April 2021: Benediction 2.0
Image: Global News
I’ve been struggling to write this since New Years’. My team has been teasing me, as I’ve struggled, that I can’t solve racism in a single newsletter entry.
But that’s not quite what I’m struggling with.
I am, of course, deeply concerned by the rising tide of overt racism that we see in our City - tiki torches marching in our streets, confederate flags flown over public spaces, Jordan Peterson endorsed curriculums unveiled that double down on Eurocentrism and walk us back from our commitment to Truth and Reconciliation, and public hearings of City Council where some of our most well-heeled citizens feel comfortable sharing their distaste at the fact that different housing types will result in different kinds of people living in their exclusive neighbourhoods. This is antithetical to the values of diversity and pluralism that lie at the centre of the fierce pride I feel at being a Calgarian and a Canadian.
I am focused on these incidents like never before because I have committed, along with all of my City Council colleagues, to the historic work of making Calgary an antiracist city. In some ways, the rise of overt racism can almost be understood as a sign that our efforts are having an effect and that we’re flushing out those most committed to maintaining our systemically racist status quo. Still, what concerns me is how our struggle with overt and systemic racism is almost a symptom of a larger problem, the disease of divisiveness, that seems to be raging across the racial, generational, gender, sexual, socio-economic, educational, religious, political, and ethical spectrums of our society.
A truth I’ve always held about what makes us Canadians (in our peace, order, and good government way) is our ability to balance and then reconcile difficult counter-truths in our steadfast march towards improving Canadian society. I’m worried that the disease of divisiveness is not only driving us away from this classically Canadian centre, but it’s actually destroying any belief in the existence of a viable middle ground. My progressive friends challenge me; what’s the middle ground on absolutes like civil rights? On racism? They’ve got a point. And I imagine, on the other side of the spectrum, if you believe that the global pandemic is some form of big government power grab, there’s not much compromise to be found when deciding whether or not you’ll wear a mask.
But the thing about our reality is that absolutes are few and far between, and much of human existence ekes itself out in the work of balancing the inter-subjective stories that bind us together and reconciling them in the pursuit of objective fact. This is not the bOtH sIdEs-ism of our current social media-fueled stalemates; this is the hard work of evolving society towards better and better outcomes for more and more of us.
Allow me to set the following scene:
It is late on a Saturday afternoon in early January. Like so many of the beautiful days we enjoyed this winter (until February’s cold snap), the sky was shockingly blue and completely devoid of clouds. The sun was golden as it descended into the southwest towards the snowy Highwood. In this scene, I’m facing the sun, but it’s not so low yet as to cause me to squint, and it’s perfectly warm on my masked face against the coolness of the day.
Two meters away from me is my Inglewood neighbour Heather Campbell, dressed to the nines in her best funeral attire. Two meters from her is Bonita Croft, the Calgary Police Commission’s Chair (Heather and I were both appointed to the Commission at the end of October). On my other side, two meters away, is our Mayor, Naheed Nenshi, and two meters from him is another Inglewood neighbour, Premier Jason Kenney.
We are standing along the circle where the driveway to the Calgary Police Service’s Headquarters at Westwinds - formerly the Nortel campus - loops around by the main entrance. The tree-lined driveway that feeds this circle extends several blocks southwards from us towards McKnight Boulevard. About halfway down, a house-sized Canadian Flag is suspended between the extended ladders of two Calgary Fire Department trucks over this driveway. All along and on both sides in unbroken lines both coming and going, and standing at attention two meters apart in dress uniforms or their funeral best, are hundreds of Calgary Police Service members, current & retired fellow first responders like the Fire Department and many, many others from the military and paramilitary sector of our society.
At that moment, we are all shaking, and our ears are ringing from the unbelievable roar of two Canadian F-18s, which, having flown over us southwards moments before, have returned on a northwards trajectory. Right above us, their tight formation has broken: one of the jets continuing to fly low and fast; and, the other - representing Calgary Police Sergeant Andrew Glenn Harnett’s spirit ascending to heaven - is climbing straight up into the blue sky. To be fair, it is not just the noise and the power of the afterburners pointing straight down at us that is making my body shake - I’m also shook with emotion. By all accounts - both official and anecdotal - Sgt. Harnett was a legitimately good human being and exactly the kind of community-invested police officer everyone would want as a person in their neighbourhood. And Sgt. Harnett, despite the ability to write his own ticket, was specifically a career-long committed servant to the neighbourhoods at the centre of which we were standing: Calgary’s diverse, hard-working, and often misunderstood, underappreciated, and (until recently) underserved North East.
Both because Sgt Harnett was so universally well regarded and because he’s the first member of the Calgary Police Service to lose his life in the line of duty in over 20 years, the funeral proceedings over the course of the week had been extensive. This was the final major event - a formal procession of his casket taking place between the funeral and the internment with all the trappings and traditions that the paramilitary nature of our police service could bring to bear. And while I was legitimately immersed in the ceremony, legitimately emotionally invested in a proceeding designed to celebrate an exemplary individual, I was also well aware that the ceremony was also a celebration of the institution of policing. I couldn’t help but think about the state of that institution, the moment of significant change it is embarking on - both enthusiastically as well as reluctantly - and the role circumstances have cast me in as a champion and overseer of that change.
I was sure that, like so many things in our society today, these acts of celebrating Andrew Harnett’s life would be caught up in a divisive conversation ultimately designed to drive us further and further apart. When I got home that evening, sure enough, my fears in that regard had been realized. People I knew were duking it out on Twitter - one side challenging the grandeur of the ceremonies as excess and calling out the military trappings and legacy of the week’s funereal proceedings as embodiments of the racist foundations of policing in North America; the other side attacking the ghoulishness of voicing such opinions in a moment of community mourning and then escalating by declaring the critics as being unworthy of police protection. But I saw this particular flare-up of divisiveness in a new light.
Over the Christmas break, I tackled a reading list - as I do every year. Long time readers will remember that last year it was Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, the year before that it was the works of Jane Jacobs. Several years before that, I had tackled Calgary-based, power-house thinker Chris Turner’s The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy (I had even gifted a copy of that book to all my colleagues on Council and the City’s senior administrative leadership). This year, I returned to Chris Turner to read The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands. I knew that Chris would comprehensively lay out a balanced understanding of one of the core disputes rocking Canadian society today: reconciling the traditional Canadian balancing act of resource exploitation with environmental stewardship as complicated by the age of Climate Change. I did not expect how that analysis would provide the thesis statement for how we as Canadians would be well served to remember our centrist roots in reconciling all the things that divide us today.
The final chapter of The Patch is titled Complicit. Chris begins by acknowledging that even though his career has been based on exploring and championing the world’s evolving responses to climate change, he - like all of us - are deeply embedded and ultimately complicit in the climate change-causing status quo of modern society. He reasserts the basic history he’s laid out through the book that Alberta’s oil sands mining industry - collectively, the ‘Patch’ - has been a multigenerational and truly Canadian national project that began in a different time - the high modern age - and aligned perfectly with the values of that time. And he clearly states the obvious that, given we are all deeply complicit in this multigenerational national project, it will take generations to wind it down and wind up other, greener ways of living our collective best Canadian lives. I believe the challenge facing whether we can get there in a peaceful, orderly, and well-governed way - a Canadian way - or at all, is the disease of divisiveness strangling the national conversation.
When the Patch’s boosters say they are simply supplying a product everyone uses every single day, they are not wrong. When the Prime Minister says, “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave it there,” he’s not wrong. When anti-pipeline protesters say that some of that oil has to stay in the ground, they’re not wrong. When Indigenous people say they’ve never been properly consulted about what those pipelines and bitumen mines are doing to their land, they’re not wrong. There’s more to the debate, though, more to the way forward, than being right.
I believe the exact same point applies to the debate surrounding Defunding or Defending the Police that is raging in Calgary and was brought into sharp focus surrounding Sgt Harnett’s funeral proceedings. People who assert that North America’s policing tradition has problematically racist roots are not wrong. Counterarguments that public safety is a fundamental pillar of human civilization and that the institution of policing is central to this pillar are also not wrong. The assertion that policing does not today, in our city, provide the equitable outcomes that our Canadian values require of it are also correct. Suggesting that it’s in poor taste to use the funeral proceedings of a legitimately good public servant - regardless of how extravagant they might have been - as an opportunity to rage against this inequity is also not wrong. I believe this divisiveness is strangling so many of the points of debate that we are confronted with these days. But as Chris Turner asserts, there are much more important things for us to tackle than simply being right.
The world we live in is changing faster than ever before, and becoming increasingly more complex as it changes. The battle between those who champion change and those who resist it is complicated on all sides by the desire for simple answers.
There are no simple answers, and the divisiveness that’s tearing us apart feeds on the desire for absolutes. The need to find a middle ground is critical to our ability to move forward together. I’m not talking about the median between justice and racism or between denying climate change and addressing it as a critical threat to human existence. This is not a BoTh SiDeS cop-out. This is about centring ourselves as Canadians and as Calgarians. If we’re not collectively centered, balanced, we won’t be able to make the moves that our city at this point in history requires of us. I’m hoping for all of our sakes, this October and many years hence into the choppy foreground that we’re proceeding into, that a majority of Calgarians can remember who we are, and find our center together so that we can plod, and sprint, and leap into the best future that lies before us.
Gian-Carlo Carra
Councillor, Ward 9
City of Calgary
Have you read Andie Wolf Leg’s Tributes to Joseph and Amy yet?
Andie Wolf Leg is a long-time advocate for vulnerable Calgarians, Indigenous Street Newspaper Vendor (& Author), and a familiar face at City Hall. You can get in touch with Andie via email - eastsidesolitary@gmail.com