COLUMN: Champlain Monument debate fueling tribalism in Orillia

Let's talk tribalism in Orillia. Does it help build a community, or does it tear it apart? Both, as it turns out. It feels to me like tribalism builds little communities within a host community, then cannibalizes the host, leaving us living degraded lives among the broken pieces of the original. The poser proto-god AI gives us this definition: 'Tribalism is the behaviour or mindset of being intensely loyal to one's own social, political, or cultural group while often showing discrimination or bias against outsiders.' In the context of politics, AI describes tribalism as 'an 'us versus them' where people support their political party, social class, or sports team no matter what.' I notice my own tribalism — most evident in my lifelong and illogical support for the Toronto Maple Leafs — has been growing stronger in recent years. Maybe you've noticed something similar in yourself. The very act of looking up tribalism on the Internet to help puzzle out the tribalistic degradation of my local community aided by the global village may be proof of the ideas of Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is known best for his puzzling and prescient proposition that 'the media is the message,' but he also gave us the concept of the global village. Foretelling the social dynamics of the Internet before it existed, he foresaw that technology would shrink the world until it felt connected like a small town by collapsing the space between us, but he warned the trend would retribalize us. Unlike AI's rosy definitions of the global village, McLuhan saw it as a bad thing. And that brings me to the Champlain Monument. The campaign literature of many of the candidates running for Orillia City Council includes a stance on the Champlain Monument and its future. The events and public debates of the past year in Orillia seem to demand no less: declare yourself. But I wonder if a more nuanced approach is in order. How we think about the monument has created two broad tribes within Orillia: those in favour of its restoration, and those in favour of making it go away. My intention here is not to champion one side or the other, something I have done in a past column. I'm thinking instead about the larger dynamics at play, and the way the monument has become a signal of our political, social and cultural tribes. McLuhan might attribute some of this to his theory that technology changes the way our brains work. I'm thinking about the negative ways tribalism may be affecting our community and getting in the way of collectively solving problems. I'm also thinking about the ways the monument debate has attracted some of the darkest attention of the global village. Orillia now talks to itself in front of the world. There are people out there with very bad ideas who are listening. And seeing opportunities. The last council, perhaps having seen trouble coming, decided to lay the monument aside until the community has acquired the wisdom to know how to handle it. The current council couldn't leave it alone and picked at the scab until it bled all over us. No matter which tribe they have picked, I ask all city council candidates to ponder the dynamics at play as they shape the narratives they hope will win over Orillians. Win or lose, will your campaign feed increasingly isolated tribes, or will it lead us back into the light of a roughly unified community which rarely agrees unanimously, but which rarely divides into rigid enemy camps? Does your approach resonate with the growing darkness of the global village, or appeal to the much-ignored better angels of our nature? Perhaps the question of the Champlain Monument should not be so much about its location and meaning; perhaps the key question is what is it doing to us? Mark Bisset spent the past 14 years of his working life as the executive director of the Couchiching Conservancy before retiring in 2024. In a previous iteration of himself, he worked in every news department at the Orillia Packet & Times, a daily newspaper from a bygone era. Mark was the managing editor when he stepped down in 2009. And before all of that, he was a pretty happy kid. He's a lifelong sailor and gardener who has chosen Orillia as his beloved home for the past 38 years.