tenable that is also practically useful, drawing on all the facets and slivers of fact, truth and possibility that are within the range of comprehension.   

That includes the kind of understanding that the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation last week is all about. My sense is that Truth, when we begin to approach it, will not be the final triumph of one conclusion over another — a kind of historical Judgement Day — but suddenly catching a glimpse of the enormity and the complexity of the great historical wrongs that are the foundation of North American culture and society. 

Picasso’s Dove on USSR stamp and souvenir sheet celebrating the centennial of his birth – wikipedia 

August 21 2023 Promenade

Our radio magazine for this week.

Mondays at 8 pm. Over the air via 98.5 CKWR | stream via ckwr.com | Rogers Cable 94.

Past issues: anchor.fm/homerange

Timestamp:

00:00 Intro; Jessica Wagler on the New Hamburg Fall Fair Ambassador legacy newhamburgfallfair.ca

16:19 Chad Brown on Maud Lewis paintings and prints maudprints.ca

36:37 A Hole in the Ground: Heather Majaury passes the torch to Angela Onuora interartsmatrix.ca

On Further Reflection – What’s in a name: Kitchener 2 of 2

Kitch

Originally written for CultKW, posted September 2, 2020

I’d like to make a motion: That the City of Kitchener be officially re-dedicated to the honour and memory of the other Lord Kitchener: Aldwyn Roberts, HBD DA, the great 20th-century Calypsonian.  

April 18, 2022 would be a good target date: The centennial of his birth.

So what connection does this city have with the grand master of calypso?

Well, we can start with the simple fact we share the Imperial Field Marshal as a namesake. The connection came to this city through the debacle of 1916. For the calypsonian, we’re told that he took “Kitchener” as his  stage name when he was a teenager, and his fans added the “Lord” later. The artist and the City shared this connection for roughly 60 years.

There is no need to disparage the City’s original namesake by any of this. The rationale can simply be, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum’`s memory has been honoured for 106 years, now let’s pay some attention to `the other Lord Kitchener for a while. There can even be a stipulation that the matter be re-examined in the year 2128, so future citizens can consider allowing the two heroes to take turns every 106 years or so.  
Designating a day to think about Lord Kitchener and his 100 + year association with the city would be an honourable parting gesture: June 6, perhaps, the day that he drowned, which was just over three weeks before the day of the referendum that selected his name for this City.

A new spirit of Lord Kitchener the calypsonian would prevail the rest of the year, adopted in part because it is much more compatible with the ethos of the original Berlin, Canada than anything associated with Kitchener.

The main connection is the historical one that we share with everyone in the land of the Canadas. The theme that makes the story of Canada as a modern nation state exceptional is the fact that we never made a complete break with what came before.

The True North we sing about in the anthem emerged out of that vast global domain that was once symbolically embodied in the personage of Victoria Regina. And we are still associated with what remains of it, both as a present actuality and as memory. The empire is part of our story, and our stories are part of the empire and its legacy.  

So in a very real way, the Canadas represent the fruition of England, France and even the Netherlands in North America, including all the treaties and other dealings with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, and all the transgressions and other dealings with the peoples of Africa. 

Naming a city after a legendary artist from Trinidad and Tobago would acknowledge all that. But this would be just a starting point for a full consideration of what this symbolic act would mean. The rest will be what we decide to make of it.

We’d be starting with a gesture that will likely appear as a joke at first. That’s OK. That’s not unlike the calypsonian way: serving up what are often “serious, even subversive, messages”1 with rhythms, sounds and words that are joyfully amusing.  

And we can use some of that in the present hour. There’s not so much as a scintilla of fun in our current namesake, other than the fact that his stiff grandiosity almost begs for derision. It is difficult to imagine “the Avenger of Gordon, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum” could ever have earned an affectionate nickname like “Kitch”.

So we can keep the distinction clear by calling our new namesake “Kitch. Once the switch is made, the can also be applied to the City in ordinary usage: It can be become a Kitch, like a William becomes a Bill, and a Dorothy a Dolly or a Dot.

A lighter touch would suit the city. Part of the inheritance of the people who started coming from Germany in the 1820s is a more healthy attitude towards fun. This stems from the fact that they were Catholics and Lutherans, in contrast to the straight-laced white anglo saxon protestant provincial mainstream, which included most of the ruling elite.

 

One of the chapters in the souvenir booklet for Kitchener’s centennial in 1954 is “Always a Showtown.” The cover, on which the arts are given equal weight to industry, and the title: “City of Talent”, indicate this as well. 

When it was first introduced, Kitchener’s Oktoberfest was a significant step towards showing Ontarians that they could have a good time eating, drinking, dancing, singing and exclaiming. It is our link to carnival traditions all over the world.

Canada as a whole has strengths in this area: We’ve become known for our humour. This is a gift that didn’t evolve out of Toronto the Good, or Sunday Blue Law Ontario. 


Modern calypso emerged in conjunction with the capacity for recording and broadcasting music, and the evolution of the steelpan drum. It is rooted in African culture, and flavoured by the French presence during the 18th century and the proximity of Spanish colonial societies.

At the point when Kitch and the kind of music he created began becoming a global phenomenon, there were entire orchestras with instruments fashioned out of the 55-gallon oil drums made available in massive quantities through the U.S. military presence in the area.

Out of recycled material related to war, domination and environmental degradation, the people of Trinidad and Tobago created a magnificent musical instrument and a joyous musical genre.

This is an example one can pin some hope on: a sword into ploughshares, lion lying down with the lamb kind of development. And therefore much more in line with the pacifist origins of Waterloo County than the man in the recruiting posters.

As the horrors of the 20th century slip farther into the past, it becomes increasingly clear that the value of the gifts that Kitch and his people have given to the world far outweigh those of any military commander.

There is no need, however, to load the name switch with too much meaning. The possibilities are better left as a field of exploration and discovery.

The challenge will be maximizing the fun element, yet retaining the appropriate gravitas given that the Atlantic slave trade, the plantation system and modern colonialism are part of the background.

Although the land of the Canadas does have historical ties with the West Indies, it is important to remember that calypso, soca and steelpan music are a gift to the world from a Caribbean culture and society, and not ours to exploit.  

It is worth noting that there are approximately 10,000 citizens of Caribbean origin in the Kitchener census area today, and that this is more than there were people of German background or the British Isles back in 1916 (the total population at the time was about 15,000).

The Caribbean includes many nations, each with a diversity of its own.

The ideal would be to make the switch part of the spirit of Berlinnova, and an avenue to meaningful connections, not just with Canadians with Caribbean roots, but with all the peoples, nations and cultures of the most southern regions of the continent we share. 

Aldwyn Roberts is also the artist who sang “London is the Place for Me” for the newsreel cameras when he arrived on the famous HMT Empire Windrush to take England by a storm in 1948.

By making the switch, the City wouldn’t be overturning the imperial connections symbolized by Lord Kitchener the warrior. By embracing Lord Kitchener the artist, it would be embarking on a journey that promises to make those associations freshly meaningful.

Note: The Empire Windrush was originally a German ship called the MV Monte Rosa, built in the 1920s for trade with and emigration to South America

post script

Oktoberfest in May

Originally written and posted May 2021

The May Day signal went out in March: Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest is facing a serious crisis.

There is talk of major changes in the works, aimed, as Oktoberfest Executive Director Alfred Lowrick has said, towards making it “a more family-friendly festival that celebrates the region’s Germanic roots while better reflecting the diversity that’s come to represent the area.”

That sounds reasonable. The best approach, when dealing with a time-honoured entity like this, is one that is progressive, but also conservative:

Protect and preserve, but also adapt. Renovate as needed; build anew where it makes sense to do so, but always build on what exists.

Taking steps to better reflect this region’s diversity is sound advice. The fact is, our diversity can be traced to those German roots: We are the only major Canadian settler city area whose founding tradition is neither anglophone nor francophone.

Thanks to those German language roots, we have reasonable claim to be the birthplace and capital of allophone Canada. And a 21st century Grand River Country Oktoberfest can play a leading role in making such a claim.

To that end, here are nine points of advice:

1 Keep the German language and culture foremost, but broaden it to encompass the German-speaking world in the 21st century, both in the homelands — Germany, Austria, Switzerland — and throughout the diaspora.

It could even be all Germanic languages, including what anglophones call “Dutch”, which is my native tongue. And if we go that far, we might as well go all the way and make it allophone Canada in all its diversity.

2 Keep the role of the German clubs central — Concordia, Schwaben, Transylvania, Alpine, Hubertus Haus. A smart move would be to invite involvement from other cultural associations, especially those that own and operate their own places and spaces. There are dozens of them. All of them face challenges. They’re better off working together.

3 Keep the beer, the sausages and the sauerkraut. It’s high time, though, to move beyond the domestic beer duopoly and towards artisanal and legacy brewing, especially independent production here in Grand River country, but also the beers of the whole wide world.

That goes for artistry and tradition in fermenting and preserving as well. If local Koreans came forward to share the kimchi tradition, it wouldn’t diminish celebrating sauerkraut in any way. The enjoyment of bratwurst and frankfurter würstchen is fully compatible with an appreciation of chorizo, boerwors, sujuk, makanek, longganisa, sai oua, or alheira.

4 In a similar vein, strengthen the polka component, but complement it with offerings from comparable popular dance traditions from around the globe: rumba, flamenco, dabke, square, line, swing, jig, shuffle, … .

Say it’s the Levant group, representing people from the Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Kurdistan area, that steps forward to bring Dabke dance into Oktoberfest. Some polka people might take it up, but they can also stick to pure polka if that’s what they prefer.

5 Keep the harvest theme, but deepen the meaning to include celebrating

  • the Waterloo County food tradition;
  • holding the line to protect the farmlands of Greater Waterloo, and
  • giving thanks for the beauty and bounty of our earthly home.

6 Keep the downtown Kitchener base, but aim towards a festival that manifests an ascendant spirit of “Berlinnova,” as the visionary Kitchener artist Edward Schleimer advocates. There has been a renaissance bursting to emerge for decades now. A 21st century Oktoberfest can help this city to truly flourish in ways it hasn’t been able to since the tragedies of the First Great War.

7 Hold fast to October – all of it, not just a nine-day slice. Extol the glory of autumn in Southern Ontario, and throughout Great Lakes North America as a whole.

8 Put the maypole up on May Day. October was once the eighth month. The time to begin preparation for a great harvest festival is when the original new year turns — i.e., months 1, 2 and 3. That means right about now, as our spring planting holidays unfold: the original new year at the vernal equinox, Easter, Earth Day, Arbour Week, May Day, Mothers Day, and Victoria Day.

9 Make land acknowledgment an integral part of every aspect of planning a revitalized Oktoberfest.

There are many ways of saying that Kitchener’s Oktoberfest takes place on the traditional home of the Neutral (Attawandoron, or Chonnonton), Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

It is a matter of fact that Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo are all built on the Haldimand Tract, the lands granted to the Six Nations from Upstate New York, refugees from the War that led to the separation of the United States.

Our community could lead the nation in developing a meaningful and distinct allophone Canadian dedication to honouring the promises and agreements with Indigenous peoples on which British and French North America were founded.

On Further Reflection – What’s in a name: Kitchener 1 of 2

Kitchener

Originally written for CultKW, posted July 20, 2020


“He is not a great man, he is a great poster.” – Margot Asquith 

Let’s face it, Kitchener is a weak name. “Tacky” is the word that keeps coming to mind, but that’s not quite it. There’s just something awkward about it. This could be why you hear people say “Kitchener-Waterloo” so often, to mask the embarrassment.  


Ah, but why get all bothered up about it once again? There’s a point when it really doesn’t matter any more. They’re just three syllables. The KI’-chuh-nr sound has been used to designate this Canadian city for 104 years now.   

Time has taken us beyond living memory. There is no one left who can remember hearing the original two-syllable name spoken during the brief time it applied (the City of Berlin only lasted four years).

A joke I once heard from a stand-up comedian on a late night talk show comes to mind; I don’t remember his name or what show. At one point in his routine he says something like “I’m quitting the comedy game and going back to graduate school. I already know the title of my dissertation: ‘Lincoln: The Man and the Car’”.

When I mention that line, as I have many times over the years, it is remarkable how often people say that they never made the connection. 

A name change can be divisive. Since Kitchener, Ontario has been around for more than a century now, changing it would be an erasure to correct an erasure.

It can also be expensive: all those signs that have to be altered; all those business cards that have to be replaced; all those websites, road maps, brochures, lettering, ancillary branding … everything “K-W” would have to go too.… . But it could be worth it. Because the name is not a good fit for a great Canadian city, especially not this particular great Canadian City.  

What I’m interested in is what makes Berlin/Kitchener exceptional, starting with how it all began.

Have you ever heard of Zelinsky’s “Theory of First Effective Settlement”? Wilbur Zelinsky was a U.S. cultural geographer who postulated that, in a settler colonial situation, when a territory is newly settled, the cultural characteristics of the first group that is able to establish “a viable, self perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band … .”

I like to imagine this is true, and enjoy looking for traces of the patterning process in operation.

We associate the County with the plain folk who made their way up here from Pennsylvania, while Berlin the town came into its own when German-speaking immigrants began arriving in the 1820s (nudge: another bicentennial coming up).

This is the only major Canadian settler city whose founding tradition is neither francophone nor anglophone. So we have a reasonable claim to be the birthplace and capital of allophone Canada. And I’ve argued that we should make that claim, with the region’s “deutschophone” population taking the lead. 

The years leading up to the name change in 1916 were a hateful time. The British Empire was at war, and Canadians were putting their lives on the line to save it. It was our patriotic duty to do so, because the Empire was part of what we were, and we were part of the Empire. It was cowardly, perhaps, but understandable that local manufacturers would want to disassociate with the once proud “Busy Berlin” brand.

A year later the British royal family yielded to pressure to take a similar path, and changed their name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

But at least that name has  some association with the family that adopted it: Windsor Castle was built by William the Conqueror, and has been used by the reigning monarch since his son Henry I ascended to the throne, which makes it the longest-occupied royal palace in the West.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, PC had no connection with Berlin, Ontario, Canada whatsoever.

What happened here in 1916 is one of the reasons why, if I was ever in a position of influence in Ottawa — a Senator, say — I would put forward a private member bill to ban decision-making through a simple majority referendum on any important matter in the Canadas forever and ever, at least any important matter pertaining to the whole.

The name change of 1916 is understandable, and although it was barely legal and far from fair, it was probably wise for citizens of Canada’s Berlin to accept their fate and get on with living, working, learning and associating.  

But what happened here during the Great War may have damaged the City in ways that have never been repaired. What sticks in my mind is something that Stuart Scadron-Wattles of Theatre & Company said at one of the public meetings about downtown revitalization long ago — I think it was for Mayor Richard Christie’s Task Force on the Downtown in 1995. 

“You people hate yourselves”, he said. He told us that he’d lived in many places before coming here from the U.S., and had never seen a community with such a low level of self-esteem, confidence and civic pride.

He went on to hypothesize that this may have something to do with what happened here in 1916.

A city can carry on, but it doesn’t simply buckle down and “get over” something like that. For the industrialists of busy Berlin, it was a brand makeover. But the final outcome of the Battle for Berlin, Ontario also lays a burden of shame and guilt on a segment of the citizenry for associations they acquired at birth.

It is, however, possible to imagine a radical break from a pattern of blame, shame and low self-esteem. 

Kitchener artist Edward Schleimer, the grand champion of name change supporters, feels that burden deeply. He calls himself the “Last Berliner”.

Aware of the limitations and complications of reverting to the original, Schleimer offers an alternative: “Berlinnova”.

It is a proposal, not just for a name that reconnects the city with its origins, but also for a new spirit, a new morale: a great flourishing of faith, of industry, and of culture in every sense, including arts&culture, folk cultures, Indigenous cultures, even horticulture and agriculture.

Schleimer’s writing includes complex layers of meaning, symbolism, riddles and word play, which can seem like deliberate obfuscation, but what he’s writing about are actually glimpses of a vision that cannot be readily encapsulated in an abstract or an executive summary.

Would the Last Berliner be satisfied with “Berlinnova” as the name of a movement, an ethos, a renaissance, without an official name change? I don’t know.

There could be other symbolic gestures towards reconciliation short of a full name change. For instance, I’d be all in favour of doing a switch, and re-renaming the city’s main civic space “Berlin Square”, as originally intended, and reciprocally honouring our long serving recent mayor with a “Carl Zehr Tower” at City Hall.

I’d be in favour of naming the area within what the new city’s limits were in 1912 “Berlin Town”, as an alternative for “downtown” or the “core”.

“Berlinnova” could be a place as well as an ethos. It could designate everything up to the Conestoga Parkway, Westmount Road and the Waterloo line, or all parts of the city that were contiguously built, from the Royal Crossroads outwards, up to 1950 or so.

There could be a Berlin, Canada Day to commemorate the 83 years a village, town and city by that name flourished in Upper Canada/Ontario. August 30, perhaps, which was the last day before the name change came into effect in 2016. Or, since the aim is to spark a renaissance, August 28, Goethe’s birthday.

Since it was Europeans fighting one another that caused all this trouble, it would be fitting if Berlin, Canada Day would be a celebration of peace, especially the peace that has prevailed in the Old World since May, 1945.

Europeans today like to emphasize that this is now the longest period without war since Pax Romana, the relative peace that began with the reign of the man we still honour with a whole month every year, Imperator Caesar Divi filius Augustus. It lasted about 200 years.

But Berlin/Kitchener is not Europe. The 205 years of peace between the original Canada and the prodigal republic to the south is also something worth celebrating. And we can go beyond that: the spirit of Berlinnova can aspire to future peace, not historic peace alone, and work towards peace on earth, not just here and there.

For Kitchener at large, I have another idea.

On Further Reflection: The lion and the lamb, a wonderful civic emblem


Edward Hicks Peaceable Kingdom 1834 – wikipedia

Originally posted November 15, 2020

It’s a wonder that the badge and shield of the Waterloo Regional Police Service bear the image of the lion and the lamb. How did a biblical motif with pacifist overtones become a symbol for a 21st-century police force? The story begins around the time Waterloo County was established as a formal entity in 1853.

The County was a creature of the province, which at that time was called Canada, itself a creature of British authorities in London. At this particular time, the colonial capital was Québec City.  

The new municipality’s autonomy was limited, but being granted an existence allowed some self-assertion. The very first thing local leaders did was authorize a “corporate or common seal” depicting a lamb and a lion. This was Waterloo County By-law No. 1.  

There is nothing in the minutes that explains why this motif was chosen. But it seems safe to assume that it’s a reference to the pacifist settlers who started coming to the area more than 50 years earlier.

I asked former Regional Chair Ken Seiling if there was any resentment over the symbol in parts of the County where settlers from Pennsylvania did not predominate. He doesn’t think there was. People interpreted the emblem as they saw fit, and it was common to associate the lion with the British Empire. 

In that sense, there’s a connection between the lion in the foreground of the statue of Queen Victoria in the Kitchener park that bears her name.  

The lion is one of the most common heraldic symbols. It is found on the crest of the University of Waterloo, and of the original Waterloo in Belgium. My native land, province and city all fly banners with lions rampant.

The lamb as a civic symbol is relatively rare, but there was one on the coat of arms of my home town in Canada — hanging on a hook.

The Empire is gone now, as is the County. So is my home town. 

A key element of the new order imposed by the province in 1973 was the Waterloo Regional Police Force, later Service, which replaced eight separate city, town and village constabularies, and took over from the Ontario Provincial Police in four townships. 

With modifications, the original seal remains the coat of arms of Waterloo the Region. However, for reasons I don’t fully understand, for everyday use, the motif was gradually set aside in favour of a logo with no wondrous elements whatsoever: It looks like something designed for a propane tank provider, not for what was once the most recognizable and honoured County “brand” in all of Canada. 

Meanwhile, our Police Service has embraced the historic seal and made it a key component of how they present themselves to the public they serve. 


They are peace officers, so it makes sense that way. But the reference is to a prophecy:

When the lion (or the wolf, as Isaiah has it) dwells with the lamb, God promises that no man or beast will “hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” 

When that happens, we won’t need police anymore, at least not for the services they provide today. 

Sculptor Ernest Daetwyler takes a different approach with his public art installation commissioned by the WRPS for their new North Waterloo building on Columbia at Weber.

As Daetwyler describes it, in his work a “powerful and strong, but relaxed lion is posed lying on its side, its tail moving languidly signifying the composure of a contented cat. The newborn lamb, while vulnerably close, is unworried as it looks upon the lion.”

He offers an interpretation: “The lamb stands for youth, getting its first shaky legs of independence as do many students who enter university life in Waterloo. The lion represents community and establishment, patient to let the youthful lamb explore its independence but watchful and protective.”

That’s a novel way to tell the story, and telling the story with artistic insight and license is what Daetwyler was hired to when he was commissioned to do the piece. As he explains further, it’s all about “the juxtaposition and tension of power versus vulnerability, a reality faced by both police and society every day.”


photo courtesy Ernest Daetwyler
 

I’m sure the artist won’t mind me saying that I’m not totally convinced, especially the wobbly-legged, capricious university student part. He’ll agree that interpretation is best left open to imagination:

What we have here is a unique, aesthetically pleasing, deeply meaningful civic symbol that is truly world class. It is a genuine wonder, and it would be a shame to explain it away.

Democratic Policing

Even though the Waterloo Regional Police Service has only existed for less than 50 of the 167 years that have gone by since County By-law No. 1 was passed, carrying that original seal on the badge says something: To me, it indicates that what we have here is not just another manifestation of modern policing in the abstract, but actual people in an actual place performing actual services.

The badge says that this is an entity that serves, represents and is inextricably bound with a distinct, constantly evolving community of communities with broad historical roots and boundless prospects.

Putting on this badge doesn’t transform police officers into lions. The badge indicates that they are citizens dedicated to service to other citizens. Their strength is not weaponry, training and other leonine qualities, but their commitment and our trust. 

Does that have any bearing on current discussions about the role of police in a just and equitable democracy? It can if we choose to give the emblem and the traditions behind it relevant meaning.

Heritage isn’t something that is mentioned very often in discussions about the role of police in modern societies, which usually deal with statistics, demographics, budgets, managerial considerations, and discussions using the language of political, economic and other social sciences of the day.

The fact that current realities are the product of an ongoing evolutionary process is clearly evident in a colonial context like we have here in the land of the Canadas. We’re still in the process of working things out. 

My emphasis on the importance of connecting policing practices with actual, distinct historical entities like cities and provinces was influenced by this extraordinary “List of killings by law enforcement officers by country” I stumbled upon recently in Wikipedia. 

It is somewhat reassuring to see that the rate of deaths at the hands of security forces here in Canada is ⅓ that of the United States or Mexico. 

It is sobering to realize that by world standards, police in the U.S. and Mexico are only moderately violent, and that law enforcement is most deadly in what the chart designates as “the Americas”, followed by Africa and Asia. 

The logical conclusion is that colonial claims, conquest and settlement are part of the picture here.

But the question that came to mind immediately when I saw this chart is: Why do Canada’s police kill at 20 times the rate of their counterparts in the United Kingdom? 

That countries like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland do better than we do is no surprise: These are known to be democracies with advanced social and economic orders that are also relatively small and homogeneous.

But to see that Britain, the land of skinheads, punks, Thatcherites, strikes, protests, soccer hooligans, race riots, sectarian animosities, deeply entrenched regional and class divides, and an increasingly diverse and much larger population, is also among the nations with the lowest rates of police killings in the world today, that is something to wonder over.  

From there, I began refreshing dim recollections about the origins of modern urban policing in Victorian England, which brought me to Sir Robert Peel’s “nine principles of ethical law enforcement”. 

“Ethical” isn’t the word I’d use. The key principle is summarized in Peel’s famous phrase “the police are the public and the public are the police.” So “democratic policing” would be more to the point, meaning liberal democratic law enforcement. 

By liberal democracy I mean something far more complex and significant than what could be called “arithmetic democracy”: majority rule through often quaint and sometimes absurd electoral rituals: that familiar numbers game dominated by parties and factions that so many of us, left, right and centre; aspirational, regressive and disruptive, have been finding increasingly exasperating of late.  

My preference is “commonwealth policing”, not as a description of anything that ever existed, certainly not as paean to anything British or Imperial, but as something to aspire to. It’s a romantic touch, designed to leave a bit of room for the wonderful, the imaginary. 

Adding the historical dimension humanizes, but in no way limits, the liberal and the democratic: Waterloo County/Region is a real place, with a diverse array of constituent communities, each made up of actual, living people, within political and institutional configurations that have evolved over time, and that remain in constant flux. The story continues.

The point is: Our future, including the future of the police service that wears the badge with the lion and the lamb, is ours to imagine, to shape, and to make real.   

statue of Sir Robert Peel in the original Preston, Lancashire, England, UK.

On Further Reflection: The Canadas (Part 2 of 2)

With minor revisions, as originally published July 1, 2020

I’ve been using the second person plural a lot: “we”, “us”. What I mean is we, the people who belong to the land of towns.

The question of who belongs here, and in what way, quickly becomes complicated.

For starters, let’s consider the sequence of events in the “Celebrate Canada” program run by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage.

It begins with National Indigenous Peoples Day, on the summer solstice. 

The traditional Quebec holiday known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day happens June 24th. 

June 27 is Canadian Multiculturalism Day. 

The series culminates with Canada Day.

This is meant to be a benign, feel-good set of observances. But the problems are immediately apparent.

Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day was renamed Fête nationale du Québec in 1984.

The “National” in Indigenous Peoples Day/Month needs some qualifications and explanations. The fact is, with the possible exception of Métis Nation, the Indigenous Peoples are part of, but not confined to the land of Canadas.  

The lines that define the various states, provinces and territories of North America, and the border that separates their union of states from our confederated provinces have little or nothing to do with the original nations of this continent.

The international border is enforced with guns and prisons, so it’s best not to defy it, as some brave souls carrying a Haudensaunee passport have been known to do. 

The point is, for Indigenous peoples, that border is an imposition, and to some extent, so was the Dominion of Canada. In the beginning, and underlying all, is the land called Turtle Island.

Inigenous Peoples Day, as the Prime Minister of Canada said this morning (I’m writing this Sunday morning, June 21, 2020) “to take time to reflect on the cultures, traditions, languages, contributions, and heritage of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people.”

The contributions of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis to what the land of the Canadas has become are valuable beyond measure. They certainly belong to the land of towns, and the land belongs to them more than to anyone else. However, in both time and geographical space, Indigenous peoples, cultures and nations transcend the Canada that Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister of.

Celebrate Canada covers, in whole or in part, two of three nations that John Ralston Saul describes as the “triangular reality” of Canada: First Peoples, francophones and anglophones. 

Francophone Canada is more than Québec. National Acadian Day happens August 15.  The Métis Nation is part of Indigenous Peoples Day; Louis Riel Day in Manitoba is February 15. 

There are also the people of the Québecois diaspora from coast to coast to coast, and over the border into the lands of the Bostonnais. 

The descendents of the Acadians who were expelled to the English colonies, and who made their way to Louisiana when it was part of Spain in the Americas are also part of the story.

But what about all the other peoples and nations that are part of the land of the Canadas?

What about Newfoundlanders. Aren’t they a nation? What about the Capers in Nova Scotia?

What about the Doukhobors and the Hutterites out West, or the Mennonites who originated from the Netherlands and came here via Russia, East Friesland, sometimes even Mexico or Paraguay? What about those settlers that came here to Grand River country from Pennsylvania, looking for land that would allow them to live, work and worship in a place more peaceable than the new revolutionary republic forged in battle? 

These aren’t nations, but they are peoples, peoples set apart by their heritage and by choice.

And what about all the rest of us? Is Canadian Multiculturalism Day a big stew pot for all of allophone Canada, including Dutch settlers like me and the Deutsch who came from Europe to build the City I live in? Or do we all get lumped in among the anglophones as soon as we learn to speak and think in English?

And speaking of the anglophone part of the triangle, why is this not part of Celebrate Canada? 

In my Waterloo Region Record column, I used to advocate for making Victoria Day part of Celebrate Canada.

I once considered our peculiar habit of observing Queen Victoria’s birth as an opportunity to reflect on the cultures, traditions, contributions, and heritage of British Canada: the United Kingdom as represented in the Union Jack. Fête de la Reine, after all, is about a monarch with palaces in both England and Scotland. 

This would cover the thistle and the rose; how the shamrock relates to the Maple Leaf Forever is another matter.

But since the rise and triumph of Brexit, I’ve changed my views. The United Kingdom barely survived a “yes or no” referendum in Scotland not so long ago, just as the land of the Canadas did, not once, but twice upon a time. 

“Better together” was the motto of the winning side in the referendum for Scottish independence in 2014. Great personages like Sir Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Sir Paul McCartney joined in the effort to save their country. But that slogan has now lost all credibility. 

My fear is that Brexit may prove to be the most momentous manifestation of the separatist impulse since the English settler colonies declared their independence in 1776. 

At least that exit made some sense: The colonies had to become a separate entity so that France, their former arch enemy, could fight with and for them. Brexit 2016-2020 makes no sense whatsoever. 

English voters were fooled, the same way voters south of the border were taken in to allow the greatest anglophone liar of all time to wear the mantle of honest George Washington. 

Appalled with the election of a clown to fill the shoes of Winston Churchill, I began shouting (in text, through social media) Vive l’Écosse libre! 

“How this will affect all the other separatist causes around the world,” I wrote, “ — Albertan, Basque, Biafran, Canarian, Catalonian, Flemish, Frisian, Hong Kongese, Kurdish, Londoner, Puerto Rican, Quebecois, Tibetan, Uyghur,  Zulu — remains to be seen”. 

It is at that point that I started thinking that an evolved configuration of the land of the Canadas might help us steer our way between the Scylla and Charybdis of a motherland besotted by the narrow nationalist separatism, and a brotherland incapacitated by the White Man Republican contagion.

Meanwhile, with regard to the Celebrate Canada lineup, my preference for the main branches of Celtic Canada — i.e. citizens with origins in the lands of the Indigenous peoples the British Isles —  are St Andrew’s Day (November 30), St David’s Day (March 1), and the one we all know: St Patrick’s Day.

In Jamaica, the national motto is “Out of Many, One People”. Which is certainly a worthy aspiration. Unity, however, doesn’t suit the Canadas. Unity was the goal of the Durham Report when it recommended the assimilation of the francophone nation into a single, anglo-dominated entity. Unity was the aim when residential schools were set up to assimilate Indigenous youth into the settler mainstream.

Canada is plural: One Land; Many Peoples. 

We are not a single unit, nor a twin, not even a triangle: We are multiform, and best viewed through a lens that is kaleidoscopic. 

To keep it together, and to prepare for the trials that lie ahead, we would be wise to embrace our manifold past, present and future, and make ours a story of how a land of nations, peoples and towns came to be, to flourish, and perhaps even to be a light to the world.