His speech started with, "the Canada that I grew up in is not the Canada we have anymore."
That's funny because until this point I thought we were all growing up as the privileged intellectual elite in 1960s Montreal.
Some more background on Richler is that he spent more than two decades working overseas for the BBC. Sound familiar?
I never had a problem with Michael Ignatieff, but if he carried himself with the righteousness that Mr. Richler did I can see where it becomes frustrating. Canada wasn't just sitting around waiting for you to come back and fill the Liberal torch with more gasoline, things change, stuff evolves. Some of those ideas were good, some were not.
Richler spent his time with my class talking about the charged language used by the Conservative government and it's media allies, most notably Christie Blatchford. He discussed the mythology of Vimy Ridge as a nation shaping event. The, "with us or with the pornographers" statement made by Vic Toews. He also talked about the divisive move of reforming old age pension (something he sees as a tactical move by the Harper government to pit young against old). Some of these I hadn't heard before, some were the kind of comical pillorying you would expect to come up at a party convention, long after the public has moved past the humour of such gaffes.
Richler criticized the current government for dredging up our nation's history at war, from 1812 to the Boer War to Vimy Ridge. For him, the story of a country at battle was problematic, as it would be to a self described "Pearsonian Liberal."
But like it or not, that is a part of our country's history. For many military families in this country this government's interest in some of our past conflicts is a welcome change from the neglect with which they are sometimes treated. I would never be so confident as to say that these events are The Big Ones, but they also deserve some attention.
Perhaps most ridiculously, Richler was encouraging us to make friends with people from many different backgrounds. As if it was our duty as Canadians lest we lose HIS vision of MY Canada.
Richler kept coming back to, (stop me if you've heard this one before) fear. He says the conservative regime is one built on fear and that fear is by nature an undemocratic ideal.
Here he made an interesting comparison to literature: He said that the novel is based on a democratic ideal. In the novel you allow yourself to hear somebody else's story, it's conversational, like democracy. On the other hand, the Epic, which preceded the novel, is based on fear. Richler didn't go so far as to talk about how this relates to Transformer/Avenger movies, but I think that's where he was going. You want more superhero movies? - keep voting for Harper, because him and the neo-conservative world are sending us back to the days of monsters waiting in the shadows.
To be clear, I know there's another side to this story. When Stephen Harper says "conservative values, are Canadian values" I want to lobotomize myself.
Back to my point, there is no My Canada. to paraphrase the Ottawa Citizen's Andrew Potter, most of the people that speak this way are Trudeau-era liberals who feel that the second half of the twentieth century was the first and only time we figured out what our identity was to going to be.
Sucks I wasn't born yet.