THE GREATEST CANADIAN
Tommy Douglas is widely considered one of the greatest ever Canadians. The story most of us know is that, as a social-democratic politician, Douglas helped bring the single-payer universal health care system to Saskatchewan that eventually became the model for the rest of the country. For this alone he is seen as a kind of national hero. Less known is that Douglas was the first to call for a constitutional bill of rights for Canadians, and that his Saskatchewan model of widespread unionization and public ownership of energy and insurance services also informed similar moves in other provinces. These anecdotes form the popular narrative about Douglas but is nothing like a complete picture.
What I feel is the most interesting missing piece from Douglas' public image is that in 1933, before his political career, the man got himself a graduate degree in Sociology from McMaster University. His degree is not the interesting bit, but how he earned it. His thesis is bonkers, perfectly bonkers. It's entitled "The Problems of the Subnormal Family." And that tells you what you're in for. In fact, it delivers all the madness you might worry it could, and more.
Douglas proposed for Canada a strict system of religion-informed eugenics. He writes of his surety that the civilized Christian world should require all couples seeking marriage and children to be first certified as "fit". And fitness, right belief and behaviour, would, of course, be spelled out for all Canadians by the certain righteous authority of people like Douglas: an ordained Baptist minister. According to Douglas, anyone found to be "subnormal" due to low intelligence or moral laxity, like ever having acquired venereal disease, say, should be sent to government re-education camps. For those in detention judged incurable of their deficiencies, mental or moral, he then prescribed sterilization – for their benefit and for the good of all humanity. And as you might expect, along with captivity and sterilization, the Douglas thesis offered an additional solution for the unfit: a soul-saving program of brainwashing using the curative powers of the bible. Brilliant.
Douglas' work and others like it has and should elicit much moral, political, and social commentary. And, given the world events that came to pass in the years immediately following his thesis, you really can't help but feel a kind of reflexive outrage reading it. But I don't actually want to get into all the obvious linkages between this call for mass incarceration and eugenics and the related logic behind Nazism, Marxism, Maoism, or other political ideology, as you know where this kind of thinking took us and what's wrong there. And, yes, you're right to notice that Douglas' thesis is exactly the same thinking (madness disguised as virtue) used to justify residential schools and the resulting generations of slow genocide here in Canada...
All of that is interesting and important and should not be left out or forgotten; but what I think is even more interesting, because it really isn't talked about, is how both the degree he earned and the contents of his thesis translate into where we find ourselves today.
It's hard not to notice how clearly the Douglas thesis demonstrates the staggering rate of academic inflation seen over the decades. Apparently, in the first half of the twentieth century you could type up just thirty pages, maybe 10,000 words, of almost pure, unqualified nonsense and be conferred a graduate degree for your non-effort. For scale, in the social sciences, even if you have little to offer, today (and at any time in the last thirty years) you couldn't expect to compose less than one or two hundred pages, around 50,000 to 100,000 words. And, even if your thesis was in the form of an auto-ethnography, essentially a journal, it would be hard to justify having fewer than a hundred references to critical works in your field of study (implying that you've learned something and done some work.) Douglas, by contrast, made almost no reference to anything but his own religious convictions. So, it's hard for me to even accept that we call these very different things by the same name...
"But why is this important, or even relevant?", you ask. That we give people the same degree, one that's worth virtually nothing of what it once was, while requiring earners to do ten times the work and at a hundred times, or a thousand times, the cost feels relevant to me. And when you notice that we do this sort of thing elsewhere in our culture it only becomes more relevant and paints a picture of a much broader trend.
"What? Where else do we do this?" Well, for instance, productivity has grown almost exponentially over the decades, while compensation has largely staggered or even plummeted. And, tragically, this circumstance is also mirrored in the cost of living and in home ownership too. Incomes and minimum wage have never kept pace with the inflated costs of what it takes to live a basic, normal life in this country. Adjusted for inflation, median incomes and median house prices (almost anywhere in the country, not just in Toronto or Vancouver) have disassociated and diverged with a kind of explosive repulsion. This lack of correlation means that saving for a down-payment and eventually paying off a mortgage today takes far longer than for the previous generation, nevermind for Tommy Douglas and his cohort. And, for many, home ownership is not even an option any longer. You know this, but it's actually worse than you think.
Even take a look at the most privileged and well-positioned among us: a couple of teachers (a rare scenario of a pair of salaried, unionized, full-time employees) today, after earning two or more degrees and working on-call for years, may each eventually earn $48,000 annually when they land their first classroom. Today this sum just barely meets the "living wage" – the minimum funds needed to feed, clothe, shelter one's self (in a rental suite), and buy a monthly bus pass – in the city of Vancouver. This isn't enough money to pay off student loans, to lease and drive a car, or start saving any money (even just for a vacation.) And after committing ten years to a district these folks may see their salaries grow to $75,000. That seems like real money but it's a wage that only puts them, as a couple, in range of being able to start saving for a down-payment and eventually applying for a mortgage.
Assuming they've paid off their student debt in ten years (which is possible though unlikely) and somehow have no other debts or even bills of any kind (let's say they're thirty-five or forty and still live with their parents), with $150,000 in combined income and $50,000 cash (maybe they won the lottery) this couple would be eligible for a mortgage of around $650,000 – about a third of what they would need to buy an average home in Port Coquitlam, 30km from Vancouver, which typically sells for $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. So a house isn't an option but this couple could afford a small condo. Great. Condo it is.
What about kids? Well, if they go in for a tiny mortgage of $650,000, their combined earnings don't amount to enough, as mid-career union members with significant seniority, for them to pay some very modest bills and also cover the cost of daycare for a single child. And one of them quitting their job to stay home for four years may not be a solution and will certainly not improve their financial situation in the long run. And yet this couple lives a dream scenario, one that's really about as good you could reasonably hope for. (Last time I checked, median income in Canada sits at $34,000.)
By contrast to this imaginary couple, young people are not just settling for a simplified, down-sized, condo-ized existence as seen in the growing small, and now "tiny", home movement and childlessness trend. Instead, many find themselves within a culture-wide movement toward the broad normalization of homelessness and poverty. As you know, thousands upon thousands of folks – educated professional couples from middle-class backgrounds – find themselves forced into a precarious freelance existence. And if their work is precarious so too must be their housing. As the gig economy has grown over the last decade people have begun seeking housing alternatives, and not just alternatives to buying a detached home or taking out an incredible mortgage on a condo but alternatives to paying rent! (Which is commonly unaffordable for gainfully employed couples.) Couples with full-time employment are rapidly leaving fixed, formal housing and filling public parks and big-box parking lots, rusticating in vans and RVs as a more sustainable but still wholly precarious alternative to renting a basement bachelor's suite. This trend is so lasting and expansive that you can find magazine articles glamourizing a kind of nomadic or semi-nomadic, neo-Gypsy lifestyle. There are whole sexy coffee table books on the topic, published years ago now, with titles like "The New Nomads: Temporary Spaces and a Life on the Move", "Van Life: Your Home on the Road", "Tin Can Homestead: The Art of Airstream Living", "Trailersteading", "The Modern House Bus", and "Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom". Go look for them. And go look for #VanLife, it's trending on Twitter and Instagram. Just today I read an article about a family of five who bounce between state parks and suburban mall parking lots in Oregon and California. The hip father is quoted saying, "It's not that we're living in a van, we just sleep in there. 'Living out of a van' is the wrong way to think about it. I like to say that we 'live' in the world."
Homelessness, in this way, has become the new yoga: with it's it's own gurus, philosophy, language, and look. But now appreciate that owning and refurbishing a van is still a dream, a freedom and independence attainable only by those able to take their work on-line and also, somehow, put aside $40,000 to pick up a van (which you now have order and have long waiting lists) and to make it livable. Things have gotten so ridiculous that I keep seeing books and articles talking about "transitioning to simplicity", featuring pictures of young men in high fashion carrying a bindle. There are even new freelancing/nomad books containing bindle fabrication techniques and strategies for "ultra-simplified" living. Yes, the bindlestiff is officially making a comeback! This is where we're at.
"So what does all this mean? And how does it relate to Tommy Douglas?" Well, have we decided whole swathes of society are unfit? Seems so. Unfit for gainful or even reliable employment, unfit for home ownership and even housing, and unfit, therefore, for reproduction. And we're actively advertising and enforcing this non-decree. And we're also selling people the idea that this is either their free choice or due to their personal failings. (And when crushed by debt, unemployment, homelessness, or all of the above, we then offer them salvation through adult (re)education programs. Courses like "how to start your own business" and "becoming debt-free" are provided by three levels of government and the businesses they fund – and is done so honestly, as if these archaic teachings even relate to contemporary reality in any appreciable manner. It's all so sick that I think future generations will look back at this scenario with greater shock and disgust than I had when I learned about Tommy Douglas' eugenics proposal.
Of course, Douglas wasn't in a position to implement his strategy when he formulated it, and the horrors of the Second World War and Germany's cleansing scheme made talk of prison camps, sterilization, and social engineering much less palatable (when directed at people of European ancestry, at least) by the time he had a political platform. But notice that this guy had a plan and a guiding sense of morality that he spelled out clearly (however confused or evil in hindsight), that also targeted only a tiny minority of the population that met a narrow set of specific criteria. Reprehensible as it is, he built a kind of trap to catch what he saw as particular social vermin, and he wanted to do this because he was convinced that this was a recipe for improving all of society. What we have today seems like far worse to me. Here we have the absence of social policy: a kind of bureaucratic fiat by neglect that goes much deeper and is sure to have greater short- and long-term repercussions than anything Tommy Douglas dreamed up.
Unlike Douglas' nasty little trap, we've been working away on social engineering of another form: extracting maximum profit out of real estate with no concern for the future of this place or the people that live here or those who will be expunged (far more than merely married couples seeking children.) And while literally everyone knows of all the attendant poisons (of money laundering, tax avoidance, institutional corruption, worsening wealth inequality, and more) nobody appears capable of mustering even the minimal necessary courage (virtually none at all) to steer society toward something less brutal. And in this way we've manufactured Douglas' subnormal family while forcibly removing innumerable unfit from society and convincing ourselves that everyone is better off for it.
That's how I see this.
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