It would have been enough for Canada’s Senate to issue a condemnation of interprovincial barriers to trade, and to criticize Canadian and provincial government foot-dragging on the issue. Convoluted legal rules preventing Canadians from different provinces from engaging in voluntary trade with each other are just as wrongheaded and harmful as their international counterparts. But the Senate went one better last week and openly mocked this country’s internal trade barriers.
Why do people want to be led? I can see wanting to be advised by someone in possession of some hard-won wisdom and experience. I get wanting to be taught by people who’ve accumulated troves of knowledge on certain topics. I can understand the benefits of being supervised by a capable manager in the performance of work offered voluntarily in exchange for money. But led? I don’t want to be led. What am I, a four-year-old? If a tree falls in the forest and no union is there to harass the family-run logging company that cut it down, does the injustice of it all still make a sound? That’s one of the questions animating Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey’s brilliant 1964 novel. On a more intimate level, there are also the family dynamics of two half-brothers, a dozen years apart, who haven’t seen each other in a dozen years. Can they get beyond past hurts and ongoing miscommunications? |
Who Writes ThisBradley Doucet is a Montreal writer and the English Editor of Le Québécois Libre. More of This
June 2016
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