I still remember the look on the woman’s face when my mom and I showed up at our local Dairy Queen to commission a birthday cake emblazoned with the Reform Party logo. She smiled, I recall, then turned away, stifling a laugh. I was an odd child. With little difficulty, I could have hopped on the train and joined my peers at the mall. Instead, at thirteen years old, I was holed up in the basement of a northeast Calgary bungalow eating Reform Party ice cream cake and filling Hilroy notebooks with poorly-drawn political cartoons. It was fun to exaggerate the length of Brian Mulroney’s chin while offering my junior high critique of his tax policies.
This obsession with politics, and Preston Manning in particular, stayed with me throughout my teen years. I attended rallies, put up signs, and went door-to-door for my local candidate, long before I was old enough to vote (or drive). It’s entirely possible I attended the same rallies as a young Pierre Poilievre, born the same year I was and, so I’ve read, with a similar interest and involvement in the Reform Party. I can’t say with certainty that our paths ever crossed at the time, but it’s evident these experiences have shaped both of our lives. He’s in politics, after all, and I satirize politicians.
I suppose a lot of people recall their teen years with some sense of nostalgia, as if the music really was better in the 90s or, in my case, that the Canadian political situation was more interesting. We had a lively cast of characters in those days—Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien, Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard—it wasn’t just Preston Manning. Western alienation was a hot topic in the school yard, or at least in the empty lot outside the private Christian school I attended. New political parties seemed to crop up every day: the Reform Party, the Bloc Québécois, the National Party, and who can forget the Natural Law Party? We also had several failed constitutional reforms, the creation of a new territory, and a referendum or two that nearly tore our country apart. These were the people and events that shaped my understanding of Canadian politics and, in particular, my understanding of Quebec.
At the time, I’d never been to Quebec. I lived far away in Calgary, and even when I moved back to Manitoba, our summer vacations were always westward. As a teenager, I had never visited any place east of Kenora, which is just across the Manitoba border in Northern Ontario. I think sometimes we underestimate the real geographic barrier created by the Canadian Shield. As a result, most of my impressions of central Canada were shaped purely by the news or by whatever Preston Manning was saying. We often grumbled about “the East,” by which we basically meant Toronto and Montreal. In the minds of Reform Party teens, and maybe some of our parents, there were “Westerners” and “Easterners,” terms that referred to Canada, rather than broader global designations. The political situation at the time made us particularly focused on Quebec. We didn’t know much about Quebecers, but we gathered that they were different from us in substantive ways. It wasn’t just because of the language, but they thought differently, so we assumed. We saw Quebecers as a monolith. They were more liberal than us, we assumed, both socially and politically; they didn’t understand our economy; they had a very different understanding of their role within (or outside of) Canada. I knew nothing of culture, only politics.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I ever visited Quebec, or anywhere in Canada east of the Shield for that matter. Since then it’s become a place to which I love to return. The historic cities. The beautiful Laurentians. The small towns that dot the St. Lawrence. When I visited Montreal recently, I was reminded how much I adore that city. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t. My wife and I spent three days working on our French and eating some of the most delicious food we’ve ever had. We visited a sugar shack, imbibed at some of the city’s finest microbreweries, strolled through The Plateau and Mile End, and stopped in parks when the weather allowed. I’m also kind of obsessive about jazz and so I mapped out an impromptu tour of the streets once walked by the great Oscar Peterson. Everywhere we went, the people were genuine and friendly.
I already knew a long time ago that people are more than politics, that visiting a place gives a very different impression than what one finds in the news. I think I was struck by this now, however, because of our current political context. We just had an election, of course, but the threats to our sovereignty from our neighbour to the south have meant that once again we are living in interesting political times. Maybe we always are. However, right now the risk is particularly high that we might allow politics, and politics alone, to shape our vision of our country and of the world.
Some have said that everything is political, that it can never be escaped, that only the privileged can ignore it. There’s truth in this, but I wonder if we wouldn’t benefit from being a little more judicious in how much we view from this lens alone. As one who writes satirical news, I’m constantly scouring the real news for an angle, something I can mine for a joke. Sometimes, however, I wish I could shut that off and just see people as people. Politics can help us understand our world and can be a tool, for better or worse, to shape the conditions in which we live. However, even if everything is political, politics is not everything. There are people and places and culture and food and art and literature and many other things. There’s laughter, too.
I recall how Anthony Bourdain used to engage with the people and places he visited. There was discussion of politics, no doubt, but there was also food and music and art. Politics can educate, but it can also dehumanize, particularly if it’s all we have. Sometimes we speak of politics in such abstractions that we forget the whole purpose of it is about people. If politics divides and distracts, if it prevents us from seeing a place as it is, if it prevents us from seeing beauty or from seeing humanity, then perhaps we need to supplement our political lens with engagement in other ways.
I live in southern Manitoba now, a place stereotyped, not without merit, as one of industry, agriculture, and religious and political conservatism, not too dissimilar, I suppose, from my teenage years in suburban Calgary. It’s been a long time, however, since I’ve thought about Preston Manning. Then seemingly out of nowhere he reappeared in an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, warning Canadians of a possible resurgence in western alienation, even secessionism, if the Liberal Party is returned to government. I wondered whether perhaps we’d all gone back to 1995 once again.
I don’t know if Manning is right. I, for one, haven’t felt the siren call of western alienation in thirty years, but I have overheard grumblings in coffee shops as of late about “the East” and “the West.” Sometimes I wish I could say, “go there, visit the place, meet the people.” I would like to think that our views on matters such as this are shaped by interactions with people, not just politics. Whatever we think of Quebec or Alberta or any other place in this country, I would hope this has been informed by a visit or two. There’s plenty of reason to travel within Canada these days.
So, no, I don’t know if Preston Manning is right, but I do know that rather than get up in arms about it right away, I’d much prefer to sit down with him over a piece of slowly melting ice cream cake and discuss it.