I have heard of many similar incidents by our politicians in Croatia, Bosnia and even in Sierra Leone when I was deployed there. Our "egalitarian" view is often seen as a huge insult by locals who place a lot of emphasis on ceremony and dignity.
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WHY BRAZIL DESPISES US
With as many as 25,000 protesters expected to descend on Quebec City for next week's Summit of the Americas, the government has marshalled the largest security operation yet undertaken in Canada. But concerns over security are threatening to eclipse what the summit is about. In an exclusive four-part series, including Part III today, the National Post examines some of the key issues government leaders will address, such as the growth of democracy in Latin America, economic integration and Canada's troubled relations with Brazil.
When Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, welcomes the 33 leaders scheduled to arrive in Quebec City for the Summit of the Americas next week, he is not likely to receive a friendly reception from Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Brazilian President whose government has not recovered from Canada's recent boycott of Brazilian beef.
Although the ban was eventually lifted, relations between Canada and Brazil have soured. They were not helped by the tension that existed long before the beef boycott.
The problems began on Jan. 15, 1981 -- the day Pierre Trudeau arrived in the country's capital wearing a business suit and a pair of sneakers.
Mr. Trudeau was the first Canadian prime minister to visit the country, and his Brazilian trip was part of a larger tour of developing countries to promote what he called the North-South dialogue, an initiative to forge closer relations between Canada and its impoverished counterparts in the Southern Hemisphere.
The day of his arrival in Brasilia, an editorial in the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper hailed "the stability of Canadian democratic institutions and [Canada's] political development ..." The newspaper went on to praise Mr. Trudeau and hope his visit would send an important message to Brazil's military leaders.
But things quickly changed as soon as Mr. Trudeau got off the plane. Dressed in a sombre grey business suit and wearing canvas sneakers, Mr. Trudeau made his way down the tarmac on that sweltering summer day to greet the Brazilian government delegation. The Brazilian generals, resplendent in their ceremonial uniforms for the occasion, could barely contain their astonishment. At that moment, Brazilians stopped focusing on democracy and development, and the issue became shoes; most specifically, what the Brazilian press called Mr. Trudeau's rather unfortunate choice of footwear.
For days after the prime minister's arrival, Brazilian newscasts were filled with close-up shots of his sneakers and detailed analyses of his wardrobe. Mr. Trudeau, known for his rather zany antics in Canada, quickly found his mercurial behaviour did not go over very well in Brazilian diplomatic circles. He became the butt of several jokes. One of the most popular became, "What does Mr. Trudeau wear at official receptions -- a jogging suit?"
Underlying the obsession with Mr. Trudeau's shoes was a sensitive nationalistic nerve that never recovered from what many Brazilians still consider a major national affront. "The prime minister of Canada felt he could show up in Brazil wearing sneakers because he saw Brazil as an inferior Third World backwater" went the argument that circulated among Brazil's political elite at the time.
"Brazilians never got over that," said one Canadian observer who was in Brazil at the time of Mr. Trudeau's visit. "Brazilians like to think of themselves as very proper, and very refined. They considered what Trudeau did to be an imperialist snub."
Brazilians are still sensitive and nationalistic when it comes to Canada, a country that was instrumental in Brazil's development, but is held up to scorn and ridicule by many Brazilians. At best, Canada is regarded as a satellite of the United States in Brazil; at worst, it is regarded as a major rival to Brazil's ambitions on the international trade circuit. Following the United States, the second power in the region should not be Canada, many Brazilians argue, but Brazil, Latin America's largest economy and one of the region's largest countries, with a population of more than 170 million people.
In an interesting reversal of traditional First World-Third World trading patterns, Canada exports mainly raw materials to Brazil, such as wheat and potash, while Brazil exports mainly manufactured goods to Canada, such as car parts, processed orange juice and instant coffee.
In cultural circles in Brazil, Canada is barely regarded. Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim once remarked about Canada, "Aqui nada ha." The phrase is a pun on the word "Canada" in Portuguese, which translates as, "in Canada, there is nothing."
Although political relations between the two countries had been cordial for most of the 20th century, they soured during Mr. Trudeau's visit, took a turn for the worse when two Canadians kidnapped a Brazilian executive in 1989, and almost completely fell apart in February, when Canada stopped importing tins of Brazilian beef over concerns Brazil did not have the proper procedures in place to prevent the spread of mad cow disease.
Although Canada lifted the ban three weeks after it was imposed, Brazilians are upset over what they consider yet another national affront.
In protest, two of the country's most important writers, Lygia Fagundes Telles and Nelida Pinon, cancelled their visits to the Summit of the Americas.
The writers had been invited as part of the Summit's cultural component to be held in Montreal and Quebec City later this month. In a recent letter to President Cardoso, they said they would not condone Canada's anti-Brazilian attitude by participating in an international meeting to be held on Canadian soil, and that Canada, by banning Brazilian beef exports, was being contemptuous of a developing economy.
Mr. Cardoso threatened to follow suit if the Canadian government did not lift the beef ban, which many in Brazil saw as a form of harassment linked to a multi-million-dollar trade dispute involving subsidies for airplane manufacturers in both countries. Since Brazil's Embraer was privatized in 1994, it has been involved in several disputes with Canada's Bombardier on the international trade circuit.
"We almost experienced a complete diplomatic breakdown over this issue," said James Mohr-Bell, executive director of the Brazil-Canada Chamber of Commerce in Sao Paulo. "Brazilians saw the beef ban as a continuation of the dispute involving Embraer and Bombardier. Most Brazilians saw it as an imperialistic company fighting against a Brazilian company. That's why the protests against Canada were so angry."
The situation is surprising considering Canadians helped turn Brazil into the economic powerhouse it is today. In the early part of the 20th century, a Toronto-based holding company called the Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Company Ltd. literally electrified Brazil's two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, providing electricity, tramlines and telephones.
The company became so influential in Brazil, Brazilians began to refer to it as The Light, a beacon of modernity. The name stuck even after the Canadians began to pull out of the country in the late 1960s.
"In a country then lacking even meagre supplies of coal or oil, electricity from The Light and the public utility services that it made possible helped to prepare the urban infrastructure of Rio and Sao Paulo for the spectacular growth they were to experience in the twentieth century," Canadian historian Duncan McDowall wrote in his book The Light: Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Company Limited.
For more than 80 years, The Light, or the "Canadian octopus," as Brazilians called it, was the Brazilian version of Ontario Hydro, the Toronto Transit Commission and Bell Canada all rolled into one company.
Brazilian press magnate Assis Chateaubriand wrote in a 1962 editorial that Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo were "but miserable colonial towns, infested with yellow fever and malaria, when the Canadians came in. They brought not only a business, but a mission." The Light was also a gold mine for the company's owners, a group of Canadian and Euro- pean investors headquartered in Toronto.
After the 1930 revolution in Brazil, foreign companies became subject to so many restrictive government regulations, the Canadian company found it difficult to compete. For example, by 1960, the company was forced to increase employees' wages by 38% but could not increase its rates to compensate for the pay raise.
After the military coup in 1964, the Brazilian government began to nationalize foreign industry and struck a deal with the Canadian company, later known as Brascan, to take over the company's utilities. At the time, the Canadian company was seen as an imperialistic presence that supplied essential services to Brazilians but was responsible to its shareholders in a place called Toronto.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Latin American intellectuals believed the First World's economic success was based primarily on the economic subjugation of such Third World countries as Brazil. In 1971, Mr. Cardoso, then a sociologist, wrote Dependency and Development, which launched the Dependency School Economists and was considered one of the most important texts on the manipulation of Latin American economies by the First World.
"The Light was never as bad as some of the American companies that dominated places like Central America in the last century, but many Brazilians did see it as a tool of imperialism," said a Rio de Janeiro-based writer who did not want to be identified. "Canada was always seen as 'the nice' imperialist, but an imperialist nonetheless."
If Canada was an agreeable imperialist force for most of the 20th century, then it radically became a nasty one in 1989, when Christine Lamont and David Spencer, two earnest Canadians, participated in Brazil's biggest kidnapping. The two Canadians, who were convicted for their roles in the kidnapping of Sao Paulo-based supermarket magnate Abilio Diniz in 1990, insisted they were innocent and being held as political prisoners in Brazil.
Their plea was backed by a lobbying effort on the part of Ms. Lamont's parents in Langley, B.C., who hired a high-profile Ottawa lobbyist and managed to turn the plight of Ms. Lamont and Mr. Spencer into the biggest bilateral issue between Canada and Brazil for most of the 1990s.
Although the evidence presented by Sao Paulo police against Ms. Lamont, Mr. Spencer and eight other Latin American terrorists was overwhelming, Canadian leaders who visited Brazil during the time the two were in jail pleaded with Brazilian authorities for their release or transfer to Canada.
Many Brazilians thought the whole matter rather absurd, especially because they had seen footage of Ms. Lamont and Mr. Spencer emerge from the safe-house in Sao Paulo where Mr. Diniz was held for several days in December, 1989.
The arrest of Ms. Lamont, Mr. Spencer and some of their Latin American accomplices was broadcast live on Brazilian television on the same day Brazilians went to the polls to vote in their first direct election in nearly three decades.
Brazilian security forces also found a sizeable arms cache in the house where Mr. Diniz was held in an underground cell. The kidnappers had demanded a ransom of US$30-million, which they later revealed was earmarked to buy weapons for rebels in El Salvador.
For years afterward, Brazilian diplomats and business people criticized Canadians for harbouring outdated views of Brazil as a tinpot dictatorship where the two Canadians were denied basic justice.
In the Canadian press, Ms. Lamont and Mr. Spencer were portrayed as unwitting dupes to the kidnapping, who were being housed in substandard, even dangerous jail cells without access to due process. The reverse was true. Because of the Canadian lobbying effort, Ms. Lamont and Mr. Spencer were granted preferential treatment by Canadian diplomats and received private medical and dental care.
"With the Lamont/Spencer case, Canada has shown itself to be the Third World country, not Brazil," said Veja Magazine, Brazil's most influential weekly, in 1995. "Now we know that the attitude of Canadians to the Lamont/Spencer affair was simply based on racism."
Many Canadians living in Brazil at the time agreed with the Veja assessment. Although Ms. Lamont and Mr. Spencer were returned to Canada under a prisoner-exchange treaty a few years ago, their case still leads to heated discussions in Brazil.
"The problem with our relations with Brazil has been that Canadians almost unconsciously start out thinking that they have a lot to teach these people called Brazilians," said a former Canadian diplomat to Brazil, who did not want to be identified. "There has been a certain lack of respect in Canada's relations with Brazil, and I think it goes back to Trudeau getting off the plane in tennis shoes." (National Post/Canada, 11/04/01)
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