‘For Canada to be assimilated by America, does this not presume that the U.S. would have to remain intact?’ Letters to the editor for July 5

Consultation and accommodation

Re “Consent needed” (Letters, June 28): A fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute takes issue with the application of Canada’s “consultation and accommodation” doctrine to projects affecting Indigenous groups, preferring the “free, prior and informed consent” requirement found in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Governments, he asserts, should adhere to “fundamental consent principles” – meaning, I gather, Indigenous consent should be required.

UNDRIP is a United Nations product, largely motivated, I believe, by developing world circumstances, where Indigenous peoples are often the victims of projects the benefits of which accrue elsewhere. In Canada, however, many projects are proposed by entrepreneurial Indigenous groups. Where this is so, why should denial of consent by one Indigenous group spell doom to the plans of another?

I suggest Indigenous protection given in Canada by the consultation and accommodation process, founded in reasonableness, has served both the country at large and its Indigenous peoples well since 2004.

John Edmond Ottawa

Different times

Re “An apple core connection” (First Person, July 3): After appreciating this account of offering apple cores to wildlife, I could not help recalling a memory from almost 60 years ago. I was a student travelling in Germany and eating an apple in a public park. When I finished, seeing no garbage cans, I asked an older gentleman sitting on a park bench where I should put my apple core. Obviously a survivor of the Second World War, he looked at me and, after a moment, said slowly, “You eat it.”

Carol Lewis London, Ont.

Can do!

Re “Can we find an extra $50-billion? Yes we can” (Opinion, June 28): Good to know Andrew Coyne thinks it’s doable. Nevertheless, I can’t shake the feeling that boosting military spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035, the goal agreed to last week by NATO countries, is largely aspirational. Certainly, Canada needs to beef up defence spending. But even the U.S. doesn’t spend 5 per cent; in 2023 it spent about 3.4 per cent.

In 3½ years, President Donald Trump will be gone. Another MAGA president may take the helm, but much can change in that time. If Canada can increase military spending, including relevant infrastructure, to 2.5 or 3 per cent within five years, that may be realistic – especially if Mr. Coyne’s analysis proves correct and Prime Minister Mark Carney and his team have the gumption to clean house, ridding us of unnecessary spending.

Joyce Rowlands Toronto

In his recent opinion piece concerning the source of funds for increased defence spending, Andrew Coyne should have been much more emphatic about decreasing the eligibility for Old Age Security payments. My wife and I are both 75 and fully conscious that the payments come out of the taxes currently paid by wage earners. When we were wage earners, the proportion of taxes paid to OAS was far smaller, as there were fewer people 65 and older.

The OAS system was set up long before CPP and other retirement benefits and needs a drastic overhaul to meet today’s situation of financial shortfalls. A more rational approach would be to tie it to the same limits as the Canada Child Benefit. This would end the unnecessary splurging on well-off seniors who already take up more tax dollars than wage earners for programs such as health care.

Gerhard Henkemans Edmonton

The Peg

Re “A nation’s crossroads” (Opinion, June 28): The report on reopening Winnipeg’s main intersection to pedestrian traffic reminded me of perhaps the most famous portrayal of that city’s downtown.

The Oscar-winning 1941 film 49th Parallel, starring among others Laurence Olivier, was commissioned by the British government as wartime propaganda at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war. The film follows the odyssey of a group of Nazi sailors quickly escaping southward from their U-boat after it was sunk by RCAF bombers in Hudson Bay. They traverse Manitoba on foot and finally reach its metropolis.

The men, after crossing forests and farmland, are bedazzled by the Times Square-like bright lights of Winnipeg. The neon of the stores and restaurants taunts them. While it is hard to identify exactly Portage and Main, there is plenty of traffic, and they certainly never have to go underground, as Winnipeggers did for decades until recently.

Perhaps Winnipeg can regain that downtown lustre by again encouraging street-level shopping and pedestrian traffic.

David Winch North Hatley, Que.

Us and them

Re “Lament for a Nationalism” (Opinion, June 28): Michael Ignatieff wisely resurrects the concerns expressed by his uncle George Grant 60 years ago about Canada being absorbed by America. Many of the warnings articulated by Grant back then remain relevant today.

However, for Canada to be assimilated by America, does this not presume that the U.S. would have to remain intact? Is the disintegration of the U.S. as it currently exists not a plausible outcome in the not too distant future, given the trends revealed there in recent years?

Robert Barclay Sudbury, Ont.

It’s interesting that Michael Ignatieff doesn’t say till the last sentence what many readers would have known at the first – that George Grant was his uncle. More interesting is what he says next: “… and I loved him.” He stops there, leaving out the rest of his family history – the Russian aristocracy on his father’s side, the Anglo-Canadian elite on his mother’s.

I think this shows a blind spot in his (and his uncle’s) view that Canada is and has been under threat from the American empire and what protect us are the “French and British sources of our distinctive identity.”

A nation is built in part from personal and family bonds – which is to say, from love. The architecture of this is complicated, made from historical contingencies of affection, geography, migration, social status and luck. Much of what emerges appears contradictory, with unnuanced visions of nationalism and of the liberal secular state – which is perhaps why Ignatieff keeps his love and his family bonds largely out of sight.

Yet many, if not most, Canadians share similarly complicated personal and family histories. To think of this as a building block of the nation – to notice the ties of love and their complexity – doesn’t force us into a “blood and belonging” view, nor remove the past and ongoing support of the English/French connection.

To shy away from candor on this issue yields the terrain to populists, ethnonationalists and, ultimately, the doctrines of Carl Schmitt and his ideological descendants in Russia, America and Europe. Better, in my view, to have shouted from the rooftops: “My name is Michael Ignatieff! Yes, it’s a Russian name, and I, and you, are Canadian. I want to tell you a story about my uncle George.”

Nicolas Lenskyj

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