Elder Advice - Thinking Inside the Box - Week 29
In a time when there is more than enough to keep us perpetually and legitimately offended, there are those with apparently nothing better to do than unleash a tsunami of abuse for tweeting the wrong colour emoji. Or deliver a vapid Throne Speech.
This week’s Throne drone, which should have been a coherent and well thought out strategy to manage the second wave of the pandemic and the multi-year economic recovery, was instead a laundry list of old and unkept promises - like a Canada-wide early learning and childcare system, national universal pharmacare, skills training and a million new jobs, all overlaid with the detail-free undertaking of “sustainable responsibility”. If the Liberal party has mastered anything, it is the art of marketing: placing flamboyant labels on empty containers. Justin being just one example.
They even trotted out that wretched “We are Team Canada” bromide. Whatever can be next- “There is no Can’t in Canada”?
And it was all delivered by the worst Governor General in the nation’s history- including the 1st Baron Lisgar. An appointment the Prime Minister imagined would make him appear fashionable, to a position he has no respect for, as evidenced by his failure to even bother having her vetted.
Damn … I’ve worked myself up into such a state that I spilled my scotch.
Just a moment while I clean up.
...
Where was I? Right - useless Prime Ministers and Governors-General. I am starting to think we would do better to go back to feudal times. When heads of government and state were reliably selected by strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords.
But you did not come here to listen to me whinge. You came for Elder Advice. Here’s some:
Appearances can be deceiving. Seconds of chaos and violence, whether or not captured in now ubiquitous cell phone videos, contain a perpetuity of confusing and conflicting acts, omissions, motives and dynamics. Untangling, analyzing and determining the right and wrong of them cannot be done in the moment. That is, after all, why we have the rule of law. To determine culpability and penalty in the cold light of another day. We delay judgement, and instead ask questions and seek answers.
The Canadian case in point.
In May, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year old black and indigenous woman, died after falling from a 24th-floor balcony in my neighbourhood. Police arrived in the middle of a fight between Ms. Korchinski-Paquet, her brother and mother, each of whom had called 911. Her brother had advised the 911 operators that she was armed with knives. The police attended because the calls were correctly assessed as an apparent domestic assault with a weapon. While they were working to determine what happened, Ms. Korchinski-Paquet went to her balcony and tried to climb over the barrier separating her apartment from her neighbour's. A video captured her fatal fall. It went viral. An Instagram post by her mother claimed she was pushed off the balcony by the police. Fuelled as well by the mainstream media, many Torontonians, without asking questions, took to the streets and made the same claim. In an odious effort to equate Canada and the United States on the issue of racism, they tried to make Ms. Korchinski-Paquet Canada’s George Floyd.
In the subsequent investigation, the mother recanted and the recordings taken by closed-circuit surveillance tape, police microphones and the 911 call logs all provided conclusive evidence that nothing of the sort had happened. Indeed, even the mainstream and social media reports that the matter should have been handled as a case of mental illness were baseless. In the 911 calls, the family denied any mental illness issues.
The simple fact is that the allegations were false. That doesn't mean that Ms. Korchinski-Paquet’s death was not tragic. Or that some reform of our policing model is not warranted. It means that the now automatic hue and cry of thoughtless people seeking to use any interaction to support their claim that all public authority is motivated by racial animus, and in this case that the police killed Ms. Korchinski-Paquet’s because of it, needs to end.
Because there is no substitute for delaying judgement, asking questions and requiring answers. Because appearances can be deceiving. Because events are complicated. Because life is complicated.
An elderly man finds a small bird with a broken wing. Ever so gingerly, he picks it up, wraps it tenderly in a handkerchief and carries it, slowly and with the greatest of care, back to his house … and feeds it to his cat.
Life is complicated.