[NON BLOG] Recent Events

Yesterday afternoon, I went again to the North York IKEA where I bought the ROBIN work station. I opted for home delivery, since hauling it home on the subway would be impossible from multiple perspectives.

From North York, I took the subway to meet up with A. and S. from Queen's for the fado concert held at the Portuguese Arts show Friday night, part of the free Friday nights program at Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM describes fado as essentially a vernacular popular music:

Fado music is the heart of the Portuguese soul and is the oldest urban folk music known worldwide. Fado is normally sung by men or women and accompanied by Portuguese and classical guitar. By the early twentieth century fado had become a musical staple in the streets of Lisbon. The themes are constant: destiny, betrayal in love, death and despair. It is said that a fado performance is not successful unless the audience is moved to tears due to its beautiful sound and passionate nature.

I enjoyed the concert greatly, with Sonia Tavares' strong sweet singing voice coming particularly to mind. I found it amusing that a popular music form essentially demotic, something favoured by the lower classes of urban Portugal, had been re-presented to a relatively old and relatively prosperous audience in Canada at one of Toronto's most prestigious cultural fora.

Afterwards, we three met up with N. at the St. George station and went to A.'s place with watch Napoleon Dynamite. It's a remarkable film, not least for the way that it manages to be painfully awkward for most of its length while remaining entertaining.

Today, my ROBIN desk was delivered at a bit past 11 o'clock. It's been said by multiple people that the acquisition of one's first piece of IKEA furniture represents a sort of crucial stage, one's emergence as an adult, as a responsible professional. This might explain why so far I've found the whole experience confusing and frustrating, and surprisingly stressful. Tonight is going to be fun.

[BRIEF NOTE] Personal Thoughts on Gay Parenthood

Recently, both Abiola Lapite and Francis Strand have commented on the potential surrounding being gay (or bisexual) and being a parent. Abiola linked to a brief comment by Andrew Sullivan expressing surprise that many parents are disturbed when their children come out as non-heterosexual, suggesting that such fears are comprehensible inasmuch as it means the likelihood of grandchildren (particularly grandchildren who are their genetic descendants) drops. As it were, Francis confirms this to be true in his own personal experience.

In retrospect, that might well have been an issue for my parents when I came out to them, though I do have to wonder if they ever thought there was any chance at all of meeting a nice girl and reproducing the McDonald and Wood genes before that time, when I was rather socially withdrawn and heavily dependent on antidepressants to remain functional. I've a sneaking suspicion that they haven't considered the question of whether my sister is at all interested in becoming a mother; they should. They've never raised the issue to me, which lends itself to multiple interpretations, none of which I can categorically adopt or exclude.

Myself, I've never excluded the prospect of one day becoming a father; in fact, right now I think that if I was suitably prepared it would be rather a nice experience. Granted that my sexual orientation complicates an interest in fatherhood--in particular, in becoming a child's biological parent--I'm still interested in the exercise (and not as a way to ensure my personal immortality if I fail to become an immortal literary or other legend). Given my traditionally poor track record at predicting the outcome of my personal affairs, though, I can't give any guarantees; I certainly have no idea how this would be achieved (same-sex relationship, opposite-sex relationship, single parent? adopted child or biological offspring?). Certainly, becoming a father right now would be a spectacularly immense and likely unrecoverable blow to my aspirations for upward mobility. One positive thing (of many) that I can say about the people I've seen lately is that it would be physically impossible for me to accidentally become a father a child with them.

I'm not a parent, so I don't understand those concerns first-hand. I'm still not very sympathetic to my parents for the ways in which they tried to avoid the entire question until I force them to go to the family counselling we needed. What I can say is that the fear that my particular combination of their genes won't be reproduced is something increasingly common to all parents nowadays, regardless of their children's sexual orientation. Fertility rates have been dropping worldwide for decades, almost inevitably below replacement levels; given that non-heterosexuals make up perhaps ~5% of the global population, the drop in the fertility rate of heterosexuals is far and away the most serious issue. Certainly, I do know that many of my heterosexual agemates aren't interested in becoming parents, or in having more than one or two children.

I wonder: How big an issue will heterosexual children's non-procreative tendencies be for their parents?

[BRIEF NOTE] Belgian and Canadian Federalisms Compared

Over at Path of the Paddle, Ikram Saeed explores Conservative leader Stephen Harper's stated interest in the Belgian model of federalism. This is refreshing to come across, inasmuch as the general justified tendency in Canadian political life to mock the too-frequent inanities of the Conserrvative Party has descended into rude and insulting statements about Belgium.

Belgian federalism is unique inasmuch as power is devolved to two parallel sets of institutions, one of which relates to the classic territorial model of state formation, the other relating to cultural matters.

Belgium is majority Flemish speaking, minority French speaking, with a tiny German minority. Each linguistic "community" has its own institutions dealing with education, culture, etc (think CBC/SRC, Montreal school boards, etc). These communities are not geographical -- francophones everywhere belong to the French community, etc.

But Belgium also has three geographical divisions: Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels. In what would be familiar to Canadians, regions

have power over regional economic development, urban planning ... housing, public works, water, energy, transportation, the environment and job training.

Confusingly, the region of Flanders and the Flemish linguistic community merged their institutions in 1980 (giving rise to Belgian asymmetrical federalism).

The Belgian model is definitely interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be very portable, inasmuch as the territorial/political and the cultural institutions were formed after the Second World War, as part of the transformation of Belgium from a centralized unitary state towards a less centralized federal or even confederal regime. If Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels had been self-govering entities before the Second World War on the model of Canadian provinces or Swiss cantons, it would likely have been impossible to set up two parallel sets of institutions. That Flanders chose to merge its territorial/political and cultural institutions almost as soon as it was able suggests to me that the Belgian model would be impossible to implement outside of Belgium.

Apart from immigrants, Flanders and Wallonia are largely homogeneous; Brussels is mostly Francophone, a consequence of immigration and the assimilation of the Netherlandophones which once predominated in Brussel, but owing to the city's status at the heart of the European Union it's a cosmopolitan regime. In the Belgian model of federalism, there is no room for linguistic minorities like Franco-Ontarians or Anglo-Quebeckers, as the Francophones of Flanders have learned.

The most critical difference between Canada and Belgium is that the existence within Belgium of two ethnonational/linguistic identities (Netherlandophone Flemish and Francophone Walloon) isn't mirrored in Canada. ~90% of French Canadians may live within the province of Québec, but the Acadiens of the Maritimes have their own separate and non-Québécois identity, while the development of a Québécois identity increasingly detached from the various non-Québécois Francophones in the rest of Canada has left these minorities to develop their own identities as best they can. As for English Canada, a specifically English Canadian nationalism (as opposed to one pan-Canadian) doesn't exist; the two strains of Canadian political thought identified by Ikram (the Trudeau-Chretien stream of one-nation bilingualism and the Mulroney-Martin-Charest method of asymmetrical federalism/Quebec autonomy) remain dominant. English Canada remains substantially defines by what it is not (not Québécois, not American). Establishing specifically English Canadian institutions would be an immensely complicated set of unrewarding political maneuvers lacking any connection to what English Canadians would want.

[NON BLOG] Further Education

My job search of late has convinced me that I need more credentials--specifically, more job-relevant credentials--than I have. Thursday night, I picked up a booklet from the continuing education program at George Brown College. The editing and technical communications certificate programs strike me as particularly interesting.

Does anyone have any information on what these programs are like, and what other programs might be out there in Toronto?