Without even trying too hard, I find that I spell Canadian, buy Canadian, sing Canadian (I know all the words to the Canadian lyrics of This Land is Your Land. Yes, I even get choked up), watch Canadian, play Canadian (winter!), travel Canadian, eat Canadian.... you get the picture. I don't know if it's so much an articulated patriotism, as just a general warm & fuzzy feeling I have about this country. It certainly has alot to do with being the daughter of an immigrant, especially growing up in the expansive Trudeau multicultural years of the late 1960s and 1970s.
In those days, the story we told ourselves was that Canada was gentle, free-thinking, forward-looking, peace-loving, and open. The landscape was as wide as our hearts. My schools were always a thick mosaic of cultures and religions, my neighbourhoods a cacophony of languages old and new. Being Canadian was about embracing the world and embracing the future.
Flash forward to the new millenium and the story is no longer a fairy tale. In fact, fairy tales have been rejected in favour of committee-driven usability reports. Too many Prime Ministers cosying up to our neighbours to the south, not enough visionaries with either the will or the power to do anything about it. We waste our energies on inter-provincial fractionalism and resentments. And we've lost such huge manufacturing swaths that all that is left is dirty oil and we'll hang on to that even if it kills us. And baby, you know it will.
But we have to remember who we are and define what we want. With that in mind, Tundra Watch is my new weekly profile of great Canadian websites. Some will be small, others will be exhaustive trawlers, but they all will be great. Cause that's just how we do things up here.
The first website is Rabble.ca. They are, as they say, a community-supported non-profit media site. It's also the best source in this country for intelligent writing on domestic and international policy and trends. Pulling in writers from across the board, from both mainstream and off-the-radar press (Naomi Klein, Rick Salutin, Linda McQuaig, Heather Mallick, etc), it is critical, incisive, sometimes hilarious and always awesome. Rabble podcasts and RabbleTV also pull in and conglomerate clips on everything from the latest obscure conference to this week's featured Indie music.
It's all about the filter, it's all about you who trust and whose opinion you're going to give some weight to. If you want to go a little deeper, if you are willing to question the status quo, the party line and some creature comforts in the process, it's time to join the Rabble.
And if you still love turning your face up to catch the snowflakes, stick with me. I got one of those old wooden toboggans that'll kill your ass. But if you break something in the process we'll go to the hospital and fix it for free. Oh yeah. Tundra Watch has "Canadian-style" health insurance.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I used to read it. Now it just seems boring and predictable. You can read Salutin's column earlier on the Globe website, and a lot of the other good stuff is pulled from other sources where you can get it sooner.
I know I should like it, but I find it tiresome.
That's funny. I used to read it alot, then lost interest when the details were too much. There's only so much Ontario politicking I can handle. But then I got back into it. You have to admit though, there's nothing else like it right now. Or is there?
Post a Comment