Ray Conlogue Mistranslating Revolution · AIDS puzzles fiction Michel Basilières reviews Gillian...

$6.50Vol. 20, No. 9

November 2012

Political journalism’s digital decline PAGE 20

PLUS: non-fiction Ian Smillie on Canadian mining versus Peruvian natives + Laura Robinson on cycling against fascism + J.R. Colombo on the obit writer’s dead beat + Alana Wilcox on ethical book shopping + Jack Mitchell on chronicling the language wars + Sharmila Mhatre on Kenyan AIDS puzzlesfiction Michel Basilières reviews Gillian Campbell’s The Apple House + Camilla Gibb reviews M.G. Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida poetry Salvatore Difalco + Tim Mook Sang + J.S. MacLean + Joanna M. Weston

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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Robin SearsNDP/Liberal merger

pipedreams

Carolyn TuohyCuring medicare’s chronic condition

John EnglishWinston Churchill, ink-stained wretch

Ray Conlogue

Mistranslating RevolutionThe overlooked generation gap behind Quebec’s student strike

The NaTural hisTory of CaNadiaN MaMMalsby Donna Naughton

This beautifully illustrated, up-to-date guide is full of fascinating facts about all 215 known species of Canadian mammals — from polar bears to killer whales. With exquisite drawings and stunning photographs, The Natural History of Canadian Mammals is a perfect companion for students, animal lovers, and anyone wishing to gain a greater appreciation of Canada’s natural wonders.

‘This outstanding book will be the reference of first choice on mammals in Canada for many years to come.’

dr ian stirling, University of Alberta

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KoreaN iMMigraNTs iN CaNadaPerspectives on Migration, integration, and the familyedited by Samuel Noh, Ann H. Kim, and Marianne S. Noh

Korean Canadians are among the fastest-growing visible minority populations in Canada today. Korean Immigrants in Canada explores the historical, psychological, social, and economic dimensions of Korean migration, settlement, and integration across Canada.

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filiPiNos iN CaNadadisturbing invisibilityedited by Roland Sintos Coloma, et al.

The fourth-largest visible minority group in Canada, the filipino community is frequently understood by such figures as the victimized nanny, the selfless nurse, and the gangster youth. This landmark book explores gender, migration, labour, youth spaces, and the politics of identity.

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froM far aNd Wide, o CaNada

BeyoNd The NaTioN?immigrants’ local lives in Transnational Culturesedited by Alexander Freund

Beyond the Nation? outlines how german-Canadians invented ethnicity under Canadian expectations, and provides moving case studies of how they integrated into Canadian society. Transcending the master narrative of immigration as nation building, Beyond the Nation? charts a new course for immigration studies.

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utppublishing.com

Co-published with the Canadian Museum of Nature

November 2012 1reviewcanada.ca

3 You Can’t Get There from HereA review of Power Trap: How Fear and Loathing Between New Democrats and Liberals Keep Stephen Harper in Power—and What Can Be Done About It, by Paul AdamsRobin V. Sears

5 A Profitable PenA review of Mr. Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book That Defined the “Special Relationship,” by Peter ClarkeJohn English

8 Posthumous PortraitsA review of Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives That Changed Canada, by Sandra MartinJohn Robert Colombo

9 The Houses CanLit BuiltA review of Ultra Libris: Policy, Technology and the Creative Economy of Book Publishing in Canada, by Rowland LorimerAlana Wilcox

11Why Did They Strike?An essayRay Conlogue

14War of WordsA review of Speaking Up: A History of Language and Politics in Canada and Quebec, by Marcel Martel and Martin Pâquet, translated by Patricia DumasJack Mitchell

16OstrichA poemSalvatore Difalco

16 Instructions to a SpeakerA poemJoanna M. Weston

17The Old MapA poemTim Mook Sang

17SkinA poemJ.S. MacLean

18An Unerring Eye for the OrdinaryA review of The Apple House, by Gillian CampbellMichel Basilières

19Chasing HistoryA review of The Magic of Saida, by M.G. VassanjiCamilla Gibb

20Berry’d AliveAn essayChristopher Waddell

22Changing PrescriptionsA review of Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health Care System Needs to Be Dragged into the 21st Century, by Jeffrey SimpsonCarolyn Hughes Tuohy

24A Medical Detective StoryA review of Piecing the Puzzle: The Genesis of AIDS Research in Africa, by Larry KrotzSharmila L. Mhatre

26Resource FeverA review of The Devil’s Curve: A Journey into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge, by Arno KopeckyIan Smillie

28A Real Sports HeroA review of Road to Valour: A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation, by Aili and Andres McConnonLaura Robinson

30Letters and Responses Paul Robinson, Anton Oleinik, Dan Malleck, Michael Abrahams, Mary Rowe, Andrew Nikiforuk, Alan G. Jamieson

Cover art and pictures throughout the issue by DaveBarnes.

Dave Barnes is an illustrator and artist living on Vancouver Island. He is currently working on new pieces for a group show at MOHS exhibit in Copenhagen, a children’s book written by Feet Banks and designed by Kristen Dillon, and illustrations for Mountain Life. More of his work is available at <www.davebarnes.ca>.

Vol. 20, No. 9 • November 2012

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Non-fiction Reads from Wolsak and Wynn Publishers

A sharp-edged and darkly comic assessment ofhow women heroes are portrayed in popularculture by poet and scholar KathleenMcConnell.

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PowerTrap:HowFearandLoathingBetweenNewDemocratsandLiberalsKeepStephenHarperinPower—andWhatCanBeDoneAboutItPaul Adams290 pages, softcoverJames LorimerISBN 9781459402706

By this fall, Liberal and New Democrat riding activists were beginning to feel like aging

singles, sullen at the endless prodding by boozy aunts at family dinners and cottage barbeques:

“When? When are you lot going to finally grow up and get married, ferch-rissake! You’re being bloody selfish, you know. Your sulky dithering is aban-doning Canada to Harper forever!”

Paul Adams is merely the latest aunt to wag his finger at recalcitrant Canadian progressives. Like the determined yenta in a 19th-century Polish shtetl or the grim nakoudo in a small Japanese town, he pounds the appeal, the inevitability and the desperate need for a marriage between the anti-Harper tribes. Wisely, he does not so clearly tout the prospect of marital bliss, for what the Manitoba activist-turned-journalist fails to understand is that such an arranged union would fly apart at the first tough political choice.

A better approach to the creation of a common progressive front in Canada than brokering a mar-riage is building a post-conflict peace. No one hates Canadian Liberals more than the competitors to their left, after all. Most Canadian Liberals have understood that they are bleeding to the left, not to the Conservatives. And as they make vehemently clear in every campaign, they resent it mightily.

Unlike a seasoned nakoudo, however, Auntie Adams knows little about the vanities, the hurts and the clan hierarchies of the reluctant bride and groom. Like his fellow matchmakers on op-ed pages and in academe, he knows the names and the political dowries of the two families, but he under-

stands little of the feuds, the careers blunted by internecine treachery, the unresolved slights and the festering hatreds that confound the prospective couple. Bob Rae’s decision not to seek the Liberal leadership was grounded in this painful reality. Thomas Mulcair, as another floor-crosser, will long be challenged in winning the loyalty of hyper- partisan New Democrats.

These matchmaking appeals remind me of my socialist grandmother, Dorothy—the lifelong pol-itical partner and beloved mate of a CCF founder, Colin Cameron. She was also a Blackadder and Hume, both haughty Scottish clans. She was infused from childhood with the mythologies and hatreds that Celts breed with great fervour.

She would never eat Campbell’s soup or shop at any establishment linked to a Campbell, let alone vote for one. For a feminist woman devoted to social and political justice, this puzzled newcom-ers. When challenged, she would snap icily, “Ya canna never trust a Campbell,” and refuse to be further drawn.

In Glencoe, 220 years ago (!), the Campbells betrayed their neighbours and allies to the English, who then murdered many of them in their beds. New Democrats and Liberals are more like Camerons and Campbells nursing ancient hurts than they are political wedding prospects. Dorothy felt about Liberals as she did about Campbells.

Adams approaches the challenge of breaking the deadly embrace in which Canadian social democrats and liberals have been trapped with the innocence of a Trudeau Liberal, hailing “reason

over passion,” seeking rational behav-iour from players whose motivational drivers never will be. He quotes with astonishment one unnamed Queen’s Park Liberal who, with curled lip, says of Sid Ryan, the working class Ulster immigrant turned Ontario labour leader, “We don’t like people like that.” Class-conscious Grits mirror Maggie Thatcher’s putdown of Tory wets and pretenders from the lower orders: “Not really PLU [people like us], you know…”

But these partisan relations are never simple: Adams would probably find it head scratching that few in the New Democrat elite can stand the logorrheic Ryan either.

It is a cliché among anthropologists that culture trumps history, history trumps ideology and ideology is usually no more meaningful than skirt length as a predictor of alliances or behaviour. It is a truth that political scientists and

journalists often ignore in matters of tribe.Philosophical bench mates always fight their

neighbours more viciously than they do distant enemies, those with whom they share borders rather than those living across real or philosophic oceans.

Secret deals between enemies are a part of every democracy’s political history. They are rarely visible, almost never acknowledged. Mackenzie King’s Liberals plotted with the Communist Party in the 1930s and ’40s to try to crush the CCF in Hamilton, Montreal, Vancouver and places in between. Tommy Douglas used Social Credit to drive a wedge into the Liberals. Adams is incredu-lous about this trading with the enemy.

When one looks at the story arc of progressive political marriages of convenience, the denoue-ment is sadly predictable: one party gets kicked out of bed at the earliest possible moment or is ground into insignificance by its more successful partner. French liberals were smothered in a series of socialist/communist Fourth Republic govern-ments, then Mitterrand first seduced and then destroyed French communism, as did socialist Bettino Craxi to his Italian Euro-communist allies.

Adams seems to understand this, predicting that Layton would have knifed his Liberal coalition partners at the first opportunity, if he had not been knifed by the incompetent Ignatieff clique first. He fails to analyze why this is almost inevitable in the partnership he promotes.

The Liberal Party of Canada—an alliance of factions built on brokerage politics and the

You Can’t Get There from HereWhy Liberal-NDP marriage plans lead straight into a minefield.Robin V. SeaRS

Robin Sears was national director of the NDP, chief of staff to Bob Rae and deputy secretary general of the Socialist International before becoming a diplomat, then a business consultant in Asia. For the past decade he has been a communications and public affairs consultant, now as a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy.


compromises of power—necessarily regards any promise as conditional and time limited. Federal New Democrats, a traditionally weak opposition party held together often by the glue of loyalty and the politics of conviction only, understandably see policy and partnership commitments as perma-nent and unconditional. Nowhere were these opposing tribal cultures more painfully in conflict than in the post-coalition days in January of 2009.

Michael Ignatieff, having signed the pledge to support a coalition in December 2008, publicly and dismissively abrogated it as soon as he became leader a few weeks later. In December, he was a leadership candidate trying to conceal his efforts to unseat Stéphane Dion—his signature was import-ant camouflage. In January, he was a new leader seeking to unseat the prime minister. As Lyndon Johnson would frequently chuckle, “Where you stand, son, depends on where you sit.”

To New Democrats this was simply classic Liberal treachery, one more proof that they could never be trusted. It remains an open wound for those New Democrats who invested much in the promise of that ill-fated coalition.

As any amateur political historian can report, divorce and defeat usually follow opportunistic marriages between progressives. In only the past two decades, French socialists and liberals have split into three bitter factions. The monoliths of social democracy, the Swedish SAP and the German SPD, have each endured bitter splits. British Liberals united, split and reunited within one decade.

Adams might better have drawn on his experi-ence of the “narcissism of small differences” that bedevils the history of Palestinians and Israelis. As one of Canada’s more thoughtful observers of that poisonous relationship, Adams wrote powerfully about the almost suicidal impulse of each side’s behaviour. Like the furious young Palestinian activ-ists of today—and their cultural cousins on the Israeli right—many Canadian Liberals and New Democrats are more interested in nursing their mutual hurts and picking at ancient scabs than finding a path to victory over a still ascendant new Canadian conservatism.

The cruel arithmetic of a first-past-the-post sys-tem is that if three parties are contending for two thirds of the electoral pie, they will still always lose to the one who safely protects the remaining third. For decades, the Liberals held Quebec as its one-third protection. Now, Greens, Liberals and New Democrats cannot hope to challenge the Tories’ hold on most of Canada west of Kenora by continu-ing to focus on scratching each other’s eyes out. Adams and his fellow yentas are not wrong in their ambition, merely in their approach.

Battle-scarred peace negotiators know that theirs is a game of inches. It can only begin when each side is finally persuaded of the futility of more bloodshed. Small confidence-building measures slowly accumulate into an edifice of trust and shared commitment. Elders from each tribe are the usual early intermediaries and they must be confi-dent they can operate in total secrecy. First comes ceasefire, then prisoner exchange, then temporary lines of truce, then neutral observers quietly nudg-ing each side’s miscreants back into line. Political peacemaking is no different.

Brian Mulroney and Bill Davis, among several other Conservative elders, played this role bril-liantly in the much simpler task of repairing the divisions on the Canadian right. It seems inevitable that such a carefully orchestrated set of steps will be required for the Liberals and New Democrats

to reluctantly drop the knives held to each other’s throats.

Adams sets up his call for progressive unity with an often wooden recitation of most of the headline political events of the past four decades. He care-fully indexes and dissects the battle over constitu-tions, language, energy, tax policy, free trade and deficits. Like many political journalists, though, he has a breezily casual understanding of economic fundamentals. He flails both Liberals and New Democrats for not being tougher in defending defi-cit spending—while claiming to support Tommy Douglas’s dread of becoming an indebted prisoner of capital markets. He attacks free trade agreements with the zeal of a 1988 Liberal—ignoring their uni-versality and success today.

More soundly, he whacks all Canadian progres-sives for their failure to be more courageous in defending a progressive tax-based democracy. A veteran of the political trenches is left to wonder, however, how real is Adams’s understanding of the magnitude and risk of undertaking such a strategy.

Adams is very good on the excesses and irresponsibilities of the neocon right and their humiliation in the crash of 2008. His recounting of the fall of Alan Greenspan is powerful indeed. And he is surely correct that now is the moment for progressives in all the democracies to frame a new policy agenda, an opportunity they blew following the collapse of communism.

So how might such a process—one more realis-tic than a series of pre-nuptial negotiations—unfold between committed progressives?

It was, as Adams reported from Jerusalem, brave and independent iconoclasts who kept the lines of communication open between Israeli and Palestinian progressives during the awful days of the Second Intifada. Courageous men and women sharing notes, furtive meals and third-country encounters who, risking censure and even death, ensured that the shutters between the two sides did not slam entirely shut.

The same process is slowly unfolding in Canada. Aging Liberals and New Democrats do not risk lives or jail time, merely some social ostracism in shar-ing a quiet dinner. Angry partisans on all sides will continue to attack sleeping with the enemy.

It is riding activists, not leaders, usually in obscure towns and communities, from the green, social democratic and liberal clans, who are leading the efforts at inter-tribal talks. More senior political hacks, who learned respect for their peers across the divide, are holding more tentative process-oriented conversations.

A progressive platform for Canada’s first centre-left governments should be the early focus of those keen on dumping Harper. An academically and politically credible platform, with an appeal to “Vote for candidates who pledge their support to these priorities!” would infuriate the party elites, but might prod them into discussion of joint action.

Some Liberal and New Democratic party rid-ings might attempt a kamikaze introduction of the Cullen plan—the joint nomination of a single progressive candidate in a riding—without permis-sion from their party bosses. That would produce mayhem, but it would certainly be interesting to watch. The process and legal obstacles to such an approach are formidable, but as a vehicle for discussion it is compelling. After all, who should know better than friends and neighbours who best represents their political values in Ottawa than local activists?

It is no accident that it was Nathan Cullen, not Paul Dewar, who led the “Imagine” parade during

the recent NDP leadership campaign. In Prince George, he could survive refusing to endorse local New Democrat candidates in favour of a more ecumenical approach to political organization. In Ottawa Centre, it would be a race between Liberal and New Democrat partisans to see who got the first knives in at anyone trying on a similar apostasy.

Adams has also done a service to Canadians who have not yet understood the implacability of the Conservative agenda, its quite remarkable success by stealth in less than six years, and its inevitable future success—unless there are deep structural changes in the Canadian partisan land-scape. Deferential, tolerant, get-along English Canadians seem to harbour the hope that Harper can be house-trained over time. Adams makes painfully clear the irresponsibility of that delusion.

It is not clear, however, that Harper conserva-tivism contains, as Canadian Liberals continue to insist, the same dark seeds of racism, sexism and gun-fetishist nativism as the wilder shores of the American Tea Party. The prime minister does hold an American “states-rights” view of the Canadian federation. The fragility of Canadian unity is such that his approach to the role of federal power risks being outmanoeuvred by a new generation of Quebec sovereigntists. His determination to cede rather than husband federal power is already mak-ing Ottawa veterans of the past generation’s consti-tutional wars twitch.

Adams believes such pre-power Harper convic-tions are bedrock and immutable. Harper’s behav-iour in power on Quebec and other controversial files makes that less clear.

He excoriates at length not only Harper but Liberals and New Democrats alike for their queasi-ness at taking tougher environmental stands, and is especially angry about the waffling of his friends on the centre-left. Each page of attack glows with Adams’s innocence of the real limitations on the use of power. Two Australian governments have been defeated for fumbling green policy, not merely dangerous amateurs like Stéphane Dion.

More than one third of Canada’s gross domestic product is based on the business of digging rocks and cutting logs, the sector most directly burdened with the obligation to reduce carbon emissions. Imposing heavy new costs on that sector—without matching efforts by global competitors—would have immediate and serious economic, and there-fore political, consequences.

Adams concludes his long cri de coeur to his friends among green, social democratic, liberal and independent progressive circles with a plea to use their money, their mouths and their political muscle to push progressive unity. The final two chapters detail at length the urgency of, the mech-anisms for and the payoff of a successful project of political unity among progressives.

Few progressives would deny the power of the dream. Many will sneer that it is merely a dream.

But horrified by the long-term damage to the achievements of generations of progressive pol-iticians and by entrenched Conservative power, perhaps some more sympathetic veterans of the progressive civil wars—shaking their heads wearily, rueful at the scale of the obstacles ahead and keenly aware of the political baggage in their path—will, nonetheless, agree that the time has come.

Adams’s plea is to move quickly. That will not happen, but we may be witnessing the first ten-tative signs of a long, complex journey toward unity on the centre left, one that would change Canadian politics more dramatically than has Mr. Harper.


Mr.Churchill’sProfession:TheStatesmanasAuthorandtheBookThatDefinedthe“SpecialRelationship”Peter ClarkeBloomsbury352 pages, hardcoverISBN 9781608193721

Wh e n t h e British Houses of Parliament

honoured Winston Chur chill on his 80th birthday in 1954, he told the lords and mem-bers of Parliament that “if I found the right words, you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue.” In Mr. Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book That Defined the “Special Relationship,” Peter Clarke, a distinguished historian of modern Britain, proves beyond doubt that Churchill teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for most of his life and only found prosperity in old age because of his fluent pen and remarkable tongue. His late financial success came from the commer-cial triumph of his history of “the English-speaking peoples,” a concept that he discovered only late in life and a work that was far from what was promised to publishers and, according to his sympathetic biographer Roy Jenkins’s analysis, by no stretch of the imagination the best of Churchill’s books.

Celebratory mists swirl around the books and the memory of Churchill in the English-speaking world today, not least in Toronto where its belea-guered anglophile ascendancy occasionally leaves its Rosedale redoubts and Bay Street warrens to cluster together in the largest Churchill Society in the world. Churchill’s image is unavoidable. He appears in films where he does not belong, as in The King’s Speech; and his books are still avidly col-lected, if rarely read. Churchill anecdotes provide spice for dreary speeches, and his image remains ubiquitous in Britain and what used to be called the overseas dominions.

Churchill still sells well. A 2002 BBC poll declared him the “Greatest Briton,” ahead of Princess Diana, who finished third, and John Lennon, who came in eighth. Publishers respond to the public’s taste with some clever light concoctions, and the title and even the subject of Mr. Churchill’s Profession might suggest it belongs to the frothier group. Fortunately it does not: its elegant prose, detailed examina-tion of Churchill’s financial records and thought-ful reflections upon the relationship between Churchill’s literary work and his political vocation provide a new understanding not only of Churchill but also of the relationships among literature, jour-nalism and politics in the 20th century.

Churchill, like his parents, customarily lived far beyond his relatively limited means. Born in Blenheim Palace, which a grateful nation gave to his ancestor John Churchill, a brilliant early 18th-century general, Churchill shared the tastes but not the resources of his eminent lineage. Politics and war fascinated him from his earliest years, and his father’s meteoric rise but ultimate eclipse in late 19th-century British politics haunted him. From the beginning, his writing reflected his political ambi-tions and served them, not least because it pro-vided the financial resources that sustained him.

Churchill was an autodidact, a voracious reader with an elephantine memory and a close

student of war, a topic that thrilled turn-of-the-century Britain. His first writings drew upon his experiences travelling in and fighting for the British Empire. Meeting the splendidly named General Blindon Blood at a country house party, the 23-year-old soldier in the 4th Hussars asked to join Blood’s expedition to the Swat Valley, northeast of Peshawar on the border of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Through his mother Jenny’s consider-able wiles, he obtained a contract to write dispatches for the Daily Telegraph. He grumbled about the ano-nymity his officer status required, particularly since his ambitions were to gain publicity for a political career. In 1898, however, he published the dispatches as a book, The Story of the

Malakand Field Force in his own name. His mother had secured an advance of £50 and generous roy-alty rates, which managed to earn him £600, twice his officer’s yearly pay.

Within a year he was off to Khartoum to witness Lord Kitchener brutally smash the dervishes at Omdurman, which he reported to the Morning Post in short reports for which he was paid well. He even found time to write a novel, which Clarke correctly describes as a romantic tale that lacks romance. But, as his grandmother, Duchess Fanny, told him, its faults were those of youth and inexperience and “£250 is not to be despised.” Indeed, a reprint of the novel earned him £225 in 1908, about £17,000 at today’s prices.

Writing was a means to a political end, one he initially failed to reach when he was defeated in a Lancashire by-election in 1899. Fortune then turned when fighting broke out in South Africa, where he went as correspondent for the Morning Post at £250 per month. In South Africa and, for that matter, for the remainder of his life, Churchill became an author and an actor, swelling the advance for his book London to Ladysmith via Pretoria by escaping from the Boers. It appeared just before the relief of Mafeking, sold more than 14,000 copies and made Churchill the perfect political candidate for a jingoistic moment. As

A Profitable PenWinston Churchill’s other career.John engliSh

John English is the general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography published by the University of Toronto.


Clarke wryly notes, “his exploits were well reported, not least by himself.” He became a Conservative MP in October 1900, which he followed immediately with a one-month British lecture tour that earned him £4,000 and another to Canada and the United States whose returns were about $8,000. He wrote to his mother: “I am very proud of the fact that there is not one person in a million who at my age could have earned £10,000 without any capital in less than two years.” That is more than $1,000,000 in today’s funds.

Earlier, Benjamin Disraeli had written novels to fashion and finance his political career. A century and a half later, Barack Obama would imaginatively reconstruct his own past to capture political sup-port and earn much greater sums than the meagre pay for social work in Chicago slums. Although fundamentally different in origin, style and substance, Churchill and Obama share considerable intellectual and literary gifts and the knowledge that their words could make them money and gain them the access and celebrity their political careers demanded.

Churchill’s aristocratic tastes for country homes, champagne, fine claret and servants of all sorts became more difficult to sustain as Britain slid toward penury between the Battle of the Somme and its “finest hour” in June 1940, when Churchill rallied its people while simultaneously begging the Americans and the dominions to keep the muni-tions flowing on credit. Like his nation, Churchill became increasingly accustomed to living on loans and gifts. As a young man, he had written NSF cheques for his beloved polo horses, correctly expecting that his fashionable London banker, Cox, would honour them because he was a Churchill. Later, he employed accountants and lawyers to convince the tax authorities he was or was not an author, depending on the advantages. But in the later 1930s, his luck ran out.

He had bought Chartwell, his country estate, without telling his wife, Clementine, which she rightly regarded as the deepest offence of their splendid marriage. It was a financial sinkhole with its lawns, servants and aristocratic ways, and in 1937 it became unsustainable. In desperation, he thought of selling it. The estate was rescued by an advance from News of the World of all places, but then his high American income was affected by a tax change and a steep fall on Wall Street that reduced his holdings by two thirds. When Churchill faced a demand for payment from his New York

broker, Chartwell went on the market for a meagre £20,000.

It was saved when Churchill’s close friend Brendan Bracken suggested he have lunch with financier Sir Henry Strakosch, who had played an important role in South African goldfields and in sorting out the South African and Indian curren-cies. Strakosch took over Churchill’s New York debts, paid him £800 for the privilege and then left him £20,000 when he died in 1943, which in effect forgave the debt. The controversial David Irving used this evidence to suggest that Strakosch, a Jew, gave funds to reward Churchill’s well-known rants against the Nazis. That may have been the reward—Clarke agrees that the donation was

apparently motivated by Strakosch’s “fervent belief in the importance of his hero’s anti-Nazi stand.” However, that Churchill “stand” and others on India, gold and South Africa long preceded the meeting with Strakosch, who was not recognized in Britain as Jewish. Nevertheless, for Churchill, the course was risky, imprudent, but, alas, not at all unusual for politicians of the day. Or, for that matter, politicians of a later day in our own country.1

Churchill’s problems arose mainly from his lav-ish spending, with annual costs for alcohol alone often exceeding a working person’s yearly wage, and the stable of assistants he maintained to keep up the flow of publications. By the later 1930s he had fallen dreadfully behind on what promised to be his most lucrative project, the proposed history of the English-speaking peoples. It had languished since he signed the contract in 1932, with its large £20,000 advance being deemed a “loan” and thus not sub-ject to taxes. In 1938, Churchill lined up new secre-tarial help and hired new research assistants, such as G.M. Young, William Deakin and Alan Bullock, who later became among the greatest historians in post-war Britain. Churchill’s working methods were extraordinary. As the historians produced drafts, which he read along with source materials of his own choosing, he would churn out directions and random thoughts, and then, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., dictate large swaths of prose to his sec-retary while fuelled by whisky and soda.

Clarke’s book does not discuss in any detail Churchill’s history of the Second World War, although David Reynolds studied it exhaustively in his book In Command of History. Clarke instead concentrates upon Churchill’s English-Speaking Peoples. As any writer knows, the subject shapes not only the book but also the author. In turning to the commercially attractive history of the English-speaking peoples, Churchill was forced to consider the relationship among the dominions, Britain and the United States. Churchill, Clarke demonstrates, had been a sentimental imperialist who spent little time, intellectually or politically, with schemes of imperial federation. His empire principally meant South Africa and India, with the rage and rants

about Gandhi and Indian nation-alism being a principal reason for his absence from ministerial office in the 1930s. He never visited Australia, had travelled briefly to Canada on his way to the United States and, despite his moth-er’s American background, often shared the British aristocrat’s

disdain for its errant ways. Churchill, incidentally, thought that Canada did not fit his grand design for the book and it is placed on the sidelines.

Yet as he pieced together his book, he developed a fascination with the American experiment, especially the Civil War, and a growing sense of the imaginative power of the concept. By the later 1930s his style, with its roots in Gibbon, Johnson, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Kipling and Dickens, had attained a full-blooded maturity and astonishing rhetorical power. As he spewed forth paragraphs late into the night, an image of a people going forth from the blessed island to bear the consciousness and conscience of a free people facing a darkened world began to emerge.

Churchill did not finish English-Speaking Peoples because in 1939 the English-speaking peoples faced their greatest challenge, and he was called upon to serve. He brought an impressive historical range and imagination together to con-front a powerful dark force also with deep roots in western tradition—good versus evil, the individual against the collective, Athens battling Sparta, Drake defeating the Armada. As Isaiah Berlin recalled, “so hypnotic was the force of his words, so strong his faith, that by the sheer intensity of his eloquence he bound his spell upon them until it seemed to them that he was indeed speaking what was in their hearts.” Romantic, anachronistic and a departure from the spare prose and modernist style of pre-war days, the effect lasted only moments, but they were the critical ones.

In September 2012, New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, founded by anglophile J.P. Morgan whose financial house bled the British during World War One, advertised a major exhibit: “Churchill: The Power of Words,” with Yousuf Karsh’s portrait of the glowering Churchill extending down a full New York Times page. Churchill would be amused, much as he was when he learned he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Reflecting the habits of a lifetime, he wrote to Clementine: “£12,000 free of tax. Not so bad!”

note1 The Strakosch affair was dealt with in Martin Gilbert’s

official biography of Churchill and continues to attract attention on internet blogs of dubious reputation. Clarke’s account of the finances differs from other sources, but the major argument—Churchill was in financial trouble—remains the same.

Although fundamentally different in origin, style and substance, Churchill and

Obama share considerable intellectual and literary gifts.

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Waging Heavy PeaceNeil Young

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Dark DiversionsJohn Ralston Saul

In Dark Diversions, acclaimed author John Ralston Saul stages a black comedy of international proportions that takes the reader from New York to Paris to Morocco to Haiti. When he’s not encountering dictators in Third World hot spots, Saul’s unnamed journalist narrator moves in privileged circles on both sides of the Atlantic, insinuating himself into the lives of well-to-do aristocrats. Through his exploits we experience a fascinating world of secret lovers, exiled princesses, death by veganism, and religious heresies.

1982Jian Ghomeshi

In 1982 the Commodore 64 computer was introduced, Ronald Reagan survived be-ing shot, the Falkland War started and ended, Michael Jackson released Thriller, Canada repatriated its

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WorkingtheDeadBeat:50LivesThatChangedCanadaSandra MartinAnansi429 pages, hardcoverISBN 9780887842467

“Canada has been the death of him,” wrote John Stuart Mill on the passing of John Lambton, Lord Durham, in 1840,

at the age of 48, the year after the Englishman com-pleted his famous Report on the Affairs of British North America.

I was reminded of Mill’s terse comment when I opened the review copy of Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada, written by Sandra Martin of The Globe and Mail. I wondered if its author might make the same claim about any of the men and women whose lives—and deaths—she describes so vividly and readably in her new book. But after reading her 50 short biographies, I came to the conclusion that Canada has “done in” nobody who is discussed in these pages.

In his foreword, William Thorsell, former pub-lisher of The Globe and Mail, praises the author for writing “portraits” rather than obituary notices, noting that she is “speaking truth to grief, exposing intimacies at the precise moment when intimacies can be most wounding.” In the introduction, in her witty, informed and teeth-clenched style, Martin writes about the misconceptions of her trade so well that this section should be required reading at journalism schools. She identifies what she calls the “Five Myths about the Dead Beat” and here is what she has to say:

1. “The dead beat is a dead end.” (To the contrary, she sees her undertaking as the beating heart of the news story; she feels that she writes from the still centre of the newsroom.)

2. “Obituaries are depressing.” (Not one of her obituaries is depressing or deflating—far from it. Instead of a “memorial service,” each one is the

“celebration” of the life of a person of interest.)3. “Obituaries are prewritten and left to moulder

in a drawer.” (It is true that newspapers keep in their so-called “morgues” standing copy on people who are in the news. But Martin notes that these para-graphs cannot be pressed into use when nature

calls; they have to be revamped for the occasion and updated.)

4. “The dying don’t want to talk about their lives.” (Everyone is dying, although death is not foremost in people’s minds. When she approaches her sub-jects, Martin says: “Talk to me about your life and I promise it won’t appear during your lifetime.”)

5. “Obituaries don’t tell the real truth.” (What account does convey “the real truth”? Martin explains, “We stand apart from the family and friends of the deceased because we are journalists, not eulogists.”)

So much for Martin’s intro. The biographies or portraits of influential Canadians that comprise the bulk of the book are organized under five head-ings, ten entries apiece, each headed with relevant observations.

1. Among the “Icons” are Galbraith, Jacobs, Berton, Forrester and Richler. (The fact that I can dispense with the first names shows how main-stream the selection is.)

2. Those who are “Builders” range from Frank Calder (first Nisga’a elected) through historian’s historian (J.M.S. Careless) to James Houston (artist).

3. “Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics” is a catch-all section that embraces poet Irving Layton, spy Gordon Lunan and novelist Scott Symons.

4. Another salmagundi section is “Private Lives, Public Impact” (Doris Anderson, Simon Reisman, Ed Mirvish).

5. The last section, called “Service,” has the few-est household names. Three of the ten biographees are Helen Allen (journalist, children’s advocate), Kay Gimpel (secret service agent and art dealer) and Rudolf Vrba (Auschwitz survivor and biochem-ist). I found this section to be the most interesting, for here I was learning about women and men who had led exciting lives of accomplishment. With this section Martin proves her point: there is no such thing as an uninteresting life, only badly researched and written accounts.

I am going to resist second-guessing the author with respect to the contents. Let other reviewers play the game of “who’s in and who’s out,” if only because all selections are necessarily arbitrary and because everyone represented here seems to belong. Also, let other reviewers who are politically correct count on their fingers the representation given in terms of sex, region, class, occupation, cul-ture, disability, etc. In these pages presentation is more important than representation.

Nothing here is solemn and there are some delicious moments. For instance, the reader learns that Edwin (Honest Ed) Mirvish, merchandiser and philanthropist, purchased the Old Vic Theatre in London in 1982, never having been inside it—indeed, never having been to England at all.

Then there is the tizzy in the Globe’s editorial office on November 30, 2004, the day Pierre Berton

died. The paper had already reserved much of its front page for the first state visit by U.S. president George W. Bush. “I saw seven or eight men stand-ing in a circle in earnest conversation, weighing the merits of George W. Bush versus Pierre Berton and the next day’s front page,” recounts Martin. The front-page editor decided the issue: “This is bigger than Bush.” The editor-in-chief agreed and so did the rest of the editors.

I wish I could describe in detail how Martin con-structs her 3,500-word profiles. Yet her account of the life of Pierre Berton (1920–2004), “Mr. Canada,” might be taken as a model. She commences by reminding readers of what they may be expected to know about the biographee. (His birth in the Yukon, his student years in Vancouver, etc.) She continues with a chronological account of the person’s life, rich in information derived from pub-lished sources and anecdotes based on interviews with friends and colleagues. (“He produced a book every autumn as regularly as the leaves fell from the trees.”) She concludes with a paragraph about the illnesses that brought that life to an end. (Heart dis-ease, diabetes.) The last line is usually the person’s age at death. (Eighty-four for “Mr. Canada.”) Her prose is lively and her model works time and again.

Martin is not alone in writing responsibly about the lives and deaths of Canadians. Her own paper also commissions the column “Lives Lived,” which offers short takes on lesser-known people rather than long profiles on familiar ones. Then there is the last page of each issue of Maclean’s, which is devoted to the passing of a non-celebrity, often a person whose life was cut tragically short, like the twelve-year-old boy who loved to cook but was suddenly felled by necrotizing fasciitis. (In time he might have become a great chef.) That editorial feature is called “The End,” and the pieces are well researched and well written … and poignant, unlike Martin’s.

I suppose the precursors of Working the Dead Beat are Plutarch’s Lives, Aubrey’s Brief Lives and Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. But Martin’s book has more in common with The Obituary Book based on obits that appeared in The New York Times compiled by its chief obituary writer, Alden Whitman, who was born in Halifax. Whitman was the pioneer of the “pre-need” obit. Indeed, he once wryly observed, “Death, the cliché assures us, is the great leveller; but it obviously levels some a great deal more than others.”

Everything that I have written above leads me to believe that if ever there is a phone call that begins,

“Hello, Mr. Colombo? I am Sandra Martin. I write for The Globe and Mail. I wonder if you would be will-ing to talk to me about your life. I promise it won’t appear during your lifetime,” I will know in advance what to expect: a lively, readable and appreciative account of the life and work of a Canadian.

Posthumous PortraitsThe art and joys of the obituary.John RobeRt Colombo

John Robert Colombo, author and anthologist, compiler of The Penguin Dictionary of Popular Canadian Quotations (Penguin, 2006) and other reference works, is completing The Canadian Adventures of Jules Verne, The Big Book of Canadian Jokes and the first-ever collection of Sax Rohmer’s occasional writings.


UltraLibris:Policy,TechnologyandtheCreativeEconomyofBookPublishinginCanadaRowland LorimerECW Press,432 pages, hardcoverISBN 9781770410763

The hullabaloo around the purported death of the printed book is reaching

a fevered pitch—again. Moveable type was going to do the book in, the paperback assured its demise and now we imagine the e-book as the one in the Grim Reaper’s robes. All this hand wringing is a sign of affection, to be sure; no one is los-ing sleep over the disappearance of the eight-track player, for example.

It seems timely, then, to ask all those fervent fans of the book to do what they do for their coffee and their carrots: to consider the source. Is the author being paid? Are the books legally sourced? Are the proceeds supporting Canadians or international shareholders? We are willing to ask these questions of our bananas but not our books; is it that we do not want to tarnish the “romance” of literature with questions of politics and cold, hard cash? If we want to keep the book alive, it would behoove us all to understand at least the basics of the publishing industry.

Enter Ultra Libris: Policy, Technology and the Creative Economy of Book Publishing in Canada, which offers all that (or perhaps more than) anyone concerned with book publishing needs to know about how this industry works in Canada: the nitty-gritty, including the state of the marketplace, the government’s role, the sad realities of distribu-tion in a huge, sparsely populated country. The book is, then, an immensely valuable resource. Its closest analogue—yin to its yang, perhaps—is Roy MacSkimming’s The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada, 1946–2006, an anecdotal, even gossipy, study of the first 60 years of Canada’s publishers. But Rowland Lorimer, in Ultra Libris,

eschews narrative, avoiding talk of individual presses and the characters who run them and instead speaking of the Canadian-owned industry as though it were a single entity, documenting the mechanics of the business and the forces that have acted on it over the past half-decade—unsexy but fundamental. If MacSkimming writes about the furniture and the parties, Lorimer focuses on how the two-by-fours hold the whole thing up.

It is worth turning to John B. Thompson’s The Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century for some background on the history of English-language publishing. The indus-try takes the form it currently does, he says, because of three major developments in the second half of the last century: the growth of the big retail chains, the rise of literary agents and the emergence of massive publishing corporations. These shifts have led to a polarization of the field (a few massive con-glomerates and countless small presses, but very few mid-sized publishers), a resulting preoccupa-tion with “big books” (the hollowing out of the mid-dle in the context of book sales) and shrinking shelf time for books, with ever-growing rates of returns from the bookstore to the publisher. Thompson is relatively balanced about all this, but what he calls “short-termism” can hardly be regarded as anything

but treacherous for a “product” whose entire raison d’être might be permanence, or at least “long-termism.”

(Let’s duck out here for a brief aside on the notion of permanence. It is, perhaps, the book’s greatest promise. How comforting to know that, no matter what happens in our own lives, Jane always mar-ries Rochester and Molly Bloom always says yes. We live now on the internet, where everything is mutable and ephemeral, which partly accounts for our renewed faith in and attachment to the solid, unchangeable book. That is not to say that the format of the printed book is right for everything; refer-ence materials, ever changing, work much more effectively in digital form—even, perhaps, books like Ultra Libris, which documents an industry that seems to change every day, such that even before its publication date there is outdated information in it. There is some irony in the fact that, in spite of this, the book becomes more credible

somehow by being run through a printing press.)The Merchants of Culture is about English-

language publishing, which we all know means the United States and the United Kingdom. Canada merits barely a mention. And yet Canadian pub-lishing is continuously buffetted about by these two forces outside our control and geography. We are at the mercy of their cultural dominance, their economies of scale, their media and our lingering sense of being a former colony. Which is why it is crucial that Canada retain its own indigenous pub-lishing industry, and why we must have this clear chronicle of it. In his second chapter, Lorimer gives a brief history of the struggle Canadian publishers have faced to carve out a space for domestic writing and publishing from the overpowering presence of two literary superpowers both publishing in the same language—and, now, multinational publish-ers, with their accountability toward non-Canadian parent companies rather than Canadian culture, competing from within. It is an unenviable under-taking, with Canadian publishing playing the role of underdog. Speaking of the now foreign-owned McClelland and Stewart, Lorimer notes:

The stark reality of marketplace challenges is this: Over the long term, 1972 to 2012,

The Houses CanLit BuiltWhy the business of publishing matters to readers.alana WilCox

Alana Wilcox is the editorial director of Coach House Books. She is a co-founding editor of the uTOpia series of books about Toronto and the author of a novel, A Grammar of Endings (Mercury Press, 2000).


in spite of all its renown, and all its awards and accomplishments, Canada’s foremost English-language trade book publisher of leading fiction and non-fiction primarily for the Canadian market proved to be financially unviable. Even its ability to take advantage of the economies of scale and the wisdom of Canada’s largest trade book publisher [Random House] on all but acquisitions and editorial preparation could not rescue its viability.

To grow an industry in a field that is inherently inhospitable to success in a landscape dominated by two massive competitors would seem foolhardy without some assistance. And so in the 1950s, a royal commission, headed by Vincent Massey, rec-ommended direct governmental support for Canadian culture. From this emerged the Canada Council for the Arts and a recogni-tion that persists, mercifully, to this day, that supporting culture is a worthy and even essential function of government. As Lorimer says,

the notion that Canadian cultural industries are weak and thus require governmental crutches to survive, let alone thrive, is not a fact but an interpretation … In the case of Canada, these industries require the fine tun-ing of the market infrastructure to counteract the size, shared language(s) with other coun-tries, and cosmopolitan nature of our domes-tic market.

Lorimer neatly packages up the rather complex history of funding for publishers from the federal and provincial governments (he focuses primarily on Ontario here, as that province hosts the lar-gest number of publishers). Recognizing that this history has always been a dialogue between the funders and the funded, he includes the positions taken by the Association of Canadian Publishers, the industry group for Canadian-owned publishers, on many major funding issues, which helps explain how financial support for publishers has ended up being so convoluted.

That our government still supports the industry is widely known (although perhaps not as widely approved of, which returns us to my earlier point about readers not necessarily understanding the context through which books are able to emerge). Less obvious, though at least equally influential, are the laws and policies that almost subterran-eously shape the industry. It is here that Lorimer shines. “Structural interventions” is what he calls governmental support that is not financial, or at least is not direct monetary support to publishers. Ownership, trade and copyright legislation are the most significant areas of positive interference; they demonstrate that our government has historically recognized that publishing’s value is more cultural than economic (although of course the economic benefits are nothing to sneeze at). This, the industry worries, might be changing.

We have long had a foreign-ownership policy in place that keeps most of Canada’s publishing, distribution and bookstores in Canadian hands by insisting that any takeovers or start-ups led by non-Canadians prove a net benefit to Canada before being allowed to proceed. It would not have allowed Borders (before it went bankrupt), for instance, to buy Indigo. This policy has always

been idiosyncratically and opaquely applied, but since the Conservative government instigated a “review” of the policy in 2010, it has all but evap-orated. Amazon has been allowed to set up shop in Canada, and McClelland and Stewart (what Lorimer charmingly calls our “family silver”) sold off to Bertelsmann, the German owner of Random House. There is some fear in the industry, as Lorimer points out, that the retail sector might be next; what would the landscape look like if buying for a bookstore in Kelowna took place in New York?

The subject of cultural exemptions in trade agreements takes up a fair amount of real estate in Ultra Libris. There is simply no way to summarize the labyrinthine history of Canada’s position(s) on

culture in trade, which has typically been in favour of “cultural diversity” but unwilling to antagonize trading partners. It is one of Lorimer’s concluding wishes for the industry that we move forward with cultural protections to allow Canada to grow:

On the basis of the principles and policies of both the [Convention on Cultural Diversity, to which Canada is a signatory] and creative economy initiatives, cultural markets will gradually restructure, which may lead to the injection of a multiplicity of diverse local expressions into global entertainment trade flows.

Copyright, as might be expected, plays an enor-mous role in the publishing industry, and thus in Ultra Libris as well. If we might return to that question of permanence, it is here that the printed word fails us: this book was finalized just before Canada’s new copyright act was imposed. Lorimer praises the old act, which, though ill equipped to deal with modern technologies, provided support for creators and cultural industries: first, by pro-tecting creators by insisting on compensation for any use of their work, and, second, by enshrining in law the intuitive notion that Canadian booksellers, for example, should source books from Canadian distributors where available, rather than importing, say, an American edition. The new copyright law, which Lorimer hints is so flawed it could not pos-sibly pass without amendments, passed; writers and publishers are still sorting out its implications, but there is much consternation that a new “educa-tional” exemption, a term that may be applied more liberally than the law makers intended, will elimin-ate a significant source of income for creators and further encourage younger people to feel entitled to free content.

Other interventions are more secure and posi-tive. The Public Lending Right Commission com-pensates writers for the availability of their books in libraries; Access Copyright (for now, anyway) manages reprography. And BookNet Canada has been created to document the book supply chain and allow booksellers and publishers to track sales and manage inventory considerably more effect-ively—Canada is the envy of other countries for the forward-thinkingness and efficacy of BookNet.

Lorimer makes the astute observation that the Supply Chain Initiative (out of which BookNet emerged, among other benefits to publishers) was a savvy response to a retail challenge, the creation of the Chapters/Indigo monopsony: “[BookNet] pre-cluded Chapters’ monopolization of industry-wide sales information; it prevented the monetization of that information, which would have given Chapters an even greater competitive advantage.”

Ultra Libris concludes its history of the Canadian publishing industry with some optimism and advice. Lorimer covers many of the difficulties the industry is facing: how technology is changing communication, readership and work flow; that bookstores are shuttering at an alarming rate; that

publishers are at the financial and legislative mercy of an unpredict-able government. As a publisher, I would add a few: the distressing polarization of title popularity (tiny “long-tail” numbers at one end, massive homogeneous best-sellers at the other, with no mid-list in between anymore); the ever increasing and terrifying global domination of Amazon; that while

we love the idea of the book, we no longer always value what is in it or think very highly of its worth (publishers and booksellers are complicit in this devaluation by heavily discounting and remain-dering titles, so that readers now feel they should not have to pay more a few dollars for a book—unsustainable in the long term).

The advice Lorimer offers to publishers is, unfortunately, a little dated, and not entirely con-vincing. He talks of using print-on-demand tech-nology for keeping backlist titles affordably in print and of working to take advantage of possibilities for e-books; I cannot think of a publisher who does not already do these things. But there is some merit in his idea of service models: publishers selling their editorial or design services to self-published auth-ors, for instance—although if publisher-as-curator is the most important way to set “official publish-ing” apart from vanity press, a for-hire service would have to be carefully managed.

A central theme through this book is Lorimer’s lament that an indigenous educational publishing industry has not been allowed to flourish; it would have made publishing in Canada viable, he con-tends, if Canadian publishers (rather than branch plants of foreign-owned publishers) had been the ones to produce Canadian textbooks over the last half-decade. I suspect he is correct, but that is an impossible do-over.

I have some quibbles with Ultra Libris, to be sure: there are some troubling factual inaccuracies, a mostly chronological structure that encourages much repetition, and a sometimes counterproduct-ive lack of specificity (it is often an advantage to think of the industry speaking and behaving as one, but it is definitely not realistic, and at times it is the endless disagreements between publishers that are most productive and illuminating). But it offers a staggering archive of a cultural history: the appendix includes a ten-page listing of relevant policy documents and a breathtakingly thorough bibliography. Lorimer’s approach is clear headed and thorough, and while the subject matter does not lend itself to fun and frolic, it is of vital import-ance to Canadian culture, and documenting its scaffolding so meticulously—so permanently, so long-termishly—creates a valuable resource and a tremendous gift to Canadian readers. Who just might want to pay attention.

We live now on the internet, where everything is mutable and ephemeral,

which partly accounts for our renewed faith in and attachment to the solid,

unchangeable book.


For most Canadians, the Quebec student strike—picturesquely nicknamed the “printemps érable,”

or “maple spring”—seemed to come out of nowhere this past May. About 300,000 college and university students, nearly three quarters of the province’s entire enrollment, struck against a tuition hike proposed by the Quebec government. Images of swathes of fetching young people, many displaying the carnival-esque painted faces and body language of attendees at a rock concert rather than a social revolution, played across the front pages of the world media.

Within a few short weeks, dramatic developments multiplied. These culmin-ated in the late May passage by Quebec’s Liberal government of Bill 78, a law against street gatherings of such ques-tionable legality that it provoked another protest march—by lawyers and law pro-fessors. Crowds of citizens poured into the streets, pounding on pots and pans in support of the students.

And then, on September 4, it ended. The Jean Charest government went down to defeat, and the incoming Parti Québécois government cancelled the tuition increase.

The question now: what, if anything, was the significance of the printemps érable? One can surmise that it does not lie in the dollar cost of a year in college. It may even go beyond Quebec’s perennial struggle to assert itself within Canada. In the words of Université du Québec sociologist Madeleine Gauthier, it seems to be part of the rising generation’s “great current of reconsideration” of the principles of western society.

The maple spring actually began two years ago in 2010, when the Charest government told student and faculty representatives that the ongoing eco-nomic crisis meant there would have to be a steep rise in post-secondary tuitions. The representatives, who had not been consulted beforehand, walked out.

Charest’s government then negotiated solely with university administrators, leading to the March 2011 announcement by finance minister Raymond Bachand of a 75 percent increase in tuition over

the course of five years. By August students began a peaceful campaign to have the hike rescinded, leading to a street rally in November and the first vote to walk out of classes in February of 2012.

It must be said, from the perspective of Canadian students outside Quebec, that Quebec students seemed to be enjoying a very sweet deal. According to Statistics Canada, Ontario students in 2011/12 paid $6,640 in tuition, Canada’s high-est, while Quebec students in the same year paid $2,519, the lowest. The average Canadian tuition was $5,366. Even with the Charest increase, Quebec tuitions would still be a third cheaper than else-where in Canada.

Observers were baffled as to how this could provoke more than a quarter of a million students to hit the bricks and shut down the post-secondary system in May 2012. English-Canadian indignation quickly morphed, as it usually does, into an attack on Quebec’s social democratic economic model. The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente luridly described student thugs driving other students out of the classroom. “These masked young men and women are the children of the celebrated Quebec model, which shares a certain mindset with the not-so-celebrated Greek model. The state owes us everything, and if we don’t get it, we’ll riot in the streets!”

This was answered by an opposite extremism from “soixante-huitard” Quebec academics nos-talgic for the uprisings of 1968 and the hippie-era rhetoric that accompanied them. “I am writing this letter,” said Université de Montréal philoso-

phy professor Christian Nadeau to the demonstrators, “in order to salute you and to humbly ask that you help us follow through with your endeavor.”

While Nadeau and Wente are extreme in their views, they do represent the ideo-logical gulf between Canada’s two soli-tudes. And this remains true even though a majority of Quebecers agreed that the Charest tuition increase was necessary. The important difference is that franco-phones admitted the necessity not with neoliberal glee, but with great misgiv-ings. This is because, within the French-speaking world, the reference point for post-secondary costs is the social demo-cratic goal of zero tuition. That is the norm in France, as well as in the Scandinavian countries.

This is also why many Quebec aca-demics, including popular Université de Montréal philosopher Michel Seymour, saw the Charest proposal as a capitulation

to the Anglo-American model. In principle, that model says that students should pay handsomely for a degree that will enrich them for the rest of their lives. But in Seymour’s view the market model drives tuitions so high that students instead are shackled with debts that will take many years to repay—years in which they become habituated to what the French call “le capitalisme sauvage” and lose sight of alternatives.

It might appear that the Parti Québécois victory in September put this combat to rest by driving a stake through the Charest proposal. Voilà le tri-omphe du populo-romantisme! But that is not quite the case.

First, reluctant voters gave the PQ only a minor-ity government. Second, and more important, many influential Parti Québécois supporters are troubled by the province’s heavy and rising debt load—not least of them François Legault, the breakaway Péquiste who founded the Coalition Avenir Québec party. It won many seats that otherwise would have gone to the PQ. The CAQ supports higher tuitions.

Another restless Péquiste is Joseph Facal, a minister in Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government who resisted attempts by Ottawa to invade Quebec’s control of education. But later, serving as minis-ter of state for the public service under Bernard Landry, Facal moved to the right. In his 2010 book Quelque chose comme un grand peuple, he writes that the Quebec model is aging poorly and becoming a “fearful retreat into positions that lead nowhere,” sometimes accompanied by a rhetorical “flight into virtual and incantatory universes.”

ESSAY

Why Did They Strike?A political generation gap—invisible to most Anglos—separates Quebec students and parents.Ray Conlogue

Ray Conlogue is a former Globe and Mail theatre and film critic, as well as the author of Impossible Nation: The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec (Mercury Press, 1996), an analysis of the cultural and historical dimensions of Quebec’s independence movement.


Although the education issue is only one thread in a book written well before the current student uprising, Facal makes acute observations about Quebec’s school system. “With universities, it is hard not to notice that many who go there do so less for the learning than for official accreditation as demanded by the workplace … or to waste time.”

Facal is also concerned that the rising gen-eration knows little about Quebec’s centuries-old struggle for cultural survival. He cites startling sta-tistics to show how much the province has changed since the independence referendum that nearly took Quebec out of the Confederation in 1995. In the short 17 years since, a half million Quebecers who mostly voted for secession have died of old age. These were the ones who were connected to the province’s history. They have been replaced by immigrants with no connection to that history, and young Quebecers born since 1978 who have little knowledge of it.

In short, the current generation of students do not know the historical roots of the independence movement, and are not serious about their education. The universities and colleges harbour “thousands of young people who should not be there” because they lack cultural and aca-demic commitment. This contributes to Quebec’s dropout rate, which, says Facal, is the highest in Canada.

Is it the highest? Determining that is not simple. The situation is complicated by Quebec’s unique system of CEGEPs, or colleges. Unlike in other provinces, a Quebecer must have a CEGEP degree (equivalent to a college degree) in order to go to university. It happens that Quebec has the highest rate of college dropouts in Canada, but a lower rate of university dropouts.

When you average the college/CEGEP dropouts with the university dropouts, the result is that, yes, Quebec does have the highest post-secondary dropout rate in the country (and also, incidentally, the highest secondary dropout rate).

In 2008, the Montmarquette report on Quebec education advocated higher university tuitions on the user-fee principle. That is, people using an in-demand public service should pay more than people who do not use it. Higher tuitions would reduce wasteful use of the resource, such as stu-dents dropping out, in the same way higher electri-city bills reduce frivolous power consumption.

That dropout rate also preoccupies Pierre Fortin, a Université du Québec à Montréal economist with an international reputation. Fortin is not an indépendantiste, but he is sympathetic to Quebec’s aspirations to be a francophone culture in North America.

Fortin points out that the Charest increase would have merely returned the ratio between tuition and total university costs to where it was in 1994. That was a desirable ratio: it would have the student paying just under 20 percent of total costs (it is about 12 percent now). This would give a stu-dent a stake in his or her educational outcome but not shackle that person with excessive debt.

Fortin also has hard-headed recommendations for reducing university costs. One is that professors’ salaries be reduced through a multi-year freeze to bring them in line with Quebec’s cost of living, which is much lower than that of English Canada or the United States.

He does not, however, agree that the social democratic model is responsible for the student malaise in Quebec. He points out that university dropout rates are climbing across North America,

and the quality of university teaching has deterior-ated as much in high-cost American schools (he is a Berkeley graduate) as it has in lower-cost Quebec schools. He also emphasizes, as does Michel Seymour, that grade inflation, increasing dropouts and the electronically damaged attention span of today’s students are a general problem across North America.

The jeremiads against Quebec’s “socialist” poli-cies in the anglo media, he writes, miss a funda-mental point. He uses health care as an example. “The key thing is to make a distinction between ends and means. The ends [for Quebec] are uni-versal and free access to healthcare services. We should remain flexible on the means of achieving this. Many socialist countries in Europe involve the private sector in healthcare and still achieve universal low-cost access.” Polls show that 88 per-cent of Quebecers support this mixed economic model, whether applied to health care or college, but feel that their governments are failing to apply it properly.

Seymour goes farther than Fortin. Where there is an admixture of public and private funding, he believes the private sector model acts aggres-sively to undermine the public model “so that the university takes on qualities of private companies, with rising salaries for the president and departure bonuses for everybody.” He cites legal philosopher John Rawls’s analysis of how a market economy may undermine equality of opportunity for all.

It is not likely that students in their late teens or early twenties are going to be preoccupied with how their strike fits into economic theory or the long arc of Quebec history. But they are aware of their move-ment’s own history. It began with a general strike in 1968 for what was undeniably a social good: to end the anglophone/Catholic church domination that had left Quebec with a second-rate French-language school system. Subsequently there were eight more general strikes, many of which sought a tuition freeze.

The movement’s formative influences included the Charte de Grenoble, which launched the French student movement in 1946. Today there are three Quebec student unions: Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), the more recent Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) and the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudi-ante (CLASSE). CLASSE is the most radical of the three, and the only one lobbying for the PQ to com-mit to a goal of free tuition.

Camille Robert, a CLASSE organizer in her early twenties, recalled in a mid-August interview that education in Quebec has been considered a public good since the 1950s. She had figures at the ready to demonstrate how the Charest government has undermined this tradition: for example, spending $350 million on a single hockey arena compared to $500 million annually for the entire university system.

She was particularly indignant (along with media analysts, it should be said) at the Charest government’s refusal to negotiate with student leaders. She threatened that the fall semester

would be struck if it were re-elected. Referring to the repressive terms of the Charest government’s Bill 78 (now known as Law 12), which declares that students who march without police permission will be arrested, Roberts said: “We will strike even if it splits the student movement.”

As we have seen, Charest was not re-elected. The incoming Parti Québécois minority government has bought peace by announcing that tuition will rise only according to the rate of inflation: about 2 percent annually—a far cry from the 15 percent per year for five years which the Charest govern-ment had threatened.

Madeleine Gauthier feels that the Charest government mistook the current generation of students for mere pranksters and frivolous neo-hip-pies who could be intimidated and outwaited. In her analysis, the students are realists who know that their generation is small in numbers (due to the low birth rate) and cannot hope to assert itself at the ballot box. Students also understand that much of the provincial debt will eventually fall on their slim

shoulders.And finally, the students know

very well that many older voters now calling for a tuition hike marched for free university tuition when they were young. The sense of generational betrayal, says Gauthier, is especially severe since these young people have been accustomed since childhood

to speaking to their parents and other adults as equals. “They would have accepted a comprom-ise solution if this had been offered earlier,” says Gauthier, “but [the government] let things fester for three months.” In fact, Charest himself never met with the students.

The students do, however, have critics. Henry Milner, a political theorist at the Université de Montréal, feels that theatrical street politics is counterproductive. Where, he asks, are their political organizing skills? He speculates that the Facebook generation has become so habituated to an electronic conversation with like-minded people that it does not know how to confront and persuade, face to face, those who do not agree. Even the unions, a natural ally of the students, did not endorse their cause publicly.

Student leaders reply that they have indeed done one-on-one, door-knocking organizing in several of Quebec’s rural regions. But the print-emps érable website is an entirely electronic and youth-oriented universe that does not acknow-ledge the least justice in the other side’s views. On a certain level it is charming (one researcher calls herself Geneviève L’obstineuse—Genevieve the Obstinate). It is surely familiar, in its élan and in its shortcomings, to a boomer generation recalling its own printemps érable of 40 years ago.

But critical observers, like Pierre Fortin, suggest that no industrial economy can afford to freeze university tuitions. That would make such a country uncompetitive over time. Fortin is also convinced that Quebec’s high dropout rate is symptomatic of a complacent generation that does not understand the economic challenges the province faces.

Quebec must also deal with larger difficulties arising from its history, difficulties that set it apart from other advanced industrial economies. In their 2007 study Language, Citizenship and Identity in Quebec, the linguists Leigh Oakes (a Briton) and Jane Warren (an Australian) note that one of these is its relationship with the more powerful English-speaking majority: “The English-Canadian press frequently aims to discredit Quebec nationalism by

The students know that many older voters now calling for a tuition hike marched for free university tuition

when they were young.


comparing it to tribalism, ethnic cleansing, racism, apartheid, xenophobia and the like.”

The denigration of a minority by a majority is never without an effect. In the case of Quebec, this is magnified by two further historical burdens: it does not have a legally enforceable national lan-guage and it is not politically independent.

These factors weaken Quebec’s ethnicity, defined as the ensemble of cultural, linguistic and historical factors in its identity. Ironically, note the authors, Canada has a federal multicultural policy that aims to preserve ethnicity. In practice, how-ever, this is directed to immigrant communities. Where the French and English are concerned, the conversation is almost entirely about respecting the ethnicity of the recently arrived.

Quebecers themselves have bought into the underlying idea that ethnicity is not for modern people. The province’s official policy, which calls for a langue publique commune for all Quebecers, is based on what Oakes and Warren call the assump-tion “that French can somehow be ‘de-ethnicised’ to become the property of all ethnic groups.”

This project faces a grave difficulty, because Quebec has a collapsing birth rate and requires a large intake of allophone immigrants. These people find it confusing that their new home (Quebec) has French as its official language, while Canada (also their home, but much more powerful) claims both English and French as official languages.

The result is foreseeable. Many immigrants to Quebec tenaciously learn and use English as much as they can. Partly for this reason, and partly because federal Supreme Court rulings say that the children of immigrants can choose to attend college in English in Quebec, the use of French on the island of Montreal has recently dropped below 50 percent.

What does this mean for Quebec’s young people? Oakes and Warren make two observations. One is that recent generations of young Quebecers tend to reject the “folkloric” aspect of the province’s culture. They also note that young Quebecers aspire not only to speak English, but to have an identity in English, which opens them to the world. The authors’ belief is that these factors test the limits of social identity theory as it is normally understood.

Social identity theory developed in the 1970s, when sociologists asserted that part of each per-son’s individual identity is defined by the “group”

he or she belongs to, whether that be religious, cultural or even simply citizenship in a particular nation. Some sociologists have recently suggested that minorities that refuse to speak the national lan-guage threaten the social identity of the majority.

Quebec is a rare case of a national language min-ority that is deeply rooted (it pre-existed Canada), affluent and thinks of itself as part of the First World. English Canada feels threatened by this, as social identity theory suggests, but has accepted that French will remain the majority language in Quebec. However, English Canada still leaps to the defence of immigrants to Quebec who assert their right to use English rather than French, refusing to acknowledge that this obviously threatens French.

Not surprisingly, there is a more careful analysis of this issue among francophone leaders. Jean-François Lisée, a respected writer elected to the legislature on September 4 for the PQ, argues in his book Nous that Quebec needs a cadre of English speakers in order to function independently in the world economy. He is willing to accept a min-imum French-speaking population of 55 percent on the island of Montreal—an astonishing conces-sion—but also argues that the separate system of English-speaking colleges, or CEGEPs, must be eliminated. Instead, a minority of courses will be taught in English in a universal system of French-language CEGEPs. Although he does not mention it, this will clearly—and, in my view, rightly—compel many immigrant students to use French rather than English.

This would be an evolutionary development in Quebec’s doctrine of “interculturalism,” an ideol-ogy the provincial government has developed as a substitute for Canada’s multiculturalism. The only difference between the two, as observers have noted, is that interculturalism takes place in French. Lisée’s proposal would ensure that continues to be the case, while also providing a significant number of educated English-capable francophones to inter-face with the world economy.

This sophisticated engagement with the perma-nent presence of English in Quebec may explain why threats to the French language do not seem to be an immediate issue for the printemps érable’s supporters. As many observers have noted, it is primarily a fight to maintain social democratic principles in Quebec (“it is principally a left-right conflict,” says Marcos Ancelovici, a McGill soci-

ologist). But this commitment to Gallic-style social democratic ideals appears to be compensatory: having momentarily set aside the language issue, the students have fastened on tuitions as a means of shoring up a “French” economic identity against the American-style “neoliberal” doctrines of the Charest and, certainly, Harper governments.

This also has the political advantage of allowing them to make common cause with English-speaking students who, as we have seen, are more numerous now than before.

These various aspects of the maple spring help explain the keen interest of Parti Québécois intel-lectuals such as Joseph Facal and Jean-François Lisée in the kind of militancy adopted by young Quebecers now.

Understandably, there is less interest among opinion leaders outside Quebec. My inference from this is that a federal government that no longer needs Quebec seats to sustain a majority and an anglophone electorate that for historical reasons finds it difficult to absorb straightforward informa-tion about Quebec have removed themselves from this conversation. That in turn creates a strong possibility that Quebec’s government—which-ever party dominates it—will see no alternative to demanding new powers in future. Indeed, the new PQ government did so within three weeks of being elected.

Few of the young people involved in the print-emps érable movement are likely to be au fait with social identity theory. It may also be true they do not know much about “Leetle Bateese,” the rebel-lion of 1837 or la survivance. Some of them are delighted to make common cause with Occupy Wall Street and get invited to American campuses to tell their battle stories. There, calling upon their impressive—if accented—English, they will lend their voices to the protest against the inequality and environmental brinksmanship of the existing global order.

On a political level, however, they—like the rest of us—live at home. In a few years the printemps érable generation will begin to take its place in the province’s educated work force. At that time it is very likely to move toward the hard-headed ver-sion of social democracy articulated by economists like Pierre Fortin and indépendentistes like Joseph Facal. That this doctrine is intensely annoying to the English-speaking world will no doubt be a plus.

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SpeakingUp:AHistoryofLanguageandPoliticsinCanadaandQuebecMarcel Martel and Martin Pâquet, translated by Patricia DumasBetween the Lines352 pages, softcoverISBN 9781926662930

So we may yet see another referendum in Quebec. On the campaign trail, the new Parti Québécois premier, Pauline Marois, deftly

bowing to the 72 percent of Quebecers who are against secession, swore not to initiate a referendum herself, even as she bought off the hard-core sover-eigntists with a promise to allow a citizen-initiated referendum, should 850,000 people sign a petition. Who knows. Could be worse. That’s politics and that’s Quebec. New parties, multiple vote-splittings, enormous public demonstrations, grand questions of the economic model, the social model, institu-tional renewal: accustomed as we are to picking gov-ernments on the basis of homophobic backbench tweets, the Rest of Canada could learn a thing or two from Quebec about vigorous, free-range democracy.

Nevertheless, one may be puzzled how 28 per-cent support for sovereignty could ever morph into 50 percent plus one, even in fantasy. But Marois’s rhetoric leaves no doubt about her strategy: ethnic nationalism. “We form a nation in our own right,” she proclaimed to a Montreal rally on August 30. “My only allegiance is to the people. It is this people which speaks French and has kept up the resistance for centuries that I will serve. For me it goes without saying. We have no excuses for being who we are.”

To ROCian ears, such a statement is so extreme as to seem almost unhinged. Try to imagine what would happen in British Columbia, Alberta or Ontario if a party leader before a cheering crowd were to proclaim that his or her sole allegiance were to the British-rooted anglo-Canadian majority, that it went without saying, that that leader made no apologies for it? Not in Arizona, not in Mississippi itself would such a leader escape without instan-taneous crucifixion. But in the recent campaign Marois and her lieutenants were sounding off like this continually, even casually.

Speaking Up: A History of Language and Politics in Canada and Quebec, by Marcel Martel and Martin Pâquet, and translated by Patricia Dumas, offers some insight both into the causes of that mindset and into its internal logic. It is a frankly nationalist history of minority language policy in Quebec and the ROC, particularly since 1927. After a rocky start on historical context (see below), the book gets rolling in chapters 3 to 6 as it traces the

resistance of French Canadians to assimilationist language policies (in the ROC) and to anglicizing socioeconomic forces (in Quebec).

The early decades of English-Canadian language policy are perhaps best thought of as a kind of Hesiodic Age of Beefsteak, when the sort of bigots who used to froth (still froth?) at bilingual cereal boxes were rampant over earth. As early as 1793, in the earliest assembly in Lower Canada, anti-French sentiment came to the fore, although as time passed the idea of anglicizing Lower Canada’s francophone population, as advocated by Lord Durham in the 1830s, was rejected as both impossible and irrel-evant, so long as French Canadians accepted a subordinate economic position. In the ROC, mean-while, cereal boxism had all the momentum. In defiance of section 133 of the British North America Act, Nova Scotia in 1864, Prince Edward Island in 1877, New Brunswick in 1871 (and for the next hundred years), Manitoba in 1890, Alberta in 1905, Ontario in 1912 and Saskatchewan in 1918 all acted to severely restrict or totally eliminate publicly funded French-language education. It is nothing short of a miracle that French survived in these areas over the following four or five generations. In the best traditions of British hypocrisy, such blatant bigotry was masked by the rhetoric of economy.

Meanwhile, through the 19th century, language and religion defined Quebec’s nascent national self-consciousness, but it was not until the early 1960s, when the birthrate dropped and anglicizing immi-gration soared, that the future of French became a cause of widespread anxiety. Simultaneously, rising political consciousness suggested that, unless the French language achieved economic dominance, post-war prosperity would spell anglicization. Given the glacial pace of response in earlier genera-tions, it is amazing how quickly and effectively the generation of the Quiet Revolution acted to estab-lish French as the official language of Quebec and roll back the adoption of English. Chapters 4 and 5, too detailed for summary here, describe the end-less series of commissions, studies, reports, bills, manifestos and so forth, which culminated in the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) in 1977. The book comes alive in these chapters and they are a welcome change from the depressing cereal boxism of chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 6, on develop-ments since the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, is duller: an era of court cases, minority rights, impassioned marginalia.

Overall, it must be said, the book is hard to read. Its lack of footnotes suggests a popular history, but its narrative tone is pure scholarship. And the trans-lation is frequently unidiomatic and sometimes misleading.

Or perhaps I am being too hard on the transla-tor, too charitable to the authors. Perhaps the latter do indeed hold that “the presence of two languages demonstrates the impossibility of co-existing on the same territory.” The historical fact of multi-ethnic

communities, from Old Babylonia to Alexandria to the Hapsburg Empire (and, really, everything in between) may well be unfamiliar to them. I would stake little on the historical sense of authors who think that in 18th-century England “the nobility conversed mostly in French, but also in German,” while “the Presbyterian Scots conversed in Scottish Gaelic or broke into folkloric songs by the great poet Robert Burns,” or who ascribe to Edmund Burke as opposed to Charlemagne the “concept of heritage stemming from birthright.” From their account of Britain’s ruthless policy toward Ireland or Acadia one would never guess that ruthlessness was the norm in 18th-century foreign policy, from the Palatinate to Poland; neither was anti- Protestantism less common in France than anti-Catholicism in Great Britain.

Most of all, presumably it is simple ignorance that fails to mention what ethnic nationalism did to European culture and society in the period of 1808 to 1945. How can the depredations of the Canadian cereal boxists of the 19th century be understood except with reference to countless other proud oppressions, of Jew by Slav, of Slav by Magyar, of Magyar by Austrian, and so on ad infinitum? As national identities replaced feudal ones, much social injustice was erased; but still more was unleashed, and neither sort can fail to inform any intellectual conscience worth the name. Even apart from the body count, which after all made the Thirty Years War look like kindergarten, it will literally be centuries before western civilization recovers the unity, confidence, sense of purpose, love of beauty, joy in language and respect for physical courage characteristic of the cosmopolitan era that ethnic nationalism obliterated. Nary of word of this, nary an echo of this will be found in Speaking Up.

On the contrary, in its theoretical assumptions this book makes my blood run cold. We learn in the introduction that “one permanent feature in public policies has remained, rooted in the basic require-ments of living together: the need to homogenize the population as a means of exercising power within a given territory … For the authorities, the efficient exercise of power requires that a popula-tion share common characteristics, including, potentially, the use of a given language.” In such a dog-eat-dog world of zero-sum identity politics, British assimilationists were acting quite naturally in desiring to crush colonial Quebec’s culture, and so were cereal boxists in trying to deracinate their francophone minorities; Quebec’s ethnic national-ists simply have fought and will fight fire with fire, led by Marois and Jean-François Lisée. But I hasten to assure the authors that, historically speaking, the will to homogenize is the exception, not the rule; that Canada’s cosmopolitan, rights-based regime, while out of step with the ethnic nationalisms of 1808–1945 (and beyond), is the normal human con-dition; that their assimilationist assumptions are, in short, equally preposterous and inhumane.

War of WordsCanada’s linguistic struggles have turned some victims vicious.JaCk mitChell

Jack Mitchell teaches Roman history at Dalhousie University. He is a novelist and epic poet, and an online editor for the LRC’s website.


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LUNCH WITH DEBORAH KIRSHNERNovember 8 | 12 PM–1:30 PM111 QUEEN’S PARK, TORONTO$25 - Admission and a bag

lunch by Chef Jamie Kennedy

Join us for an intimate

Literate Lunch session

with Deborah Kirshner,

author of Mahler’s Lament. Set in Budapest, this work

of historical fiction focuses on an episode in the early

career of composer Gustav Mahler, chronicling the

evening of November 29, 1889, as he prepares for the

premiere of his first symphony, Titan, with the Budapest

Philharmonic. As he makes his way to the theatre, he

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was as disastrous as the reception of his symphony

that evening. An award-winning writer and violinist,

Kirshner has woven the structure and aesthetic of the

first symphony into her writing using language that is

keeping with the period. Her presentation will include

musical snippets acting as guides to the book.

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OstrichHad a dream that an ostrich with powerful thighswas chasing me through Queen’s Park.My own legs felt like representations in lead,not meant to be moved exceptwhen changing exhibit locations.

I collapsed to the grass, feigning injury.The ostrich thudded to my motionless sideand kicked up leaves. I thought I hearddry clucking sounds, and observedthrough slitted eyes the manic birdbatting his cakey black eyelashes.Behind him the landscape stood likea side of beef, ribs pale in scarlet.

I tried to speak but failed. He said,“Do not attempt to save yourself,you are my greatest disappointment.”He stretched his wings, shook his head,and trotted west, toward Robarts Librarythat monolith — brutalist, avian, concrete.I spent the rest of the night in its belly,with Umberto Eco, who joined mewearing monk’s robes, his beardan Elvis wig, his eyes pierced eggslicked with small flames and silveryshimmers in the whites. My name

in the dream is Salvatore of Montferrat.When asked why I am breathing fastI tell Umberto Eco that an ostrichchased me through Queen’s Parkbut I feigned death, then followedthe bird there, where I lost my thread.

Salvatore Difalco

Joanna M. Weston has published poetry, reviews and short stor-ies in anthologies and journals for 25 years. Her middle-reader, Those Blue Shoes, was published by Clarity House Press in 2006, the same year that Frontenac House of Calgary published A Summer Father, a collec-tion of poetry. She is currently read-ing Bruce H. Lipton’s The Biology of Belief and John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning, having just finished William Golding’s Rites of Passage, Sister Dang Nghiem’s Healing: A Woman’s Journey from Doctor to Nun and Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore.

Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto and works as an Italian translator. He is currently dipping into John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath for the thousandth time and rereading Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.

Instructions to a Speakeranalyze the seated audienceeach face a complex sentence

parse the roaming eyesand conjugate restless hands

let the grammar of their bodiesstraighten under your voice

until words slough into the bookyou have created page by face

from the biographies extendinglip-by-line across the room

Joanna M. Weston


The Old MapNewspaper is floatingin a puddle by the heart-carved birchreminding me of our sixth grade geography projectwhen we made that map of Canadaby tracing the coast off a globe and then copyingwhat the textbook said was Ontariowhat Quebec, and whatever those other provinces wereRemember that we soaked our map with tea bags andburned its edges the colour of desertswith the matchbook from your parents’ dresserand when we were done with everythingburied that page in a tin boxin the soil by the sentimental treeMaybe, someday, someone will find that tinand think what’s inside is real

Tim Mook Sang

J.S. MacLean lives in Calgary. He has had some one hundred poems pub-lished in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. He served as a poetry and art editor for the Triggerfish Critical Review from 2007 to 2011. He published his own first collection, Molasses Smothered Lemon Slices, in 2012 with CreateSpace. In his spare time he works. He is currently reading Awakening by William Horwood and Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, edited by David Wagoner.

Tim Mook Sang studied at the University of Northern British Columbia and the University of Ottawa. He is a schoolteacher in Montreal. Over the past three years, his poetry has appeared in Bywords Quarterly Journal, the LRC, Jones Av, New Fairy Tales and Canadian Literature. Currently on his desk are Killdeer by Phil Hall, Big Baby by Charles Burns and Touch by Alexi Zentner.

SkinDay’s centre ripens and sweetens within while skin betrays with shrink wrinkles and scabs of night.Slice, peel, hang, and try to peer inside;but just one side to see.Fill with meat and bone,even seed, and close.It then slips to sleepbetween two faithful photon sheets.

J.S. MacLean


TheAppleHouseGillian CampbellBrindle and Glass231 pages, softcoverISBN 9781926972886

A certain kind of Canadian novel has become so common it is now a cliché, and is made fun of and complained about

by critics and novelists, even if still widely enjoyed by reading groups and prize-giving committees. It usually begins with a tragic or unexpected death, follows a trail of grief and redemptive healing, and constantly refers to the past, either the protagonist’s own early years or that of their parents or grandpar-ents. Memory and loss. Such a novel is The Apple House, Gillian Campbell’s debut.

It begins with a flashback to the protagonist’s childhood, and thereafter alternates back and forth between her coping with her husband’s sudden death in a car accident and her memories of growing up in a small village on the West Island of Montreal. These flashbacks to the past, however, are written in the present tense, while the main story, which takes place in the fictional “now,” is pre-sented in the traditional past tense. This inversion makes little sense and actually detracts from the impact, the assault on common sense undermining the reader’s faith in the narrator.

The community is bilingual, and although the tale supposedly takes place in the 1970s, during some of the years of greatest political strife between French and English—the October Crisis of 1970, the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976 and the referendum in 1980—these issues have no bearing on the lives of the characters. All of them accept the dual nature of their settlement as given, getting along as neighbours and learning to communicate with each other without any rancour, even if there is something of a divide between them. It is sim-ply not mentioned. Given the time and place, this absence is striking. It is hard to believe that these people, a short commute from the demonstrations, parades and, yes, riots that took place in the city of Montreal, had no knowledge or opinion, never read about any of it in the papers or took notice of the radio and television news reports. It is as if the village were completely cut off from the rest of

the world and lived in a space where political and language issues were kept somehow at bay.

Of course, Campbell simply is not interested in the language issue, and it is childish to complain that a writer has not delivered the book a reader expects. But it strains credulity. Language only emerges as an issue not because the protagon-ist, Imogene Laviolette, an Anglo, has married a francophone, but because in the aftermath of his death, her painstakingly acquired command of French suddenly deserts her and she uncon-sciously reverts to speaking only in English, even with her French relatives and employees. In other words, it appears simply as a convenient plot device, but otherwise politely remains invisible. This complete unawareness of the French fact was itself a symptom of the language strife that engulfed the province at the time.

As an aside, however, Campbell is not alone in this. English-language writers in Quebec have ever been loath to broach the language issue in their fiction. Even Mordecai Richler saved his deliciously pointed anti-separatist barbs for articles in Toronto publications or foreign newspapers. The anglo-phone portrayal of the Québécois is usually either as exotic foreigners suitable for fleeting romantic affairs, as in Richler and Leonard Cohen, or worse, as cardboard buffoons such as in Ray Smith’s The Man Who Hated Emily Brontë or William Weintraub’s The Underdogs. In this respect, Gillian Campbell’s French-Canadian characters are much more realistic and in fact quite sympathetic, com-ing to her protagonist’s aid more than once. The language barrier between her characters is for both sides an inconvenience, not a sore point.

Campbell spends an inordinate amount of time, especially early in the book, simply describ-ing things or delivering endless lists, as if she is either trying to remind herself of the atmosphere of that time and place, where she herself grew up, or worse, merely attempting to fill more pages. There is just no good reason for so much detail that has no bearing either on what comes after or indeed on what is actually taking place. Similarly, the group of children in the flashback sequences is larger than needed for the purposes of the novel and could eas-ily have been reduced, which would have avoided

finding a reason for them to move away as adults, only to be awkwardly hauled back years later for the funeral, where they again contribute little to the resolution.

Imogene, the protagonist, and her husband had finally been planning to move from a small apartment and buy the titular Apple House at the time of the fatal accident, and it is a surprise only to Imogene that she turns out to be pregnant after her husband has been taken from her. Adding to her woes, the village drug dealer has usurped the house from under her and hired Imogene’s developmentally challenged brother to care for his vicious dog. Initially Imogene convinces herself that she cannot bring the baby to term, but when she tells her mother she is pregnant, the mother assumes she will have it. Eventually Imogene comes around, apparently simply because that is

what others expect. Never does she consider the effect on the child of growing up fatherless.

The drug dealer, Swen, is a childhood friend of her dead husband’s but not, as Imogene has to continually remind people, of hers. He is also the only char-acter who is not by default nice; there are a scattered few village eccentrics, and the children (in the flashbacks) occasionally play the cruel games children will, but

Swen alone is responsible for any crime or bad will necessary to generate story. Imogene even blames him, without real proof, for selling marijuana to the drunk driver who killed her husband. When his dog inevitably bites the simple-minded brother and the authorities come looking, Swen burns down the Apple House, presumably to avoid his (implied) grow-op being discovered, and disappears.

With the villain defeated and herself convinced she is happy to bear her husband’s child alone, Imogene finally accepts what her life has become, returns to work in the village shoe shop she owns, and declares she “can’t think of anywhere better to live.” Although it is meant to signal her growth and acceptance, to deliver a happy ending to a tragic story, it belies the dearth of imagination invested in the tale.

Campbell’s prose is simple and clean, but never elegant, and she has an unerring eye for the ordin-ary. This extends from her vocabulary through her over-numerous descriptions and lists of objects, all the way to her choice of scene, event and subject. Everything is carefully planned and in place, no risks are taken with the narrative and therefore no surprises are forthcoming, and as a result, there is almost no tension. Campbell’s greatest assets as a writer are her patience and exactitude, but a little more imagination and daring might have made a more satisfying read.

An Unerring Eye for the OrdinaryLoss and recovery in a Montreal village.miChel baSilièReS

Michel Basilières is the author of Black Bird (Vintage Canada, 2003). He teaches creative writing at Humber College and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

The community is bilingual, and although the tale supposedly takes place in the 1970s, during some of the years of

greatest political strife between French and English, these issues have no bearing

on the lives of the characters.


TheMagicofSaidaM.G. VassanjiDoubleday Canada 352 pages, hardcoverISBN 9780385667142

The Magic of Saida takes us back to the East Africa of M.G. Vassanji’s earlier work (and Giller wins), after a departure to India

with A Place Within: Rediscovering India and his last novel, The Assassin’s Song.

For Vassanji, though, India is never a departure, or rather, being of Indian descent is not, because it is this experience of dual and sometimes dueling heritage that consistently defines his fictional worlds. He marries the two quite explicitly in the creation of Saida’s protagonist, Kamal Punja—a mixed-race man born in the Tanzanian town of Kilwa who has returned from that third realm of influence familiar to Vassanji’s readers, the Canada of his adulthood.

All has presumably not gone well on this visit home, for we first encounter Kamal through the eyes of a publisher who, while visiting a hospital in Dar es Salaam, chances upon a curious patient lying delirious in a hospital bed. Martin Kigoma is positioned as a man in search of stories, but he has presumably been introduced in order to make sense of the ramblings of a man who alleges he has been given hallucinogenic drugs that are making him talk and see things.

And so the story begins. Why has Dr. Punja returned to these parts? What has he seen? He readily admits to Martin that he has come in search of a woman he lost trace of long ago, a childhood love, an African girl who was the granddaughter of the famous Swahili poet Mzee Omari Tamim, a girl named Saida. And has he seen her? Martin asks. About that, Kamal cannot be sure.

In conversation with Martin, Kamal reflects on his childhood in Kilwa. He grew up the son of an African woman descended from slaves, his father, an Indian merchant, having left them to return to India before Kamal can retain any memory of him. This is the first of the many mysteries of Kamal’s origins to unravel in these pages—the history of his father’s family in Tanzania, his father’s return to India, the nature of the union between his parents,

the painful discovery of his mother’s descent from slaves.

Kamal’s early life has been marked by the dis-rupture of his father’s abandonment, leaving him poor and more identified as an African than an Indian. When he is eleven, Kamal’s mother will-ingly sends him off to live with his father’s rela-tives in Dar so that he might become Indianized. Kamal is not just separated from his mother and his childhood home, but also from his sweetheart, described rather portentously in press materials and jacket copy as “the mysterious Saida.” In fact,

Saida is not particularly mysterious; it is rather that the question of what has happened to her is the mystery that ostensibly propels the story.

We meet Saida as a child, not notably bright or beautiful, a poor student Kamal has been assigned to help study. They share the fairly innocent trans-gressions of boys and girls in childhood, forming a bond of secrecy and trust. One would think it would be the separation from his mother that ruptures his nascent sense of self, but no, that is handily dealt with; it is Kamal’s early and unfulfilled love for Saida that haunts him, leaving him with such an emptiness that he must return to Kilwa all these years later in search of her. That he was just eleven when they were separated makes the mystery feel like something of a conceit; only much later do we learn that Kamal returns once to Kilwa to see her, just before he is about to depart for medical school in Uganda. She is now married and yet they con-summate their love and Kamal promises his return.

Kamal does not return. He meets an Asian med-ical student who is also from Kilwa and, when she is threatened with deportation from Uganda during Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from the country, marries her and accompanies her to Canada. They live a good middle class life in Edmonton, raising two privileged immigrant children with little inter-est in their family history. No particular event forces Kamal’s return, just the malaise of later mid-life, the what-ifs.

Saida never comes alive as a girl of special charms or promise, which causes the whole prem-ise of the protagonist’s return to feel more like a

contrivance used in order to explore complex and interesting cultural and regional histories. History seems to have increasingly become Vassanji’s pre-occupation—always with reference to identity and belonging—particularly the history of the Indian East African who leaves in order to pursue further education and lives out his adult life in Canada or the United States. Vassanji’s own history serves as trajectory.

Vassanji’s interest in historical origins is most explicitly demonstrated by his return to Gujarat in A Place Within, his travelogue about India. Non-

fiction gave Vassanji licence to shift frames in a way fiction cannot tolerate without risk of seeming didactic. At moments, Vassanji almost completely abandons fic-tion in The Magic of Saida in order to catch the reader up with neces-sary historical context.

And as he commonly does, Vassanji brings in a third realm of influence, the years Kamal has spent in Canada as a doctor, a hus-

band and father, the place from which he departs on an investigative journey home. His Canadian life is only characterized in the broadest strokes, calling into question the need, beyond comment about the complexities of identity, and the guilt about the relative privilege enjoyed by the successful immi-grant abroad, for this framework. It is a structure that served Vassanji better in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, where Vikram’s Canadian life had its own narrative.

There are a number of complexities to this book’s structure that give it “epic” quality. The publisher Martin is less a character in his own right than a rather old-fashioned structural device, a screen onto which Kamal projects his narrative. Much of the story of Kamal’s childhood is taken up with listening in awe to Mzee Omari Tamim’s reci-tation of his last great poem, an attempt to recount the story of Tanzania in colonial times. We are told repeatedly of the significance of this poem; in fact, we are often told what matters here, which burdens the novel with a weight that feels imposed rather than intrinsic and earned.

There are likewise messages Vassanji repeats throughout the book—about the African complicit in colonial atrocities, about the consumer culture of the West, about the need to tell African stories—that lack subtlety and nuance, which lead the reader to feel Vassanji is saying: if this is the last novel I write, these are the things you must understand. And yes, they are important things to understand, but what Vassanji does not seem to trust is that his reader does understand them.

Chasing HistoryAn Afro-Indian Canadian searches for the girl he left in Tanzania.Camilla gibb

Camilla Gibb is the author of four novels, most recently, The Beauty of Humanity Movement (Doubleday, 2010).

Much of the story of Kamal’s childhood is taken up with listening in awe to Mzee

Omari Tamim’s recitation of his last great poem, an attempt to recount the

story of Tanzania in colonial times.


The BlackBerry, initially just a two-way messenger, appeared in national political

reporting in 2000 in the midst of what we can now see was a huge trans-formation in the Canadian media. The Research In Motion device would go on to play its own dramatic part in that transformation.

In the 1990s, the Hamilton Spectator, Windsor Star, London Free Press, Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon StarPhoenix, BCTV, CFTO and CJOH all closed their Ottawa bureaus. They started covering national politics and public policy from their home news-rooms, supplemented by news services such as Canadian Press or Ottawa bur-eaus of TV networks.

Over time this has changed the news about politics that Canadians receive.

National news services do not inject local examples or context into national political stories. Reporters for national news organizations look for issues with national appeal for readers and viewers all across the country. Local members of Parliament do not matter. Not only are readers, listeners and viewers denied a local perspective on national issues, but information stops flowing the other way too. Local newsrooms have no Ottawa-based reporters to cover important federal govern-ment stories linked to their communities. Decisions about what national news stories to cover are made without any perspective from those a long way from Parliament Hill.

One can understand the logic, though, in cut-ting political coverage starting in the 1990s. By the time Canadians defeated the Charlottetown accord in 1992, the country had been tearing itself apart for the preceding 25 years through almost non-stop crises and battles that pitted region against region. It started with the original FLQ crisis of the

1960s, followed by the rise of the Parti Québécois and its election as the governing party of Quebec in 1976, two oil price shocks and inflation in the 1970s, the 1980 Quebec referendum, the National Energy Program in October 1980, more inflation, unemployment, and deficit upon deficit in the 1980s, free trade negotiations with the United States starting in 1985, the Meech Lake accord in 1987, the free trade election in 1988, the contentious collapse of Meech in 1990, the rise of the Bloc Québécois and the Reform Party after Meech’s failure, and, finally, the 1992 Charlottetown accord campaign.

Canadians tired of the never-ending national disputes and turned away from politicians and pol-itics. The news media responded by cutting political coverage and bodies devoted to it. That began in the mid-1990s recession and has been ongoing. Even today the staff numbers in Ottawa newsrooms of national news organizations continue to fall, and with fewer bodies there are fewer or no longer any specialist reporters. Almost everyone has become a general assignment reporter expected to file every day on whatever is happening. There is no longer the time to do detailed research, talk to contacts, go to a Commons committee meeting or read background documents. The result is a slow stripping away of the knowledge, history, experi-ence and context required for political reporters to cover complex issues. They lose the ability to break stories when they cannot talk to the range of people involved in an issue who can each provide a piece of a puzzle. With fewer contacts of their own, reporters gradually become much more reliant on political parties, communications staff for ministers and the legions of lobbyists and private-sector com-

munications people, each pushing their employer’s point of view.

Journalists have also confronted the growing demands of the internet, an ever larger element of their employers’ approach to news. Reporters now face not a single daily deadline but several daily, if not hourly, deadlines, filing for websites, print, audio and video some-times in the same day.

All these changes, though, were just beginning when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien called an election in the fall of 2000. For that campaign, CBC struck a deal with RIM to provide BlackBerrys for about 16 key reporters, field pro-ducers and editors in exchange for an assessment of how the technology per-formed under the pressures of a cam-paign. The first-generation BlackBerry was a small messenger device with a

keyboard and a green and grey screen that could display a few lines of text at a time. Reception was just within major cities; yet it was still a huge advance in managing a team of reporters and producers scattered across the country. It could send a message wirelessly not just to one person but to as many as were included in the address line: all recipients would get the same message immediately and simultaneously. Contents could be instantly translated into scripts or adjustments to campaign coverage—inspiring a question to a leader, inserting a fact or a comment someone else had made into a script or live talk with an anchor, or allowing a reporter to put a background question to the campaign team travelling on one of the tours and then circulate the answer to everyone involved in the coverage.

The BlackBerry improved the network’s reporting. It kept the coverage team aware of what was happening all across the country on all the leaders’ campaigns and in the newsroom, where overall campaign coverage was managed and directed. CBC did not circulate the email addresses of those with BlackBerrys since senior editors had no interest in external distractions for their repor-ters. It was a perfect device for internal communi-cation and editorial management and reporters and producers were reluctant to surrender their BlackBerrys at the end of the campaign.

They did not have to wait long for an even bet-ter replacement. In 2002, a second-generation BlackBerry featured upgraded instant messaging capability as well as email and other business tools—a major advance on the original and an instant hit with all in the media.

ESSAY

Berry’d AliveHow the Canadian media have used new technologies to shut out the public.ChRiStopheR Waddell

Christopher Waddell is director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He was parliamentary bureau chief for CBC Television News, after serving as a producer for CBC The National and Sunday Report. Before that, he was Ottawa bureau chief, associate editor and national editor at The Globe and Mail. This essay is adapted from his chapter titled “Berry’d Alive: The Media, Technology and the Death of Political Coverage” in How Canadians Communicate IV: Media and Politics, edited by David Taras and Christopher Waddell (Athabasca University Press, 2012).


By the 2004 election, BlackBerrys were a stan-dard reporting tool, but used differently from how the CBC used them in the 2000 campaign. Reporters now gave their BlackBerry addresses to all the political parties. Opening up their BlackBerry systems to the parties’ media message managers was a fatal error. Collectively, the media handed over its communications tool to the political par-ties, who had both the people and the incentive to figure out how to use instant communications to their partisan advantage. A device originally used for internal communication within news organ-izations had become a way for the parties to shape their messages and attacks on their competitors by bombarding reporters with emails at any time of the day or night.

There was a positive side to it for reporters though, particularly in the era of all-news television and websites. The pressure to file regularly meant finding something “new” several times a day to update stories by at least creating the illusion that something new had happened. That was the gen-esis for the “reaction” story—building a new top to a story based on someone’s reaction to almost anything: a campaign development, a leader’s announce-ment, a candidate’s misstep, a dam-aging revelation about a candidate’s past or an external news event. The BlackBerry was the perfect tool to distribute the initial news story and then gather the reaction, and repor-ters were not the only ones who figured that out. The parties quickly realized the ease with which reporters who lacked context and background in many campaign issues could be manipulated and hooked on BlackBerry journalism. Their campaign offices were thrilled to flood journalists with BlackBerry messages con-taining background, comments and news releases, particularly focused on persuading reporters of the hypocrisy of their opponents by highlighting any previous comments that contradicted current state-ments and policy positions.

This all came together in the 2004 campaign. The media focused relatively little time and attention on policies. Campaign coverage was overwhelmingly about leaders, strategy and tactics, and increasingly about public opinion polling results, as nightly tracking polls now dominated election reporting. An emphasis on personality and conflict consti-tuted much of the daily coverage of politics and public policy in the last decade. Partisan blogs also assumed a greater importance, not among the gen-eral public but within the media, which followed them closely and reported on their content when they deemed it significant. All of this was ideal material to be distributed, debated and chewed over endlessly through BlackBerry mes sages, instantly spreading news and rumours across a broad cross-section of reporters and back and forth between party media managers and journalists. The media’s fascination with the inner workings of cam-paigns and party “war rooms” (despite no evidence that the interest is shared by the public) fit perfectly into a BlackBerry world.

From the political operatives’ perspective, it is always better to give the media the message and help them run with it rather than to have to respond to unexpected and disruptive stories that might emerge if the media are not kept occupied. The parties discovered that the BlackBerry was the perfect tool for this purpose. It nicely supplemented the degree to which parties already managed the media agenda by having reporters on leaders’ tours,

moving them around the country in a bubble, and feeding them daily announcements and stories isolated from both voters and what was happening in communities in individual ridings. Cutbacks by news organizations meant that they devoted fewer reporters and less coverage to the campaign with each election, but they still staffed the leaders’ planes, giving the parties the upper hand in shap-ing media coverage, which they skillfully exploited, supplemented by BlackBerrys.

The 2004 election produced a minority govern-ment, the first in Ottawa since 1979, and the uncer-tainty surrounding its lifespan meant no let-up on the media’s focus on strategy, tactics and opinion polling. Who was up, who was down, and who would force the next election and when dominated reporting from Ottawa. Through two subsequent elections, each of which produced a Conservative minority, that emphasis did not change. Nor did it change in 2011 as the story was still whether the Conservatives would get the majority that, this time, leader Stephen Harper explicitly requested from voters almost daily.

What continued to change was the technology. As BlackBerrys became more sophisticated, joined by other smart phones that included web brows-ers, social media tools emerged such as Facebook and Twitter. They have been incorporated into the parties’ efforts to control the media and shape the media’s coverage of politics and Parliament to their advantage, even as blogs have faded in significance. Some regard the 2011 election as the first social media campaign, but despite that label, there is little evidence that social media have either captured the attention of or engaged the general public. As social media analyst Mark Blevis wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on March 29, 2011, “anecdotally, the political discussion on Twitter is still tak-ing place within an echo chamber. That is, most of the political discussions involve journalists, pundits, interest groups, the politically engaged, and—yes—even politicians. The average Canadian? Not so much.” His analysis of Twitter activity dur-ing the campaign found a daily average of about 16,000 tweets related to the 2011 campaign, yet generally little more than one third each day was new content. Almost half involved someone resending (retweeting) what someone else had sent without modification, while only between 10 per-cent and 15 percent of the tweets were commenting on someone else’s message.

Toronto digital communications consultant Meghan Warby made a similar point in assessing the impact of social media. Writing during the cam-paign on The Globe and Mail website, she noted: “Political parties are using digital channels primar-ily as new funnels, within which they pour talking points from speeches, sound bites from media appearances, cut-and-pasted bullets from press releases and after-the-fact event updates. This isn’t unacceptable—more dangerously for our democ-racy, it’s uninteresting.”

For all the enthusiastic talk about the revolution in communications that social media would bring,

media coverage of the 2011 federal election was not noticeably different from that of the 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections. There remained virtually no contact or communication between the journalists writ-ing about the election and the public. The media’s emphasis remained firmly on strategy and tactics, personality and conflict. The parties created an alternate reality with the media as willing accom-plices through joint participation on BlackBerrys and other smart phones exchanging information, rumours and gossip that meant little to those out-side Ottawa. Frequently, these efforts resulted in stories about party strategy, insider political per-sonalities, conflicts within parties and other largely trivial issues within an environment in which how quickly or cleverly someone reacted, regardless of what was said, became, in the media’s eyes, a key measure of competence.

Interestingly, in the 2011 election, some media outlets actually told their audiences the source of these stories. For example, when Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was caught off guard when repor-ters in Quebec on April 6 asked him about appar-

ently racist comments by one of his Quebec candidates, CBC, CTV and Global all stated that the candidate’s comments had been given to the media by the NDP. The next day, when another Liberal candidate in Alberta, a former judge, got into hot water over past comments sug-gesting that not all sexual assaults should be treated equally by the courts, Global told its viewers that

the comments had been given to the network by the Conservatives. The party gave the reporters the tip timed to a “tough on crime” appearance by Stephen Harper in the Toronto-area riding of Cabinet minis-ter Julian Fantino. Details about the comments, and then the chase for reaction, dominated BlackBerry and Twitter activity for reporters that day.

Instead of the reality check that used to be produced by newsrooms across the country tell-ing their Ottawa reporters what did and did not play at home, the key determinant now is how the issue plays among the insiders in Ottawa and what they consider important. The parliamentary press gallery now relies on news aggregators such as nationalnewswatch.com—a site that collects head-lines and story links from across the country—for a sense of how Canadians think. Aggregators, though, simply provide lists, not a sense of what is import-ant or why in communities from coast to coast.

Decisions to cut back on reporting staff, close bureaus and replace reporters from local news-papers and TV stations with national news bureaus and national network reporters have broken the link between the public and the media that has been at the core of political communication. As a result, the media now plays a shrinking role in informing Canadians about politics and public policy. It has replaced its traditional role with an inward-looking, narrowly focused coverage that concentrates on the issues defined by the par-ties through their joint sharing with the media of technological tools and their ability to engage reporters in concentrating on the artificial world they have collectively created. Instead of using technology to bridge the communications gap between the media and voters in their commun-ities, news organizations have used it to turn their back on the public, with journalists forging closer links with the people reporters cover rather than with the citizens who used to read, watch, listen to and think about their reporting.

The media’s fascination with the inner workings of campaigns and party “war

rooms” (despite no evidence that the interest is shared by the public) fit perfectly into a BlackBerry world.


ChronicCondition:WhyCanada’sHealthCareSystemNeedstoBeDraggedintothe21stCenturyJeffrey SimpsonAllan Lane Canada304 pages, hardcoverISBN 9780670065899

If Canada needs an “adult conversation” on health care (read, a frank appraisal and

an open-minded consideration of options), that discussion appears to be well launched—at least among the chattering classes. Last year we had assessments of the performance and the sustainability of Canada’s current model of healthcare delivery and finance from two leading public finance economists—David Dodge and Don Drummond. This year, Canada’s pre-eminent healthcare journalist—André Picard of The Globe and Mail—delivered a Conference Board of Canada lecture on the same theme. And now Picard’s estimable Globe colleague Jeffrey Simpson has entered the fray with Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health Care System Needs to Be Dragged into the 21st Century.

These are important, reasoned, well-grounded politically centrist contributions, and they deserve a wide audience. While not of one view about the options to be considered, they all present a case along the following lines: the model of public health insurance that Canadians adopted in the mid 20th century, and have clung to ever since, is a high-cost system that delivers mediocre results and that threatens to crowd out other public priorities as costs continue to escalate. Canadian medicare needs to be brought down from its public policy pedestal and substantially re-examined.

Simpson’s is the most thorough and the most biting of these critiques. He zooms in on various points: beginning by letting his readers shadow Jeff Turnbull, chief of staff at the Ottawa Hospital, and

at another point visiting a private for-profit clinic in Montreal. He pans across to show how Canada compares with other countries. And he provides an engaging account of the history that led to the establishment of public hospital and medical insur-ance in the 1950s and ’60s to show that there was nothing inevitable about the choices made. But those choices, he argues, have given Canadians a system that is now “the worst of both worlds.” It requires that physician and hospital services be funded almost exclusively by government, and assigns all other services to an “American-style” realm of mixed and uneven public and private finance and limited regulation. This division creates problems of timely access (wait times) for physician and hospital services, problems of financial access (affordability) for some members of the population for all other services and problems of continuity of care as patients move from one realm to the other. Meanwhile, health costs are among the highest in the world, relative to the size of our economy and population, and are growing faster than either.

This portrait needs some shading. Canada is not among the very top spenders in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the group of advanced countries with which we normally compare ourselves), but it does rank with several countries whose total (public and private) per capita spending on health care is about 25 per-cent above the OECD average. (Leave aside the

United States in these comparisons, as does Simpson, as a distracting outlier.) Canada’s public healthcare spending per capita, however, is very close to the average. In addition, the seemingly inexorable rise of health care as a share of the economy and of public budgets has been called into question by a recent slowdown in the rise of healthcare spending across the OECD (including Canada). This may be in part because a number of widely prescribed drugs are com-ing off-patent and hence becoming cheaper, and in part because govern-ments are restraining payments to providers under austerity agendas. Nonetheless, until we understand better the reasons for this slowdown, we should expect the previous trend to resume soon—as it did after other episodes of cost constraint in the past.

As for what the Canadian system delivers for this spending, not all measures of performance are equally important. Canada generally ranks better on measures of improved health “outcomes” (the function of

health care, after all) than it ranks on measures of “process,” such as wait times for treatment. We do well in international comparisons of cancer survival rates, for example, and survival rates are less uneven across regions in Canada than in most other countries. On broader outcome measures, such as reductions in deaths from causes that are amenable to medical treatment, we are as much as 20 percent better than the OECD average, although we are still outperformed by countries such as France and Australia, which spend somewhat less. But on important measures of process—not only timeliness but also equity of access, continuity of care and more—we do significantly worse than countries that spend comparable sums or less.

So—what is to be done? Do we need to rethink the fundamental design of the system, as might be implied by Simpson’s “worst of both worlds” tag (which, to be fair, he takes from an OECD study of Canada)? The tag overstates the case. There is much to be said for funding a central core of essen-tial services exclusively from public sources, while paying for other services through a mix of public and private finance. This is the way a number of countries finance health care, in practice if not in law. In Britain, for example, where about 83 per-cent of health spending is public (in contrast to Canada’s 70 percent), all highly complex hospital treatment and almost all “primary” (first-contact and family) care is paid for publicly, while there are

Changing PrescriptionsOne of Canada’s leading journalists gives medicare a timely checkup.CaRolyn hugheS tuohy

Carolyn Hughes Tuohy is professor emerita of political science and a senior fellow at the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. She is a specialist in comparative public policy, particularly social policy. Her publica-tions include Accidental Logics: The Dynamics of Change in the Health Care Arena in the United States, Britain and Canada (Oxford University Press, 1999).


private alternatives for elective surgery and limited copayments for drugs by higher-income groups. In Holland, an exclusively publicly financed seg-ment comprising long-term care and treatment for many chronic diseases sits alongside a compulsory, highly regulated and publicly subsidized system of private insurance for acute care.

Canada’s uniqueness lies not in having an exclu-sively publicly financed core of services but rather in what we do, and do not, include in that core. If it is provided by a physician, or on physician’s orders in a hospital, government and only govern-ment picks up the tab. If it is provided outside the hospital by someone other than a physician, then depending on the province you live in, your age or your income, you may be on your own for at least some portion of the charge. Periodic health checkups for young healthy adults, long regarded by expert medical opinion as of very limited value, are in the public basket. Insulin for diabetics is not. Some rethinking of these anomalies in light of current technology is surely required. As Simpson notes, this means that Canadians might pay at least some portion of the charge for things that are now free at the point of delivery, but that other things for which they now pay would be fully covered by public insurance.

The ultimate effects of such a sorting exercise are likely to be marginal. For a broad range of “core” services there is little to be gained and much to be risked by introducing private finance options such as user charges. True, countries such as France and Sweden make quite extensive use of user charges, but in France these are fully incorporated within an integrated and tightly regulated system of public and private insurance, and Sweden’s user fees exist in the context of a highly redistributive tax system. Australia has built parallel private alternatives and user fees into its healthcare financing models with-out such extensive European-style safeguards, and its citizens bear a higher portion of out-of-pocket costs than do Canadians and are much more likely to report that they do not seek health care because of cost. (This despite the facts that social assist-ance recipients are exempt from such charges and that Australia operates a more extensive program of public coverage for drugs than does Canada.) Simpson points to evidence of the negative effects of user fees in causing some people to wait too long to seek care, and to further evidence that once the gravely and chronically ill and those on low incomes are exempted, user fees are not a signifi-cant source of revenue for the system.

What about private delivery of services, paid for by the public purse? Here Simpson engages one of the liveliest debates in Canadian health care. It is a truism among health policy wonks that most publicly financed health care in Canada is already privately delivered—by hospital or regional health authority corporations organized on a not-for-profit basis, and by physicians and other health professionals organized as private practitioners. So far, so non-controversial. The debate arises when the subject turns to privately capitalized clinics, owned by physicians or other investors, providing elective surgery and diagnostic services outside the hospital setting under contract with public payers. Proponents of these models argue that, by focus-ing exclusively on a limited range of procedures, they can develop higher levels of staff expertise and be more efficient in the use of facilities than is possible in a full-service hospital. Opponents argue that alleged “efficiencies” are gained by cost

cutting through the use of non-unionized staff and other measures threatening the quality of care. The ideological overtones of “business” versus “labour” perspectives here seem inescapable. Looking for evidence (Canada has some, but limited, experi-ence with such models) Simpson turns to Sweden and Britain.

Simpson highlights an example of privately capitalized, publicly funded care in each of these countries: family practices organized by for-profit corporations in Sweden and private surgical and diagnostic clinics in Britain. His readers might infer that these examples loom larger in each system than they do. Two thirds of family practice clinics are still owned by county councils in Sweden over-all (although in Stockholm about half are private). In Britain, private clinics accounted for about 5 per-cent of publicly funded elective surgery in Britain last year, and reforms aimed at expanding their role have been hugely controversial. Nonetheless,

the British and Swedish examples serve to make Simpson’s point that even these two historical poster children for government-run healthcare sys-tems have been willing to experiment with private delivery, and may offer some hard-won lessons about how to write and monitor contracts.

It is tempting, of course, to seek a painless solu-tion to these challenges: keeping people healthy to reduce demands on the system in the first place. Hence the “wellness agendas” aimed at obesity and other factors leading to chronic disease. But, citing international studies, Simpson shows that effective strategies are costly in themselves: targeted inter-ventions for at-risk individuals by healthcare teams of physicians, dieticians and others have much more impact than mass education campaigns or even taxation of unhealthy products. And the most important social determinants of health are inequalities in income and education, well beyond the scope of programs aimed at individual behav-iour.

In the end, having surveyed a range of options in Canada and elsewhere, and despite rhetoric that seems aimed at a more transformative response, Simpson sensibly settles on a few key adjustments to the Canadian system. Bring family physicians and other primary care providers together in prac-tices providing 24-7 access under contracts that blend payment on a per-enrolled-patient basis with some fee-for-service. Pay hospitals on the basis of the volume of service they deliver, not through his-torically based global budgets. Provide some pub-licly funded services through contracts with private clinics. Expand and improve home care programs, and increase the number of long-term care beds through public-private partnerships.

Simpson also makes a couple of suggestions that are more novel in the Canadian context. Make drug coverage compulsory, through employer-based plans together with a complementary “social insurance” plan based on mandatory contributions and government subsidies (rather like the Canada Pension Plan/Quebec Pension Plan/Old Age Security model for pensions). Quebec has pion-eered a version of this model. I myself have advo-cated such arrangements, which would bring in new public revenue while improving coverage. I am less persuaded of another of Simpson’s suggestions, which is that hospitals be allowed to use slack

operating room capacity to offer elective surgery to privately paying patients off-hours—a modest nod in the direction of allowing parallel private alterna-tives to publicly funded services. He makes a key proviso, that such usage would not reduce the avail-ability of publicly funded services. But that reduc-tion could well happen: even if operating room time is available, there is very little slack capacity for post-operative care in Canadian hospitals, and care for privately paying patients could squeeze out publicly funded care. Although Simpson does not mention it, a version of his suggestion already exists in Canada: workers’ compensation boards contract with hospitals for off-hours diagnostic imaging and elective surgery to provide expedited access for injured workers. We do not know what effect if any this has on access under public insurance, and it would be worth investigating those effects before embarking on such a change.

Most of the other changes Simpson suggests are already underway, on different scales and at different speeds across provinces—but in general they have been marginal and v-e-r-y slow. Why haven’t we made more progress on these

eminently sensible updates to our system? It is not that it “ain’t broke”: as international compari-sons show, there is much room for improvement. Looking for explanations, Simpson points to medi-care’s status as a national icon—which polls have shown to rank with the flag and hockey among sym-bols of Canadian identity. However, the British ven-eration of their National Health Service—witness its prominence in the opening gala for the London Olympics—has not kept the United Kingdom from making dramatic, albeit controversial, changes to the system while maintaining its universality.

What will it take to accelerate change in Canada? This book will have a well-deserved audience among opinion leaders, and that should help. But even if broader public discussion motivates politicians to move faster, change will have to involve the central power structure of the system—especially the medical profession. The unique Canadian model binds doctors and government into an exclusive, monopolistic relationship in each province. So far that relationship has acted as a brake. Simpson argues, rightly, that for Canada’s “chronic condition” to be ameliorated, doctors (and nurses) will have to “show more flexibility in how they work” and temper their demands for remuneration. This may seem to be a pipe dream, but Simpson, intentionally or not, gives us at least one inkling that seeds of change are being sown. In profiling Jeff Turnbull, he highlights one of the small but important number of medical leaders who understand what needs to be done to improve the performance and sustainability of the Canadian system while preserving its core values, and have the credibility to advance their views. As president of the Canadian Medical Association, Turnbull led a public discussion of a roadmap for reform that pointed in some of the directions presented by Simpson himself—such as activity-based funding (instead of global budgets) for hospitals, universal coverage for prescription drugs through a com-bination of mandates and subsidies—as well as others such as changing the way doctors (or teams of health professionals) are paid to reward high-quality performance. True, the CMA also regularly aligns itself with provincial medical associations in their remuneration battles with governments. But if the vagaries of medical politics turn up leaders such as Turnbull and his ilk, change could be afoot.

Why haven’t we made more progress on eminently sensible updates to our system?


PiecingthePuzzle:TheGenesisofAIDSResearchinAfricaLarry KrotzUniversity of Manitoba Press178 pages, softcoverISBN 9780887557309

Death, disease and the power of research. That is the lens through which Larry Krotz tells

the story in Piecing the Puzzle: The Genesis of AIDS Research in Africa about the journey of Canadian researchers to uncover the link between sexually transmitted infections and the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes acquired immunodeficiency syn-drome, commonly known as HIV/AIDS. From Manitoba to Kenya and back, one discovery leads to another, resulting in a compelling story told through the eyes of Krotz, who worked with the main characters in the book over the span of 17 years. As he states, “I paid numerous visits to Nairobi, Mombassa, and Kisumu and felt both overawed and privileged to have such ready access to both an extraordinary venture of medical science and one of the defining catastrophes of history.”

Piecing the Puzzle begins with Ronald Arnold, head of the department of medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba, arriving in Nairobi in 1980 and working with the University of Nairobi to set up a lab linked to what was known at the time as the “Casino Clinic.” This clinic cared for 600–800 men per day suffering from a variety of sexually transmitted infections. These patients also became the source of data collection. Soon young research-ers arrived from around the world, including Peter Piot, a now-famous academic and former executive director of UNAIDS. Over the course of five years, Arnold also sought Canadian talent: Margaret Fast, Frank Plummer, Joanne Embree and Stephen Moses. They and others from the University of Nairobi, working from a cramped and (at least initially) incomplete set-up of labs and equipment, began to track patients from the Casino Clinic to an area known for prostitution. From this research some key links were identified between STIs and HIV susceptibility, the risks associated with con-current and multiple partners and the importance of condoms in the prevention of AIDS. Plummer released some of the evidence at the 1987 Third International AIDS Conference in Washington and

“all hell broke loose.” First, the reality of the exist-ence of HIV in Kenya was difficult for the Kenyan government to contend with. Second, Plummer also revealed that oral contraceptives increased the risk of HIV infection. This raised fury among the family planning establishment that had huge population control investments in Africa.

Woven into the research process is the story Krotz narrates of the challenges associated with raising research funds, cross-border transportation of human samples, securing government support

and mitigating government interference. Although the author does not highlight it (and I wish he had), the sheer effort of negotiating these challenges reinforces the widely held view that HIV/AIDS is not just a disease but also a political and social phenomenon.

Other research findings are revealed as one turns the pages, demonstrating the tenacity of Canadian researchers. One researcher, Joanne Embree, discovers the link between long-term breastfeeding and the transmission of HIV to chil-dren. Then there is the story of Stephen Moses with Bob Bailey (from Chicago) and their drive to imple-ment the “definitive study, the clinical trial that would link circumcision and HIV prevention.” Their efforts were halted by an independent scientific review body, but with what results they had, in 2007 the researchers published an article in The Lancet conclusively demonstrating the link.

Halfway into the book, Krotz starts to raise some questions and introduces key Kenyan con-tributions in one chapter called “The Kenyan Side: Squaring the Collaboration.” By highlighting the work of another Canadian, Stephanie Nolen, an internationally renowned journalist, the bigger development question is raised about what obliga-tions researchers from high-income countries have to both the subjects of research and the commun-ities in which they live. Nolen wrote, for example, about the research findings from the cohort of sex workers in the Majengo shantytown that paradox-ically revealed that women who take breaks from sex work temporarily stop their exposure to HIV and rapidly lose their immune status. In her article featuring one of these sex workers, Agnes, Nolen raised the critical question of Agnes’s 20-year contribution to research with no concomitant researchers’ obligation to Agnes. It is disappointing that Krotz does not delve more deeply into Nolen’s reporting to further explore some of the “missing

puzzles” about the cross-continental AIDS research challenges, but he does at least acknowledge the pervasive “power imbalances” of the North-South collaboration. Near the end of the book, Krotz ques-tions the use and sustainability of the high level of financial investment in the battle against AIDS. UNAIDS reported the global investment for HIV/AIDS totalled $16.8 billion in 2011. Krotz highlights the challenge by quoting Peter Piot: “against AIDS we should be doing better with the same amount of money.”

There are two biases from which I read this book—one as a lover of a good story and the other as a social scientist who has had the privilege to work with a multidisci-plinary team of low- and middle-income scientists doing community-based

epidemiological studies in Africa on health and social issues. From a story point of view, the pieces in Krotz’s narrative are sometimes difficult to fol-low due to disjointed chronology. From a social scientist perspective and as a development agent, there is discomfort. There are missed opportunities here to discuss the dilemmas, incentives and dis-incentives of doing clinical research in the context of glaring inequities, suffering and hope. While this is a story of a 30-year research collaboration, the voices of the victims of HIV/AIDS are silent and the analysis of the political, social and cultural con-text in which this epidemic continues is absent. Not that there are no hints. There is even a reference to a nagging thought by one of the main characters/researchers but left unexplored by the author: “What if the lower HIV rates among those subjects were in fact a result of changes in behaviour and not a result of circumcision at all?”

Krotz contends that this book is a story of “one front in the battle against HIV/AIDS.” The Canadian researchers make the case for the importance of circumcision, treating sexually transmitted infec-tions with drugs and using condoms. However, given the title of the book, Piecing the Puzzle, the pieces that are presented make up only a few pieces of the bigger puzzle of the AIDS epidemic where in 2011 there were 34.2 million people living with the disease, and another 2.5 million newly infected individuals. While clinical research has benefits, it assumes a technical fix for a disease that has strong social and cultural dimensions. To get to the roots of the AIDS epidemic, we need to address the chal-lenges of stigma and gender equity, and to enable dialogue and respect in relationships. While this is not the storyline of Piecing the Puzzle, it is a crucial storyline to preventing AIDS. Nevertheless, Larry Krotz’s book provides useful insights into research-ers trying to make a difference with one piece of the AIDS puzzle.

A Medical Detective StoryHow Canadian and Kenyan researchers joined forces to battle HIV/AIDS.ShaRmila l. mhatRe

Sharmila L. Mhatre is the program leader of the Governance for Equity in Health Systems program at the International Development Research Centre.

Krotz questions the use and sustainability of the high level of financial investment in the battle

against AIDS. UNAIDS reported the global investment totalled $16.8 billion in 2011.


Congratulations to the following winners of our Summer Sport Poetry Competition!

A haikukjmunro

“Towards a Definition of Sport”DAVID HUEBERT

“No Man’s Land”JOSIE DI SCIASCIO-ANDREWS

SILVER

BRONZE

It’s you, weightlifter, who could bring mePersian gold when you win and this isthe only good anyone knows. A staticacrobat, an iron tiger, a juggler in pose.Anvils and axles greased with sweat,a face more set in scowl than skin.The barbell for your body and half ofsomeone else’s, yours again. Weight iswhat you train past, a grip like crushingeggs and balance through the thighs.Clean and jerk, glass holds back the world.I want another trick, what else can you do.Crouch and animals run throughthe deltoid, the triceps. Bounce the baroff your chest, hold it up and you live,there is nothing they can do.

GOLD“Summer Sport”HEATHER DAVIDSON

To read the silver and bronze poems, visit<games.reviewcanada.ca>

Many thanks to our contest judge and Olympic correspondent Priscila Uppal, and to our generous prize pack sponsors: Mansfield Press, the British Consulate and Sportsnet Magazine.

Fighting PovertySENATOR HUGH SEGAL

November 12, 2012

A former president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, Segal believes the costs and consequences of poverty are much larger than direct spending on social programs. There are

3.4 million Canadians trapped in poverty, and a long-term preventive approach would save taxpayers significant amounts in emergency health care, prisons, shelters and other social services.

The Canadian Forces in TransitionLT. GEN. (RET.) ANDREW LESLIEDecember 3, 2012

The Canadian Forces can change on a dime when lives are on the line, but what happens when the guns go quiet? Now a senior vice president (Canadian Defence and Intelligence) with CGI,

Leslie will explore the changing attitudes, directions and structure of the Forces, with an eye on the lessons learned from Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.

Immigrant PsychologyDR. KWAME McKENZIE

February 4, 2013

McKenzie, a psychiatrist, researcher and policy advisor at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), explores governments’ competition around the world for “good”

immigrants to drive economic growth. But what is a good immigrant? Why do some succeed while others fail? And what psychological or social attributes can help predict who will be good at immigrating?

We are pleased to be co-producing this series

with Big Ideas, a weekly showcase of public

intellectual culture that airs on TVO Saturday &

Sunday at 5:00 pm. For updates and past talks,

visit <reviewcanada.ca/gardiner>.

All events are FREE and start at 7 pm at the Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen’s Park, Toronto. Registration details at <reviewcanada.ca/events>

The LRC Presents continues its 2012–13 season…


TheDevil’sCurve:AJourneyintoPowerandProfitattheAmazon’sEdgeArno KopeckyDouglas and McIntyre306 pages, hardcoverISBN 9781553658979

When a young, unem-ployed, leftish-leaning Canadian journalist—as

Arno Kopecky describes himself—heads off to South America to investi-gate a shootout between the Peruvian military and native people protesting against foreign oil and mining oper-ations, you know someone is going to get a serious drubbing. If a lot of the companies in question are Canadian, and if Canadian government finger-prints are all over the disaster—in the form of a free trade agreement and aid programs “helping” the govern-ment with its mining legislation—then you might well anticipate a protracted rant aimed at Canadian mining firms and Ottawa.

That, surprisingly, is not what you get in Kopecky’s The Devil’s Curve: A Journey into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge. Kopecky has, in fact, told several tales in a single book. One is about how a murderous clash on a stretch of Peruvian highway known as the Curva del Diablo came to pass. The second, interspersed with the first, is about Colombia, the FARC, the drug cartels, cor-ruption, violence and the displacement of four million campesinos and Indians from their land in the name of peace and progress. Underpinning these are four themes. The first is the struggle for development in poor countries where there is a fast-growing spread between rich and poor. The second is about the clash between native people living in pristine, untrammelled lands and an outside world with very different ideas from theirs about progress. A third theme deals with the global rush for oil and minerals, the impatience of cor-porations and politicians with anyone who might thwart their ambition and the inevitable confronta-tion that has played out so many times in so many countries over the past century that one might be

forgiven for expecting by now a more sophisticated approach to plunder.

And the fourth is Kopecky’s own story about his travels through a series of South American jungles and towns and slums. It is the personal that makes what could have been a turgid polemic an adven-ture instead, populated by a cast of characters ran-ging from the exotic to the extraordinary. A police official in Peru: “The comandante had a voice like a coal mine and a headful of thick, greased-back mulatto hair you’d expect from a man in his pos-ition.” A gang member in Medellín: “James Richard sat against a wall. Half his head was shaved and the other half ran wild, a profusion of jet-black hair that reached to just above his right eye. His eyes—they were crossed, I realized with a start—were staring at me while seeming to look at the horizon. He, too, had been shot in the head, five years ago, at the age of fourteen.”

The Devil’s Curve fits nicely into a genre of travel writing populated by books like Tim Cahill’s Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East. It is also a kind of detective story in which Kopecky tries to piece together not only what hap-pened at Devil’s Curve in June 2009, but why.

The incident was part of a broader set of protests, the culmination of widespread anger and frustra-tion at environmental damage caused by invasive oil and mining operations, without consultation

and without tangible returns in local services or infrastructure. For seven weeks, tens of thousands of Amazonian Indians had blocked roads and rivers across Peru, closing down an oil pipeline and calling for the repeal of decrees enacted as part of the country’s free trade agreement with the United States. Indigenous communities under the leadership of AIDESEP (the Interethnic Association of Development of the Peruvian Rainforest) wanted an end to laws allowing the government to sell com-munity lands for logging, oil and min-ing purposes. Although the Peruvian Congress did repeal two of the laws and promised to examine and vote on others, it never did.

In the case of the Awajun at Devil’s Curve, who could see the devasta-tion caused by gold mining in lands adjacent to theirs just across the border in Ecuador, it was about the cavalier attitude of a government that had ignored their concerns,

demonized their leaders, gutted their constitu-tional land guarantees and that, after 2008, simply parcelled out huge swathes of their territory to foreign mining firms and their Peruvian surrogates. Tensions grew, and on June 5 Peruvian president Alan García called in the troops.

Kopecky describes the results: “Once the smoke cleared and traffic resumed and those natives who weren’t injured or in jail melted back into the jungle, the bodies left behind were counted and identified. Thirty-three people had died. Only three were Awajun. Six more were civilian rioters. The other twenty-four were soldiers.”

The Awajun claimed that many more of their people had been killed, and at first it seems that Kopecky’s mission is to expose a cover-up. He talks to native leaders, politicians, the policía, a much respected Defensoría del Pueblo—an ombuds-man. In the end, however, he accepts the official numbers while musing with one of his newfound Peruvian friends about the clash of civilizations. Misunderstanding is so commonplace that there are even problems with what seems like simple, straightforward translation. The word for 20 in Awajun, his friend explains, has nine syllables; it would take all day to pronounce a million.

“How do you conceive of something you don’t have a name for?” Kopecky asks. “Small wonder the Awajun are so notoriously vague when the con-versation involved quantities—distances, elapsed

Resource FeverIn recent clashes over mining, both Canadians and Peruvians look rapacious.ian Smillie

Ian Smillie is an Ottawa-based development con-sultant and writer. His latest book is Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade (Anthem Press, 2010).


time, crowd sizes all involved epic margins of error. Was this why so many insisted hundreds of their brethren had been killed at Devil’s Curve?”

In the end, truth about the numbers is not what matters; it is something bigger, and Kopecky describes it without the rose-coloured glasses through which such issues are so often viewed. He describes, for example, the return to Peru of Alberto Pizango, the AIDESEP president who spent a year in exile in Nicaragua after the Devil’s Curve incident. Now Pizango is back, making a speech on the very spot one year later. The throng is immense at what has become a fairground packed with food vendors, non-governmental organizations and “a handful of pontificators” denouncing the Peruvian army. Pizango appears at last on the main stage and speaks of the vision and philoso-phy of his people:

The West seeks to impose upon us its cult of the individual. This vision is one of perma-nent struggle, not only with our fellow men but against the natural world … By contrast, our philosophy strives for harmony, seeking always to maintain the bal-ance of a system in which the diverse forms of life, be they plant, animal or cosmic, do not fight or deny life to one another but support and complement each other … Brothers and sisters! This is why the fight of the indigenous peoples is not just a national fight but a global one. We are fighting for the life of the planet.

“And so on and so forth,” Kopecky says. “Not a bad speech, despite the platitudes, and very well received, especially considering there were almost no natives in the audience.” And yet, he asks, are the Indians really any better than the industrial-ized world when it comes to exploiting rather than revering nature? “Or were their numbers just so small they hadn’t got around to devastating the natural world? They didn’t hesitate to throw plastic chairs into the jungle or plastic wrappers onto the ground; their appreciation of the internal combus-tion engine was just as great as ours; their desire for money was every bit as keen.”

Perhaps the difference between “them” and “us” he says, is their physical proximity to wells and rivers and mines where they are directly exposed to contamination and despoliation, where they are ideally placed to become spokespeople for the environment. “Maybe the indígenas had become what they claimed to be. Perhaps, through the power of the spoken word, they were defending the ‘lungs of the world’.”

As the chapters sped by, I anticipated Kopecky’s inevitable trip to a mine site, his discovery of arsenic or mercury poisoning, an interview with a venal—possibly Canadian—mine manager and perhaps a corporate confrontation back home. No such thing ever came, and as the last chapters unfolded, I realized that they were not necessary. In countries like Peru the oil spills and the pol-lution and the environmental disruption are so widespread, the violence so commonplace and the Canadian imprint so ubiquitous that they hang like a dark cloud over the entire story. Some 60 percent of the world’s mineral companies are publicly listed or headquartered in Canada and more than 50 per-cent of all mining and exploration equity financing was raised in this country in 2011.

That is one side of the coin. Now the other: Peru has 70 million hectares of rainforest, the largest

part of the Amazon basin outside of Brazil, and at the time of the Devil’s Curve encounter, 70 percent of it had been granted or offered as concessions to foreign mining, oil, gas and logging companies. The Cordillera del Cóndor, an isolated arm of the Andes, home to the Awajun and one of the most biologic-ally diverse regions on earth, is also full of gold, and when the government gave vast exploration rights to a Canadian mining firm, conflict between the company and the local inhabitants led in a straight line three years later to the Devil’s Curve.

In all of this, the Canadian government has been more than slightly complicit. In 2007, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade organized a series of roundtable discus-sions on the role of Canadian mining compan-

ies abroad. The discussions were a response to growing concern about the increasing number of Canadian companies involved in violent labour disputes, environmental disasters and political unrest abroad. An ombudsman who could arbi-trate disputes—perhaps not unlike the Defensoría del Pueblo in Peru—was proposed, but the Harper government ignored that idea and others. In 2009, a private member’s bill proposed giving the Canadian government authority to investigate complaints against resource companies operating abroad, and to withhold public money from offend-ers. It was narrowly defeated during the last Harper minority government.

The challenge that the Harper government set for itself then and now was not how to rein in delin-quent Canadian mining firms abroad; it was quite the opposite. In 2008, the Canadian International Development Agency cut off bilateral assistance to eight very poor African countries, along with Sri Lanka and Cambodia. The explanation was that it had been done on the advice of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and a need to focus Canadian assistance on fewer coun-tries. At the same time, however, CIDA announced that it would be opening new programs in Peru and Colombia, the two fastest growing economies in Latin America. It was not lost, even on casual observers, that the Harper government was work-ing to conclude free trade deals with both countries. And while the Peruvian government was parcelling out huge chunks of the country to foreign mining interests, CIDA’s website—speaking in the High Church bureaucratese so beloved of aid agencies—stated piously that it “supports the Government of Peru’s decentralization reform by strengthening the capacity of regional governments to plan and deliver equitable and inclusive public services to their citizens and to sustainably develop the extractive and natural resources sector (especially mining).”

At one point in The Devil’s Curve, Kopecky quotes the explorer Hernán Cortés, who in 1519 told the Mexican Emperor Moctezuma that Spaniards suffered from “a disease of the heart for which gold is the only cure.”

Speaking to the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada earlier this year, CIDA min-ister Bev Oda had nothing but praise for Canadian

mining companies abroad. “I know,” she said, “that your companies are making significant investments in development projects and improving the quality of life for thousands in countries where you work. And I believe that all Canadians must be told of your work to reduce poverty, build schools, health clinics, new roads for the community and the many other ways that you are making life better for local communities.” Building schools and clinics is a fine thing, no doubt, and perhaps many Canadian mining companies do this—and much more. But this is surely not the responsibility of mining com-panies. Their responsibility is to mine in ways that are developmentally, environmentally, socially and legally sound. The distance between Devil’s Curve and the podium from which Oda spoke was so great

that one of them might as well have been on Mars.

Time and again, Kopecky quotes local and native lead-ers who say they are not against development. “We know there is money to be made in our selva,” one says, “and we are willing to work with corporations who have expertise. But they must teach us

what they know. They must come in good faith. Whether it is gold, or oil, or lumber they want, they must work with us in a way that doesn’t ruin the jungle for our children. This is our home. Our demands are reasonable. We want to negotiate.”

Kopecky’s greatest scorn is reserved for the national leaderships of Peru and Colombia, which reserve all negotiating entirely to themselves, and in the process have repeatedly given away the farm, ruling for years through fiat and corruption, fear, murder and assassination. It is a leadership that seems to learn little from its mistakes, digging itself ever deeper into pits from which there is no longer any simple exit.

The Devil’s Curve is—as tags in the bookstore sometimes say—a good read: fast paced, rarely dull, occasionally funny, sometimes uplifting, but, in sum, profoundly sad.

In 1519, Cortés told the Mexican Emperor Moctezuma that Spaniards

suffered “from a disease of the heart for which gold is the only cure.”

Guaranteeing income for the poorHugh Segal

Growing up with BowieIbi Kaslik

Chris Gudgeon’s Song of Kosovo

Modris Eksteins

Physics and humanismMélanie Frappier

The Frog Lake massacreMyrna Kostash

Immigration panicsPhil Triadafilopoulos

ComingupintheLRC


RoadtoValour:ATrueStoryofWorldWarIIItaly,theNazisandtheCyclistWhoInspiredaNationAili and Andres McConnonDoubleday Canada316 pages, softcoverISBN 9780385669481

Every time cycling champion Gino Bartali swung his leg over the saddle of his racing bike from the fall of 1943 to July 1944, he

knew the act could be a death sentence. Bartali, who won the Tour de France before and after World War Two as well as the Giro d’Italia and hundreds of one-day bike races, was part of an intricately organized but highly secretive cir-cle in the Assisi area that smuggled false documents to Jews, allowing them to escape fascist-run and Nazi-controlled Italy. He carried the forged documents in the seat tube of his bicycle. If the hiding place had been discovered, it would have meant a mass execution of the Bartali family and possibly others involved in the smuggling ring.

I always knew of Bartali—you could not possibly not if you were a bike racer in Southern Ontario in the 1970s when many a race was called in Italian. He was, without question, one of the great Italian riders. But we never knew of his deep Catholic faith, his father’s socialist roots, the family’s poverty and Bartali’s commitment to help save the lives of as many Jews as possible (including one family, the Goldenbergs, whom he personally hid and found food for, no matter how scarce). The sister-and-brother team of Aili and Andres McConnon have done an excellent job of telling us the cyclist’s story in Road to Valour: A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation. They get into his life so deeply that it feels as if the reader is sitting on the one chair in the sparsely fur-nished family apartment and later in the interroga-tion room of the vicious Major Mario Carità, where Bartali should have been executed.

Bartali came from a dirt-poor rural family in the tiny town of Ponte a Ema outside of Florence. Despite reassurances from Mussolini that the fas-cists would end poverty, the area did not receive electricity and plumbing until after World War Two. Gino was a thin little kid, an advantage in cycling. It was lucky that he loved the sport so much since small bodies, assuming they are equipped with the right hearts, lungs and legs, go up mountains very quickly. He swore his ability to scamper up the Alps

was helped by eating a weirdly idiosyncratic choice of fuel such as raw eggs, rum and massive steaks, and he cracked the eggs on his handlebars while racing—one of the many ways he tried to psyche out his competition. But it was his ability to bear more suffering than his competitors that was the deciding factor in so many races.

While the McConnons have researched Bartali’s life and love of cycling, his friends and family, church, faith and town extensively, it is their ability to combine this dynamic story with a much needed analysis of how sport and sporting heroes play into nationalistic and military states that makes the book valuable and, unfortunately, rare.

Every day my inbox contains at least a dozen

announcements telling me the Harper government or its minister for sport is pleased to support the women’s rowing team at the world championships or the Canada Cup softball tournament in Red Deer, or will announce the Olympic flag bearer, or to send the minister to flip pancakes with a hockey star. It is a never-ending parade—the pairing of politicians with the promise of the strong, athletic, seemingly immortal young body, a body ready to fight for its country.

Mussolini realized the potential of the hard body soon after he came to power in 1922. Road to Valour outlines how he manipulated Bartali and sport in general for propaganda purposes. Bartali came from a family that definitely did not embrace the blackshirts. His socialist father also worked for a socialist, and when Bartali was eleven, fascists broke into the boss’s house and assassinated him. “Gino would come to understand politics as the elemental force that it is—singular in its ability to build up a man or tear him down, unify a coun-try’s citizens around a common goal or turn them against one another in bloody persecution,” write the McConnons.

With extraordinary natural gifts and a work ethic created by necessity from living in post–World War One Europe, Bartali quickly became one of Italy’s dominant cyclists. Soon Mussolini was dictating where, when and how he would race. Bartali could have died if he had rejected fascist plans for him and not adhered to the race schedule Mussolini demanded.

At that time cycling had seized the western world. It was not just a sport, but a mode of trans-portation, freeing people to explore who had never moved beyond their village borders before. The bicycle had millions of supporters and, even though some were moving on to the automobile, in Europe cycling was the true sport of champions.

Spectators would ride their bikes up mountains and camp out just to see their favourite star suffer and sacrifice himself to the gods of the Alps. There was a deeply physical and emotional understanding of what cycling greats accomplished because fans knew from their own experience how hard it was to reach such altitudes.

But this godlike status of athletes can be dan-gerous. There are no studies showing that athletic participation makes you a better anything except an athlete, but politicians like to use the shine of athletes as their own. The McConnons write “As [the fascists] rose to power in the 1920s, they latched on to sports as one of their central propaganda tools for creating a new Italy ruled by a healthy, athletic, and virile

‘warrior people.’” Schools made exercise mandatory and “teachers became ‘biological engineers and builders of the human machine’.” Mussolini issued his edict, “I don’t want a population of mandolin players, I want a population of fighters.” When Bartali rode his way

onto Europe’s national stage, Mussolini seized the moment and clipped Bartali’s wings, dictating that his athletic performances coincide with the fascist propaganda machine itinerary.

Bartali had to bow out of the Tour de France more than once after receiving orders from Mussolini to do so, even though he knew he could take the race in the mountain climbs. He had crashed heavily at one point and Il Duce was afraid he could no longer win; Italian athletes under his regime could not lose on the world stage. Quitting, which was anathema to Bartali’s nature, broke his heart but no doubt saved his life. Cyclist Ottavio Bottecchia, who did not renounce his socialist leanings and ignored Mussolini’s dictates, was found with his cranium smashed in and several broken bones—dead beside his unscathed bicycle on a lonely country road he trained on regularly. (The story of Bottecchia hit me between the eyes. My first racing bike was a second-hand Bottecchia that a club member said I could have if I agreed to start racing. I am glad to know the legacy behind the bike.) Unlike Bottecchia, Bartali survived the fascists and the war and went on to win the 1948 Tour de France, an act, the McConnons argue, that united a violently divided Italy, possibly helping to avert civil war.

In Road to Valour we have a story that combines sport and heroism. It is a shining light this fall as countless Canadiana books waste trees to recount the 1972 Canada-Russia series on its 40th anniver-sary—as if telling that old myth is somehow new. It was a nationalistic piece of Cold War propaganda, styled straight out of Mussolini’s playbook.

I prefer the modest advice Bartali gave his son years after the war. “If you’re good at a sport, they attach the medals to your shirts and then they shine in some museum. That which is earned by doing good deeds is attached to the soul and shines elsewhere.”

A Real Sports HeroAn Italian cyclist provides an inspiring antidote to the Lance Armstrong revelations.lauRa RobinSon

Laura Robinson is a former member of Canada’s national cycling team. Her children’s book, Cyclist BikeList: The Book for Every Rider, was published by Tundra Books in 2010. The London Olympics were her sixth games as a journalist.

Bartali could have died if he had rejected fascist plans for him and not adhered to the race schedule Mussolini demanded.


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Canadian Literature From the Left


Re: “a Quiet Ruin,” by ChRiStopheR WeStdal (oCtobeR 2012)

The roots of Russophobia date back for cen-turies. Returning from a trip to the court of

Ivan the Terrible in 1568, Englishman George Turberville penned a poetic letter to a friend advising him, “The cold is rare, the people rude, the prince so full of pride,/The realm so stored with monks and nuns, and priests on every side,/The manners are so Turkish like, the men so full of guile/…If thou be wise, as wise thou art, and wilt be rul’d by me,/Live still at home and covet not those barbarous coasts to see.”

It would be absurd to expect such deeply entrenched prejudices to disappear overnight. Nevertheless, the continued demonization of Russia in the aftermath of the Cold War is some-what surprising. Russia poses no significant military, political or economic threat to western interests. Progress toward western-style liberal democracy has been slow and sporadic, but progress there has been. For all the condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s alleged authoritarianism, there never was a golden age of Russian liberalism under Boris Yeltsin before Putin’s arrival on the scene. Yeltsin, after all, was the man who turned battle tanks on the Russian parliament. Russia today is a far freer society than it was under the Soviets, and a richer one too. The Russian economy in recent years has outperformed other former communist states in Eastern Europe. Increases in pensions have significantly reduced poverty; the demo-graphic decline has been halted, as the death rate has fallen and the birth rate has risen; and gradual liberalization of financial markets is slowly open-ing the Russian economy up to the world. Severe problems, especially corruption, remain, but on the whole Russia in the past decade has been more of a good news story than a bad one.

Christopher Westdal’s condemnation of the Harper government’s Russian policy hits the proverbial nail firmly on the head. It is true that there are differences of opinion between Russia and Canada on certain foreign policy issues, such as Iran and Syria. But these are not of sufficient importance to justify the level of anti-Russian feeling that seems to emanate nowadays from the Canadian government. Canada would be better off if it realized that sometimes the Russians are right. As Westdal says, by alienating Russia, “we lose … a reality check for our certitudes.” Listening to the Russians rather than ceaselessly condemning them would be in our own interests just as much as it would be in Russia’s.

Paul RobinsonOttawa, Ontario

Former ambassador Christopher Westdal has a point. The history of the relationship between

Canada and Russia is characterized by ambiva-lence and numerous ups and downs. He is also right that now there are grounds for moving from “a quiet ruin” up to a partnership. Just one aspect should have been emphasized more: the even-tual détente has as much to do with the recent developments in Russia as with the current situa-tion in Canada.

Both Russia and Canada have economies that depend on natural resource rents (revenues from

oil, natural gas, coal, mineral and forest rents) to a greater than average extent. Natural resource rents represented 5.33 percent of Canadian gross domestic product for the period from 1970 to 2010, as compared with 3.48 percent of world GDP (according to calculations based on World Bank data). And Harper has indicated that this share of the country’s economy will grow in the near future. Russia’s dependence on natural resource rents is even stronger: 23.32 percent.

The two previous détentes (Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1983 visit to Ottawa and Adrienne Clarkson’s visits to Russia in 2003 and 2004) occurred around periods of high oil and mineral prices, which further boosted the contribution of natural resource rents to the two countries’ economic performance. Mineral and oil prices are at their highs these days again. Harper’s government sets its policies accordingly: the resource-rich west of the country is given priority over the manufacturing-, service- and high-tech-oriented east. Westdal rightfully regrets missed opportunities.

As Leo Tolstoy once observed, happy families are all alike. In a way, societies living on natural resource rents are similar too. They tend to have relatively less transparent and more corrupt gov-ernments than those relying on other sources of income. Resource bounty makes the government less dependent on its constituency.

There is a correlation between the 2011 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index and the value of natural resource rents in 2010. It would be an exaggera-tion to say that all resource-rich countries are corrupt, yet a drift into non-transparency charac-terizes many of them. Compared with the other Commonwealth countries, Canada has the least open government, as a recent British study from University College London suggests (see “Canada Ranks Dead Last in Transparency,” in the February 2011 issue of the CAUT Bulletin). Namely, Harper’s government shows no inclination to provide access to information under its control for Canadians.

In such conditions will the Canadian govern-ment strongly criticize its Russian counterpart for corruption and non-transparency? Probably not: who wants to be perceived as a hypocrite?

Anton OleinikSt. John’s, Newfoundland

Re: “a FouCauldian hangoVeR,” by JeSSiCa WaRneR (oCtobeR 2012)

While ostensibly reviewing my book, Jessica Warner published a diatribe against Michel

Foucault and the historians who find his work informative. In her efforts to revive a debate that raged in the 1990s, Warner mocked my work and missed the point.

Try to Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario, 1927–44 is about the early years of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which was created to deal with a difficult political issue: booze. Investigating the regulation of hundreds of hotels in six Ontario communities during the LCBO’s formative years, I found a story that often belies the stereotypes of liquor control. In contrast to some popular historians’ assertions, the LCBO was not an

administration of temperance cranks but rather of bureaucrats trying to balance pressure from the temperance movement with the demands of a diverse, and thirsty, population. Most fascinating was the subtlety with which the LCBO often exer-cised its regulatory power. Its rules were designed not only to prevent drunkenness, but to create a distinction between good citizenship (my “citizen-drinker”) and deviance. Seemingly mundane factors—the time of day, location and activities associated with drinking—determined its accept-ability. The Ontarian drinker internalized these rules and in turn controlled himself or herself. This is biopower, Foucault’s remarkably useful concept.

Yet Warner ignores the nuances of the history, fixating on my use of Foucault. But I understand! As a grad student in the 1990s, I too dismissed Foucault out of hand. Twenty years ago, I would have cheered this anti-Foucauldian vitriol. But in the last few decades I’ve found Foucault’s ideas, used in moderation, helpful in analyzing the diffu-sion of power in modern society.

Sadly, Warner’s prejudice taints her entire review. Preoccupied with a theorist she consid-ers mundane and passé, Warner recycles the tired notion that drinking life in post-prohibition Ontario was “dreary.” Hardly! Here we find a nascent control board beset on all sides: turf wars raged between illegal and legal drinking spaces; Wets and Drys lobbied persistently; beverage room managers “worked the system” to create successful businesses; women demanded their own place to drink. The board’s work was an unenviable balan-cing act.

Moreover, Warner commits the same academic sin against which I warn my second-year history students: she criticizes a book not for what it says, but for not saying what she wants it to say. She disdains the lack of generalization about complex forms of governance, rejects my use of theory to inform history and dismisses my focus on 17 years of the LCBO as “a slight topic.” Apparently what we really need are longer general histories of bigger things.

I learn from my mistakes and am open to help-ful criticism. But all I get from Warner’s review is that a history is worthwhile only if it is theoretic-ally bereft, is full of simplified generalizations and reiterates ahistorical stereotypes over broad periods.

That is not a lesson I want anyone to learn.Dan Malleck

St. Catharines, Ontario

Not all the food that drinkers were required to order went uneaten. In the mid 1950s, I was

in Toronto’s Colonial Tavern listening to Duke Ellington. I was young. I was hungry. I ate the sandwich, unaware that it had been in circulation for a considerable time. I recall the horrified wait-ers hissing, “He ate the sandwich!” Whether this was because they were concerned about my health or because another was required, I know not. In all probability, the need for another sandwich. All in all, it was a good evening. No ill effects, and Ellington sat at my table and chatted during one of his breaks.

Michael AbrahamsOakville, Ontario

Letters and Responses


Re: “ChuRCheS and StateS,” by Jonathan malloy (oCtobeR 2012)

Jonathan Malloy quotes Jason Hackworth, the author of Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism

and the Politics of Welfare in the United States, as saying the idea that church-based social services can replace the welfare state is simply “a neoliberal fantasy.” From my experience working in post-Katrina New Orleans, I have some thoughts about this.

I arrived in that city with all sorts of biases from my Canadian experience about publicly delivered social services. I shared with Hackworth a suspi-cion of what I anticipated to be an old-fashioned, sentimentalized role for church charity, paired with ideological rigidity.

But what I experienced was something much more complicated, effective and necessary. I say complicated because the role of faith commun-ities in communities across the southern United States isn’t that easy to generalize. My wife and I worshipped at an uptown Episcopal church that ran “undoing racism” workshops, as well as Bach festivals, a counselling centre, food pantries, a prison ministry and a health clinic for the public housing communities three blocks away. I worked closely with a network of neighbourhood-based recovery centres, called Beacons of Hope, which provided relief and support to returning residents and worked in partnership with many denomina-tions and faith groups. Showing me his mobile health clinic, Pastor Bruce described his outreach programs, which included AIDS prevention aware-ness and condom distribution to the hetero and gay male communities. His Baptist denomination had disaffiliated him because of this program; but he just carried on, now without the moral (or financial) support of “head office,” doing what he clearly saw was the Lord’s work. (“Jesus don’t judge no one,” he assured me.)

None of the models provided by faith-based organizations or local non-profits is perfect. But governments don’t provide social capital; com-munity engagement, offered in often less than predictable facilities, does. Flu shots available in drug stores; blood pressure readings in libraries; ESL classes at local coffee shops; voting booths in church basements; foot care and glucose screen-ings at temples. Do multiple “modes of delivery” supplant government? The scale of need in most cities is large enough and diverse enough to require multiple ways to share resources and pro-vide services to people who need them. Is looking to faith communities or private philanthropy part of some neoliberal campaign to reduce the role and influence of government? Maybe. But provid-ing resources through the most effective social networks available in a local community might also just be common sense.

Mary RoweNew York, New York

Re: “a daRk dyStopia,” by alanna mitChell (oCtobeR 2012)

Book reviewers are entitled to their critical opinions, but I take issue with three points

that Alanna Mitchell makes in her otherwise engaging review of my book The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude.

Mitchell, a good science journalist, makes repeated reference to the author being a fellow “disfigured by rage.” Not true. The Energy of Slaves was not written in anger. It is a moral and philo-sophical critique of high-energy living. When indi-viduals have as many as 89 energy slaves at their

disposal fuelled by hydrocarbons, they behave like slaveholders of old. They become fat, lazy and incompetent. Reviewers might not like the meta-phor, but it is an apt one. And yes, it should make us uncomfortable.

The second concerns tone. Mitchell suggests the book is pessimistic and downbeat and that the author unfairly beats up on modern city makers and Big Science. The book is written by a self- confessed conservative, a former business reporter, a Christian and an agrarian. But it is not penned by a dark-minded soul with visions of Hell in mind.

Every life and every civilization has its ups and downs and the availability of energy resolutely shapes these high and lows. It also informs the scale of our endeavours. Are cities and scientific progress immune to the notion of peak perform-ance? I think not. Do not computers represent a mechanization of mental activity? Do we not lose that which we do not use? Such thinking does not make me a progressive, but it does put me in the camp of hard-headed realists with a sympathy for physics.

Last but not least, in her own angst (and there is much going around these days) Mitchell seems to have missed the essential solution to high energy consumption: burning less and employing fewer energy slaves. In fact, low-energy societies tend to be much happier (and less medicated) than North Americans who now seem incapable of doing anything without the assistance of some mechanical or digital gadget powered by wasteful amounts of energy.

In sum, my lively little book challenges every reader to think differently about the quality and quantity of energy they consume in any form. And I think that’s a hopeful activity.

Andrew NikiforukCalgary, Alberta

Re: “politiCal piRaCy,” by douglaS hunteR (oCtobeR 2012)

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t seems to be Douglas Hunter’s approach to

book reviews. On the one hand my book, Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs, is as boring as a legal brief; yet on the other hand it “demonizes” the Barbary corsairs as “cruel, blood-thirsty hoodlums,” an effect rarely achieved by dry legal prose. Hunter feels I have not done justice to this “epic” story. No doubt my book is insuffi-ciently swashbuckling for him, lacking a catchy subtitle like “How the Barbary Corsairs Terrorized the Seas and Changed the World.”

If there is one subject that has over the years

attracted far too many romanticized and swash-buckling books, it is the history of corsairs and pir-ates. After these sea rovers ceased to be real threats in the 19th century, they were steadily transformed in popular consciousness from maritime terrorists into jolly figures of fun, no more frightening than Captain Hook in Peter Pan. Only in our own time have the sufferings of the victims of the Somali pir-ates reintroduced us to the grim realities of piracy.

Over the last four decades, academic histor-ians have sought to return the story of corsairs and pirates from a fantasy world of buried treasure and hook-handed buffoons to a historical reality that sets them in the context of their times. Barbary corsairs were not the bloodthirsty monsters of Christian nightmares, but men who carried out a rational if brutal activity on the maritime frontier separating Christian and Muslim worlds. They seized enemy ships and captives not just for profit, but to extend the power and influence of both the Ottoman Turkish empire and the Islamic world in general. The corsairs are of particular interest because of the willingness of Christian captives to “turn Turk” and embrace Islam, becoming Muslim corsairs in their turn. Since Muslims captured by the Christians rarely embraced the rival faith, the strength of Christian identity in the early modern period is thus an issue for debate.

A measured and scholarly appraisal of the history of the Barbary corsairs has been long overdue—the last serious single volume study in English appeared in 1890—and I hope readers will find my book has filled that gap.

Alan G. JamiesonHinton, Alberta

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PrinciPles of TsawalkAn Indigenous Approach to Global CrisisUmeek / e. RichaRd atleo

Arguing that contemporary environmental and political crises and the ongoing plight of indigenous peoples reflect a world out of balance, Umeek weaves together Nuu-chah-nulth and Western worldviews to create a new philosophical foundation for building more equitable and sustainable communities.

$32.95 | 978-0-7748-2127-8

reThinking The greaT whiTe norThRace, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canadaedited by andRew baldwin, laURa cameRon, and aUdRey kobayashi

Informed by the insight that racism is geographical as well as historical and cultural, this path-breaking book traces how notions of race, whiteness, and nature helped construct a white country in travel writing and treaty making; scientific research and park planning; and in towns, cities, and tourist centres.

$34.95 | 978-0-7748-2014-1

Blue-green ProvinceThe Environment and the Political Economy of OntariomaRk s. winfield

The first comprehensive study of environ-mental policy in Ontario, Blue-Green Province takes a long-overdue look at the crucial relationship between Ontario’s environmen-tal policy and the effects of political ideolo-gies on Ontario’s environment and politics.

$34.95 | 978-0-7748-2237-4

an environmenTal hisTory of canadalaURel sefton macdowell

Throughout history most people have associated northern North America with wilderness – with abundant fish and game, snow-capped mountains, and endless forest and prairie. Canada’s contemporary picture gallery, however, contains more disturb-ing images. This book will change the way Canadians and others around the world think about – and look at – Canada.

$49.95 | 978-0-7748-2102-5

social democracy afTer The cold waredited by bRyan evans and ingo schmidt

“This is a very timely book … It helps give people a sober road map of what social democracy really is and it goes out of its way to show the degree of continuity between Third Way thinking, between Blair-ism, between the adaptation of neoliberalism by social democracy, and the social democracy that came before that.” – Leo Panitch, author of The End of Parliamentary Socialism

$29.95 | 978-1-926836-87-4

imPerfecTionPatRick gRant

“Imperfection draws on philosophy, art, film, psychology, and mysticism among others. I can’t think of another book that combines such spread of reference, such succinctness, and such depth of concern without losing weight or coherence, not-withstanding its – shall we call it? – wisdom.” – John Wilson Foster, author of Colonial Consequences.

$24.95 | 978-1-926836-75-1

how canadians communicaTe ivMedia and Politicsedited by david taRas and chRistoPheR waddell

With contributions from such diverse figures as Elly Alboim, Richard Davis, Tom Flanagan, David Marshall, and Roger Epp, How Canadians Communicate IV is the most comprehensive review of political commu-nication in Canada in over three decades – one that poses questions fundamental to the quality of public life.

$34.95 | 978-1-926836-81-2

The meTaBolism of desireThe Poetry of Guido CavalcantitRanslated by david R. slavitt

It is chiefly through the translations of Rossetti and Pound that English-speaking readers have encountered Cavalcanti’s work. Pound’s famous translation, now viewed by some as antiquated, is remarkably different from the translation provided here in the graceful voice of poet David Slavitt. Working under the significant restraints of Cavalcanti’s elaborate formal structures, Slavitt renders an English translation faithful to the original poetry in both rhyme and rhythm.

$16.95 | 978-1-926836-84-3

here comes dayl igh T sav ings T ime. use that extra hour wisely.

Available from fine bookstores near you Order online at www.ubcpress.ca

Order by phone 1.800.565.9523 (UTP Distribution)To order an AU Press ebook please visit www.aupress.caFollow us on Twitter @UBCPress

Journey with No Maps A Life of P.K. PageS A N D R A D J WA

“Sandra Djwa has written a founda-tional biography of P.K. Page as artistand poet on which all further work on Page must draw. She conveys theextraordinary range of Page’s gener-ous engagement with the world, andfinds her way to the core of P.K.’s passion for art and friendship – herabsolute faith in love.” –Marilyn Bowering

In Twilight and in Dawn A Biography of Diamond JennessB A R N E T T R I C H L I N G

From New Guinea to the Arctic andbeyond – the life and times of one ofCanada’s foremost anthropologists.

A Two-Edged Sword The Navy as an Instrument of Canadian Foreign PolicyN I C H O L A S T R AC Y

An examination of the Royal CanadianNavy and its promotion of sovereigntythrough collective defence.

Calming the Chatter

Telling It to the Judge Taking Native History to CourtA RT H U R J. R AY

“By telling his story and placing the reader in the courtroom, the author provides a very informative, enlightening,and entertaining work.” –Choice

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Bearing Witness Perspectives on War andPeace from the Arts andHumanitiesE D I T E D B Y S H E R R I L L G R AC E,

PAT R I C K I M B E RT, A N D

T I F FA N Y J O H N S TO N E

Artists and humanists reflect upon theparadox of war.

Inside the NDP War Room Competing for Credibility in a Federal ElectionJ A M E S S. M CL E A N

A first-hand account of how decisionsto represent political parties are made.

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