CSIS, Khadr, Human Rights -- and an aside about health care.

As reported by the CBC, the Security Intelligence Review Committee has released a report indicating that CSIS violated Omar Khadr's human rights by not taking his age into account when he was interrogated at Guantanamo Bay. (He was sixteen at the time, and as video evidence shows, broke down crying for his mother while being questioned.)

Further, as reported by Kathleen Petty of CBC on The House, SIRC's report indicates that "CSIS cannot carry out its mandate solely from an intelligence-gathering perspective. They have to take things like human rights into account."

I'm not going to comment on this in depth, but I'd like to say -- thank goodness. It remains to be seen whether or not CSIS will develop a proper protocol for dealing with youth in the future, but the declaration by SIRC that human rights have to take precedence over gathering information fits quite precisely with what I like to imagine to be Canadian values.

And, on that note, an aside about health care. Today, I decided that I wanted a specialist opinion about a (definitely not urgent) health issue. So, being in the US and having good insurance through my student-employee union, I checked the directory for my insurance provider, and booked an appointment. In about two weeks, I'll be seeing a specialist (with a subspecialty, even), and paying about $10 out of pocket.

So, for a few minutes, I thought -- maybe this is better than the care I'd receive in Canada. Back home, I'd certainly be waiting longer for this doctor, and being in a smaller area I'd like not be able to find a doctor with this particular subspecialty. I wouldn't be able to decide on my own, either, that I wanted this issue double-checked, and then to make my appointment.

But then I thought, you know, I would gladly sacrifice those benefits to be sure that I was in a system where other people are getting looked after. I'd quite happily wait a few more weeks or months to be seen (with no likely health consequences). I'd quite happily consult with my GP about a referral. And all of that is, quite simply, because that's the way I think things should work.

So, at the risk of playing Smug Canadian (a game I try to avoid), I'll point out that this too is part of what I imagine to be Canadian values. Just as I'd choose to protect human rights over 'intelligence gathering', I'd choose to be part of a national collective that protects the basic healthcare needs of everybody over the convenience of those privileged to have good coverage. That's not to say that the Canadian system is perfect -- because it isn't, of course. But the principle behind the system is, well, the right one.

Aieee! Have I gone patriotic?

The CBC, or, highbrow/lowbrow

I spoke to my father this evening, and we came to the topic of the CBC. Apparently, in his opinion, the CBC has hit a 'new low' this year with programming such as MVP (which has in fact already been cancelled), and The Week the Women Went (which has apparently been very popular, and will return for another run). My father's solution? The CBC should run "more of the good BBC shows".

Now -- I'm a total sucker for BBC programming. I'm not sure what percentage of my Netflix rentals over the last two years have been BBC shows, but it's a substantial number. I've gone through the new Doctor Who, As Time Goes By, Fawlty Towers -- and, actually, after that, the list starts (ahem) to get embarrassing. But, as I said to my father, "We're not a colony any more!". Given the near-saturation of Canadian channels with American (and, to a lesser extent, British) programming, my nationalist inclination is, perhaps problematically, this: if we're producing television about Canadians, and Canadians are watching it, that's a good thing. Genres that people watch -- yes, even soap operas and 'reality' television -- do have a place on the programming roster of a government-funded national broadcaster.

This is a problematic perspective, yes. The more I dig into the issue of nationalism, the more I'm inclined to see it as something toxic -- and, in fact, to think that Canada works reasonably well as a country specifically because it lacks the coherent, mythic identity of so many more powerful, and historically more dangerous, nations. At the same time, I have to dig in my heels when I see my national culture being subsumed -- or aborted? -- by Anglo-American imports. Even if its content is lowbrow, even if it's the product of a Canadian government institution, I instinctively regard Canadian cultural products as evidence of postcolonial resistance, be it to the colonial power of the past (Britain) or the pseudocolonial power of the present (the US). Perhaps I've spent too much time immersed in the work of Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, et. al. -- the generation of writers who came of age in the late 1960s -- but there still seems to me to be some inherent value in this enterprise.

There is, however, an inherent paradox in this argument, because at least with regard to television, what this comes down to is a debate about the model in which the CBC, as a public broadcaster, should be cast. Should it be highbrow, 'educational', something that strives to provide a clear alternative to the lowest-common-denominator programming of private broadcasters? Or, as an institution funded by taxpayers, should it be concerned with offering programming that appeals to as broad a range of Canadians as possible? The paradox: the former model is that of PBS; the latter, that of the BBC. So though I might defend a broader-based approach to programming by the CBC, including Canadian content of all stripes, what I'm really defending is the model of the BBC.

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Is there a third possibility, a new model for the CBC? Is our best option to simply follow the BBC model, with an emphasis on Canadian content (as was done literally with MVP, which turned Footballer's Wives into the wives of hockey players)? What I'd love would be a reinvigorated CBC, with all the shining glory of its best programming -- The Newsroom, Twitch City, This Hour has Seven Days, even the old Degrassi. What was so glorious about all of that old programming? Thinking, offhand, of these examples, I'd have to say that they were deeply Canadian without being intentionally Canadian. The express national identity, with little explicit nationalism. They didn't hide their Canadian attitudes, Canadian settings -- but they weren't terribly emphatic about them, either. They set aside most of the anxiety about national status, accepted that they were immersed in Canadian culture in a global age, and went about their business. Perhaps instead its persistent identity crises, the CBC could try learning from its past successes, and take these up as models.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices

How uncomfortable it can be to encounter troubling rhetoric, or simply bad evidence, used in the service of a good cause. When watching Michael Moore's Sicko this summer, I was struck by how much of his evidence was strictly anecdotal, and by how easily including a few hard figures would have made his argument work. I left the theatre with a lot of sympathy for Americans who lack proper health coverage, and a lot of resentment for insurance companies who profit from others' illness -- but I felt that way when I entered the theatre, too. Nothing in Sicko would have converted me into a believer in universal health care had I not been a believer to start with.

Robert Greenwald's 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices suffers from similar problems. In some ways, this is a difficult film to criticize. It covers many of the right bases in its criticism of the company, railing against its poor wages and limited benefits for employees, its exploitation of foreign workers, and its devastating effect on small businesses. As with Moore's documentary, however, the evidence in this documentary is almost strictly anecdotal. I've checked reviews at rottentomatoes.com (where the film is rated 92% 'fresh'), and many in fact praise Greenwald's approach, suggesting that it's preferable to a detached, "analytical" or "intellectual" approach.

I can't agree. I feel great sympathy for the workers and owners of now-defunct small businesses who shared their story in this documentary -- but that's always been my inclination. As I watched the film, however, I became increasingly uncomfortable with many of its underlying ideas. Perhaps it's a brilliant move to frame Wal-Mart as a fundamental threat to traditional American values and a traditional American way of life, rather than attempting a more typical leftist, anti-corporate tack. Perhaps it's simply smarter to try to win people with such an argument, rather than asking them to reconsider both Wal-Mart and American identity at the same time. And the fact is, of course, that the business practices of Wal-Mart and similar corporations are a threat to a traditional American (or North American) way of life. As the film suggests, the outsourcing of production to China has had bad effects for both the American economy and criminally underpaid Chinese workers. American families do strain to make ends meet on Wal-Mart's minimum wage. Small American businesses do collapse when Wal-Mart moves into town, and the downtown cores of small towns do lose much of their vibrancy.

But -- much of this criticism is wrapped up in an abstract, paradisical concept of "America". Most of the commentators in the film speak as they go about daily tasks that are emblematic of a traditional American lifestyle (e.g. duck hunting). One woman who petitioned successfully to keep Wal-Mart out of her town gazes tearfully at the flag at the front of her house as she speaks of Wal-Mart's threat to the freedom defended by the country's founders; one man speaks of Wal-Mart as a company that isn't really American, but instead "Chinese with an American board of directors". There's also an extensive section that details Wal-Mart's failure to respond to the high crime rate in its parking lots, talking of thefts and rapes and murders, which seems to me to be a kind of fear-mongering often associated with less-than-noble political agendas.

I don't wish to denigrate this film as a whole, but I'd like to ask -- do people find this appeal to an 'imagined' America as an entity under threat effective? Or, if only by association with the ways it's been used in the past, do you find it distasteful, if not dangerous in itself? Part of me is delighted by the subversiveness of turning the rhetoric not on a threat from without, but a threat from within. But there's a xenophobia and a blind patriotism that underpins this rhetoric, no matter how it's used, and in the end I feel that this is a film that asks people to reject Wal-Mart's corporate practices for the wrong reasons. (Although, as I've said -- for the right reasons, too.)

A better take on this issue can be found in Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, which was shown on PBS a few years ago. Rather than taking anecdotal evidence from a confusing array of sources, this documentary focuses on the single case of Ashland, Virginia. I remember this as a genuinely moving documentary, one that captured the unresolvable, conflicting interests of people in small-town America, and one that very successfully personalized the issue. Method-wise, the comparison between these two documentaries is instructive: better to do a detailed case study than to take evidence willy-nilly from a whole country.