The Federation of the World

When commentators and reporters describe people like me as “anti-globalization,” I get annoyed.

“Globalization” in its true sense is not a set of policies or institutional initiatives. It is simply a fact. How can one oppose the movement of the air, sushi, the circulation of the oceans, the Internet, the migration of birds, the world-wide circulation of ideas? The world has become very small, and each of us is connected to all of it.

What I do oppose – what millions like me oppose – is a global conspiracy of institutions which give priority to money over human beings. I oppose a “harmonization” of trade rules and regulations which means that commerce trumps working conditions, health-care and the environment. I oppose a system which empowers unelected officials, meeting in secret and accountable to no one, to determine the conditions under which you and I will live our lives.

But I am entirely in favour of bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, if that is what their people want.(Did anyone think to ask them?) I am even more in favour of bringing democracy to the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8, and the people of North America.

One of the great oddities of economic globalization – which really amounts to economic and social homogenization – is that so many of its enthusiasts have little concept of the rich complexity and variety of the world as it is. “Globalization” seems to be driven by people as ignorant as George W. Bush, who had travelled outside the United States only once before he became president.

And I am struck by the fact that the “anti-globalization” forces are so often led by people who really do know the larger world – people who have travelled widely, and have often lived abroad as teachers, journalists, health-care workers and students.

The barons of industry and their servants in government have created global organizations to serve their interests. The rest of us don't have such resources. So we create small organizations to fight on a local scale – issue by issue, event by event, town by town. Paul Hawken recently estimated that the world's people have created nearly two million organizations actively engaged with environmental and social justice issues. But we don't have a commanding voice on the world stage.

That may be about to change. Last year, an international coalition of civil society organizations and prominent individuals launched a campaign to establish a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. The UN General Assembly provides a forum only for the national governments of the world. The UNPA, by contrast, would be a place where the world's people could be directly represented. It would begin – like the European parliament – as a consultative body made up of parliamentarians from around the world. It could evolve – again, like the European parliament – into a directly-elected World Parliament with gradually-increasing powers and authority.

Among the Canadians calling for a UN Parliamentary Assembly are Lloyd Axworthy, Flora MacDonald, Romeo Dallaire, Elizabeth May, Lois Wilson, Warren Allmand, Allan Blakeney and Douglas Roche. You could hardly find a more distinguished group of internationally-minded Canadians – two foreign ministers and a solicitor-general, our most revered soldier, a former president of the World Council of Churches, an ambassador for disarmament, the leader of the Greens.

The appeal has been endorsed by the Liberal International, the Socialist International and the Global Greens. It's been signed by parliamentarians from 113 countries, by 108 civil society organizations, and by a growing number of eminent individuals like Boutros Boutros-Ghali. You can see the list – and sign up yourself – at www.unpacampaign.org.

The idea is gaining some traction. Last July, our own House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development called on Canada's Parliament to “give favourable consideration to the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly,” noting that Canada could be the first nation to endorse the proposal.

It's time. We all breathe the same altered air, sail the same rising seas, drink the water that falls from the moving clouds. Emissions from Nova Scotian smokestacks and tailpipes compromise the polar bear's habitat, cause emphysema in Moscow and drown the island nations of the Pacific. We need political connections to match our natural connections.

In 1835, in a prophetic poem called “Locksley Hall,” Lord Tennyson foresaw commercial air travel, and aerial battles between the “airy navies” of the nations raining down a “ghastly dew” of bombs. All of that has come to pass. But Tennyson also imagined a day when
...the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

The federation of the world – Tennyson's dream – has not come to pass. But if we are to survive, it must. A parliamentary assembly of the peoples of the world would be a huge step forward.

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O Canada! Our home, da-dum, da-dum...

I recently received a much-forwarded email exhorting me to SPEAK UP about a proposal that O Canada be sung in Hindi. One Bruce Allan had apparently spoken out against the proposal and got himself in deep doo-doo. The author of the message was in a patriotic froth.

"Enough is enough,”s/he wrote. "No where or at no other time in our nation's history, did they sing it in Italian, Japanese, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German, Portuguese, Greek, or any other language because of immigration. It was written in English, adapted into co-founding French, and should be sung word for word the way it was written. The news broadcasts even gave the translation -- not even close.”

Goodness me.

I flashed up Google. I believe, rather quaintly in this day of instant electronic outrage, that it's a good idea to know what you're talking about before you sound off. So who had made the proposal, and in what circumstances? Who was Bruce Allan (or Allen) and how had he drawn his line in the sand?

Bruce Allan proved to be an impresario who has been hired to produce the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. He does regular commentaries on a private radio station. In September, he did one on immigrants.

Said Allan: "It seems more and more that we are being pilloried by special interest groups that just want to make special rules for themselves. This is easy to solve: these are the rules, there's the door. If you don't like the rules, hit it. We don't need you here. You have another place to go: it's called home. See ya."

That provoked a storm of outrage from recent immigrants and from the politically-correct. MP Raymond Chan complained to the CRTC. Allan subsequently claimed that his comments were pro-immigrant. If so, that was easy to miss.

But nothing in Allan's comments involved the singing of O Canada in Hindi, one of India's 20 official languages. I found no such proposal anywhere, though I did find a touching 2006 story about a newly-composed anthem in praise of Canada by Pakistani-Canadian composer Sohail Rana -- with lyrics apparently in Urdu.

The spectral Hindi version of O Canada is an odd episode -- but the story of O Canada was always odd. It was first written in French, not English, for a "Congrès national des Canadiens-Français" in 1880. The Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, Hon. Théodore Robitaille, commissioned Judge Adolphe-Basile Routhier to write a hymn, which the well-known composer Calixa Lavallée would set to music.

That 1880 version of O Canada is still the only French version. No English version existed until 1906, when Dr. Thomas Bedford Richardson of Toronto translated Routhier's poem:

O Canada! Our fathers' land of old
Thy brow is crown'd with leaves of red and gold.
Beneath the shade of the Holy Cross
Thy children own their birth...

Two years later, Collier's Magazine ran a contest, won by one Mercy E. Powell McCulloch. Her version began:

O Canada! in praise of thee we sing;
From echoing hills our anthems proudly ring...

There were many other versions. Growing up in BC in the 1940s, I first learned a version composed by a Vancouver bank manager named Ewing Buchan:

O Canada, our heritage, our love
Thy worth we praise all other lands above...

All this time, O Canada was just a patriotic song, not an official national anthem. It was customarily sung -- in one version or another -- at the beginning of an event, followed by God Save The King at the end. Mackenzie King thought that was quite good enough. So did Louis St. Laurent.

Finally, in 1980, Parliament proclaimed O Canada our official national anthem. The English words chosen were a revision of the version written in 1908 by Montreal judge Robert Stanley Weir. In Parliament's version, "From far and wide" replaced one of the three repetitions of "We stand on guard." Senator Vivienne Poy later introduced legislation to revise the revision, changing "in all thy sons command” to "in all of us command.”The measure never passed, but lots of people sing it that way anyway.

If there are numerous English versions and a French one already, why shouldn't there be others? Maybe the Hindi version would begin, "O Canada, great Shiva's cold domain..”The natives could sing, "O Canada! Our truly native land!”The Gaelic version might start, "O Canada! Macdonald's whisky dream...”

The true Canadian tradition about O Canada is confusion. The wording still hasn't settled down, so most of us sing the first line or two and mumble the rest. And if the people beside us are equally proud of this wonderful, goofy country, but want to mumble in Turkish or Tagalog instead, why not? Just smile and keep singing. Civility and good humour are among the great Canadian virtues.
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