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| Sunday, 25 January 2004 |
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Flying into the Canadian winter Toronto Diary by Ajith Samaranayake There lay the city as the British Airways airbus descended like some huge bird flying into the heart of a Canadian winter against which the travellers had been warned from the heat of Colombo itself. It would be cold, everybody had said and it was but then it was winter after all. The weather at destination, the panel on the aircraft had said, "very cold", but life goes on, as it has to. Warding off the winter with caps, gloves, mittens and several layers of clothing the people stream into what looks like a phantasmagoric landscape. For the sun is shining all right but yet it is cold. The reason is that the wind blows the cold into people's faces and it is the wind one has to be careful about. The sidewalks are encrusted with mud and no birds sing. The remaining birds are perched high up on the skeletal remains of the trees, hapless hostages to the seasonal cycle. Canada's new Prime Minister Paul Martin is in his heaven in Ottawa and all is almost right with this part of the world. Mr. Martin is the beneficiary of the peculiar Canadian system where any change in the leadership of a political party is automatically reflected in the office of Prime Minister if that party is in office even in the mid-term. So Mr. Martin having become leader of the Liberal Party is currently sitting pretty. But commentators see Mr. Martin as an unlikely Liberal leader. One of them wrote that the new Prime Minister will not be seen by the electorate at large as 'one of us'. His friends are all the fat cats of business and the captains of the corporate sector, hardly a likely Liberal image. However another political pundit is of the view that he is all things to all people and embodies the present Canadian moment standing both for continuity as well as change. That appears to be a more likely explanation for a country strangely obsessed with almost existential issues of identity. For Canada is certainly not North America, the country of Mr. Bush obsessed with its self-anointed role of saving the world from all kinds of imaginary monsters. Canada is more gentle, more tolerant and occupied with the deeper issues of the time. While it would be audacious to set oneself as an authority after less than a week's stay here this appears to be a country caught between modernity and post-modernity and acutely conscious of that dilemma. But more of that later. To end, however, at the beginning the immigration officer at the airport is in a jovial mood. 'This is my most impressive signature,' he says signing the passports with a flourish. My wife asks him what his name is 'Snow' comes the reply and outside it snows. |
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