Critic Wants Yankee Deserters To Stay Home

That Mathews should be arguing against an emulation of Canada’s Vietnam-era welcoming of roughly 50,000 American war resisters will come as no great surprise to anyone familiar with his life’s work. Mathews has always cast as cold an eye on the influence of the American liberal left in Canada as it’s currently fashionable to cast solely on the influence of the American right. During the late 1960s, Mathews was decidedly not among the welcoming party for Vietnam-era American refugees. He was too busy leading a hard-fought campaign that eventually led to the successful overthrow of Canada’s disgraceful university-faculty hiring practices. At the time, hirings so favoured Americans that Canadians had been reduced to a minority in this country’s university faculties. That Canadians are not especially familiar with the Smithers-born Mathews, now semi-retired from his post at Simon Fraser University’s Canadian Studies department, is an intriguing story in itself. In a widely circulated essay first published last year on the nationalist Web magazine Vive Le Canada, Ron Dart, a political-science and religious-studies professor at the University College of the Fraser Valley, compared Mathews to the American radical intellectual Noam Chomsky. Then Dart asked the question: “Why is it that Canadians know more about American political activists and writers than they do about some of the more important Canadian activists and writers?” He went on: “Many Canadians, who see themselves as radical, readily genuflect to Chomsky, and, in doing so, fail to see how they are welcoming a more subtle form of the empire into their midst.” Mathews, not given to much genuflecting, remains unapologetic in his refusal to welcome that more subtle form of American imperialism: the sort that would reduce Canada to a nation of extras in a Michael Moore documentary. In that form of the empire, we might well be allowed to sanction gay marriage or enact sensible marijuana laws. But Canada would remain a colony nonetheless, confined within the restraints of a distinctly American form of liberal individualism. From the more muscular and distinctly Canadian perspective of, say, Red Tory nationalism-—indeed, from the perspective of what Mathews calls “any self-respecting Canadian nationalism”—-there’s simply no virtue in asking Parliament for permission to quietly arrange rental accommodation for American military deserters. It would only serve to relieve the United States of the more costly and embarrassing burden of housing its own reluctant soldiers in its own jails. Mathews offered some of these bracing opinions during a recent conversation about his just-completed treatise, George Grant’s Betrayal of Canada. Grant, author of the seminal Lament For a Nation, is widely considered one of the most important philosophers in Canadian history. Mathews’s treatise presents Grant as a man of crippling pessimism, an abject moral failure who surrendered to the idea that the United States will inevitably devour Canada within the globalized super state envisioned by the godfather of neoconservatism, the American philosopher Leo Strauss. That Strauss should make a brief appearance in Mathews’s treatise helps completes the circle a bit. Straussians-—and a good number of apostate Trotskyists, incidentally—-have done much of the intellectual heavy lifting involved in building the casus belli for the very war that American deserters are now hoping to avoid by seeking refuge in Canada. Whatever fault one might find in Mathews’s position, hopelessness is not one of them. The North American Free Trade Agreement, the creeping advance of American ideas throughout Canada’s political spectrum, the rise of an American-dominated world “culture” fostered by digital technologies—-none of these things curbs Mathews’s optimism. Mathews argues that we should not make Grant’s mistake of assuming that it’s too late for Canadians to forge a renewed sense of community and destiny from their own intellectual and philosophical traditions. Ever the radical, Mathews has some advice for younger British Columbians who would refuse to settle for merely siding with one camp of Americans against another, and who might rather strike their own blows against the expansionist intentions of the United States. “Engage in public disobedience,” Mathews says. “Barricade the courts. Shut down the ferries for two or three days at a time. Take political positions, and take those positions to the streets. Think globally but act locally, and get motivated. Don’t wait for the news. Make the news.” Original: http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=11469 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on July 10, 2005]

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