Tag: Canada

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North wind

North Wind

“That’s a millisphere!” I thought when I heard Le Vent du Nord, on stage at Womad, say the Canadian province of Quebec has eight million inhabitants. I include Quebec with the “Atlantic Canada” provinces (total population 2.3 million) in a millisphere I call North Wind (Eastern Canada).

It gets seriously cold there; last Christmas Eve, during near record low temperatures, a US Navy warship, commissioned in Buffalo New York only a week earlier, got stuck in ice in the Saint Lawrence, on its way to Florida – and stayed there for a month.

Le Vent du Nord are a progressive folk ensemble playing (and singing) French Canadian folk songs with fiddles, guitar, hurdy-gurdy, accordion and bouzouki – they sounded Cajun.

From the stage they acknowledged the welcome the performers had received from the Taranaki iwi and said there were some things that should be done for their indigenous peoples. Quebec is an Algonquian word for “where the river narrows”, the river being the Saint Lawrence. Other tribes are the Iroquois and Mohawk in the south and Inuit in the north but there is inter-reservation migration and the traditional “Indians” are a small minority, living in caravans and sheds on small reservations.

The majority tribe are the French Canadians, the French speaking residents of Quebec, who all relate back to 10,000 Catholic French settlers who came in the early 1600s. At first there was a serious imbalance of men to women so squaws were taken for wives and their bloodlines can be seen on the faces of the modern Quebecois.

The minority tribe in Quebec are the British, who took the French colony by conquest in 1763, and independence for the French speaking province has been an ongoing issue ever since. When the Parti Quebecois gained control of the provincial government the French language was granted more status although independence referenda held in 1980 and 1995 where both voted down, the last by a narrow margin.

The House of Commons of Canada passed a symbolic motion recognising Quebecois as a nation within a United Canada but Quebec closely watches Brexit, Scotland and Catalonia. These days they call it the “neverendum,” a debate that continues indefinitely and remains unresolved.

As part of doing a millisphere column I like to talk with people who have been there and I interviewed a St Johns Hill couple who grew up in Montreal, the world’s second largest french speaking city, in the 1950s and 60s.

Most of the people of Quebec live in the south, by the St Laurence, and most of them live in Montreal (metro population 4 million) which is an ancient city, in North American terms, and, like New Orleans, had a unique French/cultured European/cosmopolitan flavour. Montreal is a university town, has a thriving arts and design scene and has Canada’s biggest Jewish population.
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Montreal was also a city divided by the Saint Lawrence boulevard, the east side was French and for an English schoolgirl in an enclave in west there was no reason to go there. To the north there were the Laurentian Mountains cultivated as a playground for Montreal and then there was a vast wilderness. Including all its rivers, lakes and dams Quebec is 12 percent freshwater and has 3 percent of the world’s renewable fresh water.

In the 1950s and 60s Indians were relegated to history but in 2010 a party of Quebec Iroquois, which means “they who smoke”, travelled to the World Lacrosse Championships in the United Kingdom on their own passports; Hillary Clinton interceded to allow their passage through the United States but the British government refused to recognise the Iroquois passports.

The independence issue had created uncertainty and consequently the wealthy moved their money to Ontario (Ottawa and Toronto) leaving Montreal a bit of a backwater, escaping urban renewal

In Quebec City, which is even more of a backwater, a young French Canadian man is standing trial for murder (shooting up a mosque). Immigration and emigration are both issues in the current provincial election campaign namely; Syrian and other Islamic immigrants coming in and young, rural and Anglo (English speaking) emigrants leaving.

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Northland

Living without domination

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by approximately 1000th of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

When I originally built The Millisphere, pictured, as part of a paper on the philosophy of science, it forced me to look at where people live and in the process I unearthed stories to draw on for millisphere columns.

Iceland (population 350,000) is too small to qualify as a millisphere; its nearest neighbour Greenland (56,000) has even less. It is self evident that hot/sunny countries (with lots of rainfall) can support large populations so it is not surprising that it requires all of the land and islands within the Arctic Circle, and beyond, to scrape together 3.5 million to form the millisphere I call Northland – shown here in white.

Greenland at 70 percent leads the world in the use of renewable energy (mostly hydroelectric) and 88 percent of its population are Inuits whose “nation” extends around the north of Canada, the state of Alaska and crosses the Bering Strait into the Russian Federation. There are 150,000 Inuits in total who, in 1982, for the first time, gathered at the “Inuit Circumpolar Conference.” Other hunter/gatherers such as the Nenets in Russia and the Saami in Norway and Finland complete the circle.

There is logic in considering a unique millisphere that has two months when the mid-summer sun never/hardly sets and whose inhabitants are collectively facing the impact of global warming; caused, to greater or lesser extent, by the other 999 millispheres.

The reality though is that the Arctic is divided by boundary lines radiating from the North Pole. Boundaries imposed by “Great Powers” not by the Northland migratory hunters and gatherers who live “everywhere and nowhere.”

The effects of 19th century colonialism and 20th century militarism were profound and universal for the inhabitants of Northland many of whom transitioned from hunters to wage earners. Their forests were destroyed, rivers polluted, pasturelands flooded and herds dispersed. Their health records are now poor and unemployment is high. Domestic crime, drunkenness and suicide are three or four times the national average of their respective countries.

In 1925 Canada was the first to extend its borders northward, followed quickly by the USSR, Norway, USA, Sweden, Finland, Denmark (through Greenland) and finally Iceland. The Cold War ramped up the military impact on Northland.

In 1942 the US established an air force base at Goose Bay in northern Canada as a stop off point on the flight to Europe and then converted a vast area of “empty” land into a “Tactical Fighter Weapons Training Centre” (bombing range). Paranoid that the USSR would send nuclear missiles over the pole the US deployed radar stations and invited its NATO allies to practice low-level flying over Innu land at Goose Bay. By 1990 there were around 40,000 annual “practice flights” and the Innu caribou herd had halved since the invasion began.

Not be outdone the Soviets established the Rogachevo air base on the far north island of Nova Zembla, shifted off all the native Nenets in 1957 and used the island to test nuclear weapons. In 1961 they dropped the “Tsar Bomba,” the largest and most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated. When testing concluded it transpired that not all the Nenet nomads had been evacuated.

Under the Northland ice and sea are reputed reserves of oil and natural gas. The eight contested slices of the pie radiating from the North Pole divide these fields of fossil fuels which when extracted would further impact on the millisphere of Northland.

In retrospect the question has to be asked: was it all worth it? To consume vast amounts of non-renewable resources to wreak havoc on natural environments; and inhabitants living in some sort of harmony with those environments.

There must be a better way. Northland represents a millisphere dominated by nation states – which are themselves composed of millispheres. No millisphere, or group of millispheres, should dominate any other millisphere would be a good place start.

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Chilangolandia

It didn’t matter who became the next president of the Nation of Darkness (POTNOD). Nothing will change very fast. Their toxic food, drug and gun culture will remain and the American empire will continue to spend half its annual budget on “defence” i.e. weapons of mass destruction.

Currently the world is fixating on travel restrictions, imposed by the new POTNOD, but crossing a United States border could be an unpleasant experience already, whether it is entering the “homeland” or crossing between states.

In Europe your details will have been processed while you are still in the air and when you land at Schiphol or Frankfurt you just walk straight in, and it’s the same driving from one country to the next. In the EU there will be a sign beside the road as you drive across the border, not a state trooper asking to see your passport yet again as in “the States”.

I remember the first time I entered the United State of America I was presented with the following sentence: Have you ever been arrested or convicted of an offence or crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or been arrested or convicted for two or more offences for which the aggregated sentence or confinement was five years or more; or been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

A country, which has been known to engage in assassination and torture and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands civilians in some military adventure abroad, was asking me if I had committed a moral turpitude! Tempting as it was to ask the border person what a turpitude was and whether Uncle Sam had the blood of innocent people on his hands, I thought it was safer to just tick the no box.

I once discovered that if you want to experience bad tempered American border guards at their rudest try crossing from Mexico, at night and without a visa (coming from a visa waiver country New Zealanders don’t need a visa). And then there is the lengthy process of standing on two yellow footprints and looking at a camera, as a machine, a good deal more intelligent than its operator, computerises your iris, finger and thumbprints.

Unfortunately if you place a string on a globe east from Auckland to Heath Row in London it will pass directly over LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) which most travellers to and from Europe use as their half way transit hub.

There are Air New Zealand flights direct to San Diego and Houston (for those wanting to travel on to Cuba, Mexico and Central America) and one to Vancouver, which means it is possible fly east around the north of the USA.

Mexico City International Airport (MEX) would be a convenient transit hub for both the Caribbean and Central America or onwards to Europe but as yet there are no direct flights from NZ to MEX for travellers who want to avoid the Nation of Darkness

MEX is Latin America’s second busiest airport and air traffic there “exceeds current capacity.” A new international airport will be completed next year and with the capability to move 120 million passengers per year it has the potential to become the busiest airport in the world.

A media spokesperson said Air New Zealand was not considering a direct flight to Mexico City anytime soon.

Given the choice of stopping over in LAX or MEX I would recommend the later. It helps if you can speak a little Spanish but the art galleries and museums, the street life and music, the food and the Hispanic style are well worth the journey. By distancing itself from the drug wars Mexico City is a safe city, of sorts.

The United States of Mexico is a federation of 31 states and one federal district. In the heart of Mexico City is the old “Districto Federal,” population 8.9 million, which has last year been given the status of a state and is now known as the “State of the Valley of Mexico.”

Greater Mexico City has an urban population of over 21 million and counting the surrounding municipalities Mexico City is the centre of a “megalopolis” of 34 million (2015) the sheer scale making it one of the largest economies of any “global city.”

Mexicans refer to Mexico City as “Chilangolandia” – a chilango being a loud, arrogant, ill-mannered, loutish person.

Now that the chilango gringo POTNOD north of the border has scrapped the TPP the Mexican government has initiated direct trade talks with the New Zealand government. What an economic opportunity. New Zealand prime minister Bill English should tell Mexican president Enrique: the first thing we need is a direct flight to MEX as soon as the new international airport is operational in 2018.