Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians. Chapter 45. Part One

   The Life and Death of a Canadian Mystic by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


   "I couldn't help it, officer," a driver in his 30's, told an R.C.M.P. officer one dark wet night in March of 2002. "This guy was just walking in the road right in front of me. So I didn't see him till my car was right on top of him. My God, is he dead?"
     Don Graves, a 54 year old man now lay flat on his back. He was indeed dead. He had stopped breathing on a highway in Coquitlam, a growing suburb to the east of Vancouver. As the March rain pelted down, the R.C.M.P. officer took notes in her notebook and finally an ambulance with its screaming siren drew up alongside the dead man. It was yet another death on Canada's highways, one of 2000 that happen every year.
     The dead man, Don Graves, was a divorced father of a daughter in her 20's, who now lived in Seattle, Washington. His former wife Felicia, worked in a bank in downtown Vancouver. Don Graves had searched for spiritual enlightenment in several countries, some of which were thought to be dangerous. Yet he had died in a middle class suburb of Canada. Now his searching was over. He was gone for good.
     "Don was a seeker," his older brother Edward said when he heard about Don's death. "He wasn't satisfied living here." 'Here' was Willowdale, an affluent part of Toronto where Don grew up. He went to primary and secondary schools in Willowdale and seemed to enjoy life. He played several sports but golf was his favourite game.  By the time he was 15, he'd play golf with his father, a salesman for an auto parts company and sometimes Don would beat his dad.
    Yet then in his late teens his life changed. He started to read books by Aldous Huxley like 'The Doors of Perception' and 'Heaven and Hell'. Here the nearly blind Huxley wrote about his use of L.S.D and mescaline.  Dan's focus soon shifted from playing golf to using mostly illegal drugs like marijuana and L.S.D. The English-born Huxley had died in California about four years before Dan started reading his works. Yet now it was 1967 and there were other devotees of L.S.D. and other drugs who were out there, preaching the virtues of taking L.S.D. Timothy Leary the L.S.D. advocate was touring North America, touting the virtues of this drug and other hallucinogens.
     "Tune in, turn on, drop out," Leary told North American youth. Meanwhile the Oregon-born novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters  were out in California, handing out L.S.D. as if it was candy. Thousands, then tens of thousands of Canadian youth became hippies, at least for a while. They flocked to Toronto's Yorkville district and the Kitsilano area of Vancouver. They put flowers in their hair and slept or 'crashed' as it was called in old houses, that soon had ten or more people living in these places. They wore jeans, and colourful costumes and openly smoked marijuana and made love in public. It was the springtime of what was later called 'The Counterculture'.
   
    

The Politics of Some Canadians. Chapter 44. Part Five by Dave Jaffe

      Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Five by Dave Jaffe

      "Bland is good," said longtime Ontario premier Tory 'Brampton' Bill Davis. By the mid-1980's the long Conservative rule in Ontario was ending. Yet that didn't bother Arthur Ross.
    He was by now a happy very hard working lawyer who moved among some of Ontario's elites. In the federal election of 1988 he supported free trade with the United States while his party's leader John Turner was against it. In that election Ross played no part at all.  Yet he remained a federal Liberal while voting Conservative in the election. He didn't tell people how he'd voted.
      In any case, Ross was now a genuine member of Canada's upper middle class. His motto might have been, "Change your name, change your social status." It worked for him and it worked for many other successful Canadians too.
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians: Chapter 44. Part Four.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status by Dave Jaffe. Part Four.


     Arthur Ross nee Rosen had made it in Trudeau's Canada. He ended up sitting on a number of  boards of  a few small companies and on one or two boards of larger firms. Here he met Liberal Party members and some Conservative Party members too. too. from the 1940's to the late 1980's, the Ontario Tories  ran the province as successfully as the federal Liberals ran Canada throughout most of the 20th century.  Ross decided that he agreed with some of the Conservative opinions that were floated around the board rooms.

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltiocs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 44, Part Three.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Three, by Dave Jaffe.


           In 1969 Arthur Rosen graduated from the Faculty of Law and soon became a lawyer. Yet though he got a job with an Anglophone law firm in downtown Montreal, the political situation in Quebec was heating up. In Canada's centennial year of 1967, Ross and his fiancé Deborah Steinberg went along with hundreds of thousands of others to the world's fair held in Montreal. They enjoyed themselves at the fair called 'Expo 67' and the fair was a landmark in Canadian history. Yet at the same time, French  President Charles De Gaulle came to visit Canada.
     "Vive le Quebec libre'  or "Long live a free Quebec" de Gaulle told a mostly separatist crowd at Montreal's city hall. By saying this, De Gaulle encouraged a growing separatist feeling among Quebec's French Canadians.
    In 1968, Pierre Elliot Trudeau won the general election for the Liberal Party and became Canada's new Prime Minister. Yet just around that time, Rene Levesque stalked out of the Quebec Liberal Party and set up a separatist political party later to be named the Parti Quebecois.
      "We are Quebecois," Levesque said in his book that was soon published after he left the Quebec Liberal Party. "We are attachéd to this one corner of the earth where we can be completely ourselves."
Levesque's book was called 'Option Quebec' and called for a completely independent Quebec.
      Then in 1969, a big sovereigntist march demonstrated outside  McGill University. The march was led by the Marxist political science instructor Stan Gray, whom Ross had clashed with several times when they were both undergraduates. Bombs also kept going off at anglophone targets.
      In 1970 a violent separatist cell kidnapped the British consul in Montreal James Cross. A second cell kidnapped and then killed the Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau imposed a War Measures Act on Canada. Troops patrolled the streets of Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City. Some troops came right past Ross's downtown law office. Hundreds of separatist sympathizers had their houses searched and some ended up in prison.
     "Just watch me," Prime Minister Trudeau said when asked by reporter Tim Ralfe how far he would go to crush the terrorist Front de Liberation de Quebec that claimed credit for the kidnappings and bombings. Trudeau did indeed crush the FLQ, which never re-appeared after 1970. Yet the sovereigntist threat didn't disappear. In 1976, the separatist Parti Quebecois led by Rene Levesque won the provincial election. Soon tens of thousands of anglophones left Quebec.
       Ross and his wife Deborah and their two children were among the people who fled.  Ross's mother Leah and his father had told Arthur about the French crowds that attacked Jews in east end Montreal in the 1930's and 1940's. "They hate us the Francoisen," Leah told Arthur and his wife Deborah. Arthur thought that the Quebec sovereigntists weren't as anti-Semitic as the French Canadian fascists of the 1930's. Still neither he nor his wife wanted to take any chances. They moved to Toronto, where Arthur got articled as a lawyer. "I miss Montreal," Deborah said. "But this is a nice place to bring up children.
     Ross remained a federal Liberal. He ended up as the president of Liberal constituency organization. Yet as usual he kept his religion in the background and changed his surname officially to Ross. He rarely went to synagogues though his children, a son and a daughter did go to Hebrew school. In the wealthier atmosphere of Toronto he felt at home. He was now a bond expert and his law practice thrived.
     

     
   
   
    
     

Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Dome Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 44: Part Two

  Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Two by Dave Jaffe


        Arthur Ross never did find the correct reply to the WASP woman's question demanding to know why Jewish women at McGill University dressed up while Wasp women didn't. At least he didn't find the correct answer to the question when he was young. Still, years later as a successful lawyer he did figure out the right reply. Yet by then he didn't care.
     Still as  an undergraduate he ploughed through many courses in political science, history and economics. He scored high in exams. Also like many young Canadians bent on success, he joined the Liberal Party of Canada.
       Ross had no time for the Progressive Conservatives, who he knew hadn't been very welcoming to Jews in the past. As for the newly-formed New Democratic Party, it leaned too far to the left for Ross. "The Liberal Party is the party of power," a professor of political science said in a course that Ross was taking. "In the nearly 100 years of Canada's life, Liberal governments have usually run the country." For example the professor pointed out that in 1963 which was the time he was lecturing, Liberal governments ruled in both Ottawa and Quebec City.
     Ross knew how powerful the Liberal Party was and soon took out a membership in the party. Then he ran for the university party's executive and ended up on the party's policy committee. Here, he made many contacts and also ended up meeting leading Liberal lights, like Canada's Prime Minister Lester Pearson and Quebec's minister of Natural Resources, the fiery Rene Levesque.
     Ross studied hard too. He graduated from the faculty of arts with an honours degree in political science and then enrolled in the Faculty of Law so as to be a lawyer. He was on his way to affluence. He printed up a business card with his soon-to-be adopted name on it. 'Arthur Ross' it said. Still in law classes the teachers still referred to him as "Arthur Rosen".
     Ross studied French too and became quite fluent in the language. As French Canadian nationalism and separatism were now rearing their heads, he knew that if a lawyer couldn't speak French in Quebec he or she was operating with a big handicap.
    1969 should have been a great year for Ross, and in a way it was. He graduated from the Faculty of Law and was now an accredited lawyer. Yet there were a few speed bumps on his road to success.
     

Right, Left and centre: The Poltiocs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 44, Part One.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 44, part one.


     Rosenbaum became Rosen which morphed into Ross. It was a typical progression in a surname. Many Jews and other ethnics changed their surnames and/or shortened them. Then they could blend seamlessly into the English-sounding Anglophone Canadian majority. No one  would bother you at least with a name like Ross. Or so Arthur Ross, born Arthur Rosen, figured.
      Arthur Ross as he liked to call himself, was a tall dark haired adolescent who went to McGill University in downtown Montreal in the 1960's. Back then many male students wore suits, ties and overcoats or raincoats. Women wore trendy dresses or skirts, coats and cashmere sweaters. Of course the clothes people wore back then, did depend on how rich your parents were.
      A few years later, great cultural and political rebellions swept across parts of the globe. Old dress codes vanished like many other habits. Yet when Arthur Ross first showed up at McGill, those events lay a few years away. So Arthur Ross usually wore a suit and tie.
     He came from the Jewish area of Snowden in Montreal. He was bright and aggressive and like many Jews back then had a fierce desire to succeed. He won a scholarship to McGill University, which no longer restricted Jews from becoming students there, which it had done for a quite a few years before. Art's father was a cutter in a dress factory of which he was part owner. Hyman Rosen, Art's father, had slaved long and hard to sent his only son to McGill. His eldest daughter Rachel became a primary school teacher, while his younger daughter Frances was a legal secretary.
     "Don't screw up Arthur," Hyman Rosen told his son on Arthur's first day at McGill. "We're depending on you." Arthur didn't intend to make mistakes. He knew the road to riches lay through getting a profession. At McGill, he aimed to study to be a lawyer and get a job with a big legal firm. Yet at this stage in the early 1960's, most big law firms were staffed by White Anglo-Saxon protestants, or 'WASPS' as they were called. The WASPs for the most part didn't like Jews and would never hire one.
    At McGill, few Jews that Arthur ever knew  dated  WASPs or vice versa. The smoking corridor that lay just outside the university's main library was called 'The Gaza Strip' . It surely took its name from the strip on Israel's western border. Here, Israeli troops often clashed with Arabs who tried to sneak across the border into Israel and kill Israelis.
      No gunfire ever shook the Gaza strip at McGill. Here, students, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
exchanged pleasantries while smoking tobacco. Yet in classrooms and outside them, few Jews and WASPs hung out together. And sometimes the feelings of Christians towards Jews did surface.
     "Why do your Jewish women dress up so much?" one young WASP lady asked Arthur when he first came to McGill. "We non-Jewish girls dress much more simply." Someone could have told this young woman that dressing up was a way for an ethnic minority to assert itself. Yet Arthur didn't have a reply for this question - at least not yet. He was only 18 years old and hadn't yet studied the sociology of ethnic groups. So he remained baffled by the question, at least for now. Yet that would soon change.
    
    

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43. Part Three.

   From California to Canada: One Woman's Journey Through Adulthood. By Dave Jaffe. Part Three.


     Marion Lansbury was a hardworking  teacher. She started out in Vancouver as a substitute teacher. Then she got a permanent position in a school. Soon, she went back to university and got a Master's degree in education.. She then applied for and got a job as a principal in a primary school.  Yet here she ran into problems.
     Politically speaking , Lansbury leaned to the moderate left. Although she had spent time as a child in Louisiana and then Texas, she didn't buy into the conservatism of those states' politics. She favoured strong government programs, single  payer Medicare, and had always opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Still, most politics bored her. Robert her partner was a strong supporter of the New Democratic Party. Marion went once with him to an N.D.P. convention and she never went to another convention again. "It was just so boring," she said later about the convention.
    Yet despite her basic liberalism, she was a perfectionist, and had to remain in control of everything that was going on around her. "These are just typical character traits of an adult child of an alcoholic,"said one woman who heard about Marion's personality. This woman's husband taught in the school where Marion served as principal. Lansbury demanded very high standards of performances from the teachers. A teacher at the school remarked, "This woman's a fanatic. Sure this place pays my bills but I've got another life outside this place. You just can't please this lady."
    In fact, Marion Lansbury couldn't please Robert her partner any more either. She now retreated from Robert and spent days alone in the house they shared near the Vancouver waterfront. She couldn't understand why Robert loved her. Soon, they split up and Lansbury went back to teaching, and not being a principal.
      Marion Lansbury's lack of self-worth and some other hurtful features of her personality came straight from her alcoholic mother's inability to be a true and loving parent. After Lansbury retired, she went back to the United States. She journeyed into the south Pacific area and spent many happy hours in the sun. She enjoyed herself there but never overcame the trials and traumas of her childhood. Yet after all, who does?
   

ZRight, Left and Centre: the Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43, Part Two.

    From California to Canada. One Woman's Journey to Adulthood by Dave Jaffe.


       Marion Lansbury graduated from the state university near San Francisco in the late 1960s. She'd never lived in a big city before. Yet she adapted. She met two men at different times and made love to them both. Yet these casual affairs didn't last. "Why do these men like me?" she often wondered to herself.
      Obviously Lansbury had a problem with her low self- image. Yet this didn't stop her academic progress. Having finished with her undergraduate work, she enrolled in a pre-med course at the same university she'd graduated from. Yet she didn't have the money to pay for all the required expenses. So she joined the Peace Corps.
    "Ask not what your country can do for you," President John F. Kennedy told his U.S. audience in his 1961inaugauration speech. "Ask what you can do for your country." Kennedy set up the Peace Corps to harness the youthful idealism that was floating around the U.S. of A. Thousands of young Americans flocked to the Peace Corps and ended up working  for two years in faraway lands.
     Lansbury joined the Peace Corps in the late 1960's. She took her training on another Californian university campus. She found the preparations and courses tough and grueling. "The psychological tests and exercises were very stressful," she recalled .Along the way a number of her fellow inductees dropped out. Yet  again, she survive and thrived.
    She chose to go to South Korea and for weeks on end she learned Korean, in a course given by a young male instructor. When her training ended, a big military plane whisked her  across the Pacific  Ocean. She ended up in a small village in South Korea where she spent two years teaching children.
    Sometimes she visited Seoul, South Korea's capital city. At one evening meal when she was in Seoul, explosions rocked the  city. North Korean soldiers and spies had sneaked into South Korea to kill the South Korean leader Park Chung Hee. The attempt failed and most of the infiltrators were killed. Marion could hear shooting and see streaks of tracer bullets flash around in the night time sky. "It was frightening," she said.
     Once out of the Peace Corps, Lansbury became a teacher in a primary school in northern California. On a summer trip to Mexico she met and fell in love with a short transplanted Englishman named Robert.  She followed him to Vancouver, B.C.  in Canada and ended up teaching there.
      At times, Canada disappointed her. The weather in coastal British Columbia  was often cold, rainy and dull. Some Canadians she met were hostile to Americans. "Americans run this county," one man told her. "And they don't run it very well." Others questioned why an American like her should come here and take jobs away from native born Canadians. To forestall this criticism, Marion became a Canadian citizen. Yet she also found that Canadians lacked the patriotism of Americans. "Your Canada Day celebrations are very tame," she once remarked.