It's Not That Easy Being Green: A Review of Copps' Worth Fighting For

After reading Sheila Copp's new book, Worth Fighting For, I realized that the title was a double-entendre. Intended, perhaps, to mean that Canada is worth fighting for, the cover layout reveals the second, more pointed meaning: Sheila Copps is worth fighting for. Going through the text, I was having a difficult time identifying what the main point of the book was, other than to overtly attack Paul Martin. The timelines in the book are difficult to follow, and the tales selected strategically. Then it occurred to me what the real intent of the book probably is: the book is a campaign for Sheila's idea of Canada and, ultimately, a campaign for Sheila. Ultimately, the book is political show-and-tell, which helped me to sort out something puzzling about her passion for Canada. Sheila Copps is passionate about her vision for this country, I think, because I believe Sheila Copps is a Marxist. She never says that in her book, but, indirectly, she does, and that is what frightens me about Sheila's vision for Canada.

Throughout the book, Sheila made a clear distinction between parliament and government, politicians and bureaucrats. What she should have made is a distinction between political strategizing and ideology. Essentially, the main point of Sheila Copp's book Worth Fighting For can be summed up in one abridged quotation from the text: "Here we were in a fight to the death for Canada, and...the...geniuses in charge of the campaign were playing some silly tactical game of their own."

Reading through the text, I noted that Sheila kept saying she was fighting for Canada, and she described a number of personal achievements during her time in office. However, half way through the book, the thought hit me, "Whose version of Canada is she fighting for?" The answer: Sheila's version. Never was that more clear than in her approach to leading the Canadian delegation to the Berlin environmental conference: "Nothing, nothing was more important than emerging from Berlin with a common objective of reducing greenhouse gases." Nothing, including betraying your allies, ignoring your own national delegation, and working against your party in order to achieve your, personal, vision for how the world should work. Yes, some came out of the meetings ecstatic; others, including some of our allies, were furious.

Sheila's motto could easily be described as "Either the state or the United States," and her modus operandi is to build alliances with other nations in order to make the USA look isolated in the world. No wonder the Americans look isolated when politicians from allied nations deliberately attempt to make it so, which shows off Sheila's chief strategy: rally as many little guys in order to counterbalance the big guys. Fight the rich. I don't know why she's a Liberal and not a Green or an NDP, although my political instinct makes me wonder if she's planning to overtake the Green Party leadership. It's feasible, and her book read like a look-at-me-I'm-Green advertisement. She wants a political home.

She's not just Green, though. She's appears idealistic and claims to be naive. While Sheila was fighting for her idea of Canada, she seemed repeatedly surprised to find other people working against her, "playing some silly tactical game of their own." There were points in the text when I seriously wondered just how naive about politics and political strategizing Sheila could be, when finally, she, herself, made the statement, "I suppose you could ask why someone with my years of political experience could be so naive." Indeed.

Apparently Sheila thinks politics should be like a well-run daycare, where everyone gets an equal turn, the rules are clearly defined, and you take a time out if you've been bad. Nice as that sounds, it's just not reality, so there's no point wishing it were. Politics is ugly and cut-throat. It's dirty, which is what, to date, has made me resist running, despite encouragement in the past to declare. Now, however, I'm older and not nearly as nice. I did get a laugh, though, out of her descriptions of how Paul Martin was allegedly working against her during international environmental discussions. She made the PMO sound like Mordor, and Paul Martin like the evil Sauron. Very amusing.

Sheila's supposed naivete comes out at several points in the book, along with a touch of melodrama here and there. I started writing "G's" in the margin every time I saw a statement that made me gag, like this one:

     The prospect of working in bilingual Ottawa was like a
     dream come true. What an opportunity to put the
     principles of duality and diversity into action!

Or this one:

     To this day, seventeen years later, lots of women
     come up and ask about my daughter because they
     remember the day she was born, the fact that I
     breast-fed her at the office, the fact that my struggles
     represented their struggles and my victories
     represented their victories.

That just didn't grab me, even though I'm a mother and have struggled a lot. So has my husband, a dad. I just didn't feel connected to her story. In fact, when I read that she had to break away from an important political speech to hoof herself up four flights of stairs and breastfeed her crying baby, I wondered why she didn't just take a mat leave. When my baby was born, I couldn't take a mat leave, and I couldn't breast-feed at work. I just struggled. Sorry Sheila. We're not kindred. Besides, I don't think she's as naive as she let's on. I think naivety is a crafted part of her strategy to win over the little guy: it's old-fashioned charm, except it's not working on me.

To be fair, I also wrote some P's in the margin for times she made statements that were pithy. M's for moralizing, A's -- a lot of A's -- for her noting her own achievements, and N's for naive dreaming. I also noted I's for interesting political stories, like the Bishop of Montreal not being able to rearrange a concert so that Trudeau could lie in state at the Montreal cathedral. I didn't like her "put some water in your wine" metaphor, with its weird religious overtone, or her name dropping -- big and little names. At points, I was left wondering, "Sally who?" She dropped a lot of names. I'll wager she wants these people in her corner.

On the other hand, she took direct hits at others, like this one:

     Nothwithstanding Paul Martin's public support for the
     environment, he was working directly with two western
     colleagues, Justice Minister Anne McLellan of Alberta
     and Natural Resources Minister Ralph Goodale of
     Saskatchewan, to ensure that Canada's input at the
     Berlin Conference was as weak as possible.

Paul Martin was a clear target in the book, but, honestly, I was left feeling ambivalent about his reported behavior. Yes, he came across looking like the evil Sauron, but he's a politician at the highest level of government. What exactly did she expect? What do Canadians expect? To me I was amazed that it took him 20 years to enact his coup over the PMO. What took him so long?

Sheila devoted considerable attention to her interpretation of Canadian culture. Although she sometimes confused the concepts of culture (arts and entertainment) with culture (familial heritage), and society (organized citizenry), she did a good job of delineating the importance of intercultural interaction and cultural well-being within the nation, especially for children and youth. This also is the section of text where "Either the state or the United States" not only was stated overtly, with reference to the CBC's founding, but also was driven home as the ideal behind Sheila's genuinely anti-American MO. She barely had a good comment to make about our neighbors to the south, and she organized what could only be described as a world-wide, anti-Hollywood committee ("Are you, or have you ever been, a capitalist?"), without a word in support of how much trade goes back and forth between our two nations, including in the film industry. I began to wonder whether the word economy was in her vocabulary.

In addition, although I come from an invisible minority, myself, I just couldn't resonate with her brand of Canadian cultural protectionism. While she expressed her belief that the state should actively preserve and fund people's cultures, she often confused this concept with state interference in trade and marketing of cultural products and technologies. In addition, she left me cold, quite frankly, when she implied that the government of the land is responsible for ensuring that people's cultural heritage should be directly funded to be preserved. My people came to this country and built what they had with their own money, of which they had precious little, I can assure you. Nobody paid for our churches or halls. We sold perogies, donated lumber, and took out our own mortgages. We didn't look for handouts from the state, and we didn't become the United States.

To make matters worse, Sheila lumped First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples into her version of Canadian culture without whispering the word treaty, as if multicultural policy could make up for and take care of the entire horrid history of Indigenous-Government of Canada relations by funding a few aboriginal television programs. That's definitely naive, in my books. At times, I thought she was claiming Indigenous culture is Canadian culture. At other times, I thought she was making the concepts ethnic, multicultural, and indigenous synonymous. In short, her version of culture seems to stem more from anti-American protectionism than it does from understanding the long history of the many cultural groups in the land. I didn't even see the words "third force" uttered in her discussions of Trudeau, but we all now know that she's Acadian.

Ultimately, the most valuable piece I took away from Sheila's book was her discussion of gender bias in Ottawa and her confirmation that there definitely aren't enough women's washrooms in the House of Commons. When we get around to making structural changes, attitudinal changes might come about. People tend to follow where the money goes. I enjoyed some of her anecdotes and admired her tenacity, even if I can't agree with her apparent underlying philosophy. It's great to support the little guy, but I'd rather support the little guy into a job involving economic prosperity than a position in a government bureaucracy. The question is whether we can have more Sheila with less state, and I think she's telling us that the answer to that question is a resounding no.