For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

We Ukrainian-Canadians landed east of Edmonton in 1892 and have never stopped extolling the wisdom of our forebears in choosing to settle on “free lands” in an apparent “wilderness” on which railway track had been fortuitously laid for our benefit. Years of the familiar litany of perseverance, fortitude, and sacrifice followed, and, hey, presto! rolling fields of wheat and canola on farms so big they look like the kolkhozes of Soviet yesteryear. In the cities, we have other fruits of great-great-grandbaba’s resilience: our Ph.D.s and QCs, our SUVs and time-shares, our cabinet ministers and comedians on CBC TV.

We visit the ancestral graves in rural church yards: headstones written in Cyrillic we no longer know how to read. We vote for politicians with Ukrainian last names who send us Easter and Christmas greetings in our community newspapers in Cyrillic—that they can’t read either. We send our kids to Ukrainian dance school (great costumes) because we are so damn colourful. We eat perogies and send money to orphans in Ukraine (there are a lot of them) and wear Remembrance Day poppies because, you know, we’re proud Canadians.

Ever since we Ukrainian-Canadians climbed up from bohunk status to poster kids of multiculturalism in the 1970s, we have scarcely changed our tune.

Just watch the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Museum’s promotional video. In it are horse-drawn wagons, onion-domed churches, a grain elevator, a young woman in a babushka weeding her garden. The amiable narrator in a woolen flat cap tells us that a visit here is “a way for Albertans to learn about their past.” This is substantial hogwash.

The implication is that, prior to the prodigious investment of our labour, the land had been useless, unproductive, and uninhabited. Albertans learn nothing of the fact we took homestead title on land ceded to the Crown by the Cree. They will learn nothing of the remarkable success of Ukrainian-Canadian socialists and Communists in organizing immigrants not on farms but in the packing plants, the mines, the extra gangs on the railways of western Canada.

Next year is the 125th anniversary of those first homesteads in now-legendary Edna-Star settlement east of Edmonton. It’s an ideal opportunity to reboot the narrative, especially since, with the virtual erasure of socialist, suffragist, and anti-racist contributions to that story, the unsuspecting Albertan at the Heritage Village has no idea the “settler” identity is so complex. How a landless family in bare feet on an Edmonton station platform could also be unwitting squatters on Indigenous land. How we now struggle to remember great-grandbaba’s stories of the “Indiany” who were hired on at harvest time, stories told once and never again. How nevertheless we would call this land mother and give thanks for it through our labour in the face of economic despair and dispossession. How some forebears skipped the homestead and worked as ditch-diggers in Edmonton, inspired by Wobblies from Montana to go out on strike. How the settlers’ children became school teachers in the back of beyond, the necessary bridge between ancestral folk customs and more-British-than-thou patriotism.

I could go on. The alternative stories are legion, and I am learning some of them as I prowl through my own family’s “archive,” which includes that ditch-digger, those schoolteachers and even a great-uncle who was deported from Canada as a radical, went back to the ancestral village and later hanged himself. They offer us the wonderful opportunity to turn our attention to our stories not in nostalgia but in critique and re-imagination. The future has the potential to be a whole lot more interesting than our mythologized past.

Tomee Sojourner. Photo by Anne de Haas.

Consider this: the population growth of racialized or non-white groups continues to outpace that of white Canadians. This has created a shift in the demographic balance of the Canadian mosaic, with our population on its way to becoming a “minority majority.”

According to Statistics Canada, by 2031, over 70 percent of Canadians living in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver will be from a visible minority or racialized group. Already, almost half the population in the Greater Toronto Area is a visible minority. Yet we are not seeing an equivalent shift in the halls of power: in business and in government, visible minorities—particularly African-Canadians—still represent a small fraction of the decision-makers relative to their overall population.

In April, a report by the Law Society of Upper Canada looked at the legal profession relative to others and made the following observations: “In Ontario in 2006, members of a visible minority accounted for 30.7 percent of all physicians, 31.7 percent of engineers, 17.6 percent of academics and 11.8 percent of high-level managers, compared to 11.5 percent of lawyers.”

A recently released study, entitled “DiverseCity Counts: A Snapshot of Diverse Leadership in the Greater Toronto Area,” showed that while some sectors are doing better at reflecting the general makeup of the population, visible minorities are underrepresented in leadership positions. Today, visible minorities comprise 49.5 percent of the population, but only 14 percent of senior-level leaders.

The implications of this imbalance will only become more significant as the population continues to shift. Canada must demonstrate the potential of harnessing the best of all of our peoples. Diversity in the leadership of our institutions matters. Far from being a form of tokenism, a significant increase in the number and diversity of visible minorities at all levels of leadership is essential to Canada’s competitiveness.

In May, Governor General Michaëlle Jean addressed business, academic, and socialsector leaders in a speech to the Canadian Club. She told the audience that “saying yes to diversity is saying yes to modernity, to opportunity, and to the very future of our country.” There is an economic case for embracing diversity: to create a “brain gain” by recruiting, hiring, mentoring, developing, and retaining a qualified and diverse workforce. Imagine the dividends for Canada’s global competitiveness when all its citizens have an equal opportunity to lead, to innovate, and to contribute to our social, economic, cultural, and political landscape.

The DiverseCity study also found that visible minorities are underrepresented in the media, accounting for only 19 percent of appearances by broadcasters, reporters, print columnists, subject experts, and commentators. Diversity in media leadership and representation of visible minorities is improving incrementally, but larger gains are needed. Why do we not see or hear from more visible minorities in daily coverage? How long must we wait for media outlets to do the research and start assigning these stories?

One initiative to improve the coverage of racialized minorities is DiverseCity Voices, a new electronic database of experts who are also visible minorities. Journalists can turn to the website to find underrepresented leaders who are able to provide commentary and opinion on current affairs.

Since joining the website, I have appeared in a variety of local and national print and radio, television, broadcast, and social media outlets, providing my opinions on subjects ranging from the Olympic Games, the G20 summit, and Africentric Schools. I’ve received more calls from journalists looking for comment, and that’s important to me. Young people become what they see, and role models of all backgrounds need to be seen and heard.

Sociologist John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic, published in 1965, remains the touchstone for a deeper understanding of the structure of Canadian society. Porter’s findings portrayed Canada as a hierarchical racial pecking order, with attendant consequences for social mobility, access to power, and economic success. In the Canadian mosaic, whites were (and still are) the dominant culture at the top of the heap. Fifty years on, Porter’s study still rings depressingly true. But there is reason to be optimistic.

With a conscious effort to create and sustain diversity in all our institutions, it is possible that Canada’s vertical mosaic will be replaced by one that is inclusive, linear, and beneficial to us all—no matter where we come from or the colour of our skin.

Hot on the tail of the reinvigorated nationalism left in the wake of the Olympics in Vancouver, parliament reopened yesterday with the speech from the throne given by Governor-General Michaëlle Jean.

Appropriately timed with said nationalism, the country’s National Anthem made its way into the hour-long allocution. The government would like to retool the English language version of O Canada ever so slightly, with the intent on a more gender neutral tone.

The line in question: “True patriot love, in all thy sons command.”

This is a suggestion that is bound to be met with resistance and controversy, but really it’s a non-issue. More symbolic than anything else and arguments can be made over political correctness vs. historic significance, but all in all I don’t really have a problem with a little tinkering. A fuss might be made by so called patriots who feel threatened by minor changes to any nationalistic customs, but supposing the lyrics were changed, a generation from now no one would know the difference and really, isn’t it a good idea to include the entire population?

That being said, it might be a good idea to re-examine “God keep our land…” as well. But that’s another debate.

One reason why this change shouldn’t be met with much resistance is that the original poem the lyrics are lifted from doesn’t include that line in the first place. The original poem, written by R. Stanely Weir and commissioned for the 300^th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City contained the slightly different, and wholly gender neutral, line “True patriot love thou dost in us command.” But even that is not the original version. O Canada began its life as a nationalistic French hymn in 1880, with music by French composer Calixa Lavallée and lyrics by Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier, 100 years before it was made Canada’s national anthem. The French lyrics have remained unchanged since they were first written and bear no resemblance to English Canada’s version:

O Canada! Land of our forefathers
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic of the most brilliant exploits.

Ch.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.

It wasn’t until 1901 that English Canada got its own version with translated lyrics by Dr. Thomas Bedford Richardson.

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
No stains thy glorious annals gloss
Since valour shield thy hearth.
Almighty God! On thee we call
Defend our rights, forfend this nation’s thrall,
Defend our rights, forfend this nation’s thrall.

Since then there have been many incarnations of the English language translation, some slight, some significant. Weir’s poem, written in 1908, became the favorite, and in 1927 the poem was published as part of the diamond jubilee of confederation.

Even then, it took until 1980 for O Canada to replace God Save the Queen as Canada’s official national anthem.

There is nothing sacred about the words to O Canada—they have been toyed and tooled with for a century now. Perhaps they should be a little fluid, evolving as the country does, changing to fit the nation it represents. If anything it is the melody that Canadians should hold dear.

If the decision is made to alter the anthem, it would be appropriate to reinstate Weir’s original line “Thou dost in us command,” it has historic significance, it’s gender neutral and it gives an element of power to the whole, rather than the individual, our new found post-Olympic national identity should appreciate that.

Of course, the whole thing is just a big distraction tactic by the Tories anyway. Mission accomplished!

Image credit: Sgt Serge Gouin, Rideau Hall

By now, you’ve probably heard about the Queen’s representative eating the raw heart of a dead seal this week. But there is more going on here than just heating up the old debate over the Canadian seal hunt — the news event continued a tradition of misleading the Canadian public about this issue.

General Michaëlle Jean’s legitimized the Canadian seal hunt this week by participating in gutting and eating the artery of a seal with Inuit groups while on a visit to Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. Jean claims this culinary experience showcased in front of national media was to assert Inuits’ rights to their cultural heritage. But is this really about fostering our multiculturalism?

“It’s like Sushi,” Jean said at the time.

But unlike eating a piece of raw fish at your local Japanese restaurant, there is more at stake here than a cultural experience. In a month when the European Union has banned Canadian commercial seal hunt products, it seems like more than coincidental timing for Jean’s “good-will” gesture. If anything, this act was a political maneuver, legitimizing the Canadian seal hunt on the grounds of cultural autonomy for suffering Inuit groups.

However, there is significant blurring of the lines between two starkly different industries: the commercial seal hunt in the east coast of Canada and traditional Inuit hunts in the far north.

The east-coast hunt consists of targeting 300,000 baby Harp seals in Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence Gulf annually for seal products like furs, pelts and extracts for Omega-3 pills. It is a commercial industry that hires 6,000 off-season fishermen and earns $5.5 million. In contrast, the Inuit hunt that has been practiced for over 4,000 years kills 10,000 Ring seals (a mere 3 percent of the industrial seal hunt) in the Northern territories. It is mainly practiced for food and the local economy.

“There is a difference in an indigenous culture’s right to hunt for food and economic survival, and the non-indigenous Newfoundlander’s massive slaughter of defenceless animals for profit and vanity,” says Patrick Doyle, CEO of NativeRadio.com .

Furthermore, the Inuit have been exempt from the EU ban while the east-coast hunt hasn’t. However, Inuit were exempt in the ban by European countries in the 1980s, yet they were still negatively affected. Which is something surely to be taken into consideration, more so by Canada than Europe. Nevertheless, there are important distinctions to be made in the Canadian seal hunt.

Almost no animals-rights groups are condemning the Inuit hunt — they focus their campaigns on the east-coast commercial hunt. And to suggest otherwise, as Jean has in defending the Inuit seal hunt as if these things are equivalent, masks these important distinctions.

But few feel anyways GG’s political feast will have any affect in swaying European opinion in changing its pace to Canada’s banning.

“The fact that the Governor General in public is slashing and eating a seal, I don’t think really helps the cause and I’m convinced this will not change the minds of European citizens and politicians,” Barbara Slee, an activist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told the Toronto Star.

But what this gesture does do is continue a kind of blackout for Canadians. It dupes the public about one of Canada’s great shames in the international sphere (next to the Alberta tar sands). It mixes up one of the largest mass slaughters of mammals with a culturally unique and comparatively small traditional hunt. They’re not the same.

Yet this story is the same old story; Japan too claims to be defending its “culture” with its annual Southern Ocean whale hunt of nearly a thousand whales, including endangered ones.

Governments cannot hide behind culture in the face of their own eco-injustice.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

Sea Shepherd activists confronting the Japanese whaling fleet, Winter 2009

I just posted Emily Hunter’s feature story from the May-June 2009 issue, because it has some bearing on the current controversy over the EU’s banning of commercial Canadian seal products. Trade Minister Stockwell Day says Canada will take the issue to the WTO to try and force the EU to accept Canadian seal pelts, furs, and Omega-3 pills derived from the hunt. About 6,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador make a substantial part of their income from the annual seal hunt, which kills 300,000 seals per year, and is condemned by animal rights groups for the cruel methods used.

The indignation in Canada over the EU’s decision has been, on the surface, about the economics of the decision: it will hurt the livelihoods of Canadian hunters, many of them Inuit. Whatever your opinion of the cruelty of the hunt—and I’ll be honest, the notion of clubbing an animal to death strikes me as the definition of cruel—this ban will throw people out of work or substantively lower their income in a province that needs jobs more than ever, and that’s a problem.

But it’s not really about economics: this is a sovereignty issue, about whether the EU gets to effectively shut down a foreign industry its members don’t like. Because frankly, the amount of money involved here, about $5.5 million worth of seal products that Canada sold to EU consumers last year, is a miniscule fraction—by my back-of-the-envelope math, about 0.0005%—of total Canada-EU transatlantic trade ($111 billion in 2008). As Emily explains in her article, Japan is in the same boat: the whale hunt there has no real economic impact: the actual market for whale meat is tiny, and the producers make almost nothing selling it. But despite the economic lunacy of sending all these ships around the world for a grand total of $51,000 profit, it continues because Japan doesn’t want to accept the authority of the international community that has declared whaling unethical, unnecessary, and cruel. In both cases, the verdict is in: whaling and sealing are not really viable businesses, but both countries persist in their nationalist posturing out of what seems to be pure stubbornness. There are other ways to help the people whose jobs are at risk, ways that don’t require Canada to mount a complex, longwinded, and no doubt expensive appeal to the WTO.

A whale being hauled up the slipway of the Japanese whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru. Photo by Joshua Gunn

It’s a sight I’ll never forget: a whale being hacked up in front of me, cut into tiny squares, its excess blood and guts discarded. One minute, it was a whole whale; 20 minutes later, nothing but a spinal cord and the harpoon that killed it.

It was February 6, 2009, and I had spent two months in the Antarctic Ocean with Sea Shepherd, the radical conservationist group. Sea Shepherd is notorious for the extreme tactics it uses to stop whaling in the southern oceans each year. Its ship, the M/Y Steve Irwin, had chased and harassed the Japanese whaling fleet for weeks to prevent them from hunting. But on this particular day, the whalers killed in front of us, and at first we could only watch from a distance. But it soon became a confrontation.

The Yushin Maru No. 3, a harpoon ship, attempted to transfer a dead whale to the mother ship, Japan’s whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru, the floating factory that processes whale meat at sea. The Irwin moved to block that transfer by manoeuvring into the Yushin Maru’s path. Within seconds, the boats collided with a loud crash and screeching noise that rang through our ears. The Irwin tipped 30 degrees on its side—it felt as if the ship was going belly-up. I was on the outside deck of the Irwin, hanging on to a railing watching the water approach from below. The Yushin was pushed down into the water by the force of the impact. I can only imagine the crew must have thought they would have to abandon ship. But 22 seconds later, when the two boats scraped apart, all had survived, with only minor damage to the vessels. It was a collision of two boats—but also a collision of worlds.

The Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, along with many of its supporters, argue that the annual whale hunt by Japan is the country’s national heritage, and that efforts to end Japan’s whaling is colonial Western arrogance. The critics, such as Sea Shepherd, claim that the Japanese government is simply playing a “culture card” to stymie criticism. They believe that conservation—preserving wildlife—outweighs any such cultural differences.

However, are eco-issues, like whaling, really a simple matter of culture versus conservation? Are these two opposing sides? Can they be reconciled? And if they are in opposition, is it right for cultural concerns to trump environmental ones? I take the issue personally. In high school, I lived in Japan for a year on an exchange program. I lived with a Japanese host family, attended a Japanese-speaking high school, and grew to love the culture, country, and my new friends: Japan became a second home for me. But my first home is the environmental movement. My parents, Robert and Bobbi Hunter, were ecoactivists who had fought on the first anti-whaling campaigns against the Soviets in the North Pacific in the 1970s. My father co-founded Greenpeace, which has campaigned against the global whaling industry for decades.

So you can understand why, on one hand, I felt it was important to be part of the environmental battle for the whales. But on the other, I believe cross-cultural understanding and co-operation is vital. The issue is more complex than black and white. Japan claims that its annual whale hunt is for scientific purposes. The “research” hunt is run by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which is heavily subsidized by the government of Japan. The ICR studies whale-stock demography and health. To do this, the Japanese whaling fleet targets around 900 Minke whales annually. In addition, each year a different endangered species of whale is targeted, including humpback and fin whales.

Once the scientific data is collected, the whale meat is then sold for commercial use by Kyodo Senpaku, the same private firm that runs the fleet. Selling whale meat for commercial use after collecting it for scientific use is acceptable under current international whaling laws. Recently, however, the hunt has also been called “cultural” by the ICR, which says that Japan is simply continuing its centuries-old cultural practice of whaling. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, among others, dismiss these claims as a smokescreen. If it is in fact commercial and not scientific, that would make the hunt illegal: there has been an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986.

Believing the law is on its side, Sea Shepherd was the lone group to oppose the Japanese whaling hunt in Antarctica this past winter. Sea Shepherd fights the whaling industry everywhere, whether Norwegian, Icelandic, or Japanese. Sea Shepherd’s members don’t buy the cultural basis of the hunt any more than they buy its scientific value. And so the group engages in radical direct action to stop the hunts, such as ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port, which is why some governments have labelled Sea Shepherd “eco-terrorists.” Its activities have undoubtedly stopped or limited whaling activity around the world.

Some critics, such as Milton Freeman, a specialist in ecology and culture at the University of Alberta, view groups like Sea Shepherd as difficult cases. He worries that their anti-Japanesewhaling line leads to rhetoric that is simply anti-Japanese. Freeman views anti-whaling actions as not just an animal-rights issue, but also a type of cultural bullying. It’s Western ecogroups campaigning against the remaining whaling nations, such as Japan, demanding they cease their hunt and assimilate Western cultural beliefs about whales and conservation.

This is what’s increasingly known in academic circles as “political ecology”—essentially, the politics of nature and the different ways people understand and treat nature. For some, a whale is just another fish in the sea, a resource like any other to be harvested. Others put a different value on a whale, and see a socially complex, highly intelligent sentient being that deserves the chance for a full and healthy life.

Freeman argues that our own Western views on whaling don’t give us the right to attack Japanese beliefs about it: “Seeking to stop a culturally valued activity, in any society,” he says, “is to attack those people’s culture and identity.”

Jun Hoshikawa doesn’t feel attacked. “What is taking place in the Southern Ocean is not part of Japanese culture and traditions,” says Hoshikawa, director of Greenpeace Japan. “There is a difference between coastal whaling in Japan and the industrial hunt in the Southern Ocean. Coastal whaling has taken place for centuries and continues today on a small scale with boats and spears. That can be argued to be part of Japan’s culture and identity … The industrial hunt in the Antarctic was introduced by western countries post-World War II, and is run by the government of Japan today using a six-ship fleet with exploding harpoons and guns, and it kills whales on a mass scale. It was and is purely a commercial industry. I do not call that culture.”

Hoshikawa says 82 percent of people in Japan do not eat whale meat. The profits come mainly from delicacy food restaurants or “public provisions,” where whale meat is provided to high school cafeterias, jails and the military. Mainly, it “goes to people who cannot reject the whale meat,” Hoshikawa says in a phone interview from Tokyo.

In the past, the whale-meat industry regularly produced ¥7 billion annually (US$74 million) in profit. But in recent years, profits have dropped off due to decreasing demand in Japan and unfilled catch quotas because of interference from groups like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. In 2007, the industry saw profits of just ¥5 million (US$51,000). The government of Japan has heavily subsidized the ICR’s whale program over the years to allow its work to continue, despite the financial loss. The real reason Japan persists with whaling, says Hoshikawa, is not because it is a profitable industry any longer, but because “the whaling issue has been framed through a lens of nationalism. It has less to do with whales or the industry and more to do with protecting the sovereign right of a country.” With so much negative international attention focused on Japan because of its whaling, the country is being pressured by other nations to stop the whaling project. In the last few years, nationalism has crept onto the scene: although the hunt is commercially unviable, countries like Japan that still run whaling hunts now see it as a political defeat to cave in to international pressure.

This is not an abstract issue for Canada: many of the same dynamics are at play when it comes to Canada’s annual seal hunt. On this issue, we are regarded with much the same contempt by the international community that Japan bears for its whaling.

“Every state is sovereign and can do whatever it wants” says Calestous Juma, former special advisor to the chair of the International Whaling Commission and professor of International Development Studies at Harvard University. “You can’t condemn sovereign states for exercising their rights because they will just go ahead and do it.” The International Whaling Commission is the international body that regulates whaling. Over the years, the IWC has sent letters of protest to Japan against the hunt in the Southern Ocean. In the IWC’s 2007 letter, it wrote that the lethal hunt of whales was unnecessary for Japan’s research, and called upon the government of Japan to suspend the whaling program.

But there are no real consequences for flouting the IWC rules, since as Juma says, there is no separate enforcement body for the treaty. The IWC comprises 84 member states that meet once a year to set quotas and regulations on whaling. But without an enforcement body, the regulations are toothless. Norway for example, works outside of the IWC and engages in commercial whaling despite the moratorium. Japan, in contrast, attempts to work within the framework by using the scientific loophole. This is because Japan has a real interest in doing things legally. “They want to be a good global citizen,” says Juma.

Ironically, the Japan Whaling Association states on its website that the purpose of the Japanese scientific research in whale stocks and health is to gather evidence that will lift the moratorium so that commercial whaling can resume. Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, director-general of the Institute for Cetacean Research in Tokyo, says that because the ICR believes whale stocks to be plentiful and healthy, “there is no need or reason to prevent sustainable commercial whaling in the Antarctic under IWC management procedures.”

The international community has reacted, but so far the results have been lacklustre. Panama de-registered the whaling fleet’s cargo vessel late last year, but Japan re-registered it under its own national registration; the Australian and New Zealand governments toughened their stance against Japan’s whaling, threatening to take action legally in international courts. But so far, these diplomatic and legal actions have been unsuccessful or stalled. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in June 2008 that Australia and Japan would simply have to agree to disagree.

Over the winter, a small group of IWC countries have been working at negotiating an agreement with Japan that would gradually phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean by reducing the catch by 20 percent per year for five years. In exchange, Japan would get permission to kill an increased but yet-to-be-determined number of whales off Japan’s coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

The package was developed at the request of the American chairman, Bill Hogarth, a Bush administration appointee. It was intended to be a step forward in ending Southern Ocean whaling and break the deadlock with Japan. However, most environmental groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believe this was a compromise that would both allow Japan to continue its commercial hunt, and effectively lift the global moratorium on commercial whaling. But Japan refused the deal. Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries minister Shigeru Ishiba said, “We cannot accept any proposal that would allow outside countries to prohibit Japan from continuing its research hunt.”

So the question becomes: is whaling simply a question of sovereignty? In this case, does diplomacy trump ethics, leaving the international community powerless to stop the killing? The Japanese whaling industry has cunningly used the term “culture” as a get-out-of-jail-free card—by framing this as an issue of culture or sovereignty, it aims to make any antiwhaling group look like they are colonialist and discriminatory. But the reality is that the hunt is senseless slaughter in service of fake science, a dead industry, and nationalist posturing. The whales should not bear the punishment for our foolishness.

How far are we willing to go—how much environmental damage are we willing to do—in the name of culture, heritage, national pride? None of these things will be of much use in an environmentally devastated land- and seascape.

More than 30 years ago, in 1977, my parents fought to end whaling in Australia. Their protest, in Albany, Western Australia, led to international attention, that culminated in the end of whaling in Australia. It is now one of the strongest anti-whaling nations in the world.

At the end of the anti-whaling campaign I went on this year with Sea Shepherd, I found myself in Australia and decided to visit Albany. What I found there was a miniature eco-haven: a dozen wind-power generators spinning on the horizon and organic crops in the fields. One of the old harpoon ships of the Australian whaling fleet, Cheynes IV, is now an on-land museum, and boats go out every day filled with tourists for whale-watching. The whale-watching industry has now surpassed the profitability of the whale-killing industry of 30 years ago.

I took a boat ride myself to see the whales. We got to see them up close, close enough that I could touch them. They played together in their pod, diving and chasing, waving their fins out of the water as they breached, tails in the air. It’s another sight I’ll never forget.

As in so many immigrant families, weekend mornings in my house always meant one thing: “our shows” on TV. We are of Indian descent, and the sounds of the latest Bollywood hits were a staple of our Saturdays and Sundays, as much a part of our weekends as omelettes and the newspaper. But for all the nostalgia, we had little choice. For years, if you were an immigrant looking for your own media, your only other option was one of the “ethnic” grocery-cum-video stores that still pepper neighbourhoods today. And while these shops function as impromptu community centres, there was always something a little unsettling about having to drive to an out-ofthe-way plaza only to pick up a poor-quality knock-off DVD.

The web allows immigrants to straddle two worlds like never before. Illustration by Matthew Daley

It was a disquieting state of affairs that only added to the isolation so common to the immigrant experience. But thanks to the web, things are changing. Minorities are no longer confined to gathering around a TV on weekends or driving to the nearest bazaar. With the mainstreaming of the internet, immigrant minorities have exponentially more access to film, music, and literature from their root cultures.

The difference in diversity between traditional and online outlets is striking. Zip.ca, Canada’s most popular online DVD service, currently has 728 Bollywood films available, which, last time I checked, is approximately 727 more than at my parents’ local Rogers Video. Walk into a Best Buy or HMV and you will be lucky to find a handful of “world music” CDs. In contrast, eMusic.com, Canada’s second-largest online music seller behind iTunes, currently has more than 33,000 artists under their international category. The disparity is staggering.

At the core of this pluralist promise is the “long tail.” Coined by Wired editor Chris Anderson, the term describes how the web’s massive capacity as a distribution network, coupled with its greatly reduced cost of delivery, allows online retailers to offer a much greater variety of content than bricks-and mortar stores. Rather than relying on selling huge quantities of a few blockbusters (the head), the theory suggests that online stores can thrive by selling just a few units each of a huge catalogue of titles (the tail). But though most of the technorati have focused on the long tail’s economic benefits — which might not be as lucrative as once predicted — few have yet to think through its impact on minority cultures.

After all, beyond merely having more choice, what does it now mean to be an immigrant in the face of this greatly expanded access to culture? My parents’ generation spent much of their life in a sort of cultural limbo. Unwittingly alienated by a majority culture, they sought out the familiar and the known. Yet, the trips to dingy stores around the margins of cities were more symbolic than anyone cared to admit and, despite a growing immigrant population, quality, selection, and currency were all lacking. Put off by mainstream culture and unable to connect with the contemporary culture of their homelands, they were stuck.

Flash-forward to today, and my mother can watch the most current movies from Bollywood at full quality, a few even in high definition. My father has a large MP3 collection composed of ghazals and classical Indian tracks he never thought he would find again. This is just the start: it says nothing of the radio streamed from Taiwan, the news sites from Somalia, the poetry from Pakistan, or the podcasts from Jamaica. The internet allows immigrants to engage in the currents of the cultures they know with an immediacy and range that simply could not have happened before.

The obvious danger is increased ghettoization. But in an unexpected way, the web allows for an equality of participation. The ebb and flow of media, the contemporary pulse, was once privy to those with Globe and Mail or Saturday Night subscriptions. But, though it is perhaps anecdotal, it seems no coincidence that, after finding Bollywood clips there, my mother also turned to the web for reports on the U.S. election or video from Oprah.com. Suddenly a part of the swirl of popular culture, my family’s cultural isolation lessened.

If minority alienation is a question of access and inclusion, then perhaps more than anything, the long tail means that the choice between assimilation and traditionalism has ceased to be an either/or proposition for immigrants. When one is no longer forced to cling to an imaginary past but can instead engage the cutting edge of both cultures, the movement to the contemporary Canadian becomes degrees easier and less threatening.

The web in itself might not be a magical panacea, but when immigrants are neither asked to constantly look back, nor entirely conform to an alien present, perhaps the ideal of multiculturalism has found a practical friend in the long tail of the internet.