Revisiting and reviving SHAME in Canadian culture

 Canadian shame, as in other countries, cannot be shoved under the table, out with the trash, or buried in the bin of denial. It jumps out on every national news cast and screams loudly about the human dependence on greed, manipulation and secrecy.

Career colleges that hire recruiting agents, pay them $2000 per student signed up, foment the very lies that those recruiters use of promises of quality training and easy and smooth flow into the workplace in ‘good quality jobs’. CBC’s The National documented this dynamic with a particular story from India. A farmer-father sells two vehicles in order to provide the $28K for his daughter to enrol in a Canadian career college, with false promises of great training and a good job, only to have her discover that the whole scheme was nothing but false promises.

Fake, fraudulent mortgage brokers promising clients borrowed funds after fabricating income’ that does not exist, while charging an additional 1% interest on the mortgage is just another of the shams to which innocent and desperate people are being subjected. Again, the story comes from the CBC’s The National.

And yes, Canadian military trainers in Great Britain are engaged in developing trained soldiers among Ukrainian recruits, in their nation’s fight against the terrorist-invader, pussia, (the name of the country is so defamed by the murdered in the Kremlin). Good on them, and thanks to Canada for making them available. We do have a reasonable reputation as trainers.

And yet, our emergency rooms are so under-staffed following the pandemic and the resignation of health care workers, people with broken ankles are waiting up to a full day before they can have the needed surgery. Canada has had and insisted upon building metaphoric moats and barbed-wire fences to prevent professionally trained health care workers from other countries, among others, from entering their profession here. Exams, credentials checked ‘up-the-ying-yang’ by ‘gate-keepers’ installed in a manner that fossilizes a national superiority, an arrogance, a hubris that gives a bad name to the concept of myth.

There is a difference between a myth in literary and imaginative perspective, and a myth that grips a nation by its throat, in order to create another ‘papier-mache’ tradition of false pride and false superiority. A Chilean-trained female dentist, of my acquaintance, is only one of many examples of highly skilled, committed and even ‘superior’ professional health care workers who had to endure years of menial Canadian jobs before finally being permitted entry into the Ontario Dental College. A lifetime of at least a dozen Canadian dentists is eclipsed by her discipline, her patient care and her professionalism. And much of her work is dedicated to the concept of prevention of dental decay. Treatment counsel, constant mentoring, recommendations of options and regular appointments are all as important in her practice as filling the latest cavity.

Shame, in a Canadian context too, is evident in the data point that some 47% of Canadians cannot read at a high school level. The Conference Board of Canada reports:

“Forty-eight percent of Canadian adults have inadequate literacy skills-a significant increase from a decade ago. …Literacy skills are defined as ‘the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts toparticipate3 in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential. This requires ‘accessing, identifying, and processing information from a variety of texts that relate to arrange of settings’….65 percent of recent immigrants (those arriving in Canada within the last 10 years) and 63 percent of established immigrant (those who have lived in Canada for more than 10 years)..had inadequate literacy skills (in English or French, although their literacy skills in their own language is adequate).

 

This deficit in skills exposes the failures of both commission and omission in the education system, the immigrant and refugee system, the labour situation, and the cultural pandemic of ‘instant glances for instant judgement’ of sell lines, media headlines, social media twitter blurbs and an embedded resistance to the “weeds” and the “nuances” and the fine details of any situation, except those in which we consider ourselves engaged, involved and interested in.

At first glance, it would appear that the issue of ‘preferential’ exclusion of foreign-trained professionals and national literacy rates have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. And from the perspective of “cause-effect” in a direct line, of course they don’t. What does, however, potentially link them, is a sense of societal entitlement, devoid of conscience and reflection and regret or remorse. We just assume that “our” systems are the best, simply because ‘we” operate them; “our” people have designed and constructed them and the legacy and the heritage and the presumption of superiority is built in to our perceptions of those systems.

Similarly, the issue of gaping holes in literacy rates, seems totally unrelated to how decisions are made, by public bodies like provincial legislatures. However, the members of all governments in Canada are reliant on the public perspectives on their attitudes, behaviours and ultimately their votes. And those perceptions and  attitudes devolve directly from the kind of superficial and self-inflating headlines to the degree that those elected officials can engineer those headlines. We are all painfully aware that most elected officials do not read the fine print in the many pieces of legislation that are approved and signed into law; we are also aware that the publication of those bills, and the degree to which they are each digested, reflected upon and integrated into their lives, for most people, is both brief and superficial. And part of the impetus for that dynamic is the degree to which literacy skills have been integrated into our shared culture.

Shoving information that would turn the public “off” is both easy and available as a posture for governments. And the degree of “innocence” or “ignorance” or “willful blindness” or “dedicated avoidance” of news that would upset most people, tends to be shoved into one or more of the available secret spaces, the closets, the back pages, or even into the ‘classified’ category.  As a species, we do whatever we can to avoid the really hard task of confronting the most troubling and seemingly insolvable and intractable problem, whether it is in our personal lives or, similarly, in our public debates and decisions.

And while that “penchant” to avoid, deny, and thus “do nothing” or perhaps ‘form a study’ to avoid having to take specific actions abounds, historic patterns of considering those seeking to expose our ‘dirty laundry’ to ourselves, are often considered dangerous, unco-operative, non-conformists, or worse, dangerous. Hard-headed diligent digging of data that we would all consider “too troublesome to deal with” is considered “too much” and “too offensive” and “too costly” to address adequately, honestly and humbly, as a culture.

Nevertheless, we also know that, from our personal lives, the longer we leave difficult issues to fester, in silence, whether from fear of the consequences, or some other unidentified fear, the issue continues to fester. And while we cannot “fix” everything, especially in our encounters with others, we all know that there does come a time for such serious decision-making. The same pattern also holds for the public square.

Loosening the ‘strings’ that prevent and preclude entry into Ontario professions, obviously, has now been forced upon the government, especially since the pandemic has contributed to a severe shortage of health care workers, protracted  and unacceptable waiting times for urgent treatment including surgeries for serious cancers, for example. The public argument goes that the urgency of the moment has resulted in the change in “gate-keeping”….while we all know that the “forced hand” of the government obliterates the need for a public acknowledgement of the superior, insulated, and colonial mind-set that lurks like the fog from dry ice in all of the offices and chambers in the legislature, a fog that is itself denied as well.

This morning, in The Star, I read another investigative piece about the horrors to which vulnerable people, most of whom fall between the cracks of the regulated facilities for long-term care. Whether those are victims of unemployment, milder forms of mental health needs, homelessness, or those waiting for admission to long-term care facilities, (on lists that extend to what would be part the life-span of many of these people)….many of them are currently being “warehoused” in group homes in Ontario that escape regulation, only minimal inspection and the expectation of the most basic standards of cleanliness, nutrition and personal safety.

Diane Zlomislic, investigative reporter at The Star, today October 14, 2022, writes a piece entitled: It was supposed to be a safe, affordable home for Ontarians with nowhere else to go. But inside it was horrifying.

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2022/10/14/it-was-supposed-to-be-a-safe-affordable-home-for-ontarians-with-nowhere-else-to-go-but-inside-it-was-horrifying.html

The details will offend many, while others will merely observe the headline, itself a very different from the normal “clip”, and continue on with their daily activities.

As we have all participated in the death and burial of something we used to call shame, and along with that unacknowledged and undocumented ‘funeral’ the accompanying grieving that attends all deaths, and the reflective hand-wringing that asks ‘what happened?’ after the silent, undetected death, until the full realization was so shocking that it seemed traumatic to “go there”….As George W. Bush declared, “I don’t DO nuance!” so too, we have collectively declared, “We don’t do SHAME!”

Nevertheless, although we may be in denial of our burial of shame, it continues to haunt us, in the boardroom of Hockey Canada, in the group homes of southern Ontario, in the hospitals where people who deserve immediate and highly quality health care WAIT, and on the streets, the underpasses, and in the foodbanks in most towns and cities across the land. Our language, and our capacity to care, while mediated by considerable generosity and philanthropic donoring, at the level of the public debate, we are still attempting to ride the oscillating equation between government policy that some consider “indulgent of indolence” and others consider a “needed hand up”.

It is not incidental to note that The Star story details the operator’s cash grab from the cheques of the residents in the homes, cheques that have come from public coffers. And, as a lone citizen, I have to ask why, if public funds are helping to keep these marginalized men and women afloat, why are the public ‘safety and health and sanitation’ quality control monitors not being demanded, for these homes. Is this another of the implications that inspections for long-term care homes have been radically reduced, or even discontinued, as a favour to the private-sector operators?

And has the private sector garnered such monumental control of the attitudes and the boundaries and the parameters of those making legislative decisions in this province, and also in other jurisdictions, that whatever the private sector wants, the private sector gets, so long as the problem of the marginalized, and the voiceless, and the indigent, do not become a political problem for those privileged members of the political establishment?

Are we living out our own worst nightmares because we have collectively  permitted the erosion of “citizenship” and the inherent “engagement” and public “literacy” on which functioning society relies to atrophy, and to be replaced by a kind of “gimme” instant gratification which extends to the next Netflix movie, the next social media gossip-fest, the next public scandal of some official. Are we not “entitled” to the kind of exhaustive and searing reporting that Ms Zlomislic offers in her piece, on many other public issues that tend to lie dormant, gathering dust and disinterest, and causing the political class no ‘headaches’.

It is not to simply shame an individual that this space is dedicated. It is to shame us all, in our turning away from those things we can really not afford (in all of the connotations of that word) to avoid. It is not only the short term cost of a new bill that would require licensing, inspections, accountability, responsibility and care for residents of these unlicensed group homes. The longer term coat of the glaring message that these people do not matter, in a culture and a society considered one of the best educated and most intelligent and most wealthy in the world, that really shames us all.

And none of us either wants to bear the burden of that shame, nor the full burden of a conscience that wantonly and brazenly permits such conditions to exist right under our noses, even though we cannot escape the stench.