[PHOTO] Confederation 1967 on the Sidewalk

Confederation 1967 on the Sidewalk
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

As the The Canadian Encyclopedia reminds the reader, numerous cultural events marked the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Canadian Confederation, with any number of cultural, economic, and political events marking this happy date.

Celebrations occurred throughout the year but culminated on Dominion Day, July 1. 1967 coins were different from previous (or forthcoming) years' issues, with animals on each - the cent, for instance, had a dove on its reverse.

Communities and organizations across Canada were encouraged to engage in "Centennial projects" to celebrate the anniversary. The projects ranged from special one-time events to local improvement projects, such as the construction of municipal arenas and parks.

And sidewalks.

Expo 67, in particular, was a signifier of the nation's mood of extreme optimism and confidence on heading into its second century. In retrospect, the centennial is seen by many as a high point of Canadian aspirations prior to the anxious decade of the 1970s that saw the nation divided over issues relating to inflation, an economic recession, government budget deficits and Quebec separatism. Popular Canadian historian Pierre Berton has referred to the centennial as "the last good year" in his book of the same name.

[BRIEF NOTE] A Sri Lanka roundup

The major Toronto papers have had quite a lot about the continuing conflict in Sri Lanka. The Toronto Star's Ravi Nessman's "Tamil stronghold a ghost town" reported on his trip to an almost-deserted Mullaitivu, the last urban stronghold of the Tamil Tigers, while the paper's Raveena Aulakh and
Lesley Ciarula Taylor reported on yesterday's protests by Toronto-area Tamils outside of the Sri Lankan consulate.

The consulate closed its doors for the day as almost two dozen police officers monitored the gathering. Waving signs and shouting slogans, protesters of all ages started to congregate outside the consulate on St. Clair Ave. W. near Yonge St. just before 11 a.m. and stayed till 5 p.m.

When Gaza was being pounded by Israeli forces, it made headlines everywhere "but no one seems to care about the condition in Sri Lanka," said Jeyarasalingam, holding an enlarged photograph of two dead children lying on a floor. "Things have never been so bad in Sri Lanka."

The civil war in the tiny country has raged for almost three decades and thousands have been reported killed. The rebel Tamil Tigers have been demanding a separate state for minority ethnic Tamils in the island's north and east, but on Sunday Sri Lankan forces captured the Tamil Tigers' last major stronghold, confining the rebels to a narrow slice of jungle.

The neutral International Committee of the Red Cross said hundreds of civilians have died in the past two weeks and 250,000 are trapped by intense fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tigers.

The National Post reports that more Tamil-Canadians have been conflicted in the United States of trying to acquire weapons, including surface-to-air missiles.

Finally, in The Globe and Mail Stephanie Nolen ("Hard to achieve peace when 'they just want the Tamils ... wiped out'" reports on the despair of moderate Tamil and peace advocates in Sri Lanka, who fear that between the Tigers' elimination of competing Tamil leaders and the iron fist of a vengeful Sri Lankan government a just peace won't be possible.

Dr. [Jehan] Perera is an optimist and hopes the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa - who with his brother Gothabaya, the Defence Secretary, launched this crushing strike at the Tigers 18 months ago - can be magnanimous in victory.

"The hope lies in the fact that the President was in the past a human-rights campaigner, when he was in the opposition," Dr. Perera said.

"Because he has been fighting a war he had to have the Sinhalese extremists with him, but once he wins the war he won't need them. Maybe then the President will surround himself with different advisers. That's what we have to hope, that when the situation on the ground changes that our leaders will change accordingly."

Yet it seems unlikely that President Rajapaksa has any plans to negotiate. His stated goal is to eliminate "any trace" of the Tigers. And two weeks ago, his government "proscribed" the Tigers, making it illegal to talk to them.

Nor is it clear whom the President could have negotiated with, in any case: The Tigers, in their iron reign over the area they called a homeland, moved with cold precision against anyone else who tried to speak for Tamils.

"The Tigers wiped out genuine leaders of the Tamil people - now they have neither guns nor political leaders of any eminence," observed Dr. Perera, who is Sinhalese. "For peace to be just, it has to be negotiated between equals" but such a dialogue is now impossible, he said.

[. . .]

President Rajapaksa has promised Tamils their "peace and freedom" will follow the end of the LTTE, a pledge met with considerable skepticism by international observers here. "This government says all the right things but they speak with forked tongues," said a Western diplomat who is not authorized to speak on the record. "They just want the Tamils crushed and wiped out."

The diplomat suggested that traditionally Tamil areas would likely continue to be under heavy military occupation, while a few showpiece development initiatives are undertaken.

Mr. Ranmohan said that Tamils are worn down by the fighting and living under both regimes - either Tiger or Sinhalese-majority government - and have little energy left for anything but survival. "Probably we will be like your ... Indians, pushed into a reservation," he said. "It's going to be a terrible ending and the scar will be there for generations."

[LINK] "Canada govt survives as opposition coalition dies"

Reuters lets us know the Liberal Party's reaction to the budget.

Canada's Conservative Party looked set to continue in power for the near term at least on Wednesday after an opposition coalition that sought to replace the minority government collapsed.

The main opposition Liberal Party announced its conditional support for the government's 2009 budget and economic stimulus plan, allowing the Conservatives to survive, and killing off the opposition parties' plan to install a coalition government.

"The coalition is dead, it's finished, it's over," said Gilles Duceppe, leader of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, one of the three parties that had signed an agreement last month to topple Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government at the first opportunity.

The coalition idea had proved unpopular with the electorate and the cash-strapped Liberals appeared unwilling to risk the alternative, a fourth election in five years, if they brought down the government, which was just reelected in October.

"Canadians don't want another election, and they're tired of political games," the new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, told a news conference. He said the government's deficit-laden budget, released on Tuesday, responded to the needs of the present.

"What (Canadians) want from me is political action that shows a sense of responsibility and I'm trying to do that," Ignatieff said.

He said he would present an amendment to the main budget motion on Wednesday afternoon requiring the government to report back on its budget implementation in March, June and December.

A transcript of Ignatieff's remarks is available here while more on NDP leader Jack Layton's reaction ("We have a new coalition now on Parliament Hill -- it's a coalition between Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff") is here

I tend to agree with Norman Spector's reaction to Ignatieff's qualified support for the Conservatives' budget.

With some economists predicting that we could be heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression, the equation for the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition should have been simple. Either the policies contained in the Conservative budget are adequate to deal with the situation, in which case Mr. Ignatieff should support them and, on behalf of Canadians, wish the government good luck and mean it. Or they are not, in which case he should be proposing amendments to improve the package or voting straight away to defeat the government and replace it.

At this morning's press conference, he did neither, and, in the process, came off as a man lacking in conviction and too-clever-by half -the typical scheming politician who puts the interest of his party ahead of the interest of the nation. He is now a target for the ire of his erstwhile coalition partners. Whether he will also suffer in the estimation of Canadians remains to be seen.

[LINK] "The Good News About the Bad Times"

While the Conservative government is reacting to the hollowing-out of Ontario's industrial sector by creating a regional development agency, the Southern Ontario Development Agency, Toronto Life's Philip Preville suggests (The Good News About the Bad Times") that southern Ontario may recover by becoming an international financial centre, auded by the self-destruction of Wall Street.

This wouldn't be the first time Toronto cashed in on another city’s financial devastation. Though it is synonym­ous with money, power and high rolling in this city, Bay Street was created by a mass stampede away from uncertainty, namely the election of the separatist Parti Québécois in November 1976. Separatism has since become such a staple of Canadian life (with its own political party in Ottawa, its MPs drawing salaries and pensions from Canadian taxpayers) that it’s hard to recall the panic that gripped the country, and especially Montreal’s business community, in the wake of separatism’s first election victory. Sun Life Assurance made a show of its exodus. Royal Bank, Bank of Montreal and others moved out quietly, department by department, over a period of years. Once in Toronto, the industry thrived, and the city now ranks consistently among the world’s top 20 financial centres. The September instalment of the Global Financial Centres Index, which is the industry’s gold-standard ranking of where money and power are located, showed that Toronto had jumped from 15th place to 12th, leapfrogging over Paris (which was in free fall, dropping from 14th to 20th), San Francisco and Dublin. Such financial centres as Boston, Sydney, Frankfurt and even Chicago were now within striking distance.

I met Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan in his boardroom early one November evening. “I think it should be a goal for Toronto to rank among the top 10 in the world,” he said. More than any finance minister in recent memory, Duncan, with his heavy, neckless frame, looks the part of a stereotypical banker—albeit a banker in bad times, with dark circles under his eyes. He’d spent the previous week in the riding he represents, Windsor-Tecumseh, an area heavily dependent upon the auto industry. It’s starting to look like most of the 150,000 manufacturing jobs the province has lost in the past two years are gone for good. Ontario is now experiencing what the U.K. went through under Margaret Thatcher: a final, massive shift from manufacturing jobs to service jobs. In the new economy, Ontario doesn’t make stuff anymore. We let other places do that; our new job is to lend, invest, and manage people’s money.

It'd be nice if my readers in the United Kingdom could tell us whether Thatcher's sectoral reorganization of the British economy was a good thing in the long run.