Right, Left And Centre: the Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 30, Part Two.

           The Saviour and His Disciple by Dave Jaffe. Part Two


     Gerry Coser was poring over Arthur Janov's 'The Primal Scream'  as fall and winter stripped the branches of trees outside his rooming house bare of leaves. A few weeks later in early 1976 he followed Henry Afflick into a padded room on Vancouver's east side and then closed the door behind them. "Feel Gerry," Henry urged him. "Just feel your sadness and feel your anger." As the winter rains poured down from Vancouver's grey skies, Gerry went back and forth to that padded room in east Vancouver. He screamed and cried and beat the green padded walls with his fists.
     And soon his sadness started to fade and his anger began to melt away. He started to read psychology books and realized that he had been a bad man who'd abused many women. At the time, many people in the media made fun of primal therapy. Yet Gerry disdn't mind this as the therapy was curing him. Nothing else mattered.
    Henry had other surprises in store for Gerry. He told Gerry how to apply for welfare. Once Gerry got on the welfare rolls his money worries lifted a little. Henry also taught Gerry how to write news stories. "Nobody's going to read this," Henry told him after Gerry showed Henry something he'd written for a local paper. "Go to a library and take out a book on journalism. Teach yourself how to write like a reporter does. Then you'll have a skill to sell."
    So off Gerry went to the local library and borrowed books on journalism. Soon Gerry taught himself how to write a news story and then feature articles. Yet Gerry had another problem. He needed to buy some clothes. "Never buy second hand clothes," his salesman father had told him years ago. Yet Henry told him differently. "Go to the Salvation Army store on Fourth Avenue," he said. "You can get clothes there far cheaper than you'll pay in a regular clothing place."
    So off Gerry went to the Sally Ann and sure enough Henry was right again. At the Sally Ann he found cheap clothes that were still in good condition. Once again Henry had solved another one of Gerry's problems.
     Yet there was a problem that came up between Henry and Gerry. It was called 'politics' and soon it drove the two of them apart.
     

      
     
   

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 31, Part One.

   The Saviour and His Disciple by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


      This is a story of two men. One helped the other survive. Yet in the end their politcs ended their friendship.
    It was September 1975 and Gerry Coser was in a hell of a mess. In fact, Gerry was the mess. The balding blonde short 33 year old was a graduate of the University of Toronto. Yet he had already walked out of been forced to leave two careers and his savings were quickly running down. To add to his troubles he had big physical problems too.
      "How shall I live?" this former teacher and one time government clerk asked himself as he looked
around his grim two room suite in a rooming house on Vancouver's Kitsilano district. "And what am I going to do with my life?"
    As the leaves on the trees outside his rooming house flared into red, orange and yellow, pain wracked his lower back. Coser's doctor was a cheerful transplant from Northern Ireland."You've got arthritis in your lower vertabrate,"the doctor told Coser. "It could get worse and if it does you'll probably have trouble walking." Doctor McCullin sent Gerry Coser to a back specialist who told him just to rest. Yet this man, a massive former athletic coach, told Coser that right now he had no cure for the pain in Coser's back except pain killers.
      Coser's physical pains weren't the only problem that plagued him. His mind was a mess too. His temper was out of control. Massive waves of anger would sometimes sweep across his brain. He would often yell and scream at people. At other times sadness would wrack his mind and he felt like crying. He still felt the pain of his mother and sister's deaths of a few years back. Still , he couldn't break into tears.
    "Men don't cry," was the rule he live by. So he resisted crying and ended up feeling even worse.
Gerry's girlfriend Vivian, a 20 something bureaucrat, had walked out on him, unable to take his abusive ways. "I don't ever want to see you again," she told him and then  stalked out of the rooming house where Gerry lived. He took one last painful glance at her as she walked out into the street. She did have nice shapely legs and a nice big behind that were now encased in blue jeans, he had to admit to himself. He never saw her again.
   After she left, he scanned the local papers, went to the local library to look at books on the shelves. Where were the answers to his problems, he wondered. Were they in books or what?  And then just as things were looking even worse, a saviour came into view. Henry Afflick was a tall gangly American draft resister. Gerry had met him in a political meeting. Afflick came from northern California and one day he and Gerry ran into each other again at a greasy spoon restaurant on Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano. Gerry poured out his problems to Afflick.
    Henry smiled as he sipped his coffee. "I've got the answers for you Gerry," Henry said as he pushed his long thick brown hair backwards from his forehead. "Have you ever read Arthur Janov's 'The Primal Scream'? It can help really help you." Then Afflick gave Gerry a copy of Janov's book.
   
    
    
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 30, Part Three A Deficit Hawk Who Wanted Deep Cuts.

     A Deficit Hawk Who Wanted Deep Cuts - Part Three.


    In the late 20th century Ruth Gelfand's world looked good. The governments of most of the western world made deep cuts to social programs. The economy of the world had survived a crisis in East Asia. Everything was going well until there was a massive downturn or near collapse in the high tech sector of the stock market. Still this was followed by an economic boom. And Gelfand forecast a continuing growth of the economy.
      Yet then in the years 2007 and 20008 the western economy and then large parts of the world went into what was called 'A Great Recession'. In fact it was a near depression that left millions of people around the world without a job. "Ireland is in bad shape," an Irish immigrant said in Vancouver in 2011. "that's why I came to Canada." Not only Ireland but dozens of other countries including Greece, Italy France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the U.S. and parts of Canada fell inot a massive slump.
     Still, Sandra Gelfand felt fulfilled even if she worried too about the terrible slump. Canada did eventually emerge from this terrible downturn and she had stopped the Canadian governments from spending too much money. She had done well for herself and her business allies. She remained a hard core conservative and a happy woman.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 30, Part Two; A Deficit Hawk Who Believed in Deep Cuts.

      A Deficit Hawk Who Believed in Deep Cuts - Part Two.


    Sandra Gelfand was facing big life pressures in the mid-1970's. She married another Ph.D student who was an American. Yet then the marriage fell apart and she was left alone to take care of their two children. After much hard work she got her Ph.D. Yet she was living in the New England area of the U.S. without a man or a job. Of course she did have an advanced degree. By now she was tired of the United States and felt homesick. She applied for a job with a Canadian bank and she got the job.
     From 1973 and into the 1980's, the economies of most of the western countries fell into a crisis. On the heels of two massive OPEC oil price hikes, inflation went through the roof. Jobless totals took off. And as Milton Friedman had warned in the 1960's, unemployment and inflation rose together. Meanwhile governments ran up massive debts and deficits. Now the old Keynesian models of running and growing the economy broke down. Soon right wing Friedmanite notions moved to the forefront.
    "Democratic socialism," said Peter Jenkins, "or in the continental usage, social democracy was inflationary." The solution? Friedman and his wife Rose Director Friedman thought they had the answers. Monetarism, or control of the money supply was the way to go. Yet as the Friedmans pointed out in their late 1970's best seller called 'Free To Choose'  monetary control was not enough. New sterner measures were required. The power of trade unions must be curbed. Government programs that helped the poor had to be cut to the bone. Tax breaks for the richwere necessary and must be increased. Meanwhile interest rates must go up until they sweep away inflation. Finally governments must stop running deficits  and government debt must be paid down.
     U.S. president Ronald Reagan, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Canada's prime minister Jean Chretien and his finance minister Paul Martin followed all or some of the Friedmans' advice. The policies worked to bring inflation and joblessness under control. Yet the cost was high. The poor got poorer, the middle class felt more squeezed and the rich got much richer. Sandra Gelfand embraced all of the Friedmanite policies. "Was the welfare state a dangerous error from the very first moment of its existence?" asked the American socialist Michael Harrington in the 1980's. Harrington replied that its wasn't at all. Yet Gelfand argued that it was.
     Now working one one of the bank towers that lined Toronto's Bay Street, she called for massive cuts to social programs. She told Finance Minister Paul Martin in the 1990's, that his sweeping cuts to social programs didn't go deep enough. He must, she said, make even  a greater effort  to reduce the debt and the deficit. Yet Sandra Gelfand was on a roll. Her hard core conservative economics was now very popular with the leading federal politicians. She was a success.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 30, Part One. A Deficit Hawk Wanted To Cut Deep

   Chapter 30 , Part One. A Deficit Hawk

      There were thousands of young women called Sandra in the English speaking part of 1950's Montreal. Yet somehow Sandra Gelfand or 'Sandy' as she was called, stood out in the crowd. She had dark short hair, a flashing smile and always wore neat clothes and well shod shoes. She was clever and was one of the few young women who could match most of the males in high school classes in algebra, geometry and science.
    "My daughter's going to McGill University," her proud father a small businessman, told his friends in the summer of 1960. McGill stood out as a downtown English speaking bastion in the city of Montreal. In Montreal back then about half the population spoke English as their first language while the other half spoke French. Nearly all the people in the rest of the province of Quebec were French Canadians. Yet McGill and  its deans and teachers could for now  ignore the coming upheaval of 'The Quiet Revolution' that would change many things in Quebec.
     At one time Jewish students like Gelfand and her friends would have had a hard time getting into McGill as students. But those days were in the past. Once she entered university, Gelfand took tough hard science courses and she did well in them. Yet she also in first year took an economics history course and was turned on by economics. "If you want to study economics," the economics teacher  told her, "you have to study mathematics." Since Gelfand was already studying mathematics she didn't need to make many big changes in her cirriculum. She went on to study calculus, advanced calculus and linear algebra. Once again, she was a woman in classes where nearly all the students were male. Yet here too she excelled in the courses she took.
    She also read books by big name economists. Yet she liked the right wing economists best. Milton Friedman's book 'Capitalism and Freedom' became one of her favourite books. While most of her girl friends read romances or thumbed through the pages of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine, Gelfand ploughed through the works of conservative thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Frederick Hayek.
     After graduating from McGill with honours, Sandra won a scholarship to a university in New England. Here, she laboured through graduate school and got an M.A. in economics. Then she had to study even harder to get a Ph.D. in economics. Yet she succeeded here too.
       By now it was the late 1960's and U.S. universities and colleges were embroiled in protest. In the streets of America, African Americans, whose protests had ignited protest by other groups, were demanding social justice. Thousands of students marched against the draft and the Vietnam War. Soon these groups were followed by Spanish speaking Americans, First Nations and women. Yet Gelfand remained unmoved by all this furore. "Politics is not for me,' she told her friends. Also she objected to some of the demands of  many protestors. "They want too many things for free," she said. Her parents had worked hard in their small business to make a living and others, Sandra felt, should do the same.
  
   

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. Chapter 29, Part Two: the Jihadi That Never was by Dave Jaffe.

    The Jihadi That Never Was: Part Two.


    Khalid tuned into the chat line that he'd found on the Internet. He grew his brown beard longer and started to wear a long robe.He joined  a local mosque where people had scrawled things on the outside walls like "A Bas Les Arabes" or "Down With Arabs." He prayed to Allah five times a day. The mosque didn't support Salafi Islam but it kept Khalid in touch with Islamic precepts or rules.
     The world one day said the Salafis would be ruled according to Sharia law. All Jews and Christians can be killed. Also on the targets of jihadis were Shiites and Sunni Moslems who co-operated with western countries. The black flag of Islam would fly everywhere. All wars would end and injustice would vanish. Of course some people would have to be killed especially those who stood in the way of what the Salafis called 'The Project' or the victory of Salafi Islam. This creed in some ways resembles so many utopian projects of the past. "Innumerable millions of human beings were killed in the 20th century in the name of utopia," wrote the Polish essayist and poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz lived for a time in communist ruled Poland and his book 'The Captive Mind' is an invaluable guide to what communist rule was like. Communism too tried to establish a utopia but in the end millions died under communist rule.
      "The Christians hate us too," Moslems on the chat line told Khalid. Khalid didn't check with others to find out whether this was true. Yet he did notice that when he wore a long robe and grew his beard longer, some people seemed to bump into him on purpose, while others swore at him in the street.
    Soon the people on the chat line asked Khalid whether he thought of going to Syria to fight the Assad regime. Khalid started to wonder whether he should go there. He learned that in that country young jihadis and others were trying to overthrow the government of Bashir al-Assad. Of course the odds of coming back alive from such a project weren't too high. For Assad's government is backed by Russian and Iranian troops. Assad and his allies have wiped out hundreds of jihadis.
      So though Khalid admitted that he wanted to go to Syria, he never did get there. He knew or learned that many young warriors for Islam or the Salafi brand of Islam had died there. "It would have been dangerous for me," he notes. Yet though Khalid never did get to Syria, he was visited at his parents' home by the R.C.M.P. He says now that he's under constant R.C.M.P. surveillance and he can't rravel more than 10 kilometres from his parents' house without notifying the police. This may or may not be true. For this writer met Khalid in Vancouver which is a long way from Montreal. So maybe he did tell the police he was going to take a trip across Canada. Or maybe he wasn't under surveillance at all.
     In any case all over the world there are millions of young men who like Khalid are jobless and poor. Some of them find their destiny or future in crime or war. Khalid was lucky. He's still alive. Yet his future remains doubtful for he has no money and no job. Still, as he says, "I won't be violent that's for sure." He remains a Moslem but not a violent one.
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: The Jihadi That Never Was - by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 29: Part One.

  The Jihadi That Never Was - Part One

    You don't expect to find a real live jihadi on the west island of Montreal, and in fact you may not. Khalid claims to live on the west island and also claims that he wanted to go to Syria to fight the Bashir al-Assad regime. Yet he never did. Still, he did try to change his life.
    Khalid is living in Quebec's most English speaking area - or one of them at least - in a mostly French-speaking province. He's a Moslem, a tall brown-skinned man in his late 20's. He also lives in a province where Moslems aren't exactly liked. "I thought Islam would be my saviour," Khalid says. Yet this wasn't always true. He came to Quebec City as a five year old from the Middle East. His father was a stern person who didn't like to discuss politics. His mother had a more gentle streak to her. Both his parents were middle class immigrants. His mother was trained as a nurse and his father had been a pharmacist. Yet in the snowy winters of Quebec City and its sweltering summers , they had to look for other jobs.
    The family moved south to the Montreal area. Even here, times were tight. His father ended up running a Dollarama-type store while his mother worked as a food server. Khlalid studied in school, learning English and French. Yet studying weighed him down. His sister Fatima thrived in school. He didn't . He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and was soon hanging out with a gang of wanna be's.
     Like the other gang members, Khalid started to smoke marijuana, drink alcohol and steal. "My son is a crook," his mother said when she found some expensive shoes in his bedroom closet. "You'll soon be in  prison, unless you shape up." Khalid didn't shape up. He was arrested by the police for theft and spent a month in prison. Then he was released and drifted back to the two bedroom apartment he shared with his family. As he gazed at the wall of the living room where he slept every night, he wondered what he'd do now? And what would he do with his entire life? He tossed and turned on his single bed but no answers came for a while.
     Then the answer turned up on the Internet. There he discovered a chat line of young people who were Moslems. The chat line may have been a recruiting station for jihadis. "Stop smoking," the young men on the line told him. "Stop drinking alcohol. Read the Koran and follow the way of Islam." Of course, the Islam the site was preaching was not a typical Islamic creed. It belonged to a fanatical strain of Islam called Salafiism.

The Lady Was A Liberal and A Feminist Too. Chapter 28 and Part Four of Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe

     Chapter 28, Part Four of Right,Left and Centre.


    "I hear you," a woman told Linda who came to complain about the noise that the woman and her new partner were causing in the Northland building. Yet this woman and her male partner kept causing Linda problems - until they both left.
    During the 12 years that Linda ran the building, she met several men who interested her. One was a  young engineer who came from Serbia. Then she fell in love with a Mennonite farmer-businessman.It looked for a while they would marry. Yet then this man caused her many problems. And after living together on a Gulf Island for a while they split up after Linda felt abused and put down many times. One man who came into Linda's life was a young man who lived in the apartment building and was a saviour and a real friend. Then one tragic morning he was out jogging in Ottawa and was hit by a car. He never recovered from this terrible accident and now lives on Vancouver Island as a mute crippled person who can't move and can't talk. Linda was devastated.
     Linda's mother passed away in the 21st century. Linda then sold the building and finally ended up in a condo not far from Vancouver's downtown area. One small stroke and then a bigger one nearly sidelined her forever. Yet she recovered. Friends came and left her life. She travelled to Australia, Europe and a few places in between.
     Northland is now  writing her memoirs and she is a fine writer. She remains a committed feminist and a supporter of the federal Liberals. "I will continue to support the federal Liberals," she says.  She still canvasses for the Liberals in federal elections. Her life of 71 years has had its ups and downs. Yet she's sill got a few more interesting chapters ahead.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: by Dave Jaffe Chapter 28, Part Three: The Lady was A Liberal and A Feminist Too.

      Chapter 28, Part Three:


     Linda became a landlord but at times the experience drained her completely.  In the 1990's er mother could no longer run the apartment building she owned. So Linda now ran the place . The biggest problem she faced was the tenants. Some wouldn't pay their rent on time. Others moved out of the building and left all their possessions behind, leaving Linda with the task of cleaning up behind them. Then there was the young woman who move into a suite on her own and then hooked up with a man. Both of them were very noisy and caused endless problems.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians;Chapter 28 Part Two by Dave Jaffe: She Was A Liberal and A Feminist Too.

   Chapter 28, Part Two.


    In the late 1960's, Linda went to to the University of British Columbia. There, she studied sociology and drank beer in the ten-new Student Union Building. She also started to hang out with politicos and feminists. She graduated from U.B.C. after four years and ended up hosting a local television show that dealt with women's issues. Linda also helped set up an ombudswomen's service that helped women with issues like abortion and discrmination. Years later she came across a description of the ombudswomen's services in a copy of a thesis written by a much younger feminist. The thesis attacked the whole set up of the ombudswomen's service on the grounds that it was a racist organization that condescended to women of colour.
    "This is totally untrue," Linda said. "On the contrary. we went out of our way to treat everybody equally especially the women of colour who we worked with." In any case Linda didn't only stick to women's issues. She had an active social life and in the mid-1970's, she married a New Democratic party member who was working for Dave Barrett, the then N.D.P. premier of B.C. Barrett turned up at the wedding. Linda took part in B.C. N.D.P. provincial campaigns yet federally still sometimes favoured the Liberals. This wasn't so strange. For many voters in Metro Vancouver often vote N.D.P. in the provincial elections but then vote Liberal federally.
     So everything was going well for Linda Northland in the mid-1970's. She had a good job and a nice husband. Yet then everything started to go bad. She developed anxiety attacks. She went to a prominent psychiatrist who was connected to the N.D.P. "These pills will help you," he told her and he put Linda on some tranquillizers. "They'll get rid of your anxiety attacks." The pills did indeed quell her anxiety but they came with side effects. She started to get fat and the pills numbed her feelings. She ended up shuffling around the streets of Vancouver, a sad looking woman who could barely talk.
     "Poor Linda," some of her friends said. "She's gone around the bend." Her marriage fell apart and she stopped doing anything. Yet then in the late 1980's a saviour appeared. Mohammed was a Palestinian engineer who rented an apartment in the Northland building. By now Linda was trying to help her mother run the apartment building. "You must get off those pills," Mohammed told her when she told him her problems. "You must face the world without them. They're killing you." With Mohammed's help, Linda wrenched herself free from her addiction to the pills. Yet it was tough.
       She never forgave the psychiatrist who gave her the pills. Yet more troubles lay ahead. A politician may have fallen in love with her and kept sending her flowers. She had to tell him that she just wanted to be left alone. After all he was married and showed no signs of leaving his wife. He then barred Linda from his constituency office. After that, Linda stayed away from most politicians. "I can't believe the way he treated me," She said years later.
    Linda's mother was now in her late 70's. Linda ended up running the small apartment building. She had good tenants, bad tenants and some in between. Yet her experience of being a landlord for 12 straight years was at times very hard on her.