As I was sitting here reading all of the news about how Van Jones was run out of Washington, DC on a rail, I developed a new appreciation for this country I call home. I mean, life for me may not be perfect here, but at least our racist nutbars have the decency to keep most of their hate off the airwaves and out of the streets. Oh sure, it would come to the surface if a visible minority ever became the leader of a major party in Canada, but that’s never going to happen, so this false sense of security is justified. But I digress.
Canada is the perfect home for progressives. Okay, few true progressives are in government, but when compared to our neighbours to the south, Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party looks downright leftist. We love nothing more than finger-wagging at the United States, and in looking at Van Jones’ past political affiliations, I’d say he had that finger-wagging thing down pat.
Canadians are accommodating, whereas Americans are confrontational. Canadian politicians yell and scream at each other in the chambers of Parliament, yet somehow manage to find ways to keep the political machine puttering along, primarily because we don’t want to endure yet another election campaign.
But what Canada isn’t is dynamic. We define ourselves by what we aren’t, and we don’t share a clear, unifying idea of what it means to be Canadian. It isn’t that we lack vision, it’s just that our vision has been clouded by the stunning klieg lights from the south for so long. We generally distrust anything flashy or attention-gathering (which is why so many of our creative stars head South), but something shifted once Barack Obama set foot on the international stage.
Canadians became excited.
We were enraptured, enchanted, and dazzled by this young Black man who had progressive ideas, and was able to build a powerful coalition that was the living embodiment of the Great American Melting Pot that we knew was there, but had languished, forgotten, deep at the back of the kitchen cupboard of political thought.
And then we turned around and re-elected Stephen Harper. No, I don’t understand it either.
We haven’t had a leader since Pierre Trudeau who was capable of capturing the Canadian imagination, for better or worse. There hasn’t been anyone who has been able to inspire us to define our national identity by who we are, instead of who we aren’t.
I think a voice from the outside would be the perfect vehicle for such a campaign, and that’s why I think we should draft Van Jones.
Look, we tried it with Michael Ignatieff, and as much as I respect the man for his intellect and his brilliant political mind, inspirational he is not.
What Canada needs is someone who is capable of speaking truth to power in a language that they can understand, while still being able to talk to the folks on the ground who will be needed to get work done at the community level.
Van Jones made his mark by bringing environmental activism to the inner-city. He took an issue that deeply impacts the lives of the urban poor and broke it down in such a way that it wasn’t thought of as something that only a bunch of Berkeley (or Kitsilano *cough*) eco-hippies could relate to. He made it relevant because it tied it into something that is of fundamental concerns to people who struggle with harsh economic realities: he helped people create green jobs that, while helping them improve the physical ecology, also improved their fiscal ecology at the same time.
In short – he got the people thinking. He got the people moving. He got the people doing.
We have David Suzuki, a man I greatly admire, but listen – as soon as someone becomes an iconic figure on a t-shirt, that person ceases to be real. He becomes a commodity.
(Which is the problem we’re now facing with President Obama. We bought into a commodity that we thought would improve our lives, but we’re now facing buyer’s remorse.)
Canadians talk a good game about the environment — especially here in British Columbia — but we’re one of the top producers of carbon emissions in the world. The lack of potable drinking water on many First Nations reserves should be one of our greatest national shames, but too many of us look the other way because it only happens to “those people”. Yet green jobs are growing at twice the rate of normal jobs in this country, which suggests to me that our country’s heart is in the right place, but we just need the right leader to compel us forward.
Van Jones could, no, should be that leader.
And there’s precedent for this sort of political poaching. Just last week, Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson announced that Sandhu Johnston, Chicago’s former Commissioner of the Department of the Environment has been hired as Vancouver’s new Deputy Manager.
Let’s strike another blow in favour of reverse brain-drain. Let’s draft Van Jones into service for The True North.
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