Juggling with genes PAGE 6
$6.50 Vol. 21, No. 3 April 2013
Paul Evans Dancing with the Dragon As China surges to new heights, can Canada keep step?
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
Kate Taylor Identity crisis at the museum
Wesley Wark Treason for cheap
John Burns, Ikechi Mgbeoji and more Writing aboriginal peoples back into Canada
PLUS: non-fiction Michael Valpy on the spectre of grassroots racism + Ramsay Cook on Maclean’s and the imperial dream + Terry Fenge on Arctic sovereignty and the Nunavut agreement + Robin Fisher on Canadian anthropology’s New Zealand godfather + Douglas Wright on a post- WWI mathematical peacemaker + Florin Diacu on measuring the heavens fiction Merilyn Simonds reviews Blood Secrets by Nadine McInnis + David Penhale reviews
Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 Husk by Corey Redekop Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. poetry Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson + Robin Richardson + Alice Major + Denise Desautels + PO Box 8, Station K Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 Leslie Timmins + Anne Swannell + Seymour Mayne + Dave Margoshes + Allan Peterkin NEW FROM UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Autonomous stAte tHe greAt reVersAl InHerItIng A CAnoe PADDle the epic struggle for a Canadian Car Industry How We let technology take Control of the the Canoe in Discourses of english-Canadian from oPeC to Free trade Planet nationalism by Dimitry Anastakis by David Edward Tabachnick by Misao Dean In this engrossing book, Dimitry Anastakis The Great Reversal takes the reader back to misao Dean explores the canoe paddle as a chronicles Canadian auto industry’s evolution Aristotle’s warning that humanity should never national symbol – integral to historical tales from the 1973 oPeC embargo to the 1989 allow technical thinking to cloud our judgment of exploration and trade, central to Pierre Canada–us Free trade Agreement and its about what makes for a good life. As the rise trudeau’s patriotism, and unique to Canadians effects on public policy, diplomacy, business of technology threatens our very humanity, wanting to distance themselves from British enterprise, workers, consumers, and firms. tabachnick explores the largely unrecognized and American national myths. history of technology as an idea. 9781442612976 | $39.95 9781442612877 | $29.95 9780802094698 | $24.95
HeAlIng Home AVAnt-gArDe CAnADIAn DeFInIng tHe moDern museum Health and Homelessness in the life stories of lIterAture A Case study of the Challenges of exchange Young Women the early manifestations by Lianne McTavish by Vanessa Oliver by Gregory Betts Defining the Modern Museum is a fascinating through the life stories of homeless women, In Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, Betts exploration of the museum as a cultural Vanessa oliver demonstrates how personal illustrates that Canadians have been institution. mctavish addresses topics such as and social experiences shape health outcomes producing avant-garde art since the start of the transnational exchange of objects between Healing Home offers fresh, incisive the twentieth century and explores different museums, the creation of Carnegie libraries, recommendations for health and social service forms of avant-garde literary activity, including and the rising status of curators. providers. work by mystical revolutionaries, surrealists/ 9781442644434 | $50.00 Automatists, and Canadian Vorticists. 9781442613447 | $29.95 9781442643772 | $65.00
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EDITOR Bronwyn Drainie 3 Dancing with the 14 Early Illiteracy 20 Beverley Baxter in [email protected] Dragon A poem Empireland CONTRIBUTING EDITORS An essay Robin Richardson A review of Canada and the Mark Lovewell, Molly Peacock, Anthony Westell Paul Evans 14 What I have become End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports ASSOCIATE EDITOR 6 Genes That Never through grief Robin Roger from London through War A poem Fade and Peace, 1936–1960, by POETRY EDITOR Alice Major Moira MacDougall A review of The Juggler’s Neville Thompson COPY EDITOR Children: A Journey into Ramsay Cook 14 Madeline Koch Family, Legend and the Genes A poem 22 The Nobel of ONLINE EDITORS that Bind Us, by Carolyn Denise Desautels, trans- Abraham Numbers Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, lated by Norman Cornett Donald Rickerd, C.M. Susan Crean A review of Turbulent Times PROOFREADERS 15 Triolet for in Mathematics: The Life of 7 Home Invasion Rebecca Borkowsky, Beth MacKinnon, Afghanistan J.C. Fields and the History A review of The Inconvenient Amanda Miller, Heather Schultz, Robert A poem of the Fields Medal, by Simone, Rob Tilley Indian: A Curious Account Leslie Timmins Elaine McKinnon Riehm and of Native People in North RESEARCH Frances Hoffman Rob Tilley America, by Thomas King 15 April Surprise Douglas Wright EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS John Burns A poem Luca Da Franco, Prerana Das Anne Swannell 24 Magic Spheres 9 Pioneering DESIGN A review of Heavenly 15 Gravity James Harbeck Anthropology Mathematics: The A review of In Twilight and A poem ADVERTISING/SALES Forgotten Art of Spherical Michael Wile in Dawn: A Biography of Seymour Mayne Trigonometry, by Glen Van [email protected] Diamond Jenness, by Barnett 15 Multimedia Brummelen DIRECTOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS Richling A poem Florin Diacu Michael Booth Robin Fisher Dave Margoshes 25 Ideas under Glass PUBLISHERS 10 Northwest Passage Alastair Cheng 15 Ditty An essay [email protected] Hold ’Em A poem Kate Taylor Helen Walsh An essay [email protected] Allan Peterkin 28 Does Good Policy Terry Fenge BOARD OF DIRECTORS 16 When People Seem Make Good 12 Tobacco Blowback John Honderich, C.M., Most Alive Neighbours? J. Alexander Houston, Frances Lankin, A review of Smoke A review of Blood Secrets: A review of Everyday Law on Jack Mintz, Trina McQueen Signals: The Native Takeback Stories, by Nadine McInnis the Street: City Governance ADVISORY COUNCIL of North America’s Tobacco Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., Merilyn Simonds in an Age of Diversity, by Industry, by Jim Poling Sr. Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Mariana Valverde Ikechi Mgbeoji 17 It’s Not Easy Being Drew Fagan, James Gillies, C.M., Undead Michael Valpy Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, 14 Space Is Not Equal to P.C., C.C., Susan Reisler, Grant Reuber, A review of Husk, by Corey 30 Letters and Responses Y or X O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Redekop David Orrell, Wendy Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff, A poem David Penhale Cukier, Nicholas Tracy, Reed Scowen Caitlin Elizabeth Justin Podur POETRY SUBMISSIONS Thomson 18 “Spy, Russians, For poetry submission guidelines, please see Secrets, Sold”
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 1 The LRC Presents... Andrew Nikiforuk on Canada’s water An award-winning environmental journalist and author speaks about one of our most precious resources.
May 6, 2013 Andrew Nikiforuk has written for 7:00 PM The Walrus, Maclean’s, Canadian The Gardiner Museum Business and The Globe and 111 Queen’s Park Mail, among other publications. Toronto His work has received several National Magazine Awards as well as top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists. His public This free public discussion policy position papers on water (with light refreshments and a diversion in the Great Lakes and water, energy and North American integration for the Program cash bar) will include a talk by on Water Issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Nikiforuk and subsequent Q&A. Global Affairs sparked both discussion and reform. Nikiforuk is also the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Seating is limited, so reserve Pandemonium, Empire of the Beetle, national best-seller The Tar Sands and — most recently — The Energy of Slaves. a place now by emailing
[email protected] More information about this event to come soon: check reviewcanada.ca/events for further details!
2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ESSAY Dancing with the Dragon As China surges to new heights, can Canada keep step? Paul Evans
n the spring of 2008 an academic colleague biggest owner of U.S. treasuries. China remains the the late 1940s, the immigrants to Canada from bemoaned to me the absence of materials on largest destination for foreign direct investment greater China starting in the 1980s, the huge stu- ICanada-China relations that she could use in and is moving into the top ranks of outward invest- dent flow to Canada (some 68,000 are now -regis her teaching. There were a handful of books on the ors. One of its state-owned companies recently pur- tered in Canadian post-secondary institutions) and history of the relationship, occasional academic chased Calgary-based Nexen for $15.1 billion, the the occasional reverse flow of Canadian citizens to essays and think tank reports (mainly by the Asia biggest single investment ever made by a Chinese China and its periphery with our young people in Pacific Foundation of Canada), and a steady flow of firm. China was one of the last into and first out small but increasing numbers studying in China or, media and other punditry, but dry the desert was. of the financial crash of 2008, now accounting for in larger numbers, teaching English in China and What a change in five years. Academic books, about 40 percent of world growth. around East Asia. There is a pantheon of Canadian mainly in the form of edited collections, are flow- In diplomatic terms, China has emerged as a heroes in the relationship—Bethune and Dashan ing: we have memoirs by Canadians, including serious player in virtually every major international (aka Mark Rowswell, the television personality who Paul Lin and Brian Evans, on has become Canada’s cultural the front line of Sino-Canadian What should be our strategic response ambassador to China) among relations; virtually every major them—with significant fan clubs think tank across the country (the to global China? Should China be among sinophiles in Canada and Canadian International Council, far larger ones in China. the Canada West Foundation, the approached as a friend, strategic partner, Commercially, the eternal Conference Board of Canada, the lure of the Chinese market for Fraser Institute, to name just a ally, competitor, adversary or enemy? Canadian commodities and prod- few) has published one or more ucts has now morphed into some- reports focused on China�’s rise and its implicaimplica-- institution, sometimes a leader. It is difficult to think thing bigger and more complex: integration with tions for Canada with a heavy concentration on of a global issue ranging from global warming and China into global supply chains, China as a major economics and trade. Opinion pieces about China communicable diseases to trans-boundary water source of investment, tourists, labour, and techno- and Canada-China relations are ubiquitous, with management, cyber security and non-proliferation logical innovation and exchange. economics, democracy and human rights as their where the road to a solution does not now run Diplomatically, China has rarely been a top principal concerns. Even Norman Bethune has through Beijing. priority, except during occasional moments of made a comeback, compliments of a biography by The outpouring of words about global China Canadian engagement in Asian wars, as a recur- a former governor general. is not unique to Canada. In most countries China rent Cold War problem focused on recognition How much of this outpouring has literary is top of mind for politicians, publics and authors. and China’s admission into the United Nations. Yet merit is questionable. But measured by bulk alone For Canadians, China is no longer “over there”; now, with the exception of Canada’s relations with China is very much on Canadian minds. it is right here on our doorsteps. We feel and see it the United States, no other relationship is as com- And why not? In the past decade China has gone when we walk the streets of our major cities, visit a plex, pressing and multidimensional at the levels global in the blink of a geopolitical eye. The factoids shopping mall, think about our jobs and economic of policy and management as China. Global China are dizzying. China now is the world’s second lar- future, or take out a mortgage. The choices of the affects Canada in virtually every policy domain ran- gest economy and on a likely path to be the largest Chinese government, Chinese business leaders ging from security and diplomacy through to First within a decade. It is the world’s largest trader and and Chinese consumers have impacts virtually Nations affairs, fisheries and the Arctic. the largest trading partner of Japan, Korea, India everywhere. When I was a child in the 1950s, our Few doubt that Canada’s livelihood and pros- and virtually every other country in Asia. It is the dinner table discussion was about eating everything perity, role in global and regional institutions, and second largest trading partner of both Canada and on our plate while remembering starving children exercise of leadership in the world will increas- the United States, and is on pace soon to surpass in China, as if this would make a real difference ingly depend on getting China and China policy Canada’s two-way trade with the United States. to them. Thirty years earlier Pierre Trudeau’s first right. What should be our strategic response to Over the past eight years it has been Canada’s fast- memory of China was putting nickels into a collec- global China? Should China be approached as a est rising trade partner, growing ten times faster tion plate to save the souls of little Chinese children friend, strategic partner, ally, competitor, adver- than Canadian trade with the rest of the world. being supported by the St. Enfance movement. sary or enemy? Can China become a responsible China is the largest consumer of steel and the lar- Today that dinner table discussion is about the stakeholder in the liberal international order of gest producer of carbon dioxide emissions. It holds competitive pressures and opportunities that China market capitalism, democratic institutions and more than $3 trillion in foreign reserves and is the opens for our children’s future. human rights that Canadians hold dear and that Despite vast differences in size, language, cul- they have expended so much blood and treasure to Paul Evans is a professor of Asian international ture, tradition, civilization, history, and political, underwrite? affairs at the Institute of Asian Research and the Liu social and economic institutions, China has had For almost all of the period since Pierre Trudeau Institute for Global Issues at the University of British special purchase on the Canadian imaginary from established diplomatic relations with the People’s Columbia. He is currently a visiting professor at the time of Confederation. The biggest and most Republic of China in 1970, the high-policy answer the University of Hong Kong, where he is finishing important dimension has been the human flows to these questions has been engagement. Its under- a book titled Engaging China: Myth, Aspiration that started with the labourers coming to Canada pinnings have been a calculation that engagement and Strategy in Canadian Policy from Trudeau to to work on the railroad, the Canadian missionaries is preferable to containment, isolation or confron- Harper. who flooded to China between the late 1870s and tation; a belief that Canada has both an opportunity
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 3 and a comparative advantage in bringing ing the relationship from the ground up China into the international system; and through a series of bilateral agreements a wager that opening China economic- on trade offices, foreign investment ally would eventually induce political promotion and protection, approved liberalization. destination status and an economic com- The special burden placed on engage- plementarities study that have provided a ment is that it was not only expected to new substructure to the relationship. produce commercial advantages and In many respects Canadian policy in diplomatic leverage, but also that it was 2013 is where we were in ambition and part of a moral enterprise to change means at the time that Paul Martin and China, to make China “more normal,” as Chinese president Hu Jintao declared was once described to me by a woman in the strategic partnership between the a Tim Hortons line. This was the aim of two countries in September 2005. While our missionary movement a century ago, the phrase is still used in Ottawa, the and so it remains for many Canadians current version of the strategic partner- who view human rights and democracy ship rests on different foundations. Some as the embodiment of universal values of the differences are particular to the and institutions to which China should Conservatives themselves. The ideology aspire and adapt. of anti-communism, universalist abso- Pierre Trudeau casts a long shadow. lutism and the division of friends from He gave Canada the foundations of an enemies based on types of political sys- engagement strategy for dealing with tem are deeply ingrained in the Reform/ communist China that held sway with his Alliance wing of the party. The philosophy Liberal and Progressive Conservative of small government infuses a govern- successors and became something of mental interest in promoting transactions a Canadian brand. But he also gave rather than building relationships. There Canadians a charter of rights and have been no major investments in new freedoms. programs for substantive policy dia- China policy was bound to be vexed. logue, capacity building, or promotion of Particularly since Tiananmen Square human rights and other Canadian values in June 1989, media debate has been in China. The bilateral aid program for obsessed with a distinction between China is being phased out, with no govgov-- pursuing commercial and diplomatic ernment-sponsored successor focused on opportunities with China versus promot- policy programs announced. ing human rights. Other w��������������estern������������� democ- Reflecting the style of a prime minister racies have wrestled with a similar issue, with remarkable control over the making but it is difficult to think of a country of policy, China policy is about individual where the tradeoffs have been so starkly framed China for human rights violations. He received the activities, most of them commercial, rather than in teeter-totter–like fashion, where the debate Dalai Lama in his office in the Centre Block with a grand strategic plans or pronouncements. In the has raged for so long and where it has produced Tibetan flag prominently displayed on his desk. words of one advisor to the PM, “watch what we more complications for diplomats and politicians The approach produced a near diplomatic do rather than what we say and the pattern will entrusted with managing the relationship. And far disaster. Official Chinese responses varied from become clear.” The strategic partnership is in fact from disappearing at a moment when China’s eco- puzzlement to anger. While several human an a-strategic partnership, very heavily focused on nomic leverage is in a completely different league rights non-governmental organizations and anti- economic issues and without sustained attention to than Canada’s, when the prospect of economic communist groups supported the new approach, the major power shifts underway or the changing sanctions or punishment of China through trade business leaders, academics and officials were function and roles of regional and global institu- instruments is unimaginable without horrific costs, nearly unanimous in condemnation. At precisely tions of which China is a part. our domestic debate still rotates around whether the moment that governments around the world At the same time, wider public and intellectual we should be having economic relations with a were ramping up their connections with the PRC at support for the key premises of engagement is erod- country run by a communist party. all levels, Canada was in a class of one in reversing ing. Polls conducted by the Asia Pacific Foundation Stephen Harper’s Conservatives came to power an engagement policy and depleting a reservoir of and other organizations since 2008 reveal two main in February 2006 with a very different approach to goodwill in Beijing built up over 35 years. trends. First, Canadians think China is big, import- China in mind. In a period of “cool politics, warm By early 2009 it was evident that the government ant and getting more so. Almost two thirds now economics,” the Harper government moved to was quietly and quickly reversing policy. The new believe that Chinese influence in the world will sur- expand commercial relations with China through line, remarkably similar to the approach of previous pass American within a decade. They consistently keeping the door open to Chinese imports, encour- governments, was visible when Harper made his overestimate existing trade with China and Asia, aging Chinese investment and investing in the Asia first trip to China in December of that year after a frequently by a factor of two or three. A little more Pacific Gateway project to boost transportation series of ministerial visits that the Chinese insisted than half now see it as an economic opportunity infrastructure capacity for trans-Pacific supply were necessary to build confidence in the relation- rather than an economic threat. Almost half favour chains. ship. Ottawa took great pains to reiterate its “One a free trade agreement with China. Cool politics came in several forms. Various China” policy. Harper raised human rights in his Second, they are worried about what a ris- Cabinet ministers and ministers of Parliament speeches but reverted to the established practice of ing China portends. The sense of opportunity is described China as “a godless totalitarian country dealing with individual cases in private. Words such leavened by a blend of uncertainty, anxiety and with nuclear weapons aimed at us.” The govern- as “friendship,” “engagement” and “strategic partpart-- fear. Twice as many Canadians now have a cold ment immediately announced a principled foreign nership,” banned from the official lexicon for three or unfavourable view of China as compared to a policy in which freedom, democracy, human years, reappeared in the speeches of the prime warm or favourable one. China is consistently seen rights and the rule of law would be the guiding minister and senior ministers. In perhaps the most by a significant number of Canadians as corrupt, concepts. Advisors spoke openly of shifting prior- symbolic move of all, the government provided sig- authoritarian and threatening and less than half ity from communist China to democratic India. It nificant funding for the upgrading of the Norman think the human rights situation is improving. took months for Chinese diplomats to meet with Bethune House in Gravenhurst, touting him as an Concern about China’s growing military power is ministers. The first comments about China by the exemplar of humanism and entrepreneurship. rising, and fewer than one in five favour a state- new foreign minister focused on espionage. The The remarkable policy reversal has never been controlled company from China buying a control- prime minister became personally involved in the acknowledged, much less explained. Former offi - - ling stake in a major Canadian company. case of a Canadian citizen of Uighur descent who cials have argued that this was less a reversal than The recent controversy over the sale of Nexen was imprisoned in China and openly criticized a new course, part of a coherent strategy of rebuild- to the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company
4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada revealed just how much of an exposed raw nerve Most of the recent writing by our China special- that relations with China have become. Some ists is rather more upbeat. Study after study talk of the criticisms of the sale grew out of a free about the growing importance and influence of market ideology averse to state-owned enter- China in a full panoply of areas. They emphasize THE SECRET OF prises combined with nationalist concerns about the pace and scale of change inside China, the THE BLUE TRUNK domestic control of natural resources. The major- prospects for collaboration in fields ranging from ity, however, focused on negativity about China environmental management to rules for limiting by Lise Dion itself. Mainstream and social media across the the weaponization of space, and the possibility of country, as well as voices within the Conservative convergence on rules and institutions based on A bestseller caucus and Cabinet, opposed the deal because of shared and common interests. A trip to the Central in Quebec; to CNOOC’s alleged connections to Chinese intelli- Party School is more like a visit to an executive be made into a gence, espionage and the military. Critics brought MBA program than a Marxist indoctrination cen- movie. into play arguments about China’s assertiveness tre. In many areas, including property rights, laws in the South China Sea, its policies toward Tibet have been rewritten, judiciaries and legal systems and Falun Gong, the vagaries of the Chinese improved, and in some instances rights respected In 1940 Armande Martel, a young justice system, trafficking in animal parts, the in Chinese law upheld and enforced. China’s inte- nun from Quebec, is arrested by environmental dangers of shark fin soup and gration into the global economy is leading it, step the Germans at her religious order the health hazards of Chinese products. A popu- by step, into “playing our game.” lar narrative unfolded that doing business with The hard nut remains the system of govern- in Brittany. This is the true story Chinese SOEs meant dealing with the Chinese ment. Even as the Party transforms itself and the of how a young Québécoise nun state, that the Chinese state was controlled by the domain of personal freedoms expands, funda- ended up a prisoner of war in Chinese Communist Party and that the Chinese mental transformation of the political system Buchenwald and how her daughter Communist Party oppressed its people and vio- through electoral mechanisms has stalled. China discovered her secrets. lated their basic human rights. The cumulative fear may no longer be totalitarian, but it remains of a rising China risks becoming greater than the authoritarian and is unlikely soon to evolve in the sum of individual concerns. direction of western-style multi-party democracy. By the author The approval of the sale by the Harper- gov Our missionary impulse to change China con- of Pilgrim in ernment on December 7, 2012, was a triumph tinues to run deep. It now encounters a China the Palace of clever politics and tactical compromise. But it that is more wealthy, more powerful, more open of Words. did not lay the foundation for the energy dimen- and more outward looking than could have been sion of the next phase of the strategic partnership imagined in 1970. Paradoxically, current expecta- TRIPPING or directly address the growing negativity about tions are much greater and more exacting than THE WORLD China. they were in the Mao period. For democratic FANTASTIC Behind the negativity is a growing fear that a fundamentalists, China is not a legitimate form of A Journey Through rising China poses a profound challenge to values government, whatever the views of the majority the Music of Our and institutions that Canadians hold dear. Preston of Chinese citizens. Planet Manning framed the sale as part of a “deadly ser- The intellectual issue ahead of us is how to by Glenn Dixon ious political competition with China” that “pits understand China’s response to the encyclopedia the well-developed Chinese Communist ideology of acute domestic problems it is facing and its A fascinating journey through the of state-controlled capitalism and state-directed evolving global role. The great strategic issue of our world’s musical cultures. Through ‘democracy’ against the older Western ideology times is not just China’s rising power but whether his adventures, author Glenn Dixon of market-driven capitalism and citizen-directed its world view and applied theory will reproduce, uncovers the real reasons why music democracy. This competition is especially keen in converge with or take a separate path from the has such a powerful hold on us. developing countries where the West and China world order and ideas produced in the era of trans- compete for resources.” The West, he added, Atlantic dominance. “appears to be losing the competition.” This calls for a 21st-century reprise of Canada’s A few months earlier, Michael Ignatieff spoke middle power role. The policy challenge, beyond THE WHISPER OF in Riga about the “decisive encounter” of liberal managing a myriad of pressing bilateral issues, LEGENDS democracies with post-communist oligarchies in is to facilitate a great power transition and fos- An Inspector Green Russia and China “that have no ideology other ter rules, norms and institutions that allow an Mystery, Book 9 than enrichment and are recalcitrant to global ascending China and an established America to order,” that are “predatory on their own societies” traverse a diagonal rather than enter into direct by Barbara Fradkin and that are “attempting to demonstrate a novel confrontation. Earlier this involved getting China proposition: that economic freedoms can be sev- to as many tables as possible. Now it means By the Arthur Ellis Award winning ered from political and civil freedom, and that extensive dialogues at the official, track-two and author of Fifth Son freedom is divisible.” As “Mao continues to glower academic levels and exchanges at as many levels and Honour down over Tiananmen Square,” commerce and as possible. Among Men capitalism, contracts and economic relationships The political issue is how a Conservative- gov have not dented China’s political system. He called ernment that is ideologically anti-communist and When his teenage daughter goes for a “defiant stance toward the new tyrannies in philosophically ill disposed to strong national missing on a summer wilderness China and Russia,” and approaching them as “the leadership can ramp up a relationship that will canoe trip to the Nahanni River in chief strategic threat to the moral and political need imagination, clear articulation of goals the Northwest Territories, Inspector commitments of liberal democracies.” But rather and new resources. China needs explaining and Green is forced into unfamiliar than seeing conflict as inevitable and eternal, he Conservative Ottawa needs to make a case for why territory just as dangerous as the advocated responding with both curiosity and and how the strategic engagement of China needs back streets of Ottawa. tolerance, avoiding the fixed categories of “us” to be played on a field much larger than commer- and “them,” “[learning] from beliefs we cannot cial interests. share,” and treating China as an opponent, not It will take wisdom, knowledge and political an enemy while practising politics, not war or courage to update the strategic partnership and religion. recast the Canada-China narrative. It will mean /dundurnpress | @dundurnpress | dundurn.com Neither Manning’s nor Ignatieff’s approach eschewing absolutes and being cosmopolitan in closes the door on an engagement strategy, but opening values and institutions, including our both place limits and frame the encounter as an own, to constant interrogation and the search for epic competition rather than an opportunity for common ground in a messy multi-centric world deep collaboration. order shifting before our very eyes.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 5 Genes That Never Fade Why are we so mesmerized by digging up ancient family history? Susan Crean
children. Almost nothing was known about his sick child—false paternities are discovered, known The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, family either. He apparently retained no connection as “pedigree errors.” People go looking for a needle Legend and the Genes that Bind Us with his kin; all that remained were hints of some in a haystack, and find the family skeleton. Carolyn Abraham distinction and perhaps money. “Where the jug- Originally The Juggler’s Children was subtitled Random House gler’s legacy was shrouded in secrecy, the Captain’s “A Family History Gene by Gene,” which is an 384 pages, softcover was clouded by wild speculation,” writes Abraham. apt description of the plodding nature of DNA ISBN 9780679314592 What may have started as an attempt to verify research. One DNA test always needs another. Its legend quickly became an exercise in fleshing it main contribution to Abraham’s project was pro- out, for in this story, family memory proved more viding confirmation of what was already known, n Falen Johnson’s recent play Salt Baby, the reliable than the DNA testing. Abraham, who is a and pointers for further research. Science can central character is a young Métis woman tor- science writer and frequent Globe and Mail com- give you ideas, but not the story line. In this the Imented by her pale complexion, which leads mentator on gene research, knew what she was internet, that great connector of dots, has been people to mistake her for a non-Native. “I been told getting into; she has interviewed the players and instrumental. FamilyTree has forums; Ancestry. I look white my entire life,” she laments. She consid- understands the science. So she is the ideal guide ca (which is part of a chain of websites operat- ers DNA testing as a way to prove her Tuscarora/ to the brave and crowded new world of internet ing globally) operates as a social networking site Mohawk ancestry, although she anguishes about genealogy. Plotting the family tree used to be an like Facebook, but charges a membership fee. the possibility of unexpected results. Would it be idiosyncratic and solitary pastime, like stamp There are two issues I wish Abraham had tackled. so bad if you found out you are only one-quarter collecting; but that changed when it met up with The first concerns the implications of commercial- Native? asks her white boyfriend. “I wouldn’t be the web and then DNA testing in the late 1990s izing genetic testing, starting with the matter of me. I would feel like I had been living a lie, like my and turned into a mass hobby. Today it ranks who owns the resulting pool of DNA. The status entire existence was bullshit,” she answers. Still she second to pornography in popularity on the net, of the information on family history sites is equally pursues the DNA idea, attempting to recruit her and rivals gaming. Along with thousands of sites perplexing. As is the concept of private, for-profit father so she will have a Y chromosome to work dedicated to individual family names and their access to public documents. What kind of money with. Dad is deeply unenthusiastic. “I don’t want to myriad branches, and hundreds more offering help disappears down this rabbit hole?1 I once dropped be anything different than what ’I ve been my whole researching family history, there are a host of pri- €30 to learn where my great-grandfather was not life,” he tells her, echoing her own sentiments. “This vate websites providing direct-to-consumer DNA born, and was totally taken aback by the impulse to land, this place, these people, this is me. A pie chart testing. “Dozens of companies sprang up to cash in, try again. This is the other great question—the phe- or a graph can say what it wants about me, but making qualified promises to predict disease risk, nomenon itself. What motivates people to research I know who I am.” design diet and fitness plans to suit your genome, their family? What of the “genealogy junkies” who And there you have it: the paradox of race and or even find you the perfect date—a molecular love never stop? I presume most start with natural curi- identity. And who can say how genes and lived match,” writes Abraham. You can imagine the scep- osity, as Abraham does, but even she gets caught experience play in our psyches? In The Juggler’s ticism this aroused among experts who describe up in the chase and at one point seriously contem- Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the the phenomenon as “recreational genomics.” They plates grave digging. The BBC’s Who Do You Think Genes that Bind Us, Carolyn Abraham’s chron- worry about the likelihood of people being misled. You Are is a clue that many people are on a treasure icle of a seven-year search for two elusive great- Abraham used Texas-based FamilyTreeDNA, hunt for connection to royalty or greatness of some grandfathers, we get a rare glimpse of that dance: it but did not stop researching the old-fashioned sort. Others come to it feeling “relative deprived,” is an artfully choreographed pas de deux between way, looking for documentation online, in archives and still others (whose families assimilated beyond DNA testing and family identity. The narrative fol- and attics and talking to people. This is the great recognition into the mainstream) come looking for lows Abraham as she trails her ancestors, a journey value of The Juggler’s Children. It is an insider’s ethnic identity. It makes me wonder about the con- both surprising and exasperating. On her father’s view of genealogical research by someone doing nection to the current fascination with memoir and side is the juggler of the title who came to Tamil it, an account that includes stories of what can life writing, which cuts across the genres as well as Nadu in the late 19th century, married a local girl go wrong and how you get blindsided. In the go- media. and lived in the Nilgiri Hills until his past caught wrong department were the astonishing percent- The Juggler’s Children is a perfect match of mem- up with him. He vanished leaving three children. ages of Native American genes reported in the oir and journalism. The personal story happens to (Well, six, actually, as Abraham discovers, three family’s early analyses. (Twenty-five percent in her be the very subject of the investigation, and the having inexplicably disappeared from family view.) father’s case.) Eventually, Abraham discovered that memoir benefits from a larger context. Abraham Little is known about John Abraham, but it was said DNAPrint Genomics had identified these markers writes with ease and humour, undaunted by com- he was Chinese and had fled accusations of murder as Native American (apparently to appeal to the plexity, and the narrative unfolds like a detective by becoming a juggler and leaving China with a cir- American market), but they are in fact the genes story. There are wonderful cathartic moments, such cus. On her mother’s side was a seafaring man from of ancient Central Asians who migrated east and as when her father stumbles on a marriage register Jamaica, Captain Frederick Crooks, who also turned south, and are thus common to people in regions recording the day when the juggler surrendered the up in South India and married a local woman. He ranging from the Americas to Asia and the South name Chu and became John Abraham. And when Y died after four years of marriage, leaving two small Pacific. At another point on the journey, Y chromo- chromosome DNA tests confirm his Chinese ances- some DNA tests come back indicating that one of try he is chuffed. Here was proof his grandfather Susan Crean is a writer and journalist whose last her uncles had no Crooks matches but matched was not a figment of family legend. It verified some- article for the LRC reported on developments at with her great-grandmother’s family. Abraham thing he already knew, yet somehow it mattered. Library and Archives Canada, including the impact spends weeks wondering what Nana Gladys Salt Baby would understand. of the genealogy boom on service. She is the author had been up to. But with a more sophisticated Note of The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr test, Nana was off the hook and the author had 1 Costs posted on FamilyTreeDNA.com range from $169 (HarperFlamingo, 2001), which explores the legacy another link to Jamaica. This detour, however, leads for a Y chromosome test with 37 markers to $837 for a comprehensive genome analysis. Ancestry.ca charges a of the British Columbian artist, and was nominated Abraham to note that 10 percent of the time when minimum fee of $10 per month for access to public docu- for the Governor General’s Award in literature. both parents are tested—for example, if they have a ments such as census and vital statistics.
6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Home Invasion In the end, modern North America’s story comes down to stolen land. John Burns
right to protect ancestral remains The Inconvenient Indian: and a village midden from condo A Curious Account of Native development. People in North America King’s book, which wanders Thomas King freely and breezily through the 19th Doubleday and 20th centuries, aims to docu- 288 pages, hardcover ment the full breadth of accom- ISBN 9780385664219 modation and disappointment and betrayal encountered in Native life. He talks about the depiction of o. Indians in art (including, of course, It is 1868. In Russia western movies, a preoccupation SMaxim Gorky is born, in of his), the fixing of Natives in the Canada Thomas D’Arcy McGee amber of pop culture, and the cas- gets assassinated, and in England ual, enduring racism of law mak- astronomer Norman Lockyer dis- ers, politicians and neighbours. He covers helium. In the Wyoming dekes energetically, drawing deft Territory of the United States, connections between seemingly meanwhile, the Treaty of Fort disparate experiences, but never Laramie is signed, setting aside does he stray far from his central for the sole use of the Lakota tribe topic: “Land has always been a forever the Black Hills mountain defining element of Aboriginal cul- range and all of northeastern ture. Land contains the languages, Wyoming. the stories, and the histories of a Given the endless suffering in people. It provides water, air, shel- so many wars between settlers and First Nations— Account of Native People in North America, noted ter, and food. Land participates in the ceremonies from the Cherokees and Seminoles in the East novelist and broadcaster Thomas King retells and the songs. And land is home. Not in an abstract to the Nez Perce and Sioux in the West (these the history of this continent from a First Nations way.” choices being entirely arbitrary: little earth is free perspective, and like Coyote in his well-received The case for the prosecution returns again of blood)—the resolution of this treaty is a blessing, novels, he is not going to stop until we well and and again to land. To the theft of the Ipperwash a blessing that, designed to be eternal, lasts in fact truly get the point. Which in this case is that the lands from the Stoney Point Ojibway; to the six years. In 1874, enter General George Armstrong influx of white settlers did not well please the 3,300 acres of Nisqually land in Washington state Custer, last seen killing Cheyennes in the Battle of Lakota, who appealed to Ulysses S. Grant to hon- annexed to the Fort Lewis artillery range and to the Washita River. Of all things, Custer discovers gold our the treaty terms. President Grant responded Nisqually’s river lands routinely barred from their in them thar Black Hills and instead with the offer of a $25,000 land grant and fishing access; to the entire Seneca reservation in an all-expenses-paid trip to a new homeland in the Pennsylvania now sunk beneath the Kinzua Dam Before you could say “Fort Laramie Treaty,” Indian Territory. The Lakota refused then, refused reservoir; to the Mohawk lands commandeered White miners swarmed into the Black Hills again in 1980 when the U.S. government, following for the Club de golf d’Oka and the Musqueam and began digging mines, sluicing rivers, the Supreme Court ruling United States versus Sioux lands locked in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Golf and blasting away the sides of mountains with Nation of Indians, upped the offer to $106 million, Country Club; and to 50,000 acres of Taos Pueblo hydraulic cannons, and clear-cutting the for- and they are refusing still. Their point: this is stolen Indian land confiscated by Teddy Roosevelt to cre- ests in the Hills for the timber. The army was land to which its owners have never ceded rights— ate the Carson National Forest. supposed to keep the Whites out of the Hills. which is all very high-minded, except that the Given the marshalling of so many instances and But they didn’t. A great many histories will tell sanctity of the traditional Black Hills territory was their ongoing nature—the Shaughnessy golf club you that the military was powerless to stop irredeemably altered anyway back in the 1920s and will not revert to Musqueam control until 2033—it the flood of Whites who came to the Hills for ’30s when sculptor Gutzon Borglum dynamited the is understandable that King positions land as such the gold, but the truth of the matter is that the sacred Black Hills mountain, “Six Grandfathers,” to a polarizing resource. “For non-Natives,” he writes, army didn’t really try. create Mount Rushmore. “land is primarily a commodity, something that As broken promises go, this one is striking— has value for what you can take from it or what Fortunately, we are not dealing with a great explosive, even—but of course it is not the only one you can get for it.” Even more baldly: “Sure, Whites many histories here. In The Inconvenient Indian, King has at his disposal in this overview of Native/ want Indians to disappear, and they want Indians blessed/burdened with the subtitle A Curious non-Native dealings. The Oka crisis of 1990 was a to assimilate, and they want Indians to under- fight over the desecration of Indian burial land. The stand that everything that Whites have done was John Burns is the editor-in-chief of Vancouver Hopi have battled mining companies for the sanc- for their own good because Native people, left to magazine, a city staple published in traditional tity of their traditional lands. A few kilometres from their own devices, couldn’t make good decisions Musqueam territory since 1967. where I write, the Musqueam only just won the for themselves.” But more than that? “Whites want
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 7 land.” He is quick to point out that the brush he is under control. A good historian would have tried to and Custers: “I simply have difficulty with how we using is broad, but there is a lot of canvas to cover, keep personal anecdotes in check. A good historian choose which stories become the pulse of history a lot of wrongs to redress. And it is hard to dispute would have provided footnotes. I have not.” and which do not.” arguments like “the Alberta Tar Sands is an excel- The book conjures images of Don Quixote in In this argument, and through the power of lik- lent example of a non-Native understanding of headdress and blanket tilting at hydroelectric ening history and story, King connects the defeats land,” even as the prospect of billions shakes the dams. (The author’s sense of outsize drama is of historical wars with the broader defeats of cul- moral foundation of not just Europeans but every contagious.) King apologizes for the guns refer- tural neutering. The signifiers of the civil war, the Canadian adjacent to the money pit that is Alberta. ence, by the way, allowing elsewhere that we have Northwest Rebellion and western expansionism dispensed with guns and bugles—although in all triumphed on the battlefield, yes, but continue he truth about stories is that that’s all we other senses progress has been poor. “While North to triumph in the limited imagination that is the “Tare.” So ran the binding thread through America’s sense of its own superiority is better hid- legacy of history rewritten. With this reduction, we King’s 2003 Massey Lectures, The Truth About den, its disdain muted, twenty-first-century atti- all suffer, especially since, as he points out, while Stories. By it, he meant that reality is negotiated, that tudes towards Native people are remarkably similar China has a history of dynasties and Europe has the meaning is provisional and interactive, that chan- to those of the previous centuries.” This is clearly classical civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome, ges and shifts are always possible. The Inconvenient not untrue: by any measure we have underserved we have no antiquity beyond the redface survivors Indian, which King has been noodling away at since our Native citizens. To choose just one metric: of mythology: grad school back in the early 1970s, tackles many of Aboriginal Affairs’ 2009 assessment of water and the same issues and questions. Finally published, it wastewater systems characterized 39 percent of The sad truth is that, within the public sphere, pushes his earlier understanding of “story,” arguing reserve water systems as at high risk for poor health within the collective consciousness of the that story and history are complementary, yes, but and another 34 percent as medium risk. general populace, most of the history of to go one postmodern step further: they are inter- This is an opportune moment to question the Indians in North America has been forgotten, changeable. In fact, personally, he says, rather than project that is The Inconvenient Indian. Is it counter- and what we are left with is a series of histor- a close reading of history he will take representative history? Cri de coeur? A settling of accounts? “There ical artifacts and, more importantly, a series stories every time. History is is a great deal in The Inconvenient Indian that is of entertainments … an imaginative cobbling history,” King writes in the prologue. “I’m just not together of fears and loathings, romances and a grand structure, a national chronicle, a the historian you had in mind.” Question begged: reverences, facts and fantasies into a cycle of closely organized and guarded record of “you” who? The book’s overall tone, its retelling creative performances, in Technicolor and agreed-upon events and interpretations, a of vignettes like the blasting of Mount Rushmore 3-D, with accompanying soft drinks, candy, bundle of “authenticities” and “truths” welded and the Oka standoff, suggest he is aiming for the and popcorn. into a flexible, yet conservative narrative that broadest of readerships: schoolkids, book club- explains how we got from there to here. It is bers, radio phone-inners. The traction of the Idle Dead Dog Café was meant to countermand this a relationship we have with ourselves, a love No More movement, and its specific message that romantic hogwash. Green Grass, Running Water affair we celebrate with flags and anthems, early land negotiations were enacted in good faith was, too. And The Inconvenient Indian, in its cross- festivals and guns. but subsequently dirtied and dismissed, suggests boundary, era-leaping, fast-and-loose trickery, is that King is not wrong to pitch an alternate “once as well. Kindhearted, King fixes our gaze on our Writing history, he says, is like herding porcu- upon a time” history of this land to the same broad own actions—whoever “we” are on this contin- pines with your elbows. Writing a novel, by con- audience that for four years enjoyed his Dead Dog ent—while whispering in our ears that the story, trast, is like buttering warm toast. Part of this sense Café Comedy Hour on CBC Radio. although tragic, is far from over. In The Truth About of ease must come from the way King sees stories. King’s greatest accomplishment through his Stories, he included this wish: “If I ever get to Pluto, By contrast to the closely organized and guarded writing—and, I would guess, his decades of teach- that’s how I would like to begin. With a story”—for record of history, stories can be, he suggests, mut- ing—is the broad compassion he shows to all stories are the alpha and omega, the wellspring of able and humble, disorganized and fractious. As a his readers. The sorrow and rage he feels at the creation and the homage to destruction. Ten years result, although The Inconvenient Indian is “fraught mistreatment of North America’s First Peoples later, The Inconvenient Indiandoes amend his wish: with history”—he told The Globe and Mail he put sits comfortably alongside an acknowledgement “If we ever get to the stars and find a new world 470 dates in its 266 pages, and I have no reason to of humanity’s ongoing foibles and myopia. For that can support our version of life, and we decide doubt him—“the underlying narrative is a series of each hero defeated—each Louis Riel and Crazy to terraform the place, it would be best to keep conversations and arguments that I’ve been having Horse and Sitting Bull and Gabriel Dumont—he the Department of Indian Affairs and the Bureau with myself and others for most of my adult life … mourns equally the broader, ongoing blindness of of Indian Affairs as far away from that planet as A good historian would have tried to keep biases a dominant culture that has settled for Middletons possible.”
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8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Pioneering Anthropology A New Zealander opened the door to aboriginal studies in Canada. Robin Fisher
came to Canada, and to the Arctic as a member of Survey focused on geology and the natural sci- In Twilight and in Dawn: an expedition led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1913. ences, and less apparently “useful” disciplines A Biography of Diamond Jenness It was the beginning of a long career devoted to the such as anthropology suffered from lack of interest Barnett Richling study and understanding of indigenous people in and support. Constantly underfunded and under- McGill-Queen’s University Press Canada. Jenness is best known for his studies of staffed, it was difficult to get any momentum going 413 pages, hardcover the people of the Arctic, but he worked among and on the urgent work of understanding aboriginal cul- ISBN 9780773539815 wrote about an amazing range of aboriginal groups, tures. As a civil servant, Jenness was also prevented from Alaska to Newfoundland. The objectives, in from publishing anything that could be seen as those pioneering days of Canadian anthropology, critical of Canadian government policy or even, in iamond Jenness was Canada’s fore were coverage and salvage. Jenness and his col- some cases, that might be offensive to public sens- most anthropologist of his generation, leagues wanted to record descriptions of as many ibility. It is little wonder that he much preferred the Dperhaps of any generation. A biography traditional aboriginal peoples as possible before freedom of the field to the constraints of the office. of Jenness is therefore very welcome for an under- they were changed forever. Jenness hoped to find Particularly in retirement, Jenness did express standing of the life and the times: of Jenness as pristine cultures that were unaffected by contact his views on the treatment of indigenous people a personality and of the early development of with newcomers, and then was distressed to find in Canada, presenting them, for example, before Canadian anthropology. a federal committee set up in There is a bit of a pattern of New Unlike Canada, one could not grow 1946 to examine the Indian Act. Zealanders coming to Canada and He drew on what he saw as the taking up the study of aboriginal up in turn of the 20th-century New positive New Zealand example people. Diamond Jenness was and advocated for efforts to pre- the first, arriving just before the Zealand, or have any acquaintance with serve indigenous cultures, greater First World War, followed later by integration of aboriginal people Harry Hawthorn who established its history, and ignore the Maori. into Canadian society and greater anthropology as a discipline at the involvement in national pol- University of British Columbia. As well as compatri- that, even in remote areas, lives were already being itics. The New Zealand Maori got the vote at the ots, Jenness and Hawthorn were also colleagues. changed by outside influences. same time as Europeans and had four seats in I arrived from Auckland at the University of British The choice of field locations was not systematic Parliament, whereas in Canada aboriginal people Columbia a year after Jenness passed away and, but seemed to be determined by chance, fund- still could not even vote. Jenness was sent by Indian after a couple of conversations with Hawthorn, ing and opportunity. Once the ethnographer had Affairs to investigate the state of Maori schooling to moved on to work with Wilson Duff on the history arrived among a particular group of people, the first see if anything could be learned that would benefit of First Nations people in British Columbia. objective of the participant observation approach Canada. In the end though, little notice was taken If three make a pattern, there is a reason for was a detailed description of the culture, including of his views. Bureaucrats and politicians of the day it and Richling explains it in In Twilight and in learning as much as possible of the language. But were not open to any critique of Canadian Indian Dawn: A Biography of Diamond Jenness, at least Jenness also moved from description to analysis, policy let alone any significant change in approach. for Jenness. Unlike Canada, one could not grow up and here, too, his most lasting contributions were Subsequent academics, as is their wont, have in turn of the 20th-century New Zealand, or have in the Arctic. He identified the Dorset Eskimo cul- extracted Jenness’s views out of his times and then any acquaintance with its history, and ignore the ture, and his conclusions about Inuit origins and judged them to be unsatisfactory. Maori. New Zealand was never a paradise of racial patterns of migration have not been dismantled by As biographies go, on the life and times con- harmony, but Maori were a much larger proportion more recent research. tinuum, this one is more on the times than the of the population than the Indians of Canada and, Jenness’s lifetime of field work resulted in a life. A historian, to some extent, is the servant of even in the early 1900s, society was moving toward huge body of published work. Much of it was writ- his sources and Jenness left few personal records. greater integration. There was even a seriously ten for an academic audience, but there were also We learn about who Jenness was from what he did regarded current of anthropological thought that classics written for a wider reading public such and that approach to personality is not completely believed that the “Aryan Maori” were so superior as The Indians of Canada, one of the first general revealing. Barnett does emphasize that Jenness was among aboriginal people that they shared the same accounts of the aboriginal peoples of Canada, and unassuming and self-deprecating and those char- ancestry as Europeans. Jenness was actually turned People of the Twilight, on Inuit cultures. Jenness acteristics—avoiding the tall poppy syndrome in on to anthropology as a student at Oxford initially clearly loved to get out to remote places, to live case you got your head shot off—was characteristic through a meeting with the Canadian ethnographer among the indigenous people and to understand of many New Zealanders of his generation. This and anthropologist Marius Barbeau, but his New and record their cultures. biography also does not pursue a straight chrono- Zealand upbringing remained formative and, for When it came to the bureaucracy that con- logical track as you might expect when following a Jenness, a positive example of how to develop tained most of his professional life, Jenness lifeline. Instead, it circles back and forth as Jenness aboriginal policy. was less enamoured. For much of his career he goes to a new place for field work or encounters a After a stint of field work in New Guinea, Jenness worked in the Geological Survey of Canada’s new professional challenge and the author explains Anthropology Division, then later at the National the backgound. So the life is largely the professional Robin Fisher recently stepped down as provost and Museum of Canada. At one point, much against career, but this approach does make for a compre- vice-president academic at Mount Royal University. his better judgement, he took on the role of chief of hensive and insightful history of the early develop- He has written on the history of British Columbia the Anthropology Division, only to resign after a few ment of anthropology in Canada. And it is that including Contact and Conflict: Indian-European years in disgust over the lack of support for the work history, along with Diamond Jenness’s role in it, Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890 of the anthropologists. In a way little has changed. that this biography describes and explains so well. (University of British Columbia Press, 1977, 1992) As with today’s universities, there was too much Barnett Richling’s biography of Diamond and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University control and too little money from government. The Jenness has been a long time coming, but it is worth of Toronto Press, 1991). thinking and the funding within the Geological the wait.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 9 ESSAY Northwest Passage Hold ’Em For an Arctic sovereignty win, Canada needs to honour its treaty with Nunavut’s Inuit. Terry Fenge
sserting sovereignty in the Arctic is outcome of this debate. Melting sea ice as a result tion of historic title predated this statement. The a key feature of Prime Minister Stephen of global climate change is opening the Arctic. government of Canada cited the need to protect AHarper’s northern policy. His government Destination tourist vessels now quite frequently Inuit hunting when the Arctic Waters Pollution is pursuing this goal by strengthening Canada’s visit the Northwest Passage. It may be many years Prevention Act was passed by Parliament in 1970 military presence in the region, investing in “world before it is regularly transited by ocean-going in response to the uninvited transits through the class” research facilities in Nunavut and building a general cargo vessels, including tankers, but this is passage by the American supertanker Manhattan. new polar class icebreaker to be named the John likely to happen at some stage, for using the passage Actually, the connection goes back even further. G. Diefenbaker. There is no doubt about the prime reduces by thousands of kilometres the journey The hunting interests of Inuit were cited by the minister’s commitment. In the midst of a global between western Europe and the eastern seaboard government in the early 1930s when denying a recession and mounting federal deficits, his gov- of North America and eastern Asia. Norwegian request for commercial access to the ernment has committed hundreds of millions of Te prospect of convenience-flagged vessels Sverdrup Islands, discovered and mapped 30 years dollars to sovereignty assertion initiatives. But manned by poorly trained crews plying the passage earlier by Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup. where do Inuit, the region’s permanent residents, under weakly enforced international regulations To recap: the use and occupancy of sea and sea fit into all of this? is not appealing and neither is it an outlandish ice by Inuit have and continue to be cited by the Mary Simon, former president of Inuit Tapiriit scenario. Negotiations under the auspices of the government as a factor underlying and supporting Kanatami, the national Inuit organization, has International Maritime Organization to strengthen its assertion of historic title and full jurisdiction said “sovereignty begins at home.” She is right. The and make mandatory the existing Guidelines for and sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. This presence in the Arctic of Inuit who have occupied Ships Operating in Polar Waters continue to be position and view is explicitly referenced in the the region for generations uncounted, and the full hindered by the unwillingness of flag states to 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, a mod- integration of Nunavut—about 22 percent of the accede to stringent environmental regulation. This ern treaty negotiated and ratified by the Inuit of country—into Canada through implementation is likely why Canada has announced its intention to Nunavut and the Crown. The promises defined in of the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement are take Arctic shipping concerns to the eight-member this modern treaty confer rights that are guaranteed sovereignty assertion assets that the federal govern- Arctic Council when it assumes the chair of the and protected under section 35 of the Canadian ment has yet to fully use. This is unfortunate, for council in May 2013. constitution. they may be trump cards in the geopolitical poker Canada asserts “historic title” over Arctic wat- The Nunavut agreement defines an exchange game already underway in the region. ers, including the Northwest Passage and, since between the Inuit of Nunavut and the government Arctic sovereignty is a much used but sometimes January 1, 1986, has claimed as internal all waters of Canada. Through the agreement Inuit misunderstood term. With the exception of the landward of “straight baselines” drawn around the legal status of Hans Island in Nares Strait between Arctic Archipelago. Both of these legal positions cede, release and surrender to Her Majesty Ellesmere Island and Greenland, and offshore reflect, at least in part, Inuit use and occupancy of The Queen in Right of Canada, all their boundary disputes in the Lincoln Sea between sea and sea ice. In the mid 1970s map biographies aboriginal claims, rights, title and interests, Canada and Denmark, and in the Beaufort Sea were prepared by more than 85 percent of Inuit if any, in and to lands and waters anywhere between Canada and the United States, there are hunters resident in the Northwest Territories (this within Canada and adjacent offshore areas no legal disputes regarding sovereignty over Arctic was more than 20 years before the creation of the within the sovereignty or jurisdiction of lands or ocean in areas claimed by Canada. The Nunavut Territory). Published by the government Canada. international community recognizes these lands of Canada in 1976 in the three-volume report of and waters to be part and parcel of Canada. At issue the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project, these In return, the Inuit of Nunavut were promised is whether the Northwest Passage—actually a series map biographies showed the extent, frequency a wide range of rights and benefits, including land of passages linking Davis Strait and Baffin Bay in the and intensity of Inuit use and occupancy of nearly ownership, participation in management of land, east to the Bering Sea in the west—is or, as a result 4 million square kilometres of land and ocean, wildlife and natural resources, establishment of of increased transits by foreign flagged vessels, including Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait and parks and protected areas, financial transfers, could become an “international strait” under inter- Viscount Melville Sound—the eastern and central economic development opportunities and wildlife national law, which is the position of the United portion of the Northwest Passage. harvesting. The exchange is “IN RECOGNITION of States. The implication of this position is that states These map biographies provided context to the the contributions of Inuit to Canada’s history, iden- enjoy transit rights through the Northwest Passage. 1985 “straight baseline” statement in the House of tity and sovereignty in the Arctic” [emphasis added]. Or is it, as the government of Canada maintains, Commons by Joe Clark, Minister of External Affairs, Article 15 of the agreement adds: “Canada’s “internal waters” over which Canada enjoys full who said: sovereignty over the waters of the arctic archipelago and complete jurisdiction, including the ability to is supported by Inuit use and occupancy” [empha- bar access to foreign vessels? The legal issue boils Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic is indivis- sis added]. down to whether there is the equivalent of an inter- ible. It embraces land, sea and ice. It extends Legal scholar Michael Byers characterizes the national easement through the passage. without interruption to the seaward-facing Nunavut agreement as a vehicle to strengthen Much of practical significance rests on the coasts of the Arctic islands. These islands Canada’s assertion of Arctic sovereignty. He notes are joined, and not divided, by the waters that in 1975 the International Court of Justice in Terry Fenge is an Ottawa-based consultant spe- between them. They are bridged most of the the Western Sahara case affirmed the ability of cializing in aboriginal, Arctic and environmental year by ice. From time immemorial Canada’s nomadic peoples to acquire and transfer sover- issues. From 1985 to 1992 he was the research direc- Inuit people have used and occupied the ice eignty rights—arguably what happened through tor and senior negotiator for Inuit in negotiation of as they have used and occupied the land. the Nunavut agreement. Byers also notes that “any the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. He continues argument based on a transfer of rights is weakened to advise Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. This article rep- The connection between Inuit use and occu- if the recipient fails to uphold the bargain.” Such resents his personal views. pancy of sea and sea ice and Canada’s asser- a failure would almost certainly weaken Canada’s
10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada 153° W 144° W 135° W 126° W 117° W 108° W 99° W 90° W 81° W 72° W 63° W 54° W 45° W 36° W
! Land, Sea and Sea Ice Use and Occupancy in the mid- Eureka Problems implementing mod- N
° Ellesmere 0 1970s by Inuit Resident in the Northwest Territories 7 Island ¨ ern treaties predate the assump-
Grise Fiord tion to power in January 2006 of ! Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s A R C T I C O C E A N Nunavut GREENLAND Resolute Conservative Party. Be that as it may, Banks Island ! ALASKA N o r t h W e s t P a s s a g e the disbandment of the Cabinet B e a u f o r t S e a Pond InBletA F F I N B A Y Northwest Territories Arctic Bay Nanisivik ! !! Committee on Aboriginal Affairs Clyde River ! Victoria Baffin and the secretariat in the Privy Island D Island a Council Office that served it within Qikiqtarjuaq Nunavut ! v Igloolik i ! s Yukon Taloyoak Nunavut months of the election was, in ! S Territory Pangnirtung t Gjoa Haven Kugaaruk ! r hindsight, the writing on the wall. ! ! a i t The secretariat had been facilitat- Bathurst Inlet ! Repulse Bay ! N
ing negotiations between the Land °
F o x e 0 Iqaluit 6 Nunavut B a s i n ! Cape Dorset Claims Agreements Coalition and ! N
° Kimmirut ! 0 6 Coral Harbour Baker Lake ! federal agencies of a formal policy to Northwest Territories ! L a b r a d o r S e a Chesterfield Inlet improve implementation of modern ! ! Rankin Inlet treaties. !Whale Cove D a v i s It might be that the current gov- Arviat ! I n l e t ernment of Canada’s difficulties British Columbia with implementing modern treat- Québec Alberta ies, including using the Nunavut Saskatchewan H U D S O N B A Y Newfoundland & Manitoba Sanikiluaq ! Labrador agreement for sovereignty assertion Source: Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project, Volume 3: Land Use Atlas Map 153, Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1976. purposes, reflects an aversion to 0 250 500 1,000 Kilometres Ontario the collective rights of aboriginal 117° W 108° W 99° W 90° W 81° W 72° W peoples in Canada. The govern- political and moral credibility on Arctic foreign apparently vulnerable position seems to reflect ment’s Northern Strategy, released with consider- policy issues, including sovereignty assertion, in a less than serious approach to implementing able fanfare in 2009, reveals this to be at least a the eyes of non-Canadians. all modern treaties. In 2003 aboriginal peoples plausible explanation. The strategy fails to - men So what is the state of play with the Nunavut with modern treaties formed the Land Claims tion implementation of modern treaties—the very agreement? Is it being fully and fairly implemented, Agreements Coalition to press Ottawa to fully embodiment of collective rights—and instead and is Canada citing it internationally in support of implement these agreements painstakingly nego- stresses a “northern vision” of “self-reliant indi- its Arctic sovereignty? Unfortunately the answer to tiated over many years. The coalition has offered viduals.” It is, perhaps, this misperception and these questions is no. In December 2006 Nunavut a compelling critique of Ottawa’s narrow and misunderstanding of the very nature of northern Tunngavik Inc., the Inuit organization charged with unimaginative approach toward implementation. Canada that enabled Prime Minister Harper in 2007 implementing the Nunavut agreement, initiated a Many in Ottawa, the coalition suggests, assume to say that “Canada has a choice when it comes to lawsuit alleging widespread failure on the part of that modern treaty implementation is the respon- defending our sovereignty in the Arctic: either we the government of Canada to fulfill its obligations sibility of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and use it or we lose it.” and duties. Sixteen contractual breaches and num- Northern Development rather than the government In making this statement the prime minister erous breaches of fiduciary duties that require the of Canada as a whole. In short, federal agencies appeared to step back from the long-standing Crown to act in a trust relationship with Inuit are including the departments of transport, environ- sovereignty supporting “historic title” argument of alleged in NTI’s statement of claim. Most promin- ment, fisheries and oceans, and others do not focus previous federal governments. While the “historic ent among these allegations are failure to fund on modern treaties because they do not think they title” position was reiterated in the government’s implementation, failure to arbitrate disputes and have to. 2011 Arctic Foreign Policy statement, many Inuit failure to take initiatives to boost Inuit employment As well, the federal government’s budgetary were deeply insulted by the prime minister’s “use in government to a “representative” level. This case system that deals with annual expenditures by it or lose it” comment, which they interpreted as continues to move toward trial and may very well individual agencies has huge difficulty providing a dismissal of their culture and economy and of end up before the Supreme Court of Canada. implementation funds for multi-year, interagency their contribution to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. In June 2012, Justice Earl Johnson of the Nunavut activities in support of modern treaty implementa- Some commentators suggested that the aphorism Court of Justice came down hard on the federal gov- tion. Recently the government of Canada published weakened rather than strengthened Canada’s abil- ernment on a specific component of this case. He guidelines, years in the making, elevating to official ity to assert Arctic sovereignty. After all, what other awarded almost $15 million in damages to NTI as policy its refusal to arbitrate modern treaty dis- leader of a G8 country would suggest that how a a result of the federal government’s “indifferent” putes of a financial nature. Current efforts by the state uses its territory is a factor in the acceptance refusal for many years to implement the general government to define and apply a formula to fund by other states of its sovereignty over that same ter- monitoring provisions of the agreement. This implementation of land claims and aboriginal self- ritory? Does the prime minister truly believe—and judgement is under appeal. But what might be the government agreements will likely breach com- does he expect the Canadian public to believe— impact on public opinion in Canada and abroad, mitments in agreements to negotiate funding, and that minerals and hydrocarbons in the Canadian and on foreign governments with Arctic inter- can only further worsen the deteriorating relation- Arctic have to be developed in order to ensure that ests, should the trial judge’s decision be upheld ship between the government and modern treaty other countries will acknowledge our Arctic sover- and should his reasoning and findings be extended organizations. eignty and jurisdiction? to the additional and larger alleged breaches of the Little of the coalition’s critique of current imple- Perhaps Franklyn Griffiths, an early exponent agreement? Conceivably, such a situation might mentation challenges or suggested policy and of international cooperation in the Arctic, should prompt onlookers to suggest that the government institutional changes to improve the situation seem have the final word, for he has come to realize and of Canada had effectively repudiated the agree- to have registered in Ottawa. Appearing before the write about the sterility of a debate predicated on a ment, perhaps stimulating a debate on the ability Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and narrow interpretation of national sovereignty in the of Inuit, in response, to rescind it and reassert their Northern Development on November 30, 2011, Arctic. He suggests that Arctic states “adopt a multi- aboriginal title. NTI’s court case is framed as a Minister John Duncan had this to say about modern lateral and region-wide approach to Arctic affairs. breach of contract, and rescission of agreements is treaties: Besides seizing opportunities as they arise, the ice part and parcel of the law of contracts. In relation to states would orchestrate joint actions so as to shape a modern treaty these would be uncharted and pot- We’ve made enough serious progress over the region’s development according to a common entially dangerous political and legal waters. Would the last three years really that most of the strategic design.” rescission, or even a serious debate about it, hinder issues have gone away. Our implementation Within this framework Griffiths recommends the political ability of the government to cite Inuit has been done very well. I may hear of some an approach that binds sovereignty with stew- use and occupancy of sea and sea ice to support specific items today, but my understanding is ardship—something about which the Nunavut Canada’s Arctic sovereignty based on historic title? that, for the most part, we’ve really addressed agreement and other modern treaties in northern The reason the government has put itself in this the whole implementation issue very well. Canada also have a great deal to say.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 11 Tobacco Blowback How colonial trade turned a sacred plant into a toxic threat. Ikechi Mgbeoji
Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry Jim Poling Sr. Dundurn Press 253 pages, softcover ISBN 9781459706408
moke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry is one of those Srare labours of love, rich in materials, insights and wisdom and yet most likely to be ignored by “scholars.” It is the irony of contemporary academia that some works that are the products of practical experience and sweeping insights suffer benign neglect on the basis that they lack the form and framework of “academic rigour.” This paradox may explain why author Jim Poling Sr. himself pre- emptively avows that “Smoke Signals is not in any Poling quotes a study by Moravian mission- tion in the emergent tobacco economy in North way an academic study.” Despite this disclaimer, ary John Heckewelder in the late 1700s: “Eastern America. But his failure or omission to explain Smoke Signals is a serious piece of work, and, in North American tribes carried large amounts of how the Natives were excluded from the emergent some material respects, a tour de force. tobacco in pouches as a readily accepted trade tobacco economy is a serious flaw in the book. As I have argued elsewhere, plants and crops item, and often smoked it, either in defined sacred How was tobacco taken from the Natives to create have had more enduring political, military, eco- ceremonies, or to seal a bargain.” Jacob Gottsegen a new economy? What were the institutional, regu- nomic and racial impact on the colonial experience adds that “Native Americans believed that tobacco latory and statutory mechanisms by which Native than perhaps any theft of land, gold, silver and is a gift from the Creator, and that the exhaled American participation in the emergent tobacco precious gems. The colonial conquest and near tobacco smoke carries one’s thoughts and pray- industry was nullified? The colonial project “took” annihilation of North American indigenous groups ers to heaven.” As Poling observes, “the Navajo rice, cotton, rubber, potato, etc., from the colonies would not have been possible without the contribu- believe that the universe could not be created until but the taking of these important food crops did not tions of certain crop items such as tobacco, wheat, Sky Father and Earth Mother have smoked sacred exclude indigenous people’s participation in those cotton and rubber. In this important respect, Smoke tobacco.” economies. What made tobacco peculiar? Poling’s Signals lends a voice to the silent tale. Early Amerindians cultivated tobacco and made analysis fails to address this important question. Tracing the origins of the story to the Manitou significant contributions to the genetic refinement The economic complex of tobacco is per- of the Andes, where tobacco—a member of of the qualities of the plant. Not surprisingly, given haps best exemplified in its role in firing upthe the strange nightshade family of plants (which the colonial attitudes toward non-Europeans, the American revolutionary war. As Poling points out, includes the potato, tomato and chili pepper)—was intellectual contributions of Amerindians to tobacco export and taxes on tobacco sales were developed, the book explores virtually all the his- the development of tobacco varieties never gar- hugely influential in financing the war. In Canada, torical, industrial, political and moral controversies nered respect or accolades in “scientific” circles. tobacco was equally important in shaping the early surrounding this now ubiquitous substance. Poling then likens the colonial contact with economy and polity. Events such as these set the Apart from being one of the most traded com- tobacco to the opening of a Pandora’s box. To the stage for the moral contradictions embedded in modities on the face of the planet, tobacco captures Europeans, tobacco was a major commodity for the industrialization of tobacco, which the author the unresolved conflicts and contradictions of the commerce and a veritable source of stupendous then goes on to explore. colonial encounter and experience. Poling begins wealth, only surpassed by cotton. From then on, Tobacco is widely acknowledged to be addictive by elaborating on the different meanings embed- tobacco has occupied a complex space at the inter- and yet some knowledgeable medical profession- ded in tobacco. Tobacco was used by the Native face between virtue and vice, greed and charity. It als and religious officials are well-known smokers. Americans in the Andes and middle Americas for intertwines the noble with the base. Governments love the revenue from cigarette taxes religious purposes, social bonding and medicine. The colonial encounter also marked what Poling while lamenting the huge medical and human It was more than a narcotic; it possessed virtuous characterizes as the “taking” or hijack of tobacco costs of smoking. Poling excels at teasing out the as well as deleterious qualities. Tobacco had medi- by European merchant classes and governments in paradoxical relationship between governments and cinal use in the treatment of hornet, bee, scorpion the colonial project. The gradual introduction and tobacco. And, as a cheap drug for the masses, no and wasp bites and could be used as an insecticide. gentrification of tobacco in Europe was a significant narrative on tobacco smoking would be complete Its negative properties, as an addictive narcotic and catalyst in the industrialization of tobacco farming without reference to those perverse human activ- carcinogenic agent, are well known. in the newly colonized Americas. It is ironic that ities that often decimates the poor: war and military a plant product native to the Americas was one of conflicts. Poling devotes one chapter to the close Ikechi Mgbeoji is an associate professor of law the key catalysts to the takeover of the Americas by connection between the human costs of war and at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University colonizing Europeans. the use of tobacco. For example, from the American and author of Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants Poling implies that the dispossession of the Civil War until the latter part of the Second World and Indigenous Knowledge (University of British Natives and the capture of the instruments of gov- War, military authorities in the United States and Columbia Press, 2005). ernment combined to displace Native participa- Europe gave daily rations of cigarettes to soldiers
12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada to quench hunger, calm nerves and relieve anxiety. The perfect geographical point for the -smug on conflicts between state and Native groups. In This practice ended in the late 1960s when the gling of cigarettes would seem to be Akwesasne, the Native takeback of tobacco, mutual resent- harmful effects of tobacco smoking became- con the reserve that “straddles the St. Lawrence River, ments have often surfaced. Given the violence and ventional wisdom. eighty miles south of Montreal. New York State and confrontation, it is often mystifying to watch the By Poling’s account, it would seem that the the provinces of Ontario and Quebec each cover comical avoidance of the root causes of the anomie appropriation of tobacco by governments and big pieces of it, but it is Mohawk land, governed by by various governments. tobacco manufacturers to the apparent exclusion of Mohawks.” As Poling notes, this parcel of territory The issue is fundamentally about the -destruc aboriginal peoples has for centuries been resented “has been a centre of Indian resistance to European tion of the hunter-fisher-gatherer economy and by indigenous and Native populations in Canada takeover for more than 250 years.” the need to replace it with a modern economy and the United States. He then suggests that the Akwesasne goes beyond smuggling of cigarettes; that gives indigenous peoples a fair shake while fungible nature of tobacco and the ease with which rather, Poling writes, it captures the complexities acknowledging the centuries of genocide and cul- it can be smuggled and resold combine to make it and frustrations of the “unfinished” aspects of tural despoliation visited on them. It is not a jour- a veritable instrument in redressing ney into guilt but a recognition that Native socioeconomic grievances. Tobacco has occupied a complex grave wrong was done and that the As governments have continued to injustice has contemporary impacts treat tobacco as more and more of space at the interface between still visible and palpable. a cash cow, raising the sin taxes to Poling argues for a rethinking of very high levels (and hypocritically virtue and vice, greed and charity. It the rules of engagement between using the growing medical concerns indigenous groups and settlers in about smoking to justify those tax intertwines the noble with the base. North America. Native takeback of increases), aboriginal groups see a tobacco and Native engagement with chance to make money by smuggling tobacco and colonial seizure of Native land and resources. The the tobacco business are not enough. The tide is using their tax-free status to provide it to consumers St. Lawrence Seaway project devastated the Native turning against tobacco and thus the issue ought to at lower-than-standard prices. fishing industry in Akwesasne. While the seaway be about laying the foundations for a post-tobacco Poling’s central argument about smuggling is brought economic boon to the governments of economy in which Native peoples have a stake. that Native communities have been driven to this Canada and the United States, it destroyed the In sum, the issue is not about tobacco per se; juncture by the industrial-scale destruction of their Akwesasne economy and way of life. In addition, it is about the unfinished business of the colonial way of life. With these populations deprived of the unabated pollution of the St. Lawrence River encounter, the crying need for dignity and sover- their natural resources and kept on reserves, the deformed whatever sea life was left. Tobacco and eignty of a group of people who have for centuries result has been a culture of dependency, alcohol- Akwesasne are enduring motifs of the colonial been abused, robbed and humiliated simply for ism and increased suicide rates. In this toxic brew experience in North America. being who they are—a family of humanity differ- of hopelessness, tobacco smuggling has become a Clearly, these structural and systemic anomies ent only from other families in terms of skin colour plausible escape route from a life of drudgery and in society were bound to lead to violence and con- and histories. Notwithstanding its shortcomings, in penury. The unfinished business of dispossession frontation between the various actors. Five chapters Smoke Signals, Jim Poling Sr. has done us a favour of Native land and territories has also added to in Poling’s book detail the episodic but recurring by his overview of and acute insights into the the complications of tobacco smuggling in North incidents of confrontation, smuggling of contra- tobacco debacle. Smoke Signals should be taken America. band cigarettes and, of course, media stereotyping seriously.
one hundred aMerican, canadian and european works froM thirty MuseuMs to celebrate the wag’s centennial
May 11 to august 18 100masters.wag.ca
Presented by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le concert (detail), 1918- 1919. Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of Reuben Wells Leonard Estate, 1954. © 2012 AGO
Doowah Design Inc. Client: WAG Job no: 3509 Insertion: March 18 2013 PO# 8684 AprilWAG 100 2013 Masters ad - McMasters Newsletter / BW / 8.5 in x 6.167 in reviewcanada.ca 13 Problems or questions, call Brent at (204) 949-7230 Space Is Not Equal to Y or X I wake to the world What I have become constructed without dreams, the one I left to dust itself off in blue exhaustion. through grief
A line of spider silk, glinting like a mandolin string Uncorked wine, just a plucked by air. A twang of light. glass gone, rind of cheese, hunk of bread tilted sideways, A bag of garnet velvet The exoskeleton of wrapped around ashes. grapes, vine left without a clue to their colour. A painted cup, leaf of bone
china. The shadow of fingers. The rains of winter descend outside, and I am unbalanced, in wool socks Alice Major waiting for distance to become time.
Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson de jour en jour le ciel consent à s’affaisser mon rêve rapetisse sur l’oreiller morsure contre morsure les mots n’atteindront jamais l’autre le lit est une nature morte Early Illiteracy où les pitiés prolifèrent Because penmanship became a way to decorate my dyslexia, disguise poor spelling with the perfect curve, ampersand a skirting of the word. Each point day in day out spearheading the finger as it scanned, not comprehending. the sky ebbs and flows bit by bit Robin Richardson dreams dwindle on my pillow and words remain stillborn death sleeps in the bed where misery abounds
Denise Desautels translated by Norman Cornett
Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson’s work Robin Richardson is the author Alice Major has published nine books Denise Desautels has published has appeared in numerous journals of Knife Throwing Through Self- of poetry and a collection of essays, nearly 40 volumes and won numer- including the Hart House Review, Hypnosis (ECW Press, 2013) and Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks ous honours, including the Governor Going Down Swinging, Labletter, The Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac at Science (University of Alberta General’s Award, the Prix du Festival Toronto Quarterly and Neon. Her Press, 2011). She has been shortlisted Press, 2011). She is currently reading International de la Poésie de Trois- first collection of poems, The Victims for the ReLit award and longlisted for Cognitive Science, Literature and the Rivières and a CBC Literary Award. of Ted Bundy: Washington State and the CBC Poetry Award, and won the Arts by Patrick Colm. The other night, Her poetry anthologies include Oregon, is now available from Jeanne John B. Santoianni Award and she also took down The Rubáiyát Mémoires parallèles (Éditions du Duval Editions. She is currently read- the Joan T. Baldwin Award. She holds of Omar Khayyám, translated by Noroît, 2004) and The Night Will Be ing Absolution by Patrick Flannery a master of fine arts in poetry from Edward Fitzgerald to reread. Insistent, Selected Poems: 1987–2002 and Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross Sarah Lawrence College and currently (Guernica Editions, 2007), translated of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel. divides her time between Toronto and by Daniel Sloate. She received the Prix New York. She is currently reading Athanase-David for Le cœur et autres Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew mélancolies (Éditions Apogée, 2007). Dickman, The Dance of No Hard L’angle noir de la joie (Arfuyen and Feeling by Mark Bibbins and Louise Le Noroît, 2011) marked her selection Glück’s Poems 1962–2012. for the Jean Arp European Prize for Francophone Literature.
14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Triolet for Afghanistan
my country is a fractured mirror Multimedia a continuous fire a burning garden The poem stands before the painting —Asadulla Habib in the cloaked gallery, licking its chops. It asks the usual questions, who, what, where At Kag Khana four boys flee and answers with roses. the peacemakers’ war, the Pashtun lord. Sandflies tear their cheeks, scars seed Dave Margoshes at Kag Khana. Four boys flee across mountains bereft of the grace of trees that will cast them back to Kag Khana four shadows to be Gravity peacemakers, lords of war? Molecules, Leslie Timmins breasts, the kiss of fingerprints— what Ditty did we Never love a writer let They’ll take you fly To the brink from love’s They’ll tell your story gravity? As their own And make you April Surprise Seymour Mayne Swallow ink There’s beauty Frost on the windshield In the work and no scraper to be found; But seldom in the life ice under my nails. Woe betide the husband Anne Swannell Woe betide the wife
Allan Peterkin
Leslie Timmins’s poetry, short Anne Swannell is a writer, Seymour Mayne’s latest col- Dave Margoshes’s most recent Allan Peterkin is a Toronto stories, articles and essays painter and mosaicist who lections include Ricochet: poetry collection, Dimensions doctor and the author of have appeared in numerous lives in Victoria, British Word Sonnets/Sonnets d’un of an Orchard, won the Anne twelve books for adults and magazines and antholo- Columbia. She has pub- mot (University of Ottawa Szumigalski Poetry Prize at children. He is a founding gies. Her poetry has been lished three books of poetry: Press, 2011) and The Old the 2010 Saskatchewan Book editor of Ars Medica — A shortlisted for the Montreal Drawing Circles on the Water Blue Couch and Other Awards. He is currently read- Journal of Medicine, the Arts International Poetry Prize (Rampant Swan, 1990), Mall Stories (Ronald P. Frye and ing four Alberta poets: I see and Humanities, a senior and won honours in the (Rowan Books, 1991) and Company, 2012). He is a pro- my love more clearly from fellow at Massey College FreeFall Magazine Poetry Shifting (Ekstasis Editions, fessor of Canadian literature, a distance, by Nora Gould, and head of the Program in Prize. At the top of the pile 2008), plus a children’s Canadian studies and cre- Wells by Jenna Butler, Naomi Health, Arts and Humanities of books at her bedside is picture book, The Lost Kitten ative writing at the University McIlwraith’s Kiyam and at the University of Toronto. a memoir by W.S. Merwin of Toledo (Rampant Swan, of Ottawa. He is currently novel The Tinsmith, by Tim Recently he has been reading called Summer Doorways. 2004). She has just finished reading You Must Know Bowling. When I Was A Child I Read Second from the top of the reading The Patron Saint of Everything: Stories 1915– Books by Marilyn Robinson, book pile is Living Arctic, Liars by Ann Patchett. 1937 by Isaac Babel, How to See Now Then by Jamaica Hunters in the Canadian Live or A Life of Montaigne Kincaid and Music from North by Hugh Brody. by Sarah Bakewell and This Apartment 8 by John Stone. Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 15 When People Seem Most Alive Stories set in the crux of life and death. Merilyn Simonds
A similar juxtaposition of consequences opens searches for the theatre his father built, his grand- Blood Secrets: Stories the second story, “Heart of Blue, Glowing,” which parents’ graves and the house his mother was born Nadine McInnis takes place in a hospice where candles burn for the in. In “Snow Moths,” a young man dying of AIDS Biblioasis recent dead even as ambulances bring new patients is tended by a trainee who has scarcely recovered 220 pages, softcover to take over their beds. Joyce is the protagonist here, from injuries suffered in a terrible car crash. The girl ISBN 9781926845937 too. The indigo buntings she was intending to paint breaks the rules to find the young man’s estranged in “The Story of Time” are hanging on the wall of family, although he welcomes his solitary end, the hospice she first visited with her pharmacist- believing that he has lived many past lives and that t first, Blood Secrets seems an odd lover and where she now volunteers to fill the hours death will leave him finally “free and clear.” title for this latest collection of Nadine emptied of both husband and lover. In “Bare Bones,” a nurse who has been betrayed AMcInnis’s short stories. The term, to me, At the hospice, she watches as a family fights by her husband struggles with guilt at the pass- implies race and genetics, the maimers and killers over whether to give into their dying father’s senti- ing of a friend, who died alone in a hallway as she that lie dormant, the unpredictable and merciless mental last request, then she sits with the old man, rushed to get her a room. In “Lucky,” a father who inheritance of birth. holding his hand as he dies. convinces his daughter to take him out for one Instead, McInnis’s subject is dying. Most of the last spree at the casino wins $100,000, which she 13 stories in Blood Secrets take place in hospices There were shimmery movements beneath spends on palliative care. Such thumbnail descrip- and hospital rooms as family, friends, nurses and the pale lids, his mouth thinning and wid- tions are desperately inadequate for stories that volunteers watch over the final moments of a life, ening like the mild dreamy face of a fish. This are so deftly layered, so delicately positioned at the the narratives spinning into the past and the future wasn’t exactly sleep, just as a newborn doesn’t crux of life and death. but always returning to that split second when the exactly sleep. Gently, between being here and The final story neatly book-ends Joyce’s experi- heart with its flow of life blood stops. being nowhere, she felt herself travelling with ence in the hospice, although the narrator is no A question McInnis asks in one story could him and understood that she wasn’t holding longer an onlooker. She is standing with her sisters apply to them all: “Why is it that people seemed his hand any longer; he was holding hers. around her mother’s deathbed, telling the story in most alive when they would soon be gone?” the first person, pushing our faces up close. Blood Secrets begins with “The Story of Time,” Such delicately shifting perspectives pervade “She breathed and then she stopped,” McInnis named for a bleak sound-and-light show that marks a second pair of stories, too. In “Where All the writes. “I held my breath and waited and she the end of the millennium and the beginning of an Ladders Start,” Deirdre is on a backpacking trip with did not resume although I had to, after a slow affair for Joyce. As the crowd leaves, she is swept her daughter, although she is barely recovered from exhalation.” The daughter stays in the room as her away from her husband and daughter and into the a debilitating bout of depression, which runs in the mother’s body cools, her mind drifting with the arms of a man who tends to her bleeding forehead family; her father has recently committed suicide. Valium she has taken, recalling the Caesarian birth and the discomforts of her life. In the next story, “Bliss,” Deirdre is in a hospice, of her own child. “Unable to shake the sensation of The secret of the affair is obvious, but the story dying of breast cancer she left untreated, a self- a man’s hands inside me, pulling life from the split is rife with other secrets, too. As Joyce stands in line imposed ending her husband cannot accept. “For pod. Daughter arriving, mother leaving, the same.” at the pharmacy to see her new lover, she listens to God’s sake, can’t you just tell me why?” he begs. In There are two anomalies in the collection. In women discuss their intimate problems with him. the end, he sees that she is protecting their daughter “Persephone Without Maps,” a mother struggles from an even messier ending. “I know now. There to guide her daughter out of the dark broodings When it was her turn, she said, “You know all are worse things that can happen than this,” he says. of adolescence. And in “The Men Have Gone our secrets.” Endings imply beginnings. In the title story, Hunting,” a woman alone at home is confronted … “Only the secrets of the body,” he said. Dulcie, also a hospice volunteer, recalls her first by men bloodied from their hunt. In the latter, the “Are there any other kind?” she asked. sexual encounter with the man who would be her blood is there, and, in the former, the swirling struc- husband, a deflowering baptized in menstrual ture and complex interweaving of past, present and The story begins and ends with the catalytic blood, which she refers to as “secret blood.” future—but without the consequences of blood moment when the chance encounter explodes Whereas Joyce sees the aliveness of the almost- and secrets, without the scarring—make these links into an affair. In between, the story moves forward dead, what Dulcie notices is how pale the dying are, seem slight, breaking the taut tone of the collection. to illuminate the consequences for Joyce and for how bloodless. Blood Secrets is Nadine McInnis’s second book her daughter Ruth, who bears the scars of self- of stories. She has also published five poetry collec- mutilation as well as the scars of her mother’s leav- Death came on as a kind of gradual bleaching, tions, which explains the lean and lyrical language ing. “Everyone has a scar somewhere,” Joyce says. the skin thinning and growing more dry. Just of these stories, and the arresting images. The as her body was now starting to pale, her per- silence between mother and daughter is described Merilyn Simonds is the author of 16 books includ- iods coming less frequently, and when they as “hardening like a carapace”; winter streets ing The Convict Lover (Macfarlane, Walter and did, after an absence of months sometimes, become “thick with serpent-patterned slush, a hiss- Ross, 1997), nominated for the Governor General’s she felt a melancholy for her lost fertility. ing as cars passed.” Award, The Holding (McClelland and Stewart, Blood Secrets is a deceptively gentle book, a 2005), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Melancholy pervades these stories, not in the desperately tender succession of tales that bruise Choice, and, most recently, The Paradise Project sense of a gloomy state of mind, a depression, the heart with their sadness, while at the same time (Thee Hellbox Press, 2012), a collection of flash but rather in the pensiveness that melancholy offering the salve of kindness. Be careful, they seem fiction, hand-printed in a limited, hand-bound implies, a sober thoughtfulness in the face of the to say. The present will one day be the past: what edition. end. In “Stone Deaf,” as his mother lies dying, a son scars will your secrets leave?
16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada It’s Not Easy Being Undead The travails of a Toronto zombie. David Penhale
ginal form through the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Art. Zombie-ologists insist that the monsters Husk an African-American folklorist who travelled the in Romero’s first film are never called zombies. Corey Redekop Caribbean in the 1930s, recording legends and Nevertheless, the connection is clear, and Romero ECW Press myths. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and claimed the term in subsequent movies. 307 pages, softcover Jamaica, a volume of non-fiction published in 1938, If the idea of a Canadian zombie seems a stretch, ISBN 9781770410329 documents the rituals and superstitions Hurston we should remember that zombies have roots in encountered. Scholars believe that the legend of Toronto. Diary of the Dead, Romero’s latest film, the zombie took ship in Africa with the miserable was shot in that chameleon city, disguised as usual ow that he has been turned into a captives bound for the slave plantations of the new as various American locales. The Toronto Zombie zombie, Sheldon Funk misses a number world. The connection with slavery is fundamental. Walk, a piece of street theatre that lets everyone Nof things. Breathing. Yawning. Blowing Beckoned from the grave by a voudon sorcerer, the dress down and lurch around, first saw the light of his nose. Sex, not so much. Caribbean zombie is condemned to an eternity of day in 2003. In the opening pages of Husk, Corey Redekop’s toil, a fate that caps the horror of slavery with a cruel With the events of September 2001 came a zom- madcap zombie yarn, Sheldon faces a more press- irony. America has a sweet tooth for the macabre; bie boom. The harrowing spectacle of victims stum- ing problem. Two guys in white lab coats are cutting the country took to the zombie immediately. The bling away from the ruins, white with dust, struck a him open and tearing out his vital organs. Roaring shadowy figure of a mindless monster, with its resonant, apocalyptic chord. Zombie movies and into action, Sheldon rises from his gurney, trashes racial overtones, became a staple of mid-century zombie novels proliferated. The Walking Dead, an the morgue, dispatches his tormentors, snacks on radio drama and horror films. American TV series that debuted in 2010, is typical their remains and trundles off into the night, kick- Oblivious to all this, Sheldon stumbles home, of the genre: a band of survivors fight to stay alive in ing off a comic, picaresque novel that, although feeds the cat and faces an identity crisis. Who a world terrorized by zombie hoards. Ishtar would occasionally over the top, is fresh, be pleased. original and engaging. The zombie tries on a pop-psych Redekop, always a clever Determined to get on with writer, lets the zombie tell its afterlife, Sheldon stuffs his innards explanation: “I eat people because side of the story. As Sheldon into his eviscerated torso and grapples with his predicament, considers binding his wounds subconsciously I believe I am supposed to.” he acquires an endearing com- with duct tape. Canadian identity plexity. He tries to distance may be elusive, but apparently it outlasts death. was he, exactly? An actor, he learns; his agent has himself from his dilemma by casting it in poetic Toronto turns out to be a tough town for zombies. left an audition call on his answering machine. prose: “The world around me blurred red, and all “Snow and wind battered me,” Sheldon relates as he With the notable exception of his flesh-crazed was blood and hunger.” He looks for the bright side, trudges away from the hospital, “pushing me across rampages, Sheldon is a zombie in the Canadian reflecting, for instance, that as an actor, “Death had the ice rink of a parking lot.” Is he the only zombie mode: self-effacing, caring, conscientious. He may provided me an unsettling and savage charisma in the city, he wonders. If so, he has beaten the be dead, but he has a mother in a nursing home, I had lacked in life.” He puzzles over zombie-ism odds. His next thoughts establish the comic tone. and someone has to pay the rent. A second career like a philosopher possessed—who gets to be a He decides to buy lottery tickets on the way home, begins; zombies do well in casting calls. He learns zombie, and why?—creating a narrative thread that then wonders if he should stop by Canadian Tire to to speak, after a fashion, and he finds ways—often reads like a parody of the Calvinist doctrine of elec- purchase a scythe. hilarious—to cope with his decaying flesh. You can- tion. A child of the age of therapy, Sheldon eventu- Deeper thoughts trouble him. Is he death itself, not keep a good zombie down, and Sheldon takes ally tries on a pop-psych explanation: “Raised from a dark angel sent to gather living souls? What might the American media by storm, a development that an early age on a steady pop culture diet of late- eternity hold for a self-described gay, atheistic, suggests certain truths are perpetual—to make it night B-movies on cable television, I have always chronically unemployed 30-something? Come to big, even the Canadian undead head for the States. believed the classic zombie to be obsessed with think of it, since he is dead, how can it be that he The story rollicks along with Redekop supplying a the cannibalistic consumption of human flesh. So still has a mind? What does it mean to be a zombie, steady stream of laugh-aloud moments. My favour- following the path of logic, I eat people because, exactly? ite comes when Oprah tells Sheldon that he has subconsciously, I believe I am supposed to.” Late in The notion of the dangerous undead has deep crawled his way “out of the grave and straight into the novel, a tormentor endorses this circular think- roots. In the epic of Gilgamesh, recorded on stone her heart.” ing and adds a burden of guilt: “You couldn’t even tablets circa 2000 BCE, the goddess Ishtar curses Being a zombie has its advantages. “I had some be a proper zombie,” Sheldon is told. “You had to the future with a dark promise: “I will raise up the new lines to go over before shooting started the next be conflicted.” dead and they will eat the living.” Indeed, as his- day, but since I no longer slept, I had plenty of time The line between drama and comedy is a tight- tory unfolds, the undead keep popping up. The for memorization later.” “My hair is static, which rope, and Redekop keeps the narrative in balance ghoul, a demon native to Arabian mythology, lures saves on hairdressing fees.” Sheldon gets by, pros- until the last sequence, when, for this reader at travellers into the desert and devours them. The pers even, constantly fighting the itch to go wild least, events take an unlikely turn—even for a zom- revenant, a corpse freed from the grave, haunts the and feast on human flesh. bie novel. Still, the plot never spoils the fun, and folklore of the Middle Ages. The zombie, a relative Sheldon’s inner zombie—an insatiable, pest- we should not fault Sheldon for not figuring it all newcomer to western culture, came to us in its ori- iferous, clannish cannibal who prowls the land by out. He comes close. As the novel concludes, our night—stems from The Night of the Living Dead, zombie antihero rails at his fate and speaks with an David Penhale is the author of Passing Through the low-budget horror flick that took the drive-ins eerie clairvoyance: “a crazy impulse took me and (Cormorant, 2011), a novel reviewed in the by storm in 1968. George Romero’s iconic film I yelled, ‘I am Spartacus!’” In that moment of self- January/February 2012 issue of the LRC. He lives in went on to make millions and to earn the ultimate knowledge, the zombie comes full circle and is once Toronto and is working on his second novel. accolade—a screening at the Museum of Modern again a creature born of slavery.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 17 ESSAY “Spy, Russians, Secrets, Sold” In the Jeffrey Delisle affair, one thing is certain: baffling incompetence on all sides. Wesley Wark
py … Russians … secrets provided, particularly in the tech- … sold … These jumbled nical and scientific fields, includ- Slinguistic fragments now ing information on how Canada define the life of ex–sub-lieutenant and its allies protect coded com- Jeffrey Delisle, recently sentenced munications. This puzzled Delisle, to a 20-year jail term. Delisle was as well it might. The GRU also the first Canadian spy case of the asked him for information that new century, joining a short list he had no access to, their obses- of major cases from the previous sion being with western intelli- one, headlined by the defection gence services’ efforts to penetrate of Igor Gouzenko. Delisle was the Russian operations, all very Putin- first man to be tried and convicted esque. They asked him to supply under Canada’s refurbished offi- information on Canadian know- cial secrets act (the Security of ledge of Russian organized crime Information Act, passed in 2001), and about Canadian energy deals and a record holder for length abroad—hardly his bailiwick as a of his sentence. He did damage, military intelligence analyst. The the extent of which we may never Russians did not try to get him to know. But, ultimately, the Delisle recruit others, or change positions spy case will be remembered for with the Canadian military. They its sheer oddity. As the jail door did not press too hard to arrange closes on Jeffrey Delisle, we are face-to-face meetings with him. left with a spy case transformed into an unsolved As for his motives, all we know is what he told his The Russians wanted him, but did not fully mystery. Nothing about it quite adds up, or meets RCMP interrogator. He said he had decided in 2007 exploit him. Either they wanted him for later or our expectations of what an espionage operation to commit what he called “professional suicide.” He did not know how to fully exploit him, or did not should look like. may well be the first spy on record to have engaged fully trust him, or maybe (a dark thought) had even What follows is an effort to reshape the Delisle in espionage as a form of suicide. He believed his better spies and sources in their North American narrative, based on court records. But a word of life had been ruined by the break-up of his marriage roster. Delisle did claim that he came to be aware of caution. Spy stories resist exposure, are never com- to his high school sweetheart, whom he had caught a large apparatus of Russian spying in Canada and plete, are subject to manipulation and are often having an affair not once but twice. He contem- that, as unlikely as this sounds, the Russians were folded into a popular culture outlook that can be plated more literal forms of suicide, but drew back grooming him for a job as a liaison or go-between highly mythological. from them, so he says, out of concerns for his chil- (“pigeon”) to connect their many operatives in dren. In committing professional suicide, Delisle Canada. That plan, if a real plan it was, was put on Spy became a fatalistic spy, certain that he would be ice by his arrest. Jeffrey Delisle, age 41 at the time of his sentencing caught one day. When that day drew near, he made in early 2013, was a self-confessed spy for the no attempt to act on his escape plan provided by Secrets Russians, specifically for a branch of Russian intel- the Russians. He just waited for the knock on the We should not be fooled by Jeffrey Delisle’s rela- ligence called the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoe door. The knock came, ironically, as he was about to tively low rank and lacklustre career. What matters Upravleniye, meaning “Russian military intel- embark on a new life with a new partner. when it comes to spying is not gold braid, but access ligence”), whose history and exploits date back to to secrets, and Delisle had access in spades. He had the time of the Russian revolution. But what kind Russians a top secret clearance, obtained before he began of spy was Jeffrey Delisle? He certainly does not If Delisle’s own motives for becoming a spy read as spying for the Russians in 2007 (his first Russian fit the current and disconcerting mould of people outlandish, they also clearly puzzled his Russian paycheque arrived in July). The next scheduled who engage in espionage out of what the U.S. intel- spy masters. Spy services like to know who they are round of his security clearance was inexplicably ligence community calls “divided loyalties.” He had dealing with when it comes to stealing secrets. They delayed by the Department of National Defence; no loyalty to Russia, was not born there and never want either surety about motive or at least a good, that round should have happened in 2011, but did visited the country. He did not carry a picture of strong handle on any agent—such as that provided not. Government witnesses at his sentencing hear- Vladimir Putin in his wallet—only pictures of his by money, or fear of exposure, or manipulation of ing provided lame excuses, but no explanations. kids. some character weakness. When pressed, Delisle Delisle had untrammelled access to some of apparently told the GRU that he was acting for the most sensitive intelligence databases available Wesley Wark is an expert on intelligence and secur- “ideological” reasons, something that would have in Canada, ones that featured both Canadian and ity issues who teaches at the Munk School of Global scared them. allied material. He found it ludicrously easy to copy Affairs at the University of Toronto. He served as The few things we know about the Russian data and take it out of the office with him. He had an expert witness for the defence at the sentencing handling of their volunteer spy add to the oddity of no need for the spy gear of old, no Minox camera hearing for Jeffrey Delisle. He is one of the editors of the Delisle affair. Incredibly, the GRU was uninter- secreted in his uniform pocket. No late-night, after- Secret Intelligence: A Reader (Routledge, 2009). ested in some of the best stuff Delisle could have hours sessions huddled over a desk sweating over
18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada page-by-page illegal photography. All he needed talking because no plea bargain had been extended airport. It does not appear as though the CBSA was a simple USB key. As he explained to his to him. This was again odd, as only with Delisle’s officer was tipped off about Delisle in advance; he bemused RCMP interrogator, he was able to down- cooperation could the Canadian authorities have just had a suspicious nose. Delisle was not able to load selected files from his top secret intelligence had any chance of really discovering what secrets sell his thin cover story about having taken a Brazil systems onto floppy disks (yes, floppy disks—a hint the spy had divulged. All they had to go on was one trip on a whim and about his cash hoard being a of the obsolescence that defined computer secur- intercepted package of documents from January product of success at gambling and online gam- ity at his DND workplace), transfer these disks to 2012, twelve in number, which never reached the ing. Among the many inconsistencies noted by the a non-secret computer system, download infor- GRU. Whether this package was anomalous or CBSA officer was that Delisle had gone to Brazil for mation from the non-secret computer onto a USB typical, no one could say. The harm it did was, of a holiday, but came back without a tan. Perhaps this stick, put it in his pocket and go home. course, purely theoretical. The document pack- was a good-sense judgement, or just the envy of a Never once in his four-year spying career was age was introduced in court, but its contents were Haligonian airport security officer with the summer Delisle searched. Never once, so it would appear, entirely blacked out. behind him and a blustery fall ahead. A report was were any questions asked about a computer set-up We do not know, and may never know, whether duly sent in on Delisle, but appears to have van- that allowed the strictly forbidden—the copying Delisle stole the intelligence equivalent of candy or ished in the system. Odd. of data from top secret systems. Only after he was Fort Knox. All we know for certain is that Canada’s The GRU was sufficiently alarmed by the airport caught was his workplace, a naval intelligence intelligence partners, led by the United States, were investigation to suggest to Delisle that he take a fusion centre in Halifax called HMCS Trinity, aroused to anger by the security breaches revealed “sabbatical” until things cooled off. Delisle, the unplugged. To add to the mundanity of it all, when by the Delisle case and, in unprecedented fashion, fatalistic spy, declined. He resumed his spying. In Delisle was finished with his USB December 2011, the FBI stepped keys, where did they go? To his Jeffrey Delisle’s career in stealing secrets out of the shadows to tell the kids, for use with their Xbox. Canadian government that Delisle Jeffrey Delisle’s career in steal- was aided and abetted by a security was burrowing into secrets, the ing secrets was aided and abetted RCMP awoke and investigated, by a security system that failed, system that failed, and failed abysmally, and jail opened its narrow doors to and failed abysmally, at every swallow up this strangest of spies. possible level. Delisle was caught, at every possible level. The moniker “the spy who had not by any trip-wire Canadian no tan” perhaps sums up all the security measure, but by the U.S. Federal Bureau have demanded that Canada clean up its act or face oddities of the Delisle case. He did not behave as of Investigation, which alerted a badly startled possible expulsion from the world’s leading intel- a textbook spy should do. His Russian spy masters Canadian system to its detailed suspicions of ligence club called the “Five Eyes” (a club in which also did not behave as we might have expected. Delisle in December 2011. Only at that point did the we are more or less a charter member since World The Canadian security system failed to perform as RCMP begin an investigation, which was delayed War Two). It might also be worth noting that neither it should have done and was only rescued from three weeks before a search warrant was acquired. Canada, spied upon, nor Russia, doing the spying, further leakages by the FBI. When confronted by Once the RCMP had a search warrant, their inves- seemed moved enough about the Delisle affair to the opportunity to turn Delisle back against the tigation was impeccable. They pulled incriminating make it a point of diplomatic friction. Odd, that. Russians, the Canadians turned a blind eye, never evidence from Delisle’s home and work computers Accuse the Chinese of spying and you would get once tempted from the straight and narrow of a nice and when they confronted Delisle with this evi- a very different reaction. Nor would many victim criminal prosecution. Only our allies reacted pre- dence, he quickly confessed. states approach a public case of espionage with as dictably, with behind-the-scenes anger and dismay But even in the RCMP investigation of Delisle much—equanimity, shall we call it?—as shown by when the Delisle case came to light. there is an oddity that has gone unremarked in the Canadian government. Spies do not have tans. They are unpredictable media stories. In their effort to nail the case, the creatures, who operate in the shadows, for shadowy RCMP engaged in a bold and risky manoeuvre. Sold motives. There is no textbook spy and the efforts They put up messages on the shared website that Jeffrey Delilse sold secrets to the Russians between of counter-intelligence agencies to create pro- Delisle used, pretending to be his Russian hand- 2007 and 2011. He was paid US$71,817 for his files, once summed up under the acronym MICE ler. This was risky because there was always the reporting from July 2007 to August 2011, and (money, ideology, corruption, ego), to understand possibility that Delisle might become suspicious, then was suddenly offered an additional sum of the behaviour of those who would steal secrets particularly if the language, timing or demands of $50,000 during a once-only overseas trip, to Brazil and sell them to a foreign power look laughably an RCMP message failed to ring true. In the end the in September 2011, to meet face to face with a simplistic. You do not catch spies by profiling them; boldness and risk paid off, and Delisle apparently GRU officer. Delisle claimed never to have been you only catch them at their work, something that suspected nothing. motivated by the money and he knew a lump-sum the Canadian government failed in this case to do. But in intervening clandestinely in Delisle’s $50,000 could get him into trouble if he brought it The Delisle case might have had whiffs of the old- message traffic, the RCMP and possibly other agen- back to Canada, but he tried it anyway. It nearly led fashioned, brought to us by the same spy service cies of the Canadian intelligence system appeared to his downfall. that gave us Igor Gouzenko in 1945. But he was also oblivious to a much greater strategic game. No Upon his return from his brief Brazil trip, Jeffrey a cyber spy and, in a new age of cyber espionage, effort was ever made to bring Delisle under control Delisle was subjected to secondary examination by catching spying at work, devilling in computer sys- and turn him against the Russian spy service, either a Canada Border Services Agency officer at Halifax tems, is going to be the demand. to feed them false information or to gain additional insights into the Russian spy system in Canada and 2012-2013 ConCert SerieS elsewhere. Turning Delisle into a double agent (or maybe a triple, depending on how you count) would have been audacious, but appears never PiAno to have tempted anyone in the Canadian system, despite the potential benefits. Were we simply risk- eCStACY averse, or unaware, or forgetful of the long history A celebration of music for multiple pianos, featuring works of such deception operations in World War Two by Steve reich, John Cage, Shostakovich, and more. and the Cold War? Who can say? It is just odd. Once Delisle had decided to plead guilty, all that APriL 26, 2013 At 8:00 Pm was left was his sentencing. But even the sentencing Koerner Hall, teLUS Centre for PerformancePantone version and Learning end-game was somewhat strange, not only because For tickets call 416.408.0208 or visit soundstreams.ca there was no legal precedent in Canadian jurispru- dence, but because, at the end of the day, no one CMYK version could say with any authority just how much dam-
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April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 19 Pantone Beverley Baxter in Empireland A Canadian columnist beat the British drum, at Lord Beaverbrook’s behest. Ramsay Cook
note that all decisions were Canada and the End of the subject to the approval of each Imperial Dream: Beverley Dominion parliament. The Baxter’s Reports from 1926 Balfour Declaration iced London through War and the autonomy cake, the Statute Peace, 1936–1960 of Westminster legalized it. “We Neville Thompson are all ‘extreme autonomists’ Oxford University Press now,” the Manitoba Free Press 394 pages, hardcover crowed when the Bennett ISBN 9780199003938 Conservatives approved it. For the Dominions the Empire was now over, replaced by he British Empire/ a commonwealth of equal, C o m m o n w e a l t h , autonomous countries. Only Tearlier a staple of a few details remained: a sep- Canadian historical writing, arate declaration of war in has fallen out of fashion. That 1939, Canadian citizenship in partly reflects the adjournment 1947, a flag in 1965 and power sine die of the once acrimoni- to amend the British North ous debates about Canada’s America Act in 1982. The final place in an empire on which act beckons: replacement of the sun was said never to set. the British monarchy by the Neville Thompson’s new book governor general as the only is both an attempt to revive a head of state in Canada. neglected historical subject The lack of this background and an account of one man’s effort to prevent the anything more than a vague idea, the imperial narrative perhaps explains this book’s some- sunset. In those historical and political debates, cabinet concept was tested during World War One, what misleading title, Canada and the End of the one side was often called “imperialist,” the other experiencing some modest success (even though Imperial Dream. A more accurate one would be: “nationalist” even though the reality was far more Sir Robert Borden complained privately that the “Beverley Baxter’s Attempt to Revive an Old 19th- complex. As Carl Berger argued in a superb book British treated the Dominions as “mere toy autom- Century Imperial Dream in Canada and Great entitled The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas ata”). After the war that ad hoc arrangement soon Britain through his regular columns in Maclean’s of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914, “Canadian proved unworkable. The Dominions insisted on Magazine between 1936 and 1960.” imperialism was one version of Canadian national- signing the Treaty of Versailles separately (although Born in Toronto, Baxter dropped out of Harbord ism … which rested upon a certain understanding indented under Great Britain), and on obtaining Collegiate at 15 to become a piano salesman, of history, the national character, and the national seats in the League of Nations. While the “splendid eventually earning $3,500 a year. (This is the first mission.” That could be called British-Canadian little war” was a cause for pride, Canadians knew and last detail about his income. He later became nationalism. Most French Canadians, and many that the glory of Vimy was followed by the gore of a wealthy man, exactly how and how affluent we other Canadians, thought of themselves as nation- Passchendaele. Ten there was the political cost are not told, although he apparently faced money alists in a North American nation. paid in the deep divisions created by conscrip- problems after he finally broke with his patron, After Confederation these two nationalist tion, a policy introduced by the Union government Lord Beaverbrook). In 1915 he joined the Canadian schools shared a common view: dissatisfaction not only for military reasons but also to shore up Army as a commissioned officer (obtained through with Canada’s status, a status where Britain formu- Borden’s quest for an improved Canadian status in a relative’s influence) in the Signal Corps. Once lated foreign policy for the entire empire. British- the empire. These grim realities made Canadians— overseas he caught the influenza and was - hos Canadian nationalists, mostly Conservatives, not just francophones—wary of overseas commit- pitalized in England. After the war he settled in favoured some institution that would allow the ments whether with “imperial” partners or the new England, making trips to Canada and the United Dominions a voice in making imperial foreign League of Nations. States for speaking engagements or vacations. In policy: imperial federation or an imperial cabinet In 1921 Prime Minister Arthur Meighen London he was mainly employed as a journalist that would continuously consult before deciding. found himself at odds with the other members with Beaverbrook’s Daily Express and The Evening Canadian nationalists argued instead that Canada of the Imperial Cabinet over the renewal of the Standard and in the film industry. Moreover, he sat should acquire the power to make its own external Anglo-Japanese Treaty. Then, in 1922, British as a Conservative member of the British Parliament policy by exercising complete autonomy in domes- prime minister David Lloyd George called for from 1935 until his death in 1964. tic and foreign policy. military support from the Dominions for war with Baxter’s journalism was probably the central Although imperial federation was never Turkey at Chanak without any prior consultation. focus of Neville Thompson’s Joanne Goodman Canada declined. The coup de grâce came at the Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in Ramsay Cook, son of an English immigrant, is a 1923 Imperial Conference, when William Lyon 2004. Now the author has expanded his three-part professor emeritus of history. Mackenzie King insisted that its final communiqué series into a 360-page monograph by incorporating
20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada copious details about British political and par- what was his dream, and why did Maclean’s hire In Thompson’s often ironic and critical liamentary history roughly from appeasement him? Thompson notes that he regularly played the recounting, Baxter had no understanding that through World War Two to the Cold War, Suez and role of Beaverbrook’s gramophone, faithfully trans- Canada, far from being a homogeneous race, rather decolonization, from Chamberlain to Macmillan. lating his master’s voice into purple prose, promot- contained two major cultural groups, anglophone Cabinet quarrels, domestic politics and policies are ing him as “his hero,” “a Napoleon” having “some and francophone, plus immigrants from many detailed in a conscientiously prepared synthesis of claim to the higher attributes of Christianity” and countries. Only twice does Baxter make refer- standard secondary works. The politics of Canada “whose mind is both penetrating and informed.” ence to the French Canadians, whose weight in and, to a lesser degree, of the United States are Readers are left wondering what Beaverbrook paid Canadian political life equalled or even exceeded occasionally, but thankfully more briefly, inter- him to believe and say such things and for his edi- their numbers. Once he chided them for their woven. Although some of this is helpful background torial and journalistic services. 90 percent negative vote in the 1942 conscription to Baxter’s journalism, the central figure often dis- The two had their differences, usually resolved plebiscite. His other reference is to describe a appears behind a distracting blizzard of sometimes amicably. They shared a faith declared by Baxter in French-Canadian soldier whom he met in England irrelevant detail. A fuller biography of Beverley his column of August 1, 1942: “The British Empire as “a wonderful ambassador. He has warmth and Baxter and a sharper editorial pencil would have will be needed as the cornerstone of the New World. charm. He has good humor and is sentimental.” If increased the interest of this lengthy book. Will a truly united Canada play her part in the it is not a redundancy, that might be called condes- A second problem is this: both “imperial” and leadership that alone can guide mankind from the cending imperialism, usually reserved for the lesser “imperialism” are malleable terms that, without darkness to the light?” This messianic exhortation breeds without the law. Baxter’s imperialist dream some explanation, make more sound than sense. coloured all of Baxter’s communiqués from the evoked some enthusiasm in Toronto business Thompson writes about Baxter as an “imperial centre of civilization. and Conservative circles and even among some citizen,” clearly implying that he anglophone Quebeckers, but it was something more than simply a The desperate British wartime crisis left French Canadians cold and “British subject.” He calls Toronto suspicious. In Western Canada “the heartland of Canadian imper- required just enough drama to stimulate strong support for the war effort ialism,” but does that mean the was accompanied by views of same as British imperialism? rather than depress Canadian readers Commonwealth relations similar He describes a “social-imper- to those expressed in the Liberal ial grenade” that advocated no who were being called upon to increase nationalist Sifton papers. For these restraint on profits and earn- Canadians the war was about ings and a weekly basic wage of their war effort. something more important than six pounds for workers. Other “the high destiny of the British examples abound. The “imperial dream” some- In his regular “Letter,” Baxter skillfully, if not race.” If the Great War was the Empire’s War, World times encompasses all these versions, but since its always truthfully, performed a deft balancing act: War Two became Canada’s war conducted with its essential content was some form of institutionally the desperate British wartime crisis required just Commonwealth, European, American and USSR united empire with a single foreign, defence and enough drama to stimulate rather than depress allies. These Canadians formed the majority who sometimes trade policy, it is far from clear that Canadian readers who were being called upon to supported Mackenzie King (or the CCF) even when the dream was shared by imperialists of all stripes. increase their war effort. He repeatedly praised holding their noses. British politicians, including Churchill, could speak Canadian troops, hoping they would soon move So what influence did Baxter’s unrelenting as though “empire” and “Commonwealth” were from camps in Britain to the real war on the con- imperialist advocacy exert? That the “imperialist” interchangeable terms, although most Canadians tinent. He believed what he wrote ex cathedra in Lieutenant Colonel J.B. Maclean kept him on sug- had come to believe that they no longer lived in a the Daily Telegraph just prior to the outbreak of gests that he was popular enough. But apart from colony, which is, after all, what empires possess. war: “If Great Britain goes to war for any cause, quoting the odd letter to the editor, Thompson That most Canadians valued the British connection just or unjust, wise or foolish, no living premier or makes no attempt to measure broader influence, for its institutions and culture, and as a counter- ex-premier of Canada or Great Britain could pre- not even offering any circulation figures. He often balance to the United States, cannot be denied. vent the young men of Canada streaming in their resorts to tentative phrases such as “readers must But was that imperialism? Hardly. The empire that tens of thousands to the assistance of the Mother have felt,” “may have helped,” “undoubtedly read,” splashed red across Asia, Africa and the Middle East Country.” Later not even the Dieppe disaster damp- “undoubtedly hoped,” but without any concrete was rarely on the Canadian radar except to signal ened his enthusiasm for more front-line action evidence. Many may have read and some may danger: the Boer War, the Great War, Chanak, Suez. for Canadians. Impatient for a second front he have chosen Baxter’s message. But Canadians These were the times when the “weary Titan,” strug- spared no praise when writing of the Soviet Union, had more sources than Maclean’s for information gling “under the too vast orb of its fate,” called them once distrusted and after the war condemned. about Britain and the progress of the war: the CBC/ to her councils. Inconsistency often seemed his stock-in-trade, a Radio Canada—especially Matthew Halton—and There is another word that is associated with characteristic shared with, or acquired from, the the BBC news broadcasts, daily newspapers with the imperial dream: “race.” Baxter spoke of the “Beaver.” Always capable of flattery in a good cause, overseas correspondents and foreign, mainly U.S., “Canadian race” (Thompson speaks of “interracial following one of his speaking junkets to North magazines. In contrast to ex-pats such as Baxter, relations”), but the word was usually qualified as America, he wrote that “perhaps here in Canada Beaverbrook and Lord Bennett of Calgary, who in “the mighty destiny of the British race” that was is the truest expression of what is best in British had lost touch with Canada, these journalists had a often claimed to be the basis of the empire’s real ideology and British tradition … I felt that the day firmer, more immediate grasp on Canadian realities or anticipated unity. What does this term mean? might come when in Britain we shall have to look during its war. Theirs were the dominant voices, Was it thought to have a biological basis (which to Canada for guidance in the way of life.” Those Baxter’s only an echo of a time that had passed. it does not), or did it mean culture or ethnicity? inflated imaginings displayed in a nutshell the illu- Shortly after the Allied victory at El Alamein Certainly no imperialist believed that the British sions inhabiting the “Imperial Dream” of Baxter, in 1942, Baxter, urged on by Floyd Chalmers, were a mere ethnic group. “Imperialism” and “race” Beaverbrook and a few others. wrote a three-act play, It Happened in September, are slippery terms. Lewis Carroll’s Alice asked In 1956, in a startling about-face and a move based on the life and death of a friend and fellow “whether you can make words mean so many dif- that would cause a permanent rift between him Conservative imperialist. The night it opened in ferent things.” Humpty Dumpty, an imperialist after and Beaverbrook, Baxter gave up on the empire to London, the stalls were occupied by many nobs Beverley Baxter’s and Max Aitken’s hearts, replied: become “a born-again convert” to European unifi- from the social class into which the young man “The question is which is to be master—that’s all.” cation led, of course, by Great Britain, and possibly from Toronto had climbed. When the curtain fell Empire means that one group or state has dom- including the Dominions. Thompson explains that a woman rose in the balcony shouting: “It’s a rot- inant power over other peoples and territories Baxter was converted by a “radical, raffish bisexual” ten play.” The critics agreed. It soon closed, Baxter known as colonies; imperialism is the ideology fellow MP to the conclusion that post-war Britain rejecting an offer by Garfield Weston to purchase that attempts to justify that domination. The idea was too weak to resume leadership of the “Empire.” 1,000 pounds’ worth of tickets for Canadian troops. of race, whether biological or ethnocentric, often He now claimed that Britain had always been a That same verdict might apply to Baxter’s long- infuses that ideology. “European … power.” Awakening from dreams usu- running Technicolor drama entitled “The Imperial Now to what is original in Thompson’s book: the ally means a return to reality, but surely something Dream.” exploration of Baxter’s columns. Who was Baxter, more led him onto the road to Europe?
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 21 The Nobel of Numbers How a Hamilton native played mathematical peacemaker after World War One. Douglas Wright
He went to Europe in 1892, spending two years papers that he had published were highly regarded Turbulent Times in Mathematics: The Life of in France, followed by five in Germany in Berlin and led to his recognition as “a mathematician J.C. Fields and the History of the Fields Medal and Göttingen. He became fluent in French and of the first rank.” They led to his being elected a Elaine McKinnon Riehm and Frances Hoffman German. And he became well acquainted with the fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1909 and American Mathematical Society leading mathematicians in Europe, also visiting a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1913. and the Fields Institute Britain and Scandinavia. His book was the first publication of an important 257 pages, softcover The community of scientists was small, and mathematical monograph by a Canadian. Yet his ISBN 9780821869147 while their meetings tended to be formal with long work, highly regarded at the time, was subsequently speeches, they also enjoyed casual evenings with overshadowed by modern approaches that used beer in taverns. abstract algebra. ohn Charles Fields is a little-known After a year at the University of Chicago, Te last decade of the 19th century and the Canadian. He deserves to be better known. Fields returned to Canada in 1901, taking up an early years of the 20th were golden years in Europe JTurbulent Times in Mathematics: The Life of appointment in mathematics at the University of and golden years for international science. Fields’s J.C. Fields and the History of the Fields Medal, a Toronto, and established a pattern of teaching years at universities in Europe and his close fine biography and account of his career and work at Toronto during the academic year and travelling acquaintanceship and friendship with many lead- by Elaine McKinnon Riehm and Frances Hoffman, to Europe for the summer months. He followed ing European mathematicians were a great source may help to rectify that situation. this pattern for the rest of his life, except for the of pleasure to him. And he was profoundly affected Fields is best known today among the world’s war years. His biographers estimate that, over the by the spirit of the international organizations that mathematicians for having established an award years, he spent more than 50 weeks criss-crossing had arisen to facilitate and foster the meetings of that has taken the place of a Nobel Prize for math- the Atlantic. How did he manage this on a modest scientists that became powerful stimuli to advan- ematics. No one really knows why Nobel over- professorial income? He evidently lived quite sim- cement. He believed strongly in the international looked mathematics when he set up the prizes in ply in Toronto, “rooming” in one of the substantial culture of science. his will. There are rumours, but no real evidence family homes in the neighbourhood just to the west Fields attended the first International Congress as to Nobel’s reason. Fields, through his promin- of the university. He never married, never owned of Mathematicians convened at Cambridge in ence in North America and Europe, saw the need a home. He had had a small inheritance but was England in 1912. But that hopeful beginning was and opportunity and set out to fill it. The medal never a wealthy man. quickly stymied. Te outbreak of war in 1914 led he created, officially known as the International He had become convinced from the examples to a deep schism among European scientists, par- Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, he had seen at Johns Hopkins and in Berlin and ticularly between the Germans and the French and was to be awarded every four years, to two, three Chicago that universities and their professors their allies. This was to last for many years. What is or four mathematicians not over the age of 40, at should be committed to research. But it was not amazing is that during the no less bitter Napoleonic the quadrennial conference of the International until 1915 that one of his students, Samuel Beatty, Wars British and French scientists regularly and Mathematical Union. Fields died before the medal received the first PhD in mathematics awarded peacefully visited back and forth between London was first awarded: it immediately became known as in Canada. Fields also believed that scientific and Paris to present scientific papers and be enter- the Fields Medal. research should be a concern of government, busi- tained at their respective academies. Fields was born in 1863 and raised in Hamilton. ness and the public. Not only as an intellectual When the time came in 1920 for the first post- He benefited from excellent schools that had been pursuit, “for the sake of knowledge,” but also as a war International Congress of Mathematicians, established in Hamilton, undoubtedly under the basis for economic advancement and competitive- under French influence and with great symbolic influence of Egerton Ryerson. ness. He lobbied Queen’s Park and Ottawa inten- significance, it was held in Strasbourg. This was, During the years when Fields was a student, sively as well as his friends in business. He was of course, in Alsace, which France had lost to graduates of the Hamilton Collegiate took first or involved with, and led for some years, the Royal Germany in 1871 and only recovered with the sort- second place in classics and mathematics at the Canadian Institute, which offered lectures on sci- ing out of borders in 1919 after the First World War. University of Toronto every year. (Would that our ence on Saturday nights at Convocation Hall at the The Germans and their allies were excluded from high schools still taught classics instead of some of University of Toronto. These were popular and well the Congress, to Fields’s regret and to that of other the intellectually weak content now included.) attended for many years. eminent scholars including G.H. Hardy, England’s Fields graduated from the University of Toronto He hoped that there might be philanthropic leading mathematician and the author of the classic in 1884 with the gold medal in mathematics. He support for research in Canada such as had been A Mathematician’s Apology. then went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore provided at Johns Hopkins (by Hopkins himself) It had been expected that the next international to pursue a PhD. Johns Hopkins had been founded and at Chicago (by the Rockefellers). But it was to mathematical congress would be held in the United only in 1876, based on the German model, with a be almost one hundred years before Mike Lazaridis States. But disagreements and controversy in commitment to research and offering a doctorate. founded and endowed the Perimeter Institute for America destroyed support for the congress. Fields No Canadian university then offered such a degree. Theoretical Physics as a major centre for research saw his opportunity and, utilizing his connections (Neither Oxford nor Cambridge offered a PhD until and the training of researchers. Fraser Mustard had in Ottawa and in Toronto, generated support for the 1920s, and only then because foreign graduate established the Canadian Institute for Advanced an invitation to hold the 1924 congress in Toronto. students were all going to Germany to get them.) Research in 1982 with the hope of major philan- In spite of Canada’s weakness in mathematics and Fields enjoyed the atmosphere at Johns Hopkins, thropic support, but it never arose. scientific research generally, the 1924 congress pro- spent two more years there, and then taught for Fields’s own research, including his doctoral ceeded and was a great success. It concluded with a three years in a college in Pennsylvania. work and the work he had completed in Berlin, 17-day rail excursion to the Pacific coast and back. provided the basis for a book, Theory of the It was all Fields’s triumph. Douglas Wright, OC, is president emeritus of the Algebraic Functions of a Complex Variable, which At the congress, the Americans proposed that University of Waterloo. was published in Europe in 1906. This and other the policies that had excluded the Germans and
22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada their allies be changed to readmit them. It took four years of politicking in Europe, in which Fields played a significant role, for the policy to be reversed. Finally, at the 1928 congress in Bologna, the Germans participated. It had taken a decade since the end of the war. It was after the 1928 congress that Fields, perceiving that “the rift is still huge,” developed his idea for an international award in mathemat- ics that in his opinion would help repair it. He started speaking about his idea in Europe and in North America. He found support among national mathematical associations. Fields developed his plans carefully. He was determined that the medal should honour work done by mathematicians under the age of 40. The medal was designed by the Canadian sculptor R. Tait McKenzie. It has a figure of Archimedes on its front and a classical Latin quotation on the reverse, which translates as “mathematicians gathered together from around the world honour noteworthy contributions to knowledge.” The recipient’s name would appear on the edge. Fields’s name does not appear. He died in 1932, committing most of his fairly modest estate to establishing the prize. The medals were first awarded in 1936. With a break until the 1950 congress in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but with none of the animosities that characterized the years of and after the First World War, 52 medals have since been awarded at 17 congresses. The authors of this book have done a superb job with exhaustive attention to the details of the history, both of Fields’s efforts and of the mathematical organizations. The only conspicu- ous error suggests that Bertrand Russell lost his position at Oxford because of his pacifist oppos- ition to the First World War: it was Trinity College Cambridge that had dismissed him. Fields would be pleased and probably sur- prised to know how mathematics has developed in Canada since his time. It used to be a subject chosen for its intellectual challenge, but offering careers primarily in teaching and, occasionally, in actuarial work. Mathematics is still valued for its intellectual rigour, but now offers many career prospects in the modern economy. There are good departments of mathematics in many uni- versities across Canada. The University of Toronto remains strong. But led by the migration of a num- ber of mathematicians from Toronto to Waterloo, the University of Waterloo has developed a con- centration in mathematics. Waterloo now has the largest enrollment in mathematics in North America, and probably in the world. Toronto and Waterloo enjoy a healthy rivalry, not only between themselves, but with the best in the United States. In 1992, mathematics professors from McMaster University and the universities of Toronto and Waterloo conceived of a centre for research that would have no permanent academic staff, but would bring researchers from across Canada and abroad to work together for a period on a defined area. They were successful, and the Fields Institute was established on the Toronto campus, where it occupies a purpose-built home. The American Mathematical Society conducts annual contests, known as the Putnams, for uni- versity students. Against teams from Harvard, MIT and Caltech, in recent years, teams from Toronto and Waterloo have each ranked in the top five 18 times. A remarkable number of young Canadians now choose to study mathematics. This, as well as the medal and the institute, can be seen as Fields’s legacy.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 23 Magic Spheres The forgotten art of reckoning the heavens. Florin Diacu
need it now can learn it in a matter of weeks if through these cities and whose geometric plane, Heavenly Mathematics: their geometric background is solid enough. Even if extended through the Earth’s core, would pass The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry without this background, readers with basic math- directly through its centre. Glen Van Brummelen ematical skills, and more importantly the will to Such simple observations open a new world. A Princeton University Press actively apply them, can learn to scale some of the spherical triangle is formed by three arcs of great 192 pages, hardcover subject’s greatest heights. Heavenly Mathematics circles that connect three points. For example, two ISBN 9780691148922 shows that the intellectual reward is considerable. points could be on the Equator and one could be Not least, the logic that underpinned past practices the North Pole. So two of this triangle’s arcs fol- in astronomy and navigation comes gratifyingly to low longitudinal meridians, which form 90 degree ow does one estimate the size of the light. angles with the equator. Given these two right Earth? The distance to the Moon? More In his preface, Van Brummelen, who teaches at angles, the three angles of this illustrative spherical Hto the point, how could scientists accom- Quest University Canada, a liberal arts and sciences triangle (and indeed of all spherical triangles) must plish these feats at a time when the only available college in Squamish, British Columbia, signals the add to more than 180 degrees—a feature that is instruments were as simple as those of ancient sur- sort of book he has written: impossible in regular Euclidian geometry, where a geons: no X-rays, CAT scans or MRIs; just scalpels, triangle can have only one right angle, and where spatulas and forceps? This is not a scholarly work in the history of the sum of all three of a triangle’s angles always Scientists in the ancient world, and the succes- mathematics. It does not contain footnotes, sums to 180 degrees. sors who extended the techniques in the following does not profess to tell the whole story … This This is only one of the numerous ways that centuries, did so using nothing but geometrical is simply an appreciation of a beautiful lost spherical triangles differ from their planar counter- reasoning and simple computations. Taking a subject, with historical overtones and a few parts, and it is these differences that give spherical scenic journey through the history of mathemat- subtly placed messages that I’m sure you will trigonometry its mysterious quality in the eyes of ics, Glen Van Brummelen’s Heavenly Mathematics: recognize. Take it for what it is, and enjoy. most laypeople. It was also a keen understanding The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry shows of these distinctive features that allowed genera- exactly how they did so. Readers should be warned that mathematics tions of early mathematicians to answer a host of Euclidean geometry is a product of the ancient can rarely be absorbed linearly. More commonly it practical questions, including the relatively exact Greek world that has been studied and held in resembles a cliff. Sometimes those who attempt to determination of a certain location’s latitude and— high esteem ever since. One branch, planar geom- scale it reach a dead end and are forced to return to after the invention of accurate chronometers in the etry, focuses on flat surfaces and explores the an intermediate point to start afresh. They may also 18th century—longitude as well. Other intriguing relationships between the sides and the angles of need to stop and reflect occasionally, using pencil questions were dealt with along the way—for regular triangles. But to understand the cosmos and paper to clarify their understanding of the example, helping believers in the Islamic world as conceived by the ancients—a sphere on which path being taken. To make the ascent more bear- ensure they were correctly aligned to Mecca during the heavenly objects were assumed to move—a able, and to provide occasions to breathe between their daily prayers. separate allied subject was needed. By the second steep climbs through mathematical proofs, Van As adept as Van Brummelen is in explaining century AD, this evolving field of study, known as Brummelen intermingles each new theorem such solutions, unfortunately he never puts spher- spherical trigonometry, was enabling the growth with historical narrative. As the president of the ical trigonometry fully in perspective by sum- of astronomy and navigational theory. Important Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of marizing how its evolution fits into the broader refinements continued in succeeding centuries, Mathematics, he specializes in the astronomy development of geometry. A few pages explaining first in India (where theoretical developments were and trigonometry of ancient Greece and medieval where spherical trigonometry belongs in math- at least partly independent from advances in the Islam, and these subjects are at the core of his ematics, how it relates to other branches and why West) and the Islamic world, and then in medieval book. He even gives thrill-seekers the chance to it is no longer studied would have helped make and modern Europe. attack new cliffs alone, with carefully chosen end- this book complete. For example, to say, as Van During the 19th century, the rise of modern of-chapter exercises. Brummelen does, that the decline of spherical geometries challenged mathematicians to go Heavenly Mathematics is a work of love, with a trigonometry was merely a matter of fashion is an beyond the intuition they had built for Euclidean passion for its subject permeating every line. This oversimplification of the truth. A couple of pages space. The study of spherical phenomena from passion is one reason Van Brummelen is such an that mention the contribution of Gauss, Bolyai, this new more all-encompassing perspective left excellent guide, but this is still mathematics, so Lobachevsky, Riemann and Klein—the extraordin- little room for traditional spherical trigonometry. there is no royal road. His main goal is to introduce ary journey from classical to non-Euclidean and, Nevertheless, the subject remained in school text- the mixture of geometric foundations and astro- finally, to the modern geometries of the Erlangen books. Then in the mid 20th century, the curricula nomic questions that led to the systematic explora- Program—would have clarified why spherical trig- of the western world dropped it within a decade. tion of spherical trigonometry over many centuries. onometry is not studied anymore. Planar trigonometry was kept: it still forms Those familiar with only Euclidean geometry will But such criticism does not detract from Van basic knowledge in mathematics. But spherical be surprised by how different everything is when Brummelen’s achievement. Heavenly Mathematics trigonometry proved dispensable. Those few who one moves from the flat surface of a geometric proves the value of bringing a fascinating piece of plane to a sphere. In the plane, we measure dis- mathematical history within the grasp of the general Florin Diacu is a professor of mathematics at the tances along straight lines. On the sphere we do reader. At a time when the impact of mathematical University of Victoria and author of The Lost so along arcs of so-called great circles such as the advances in the broad sweep of intellectual history Millennium: History’s Timetables under Siege, Equator or meridians of longitude. To fly from Paris is all too often ignored or misunderstood, one can whose second edition was published in 2011 by to Toronto, for example, an airplane must stay as only hope that this author’s talents will be put to Johns Hopkins University Press. close as possible to the great circle that passes further use.
24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ESSAY Ideas under Glass As museums turn from artifacts to stories, cultural tensions arise. Kate Taylor
any institu skeleton and a mummy case tions can lay can happily sit side by side. Mclaim to an The sense that this is not uplifting foundation myth, good enough, that the public but the new Canadian has neither the patience to Museum for Human Rights read the small print nor the boasts not one but two. wit to place objects in con- There is the story text had become received that Prime Minister Jean wisdom by the 1970s. By Chrétien was so moved the 1980s it was fashionable by a visit to Auschwitz in to point out that the sup- 1999 that he declared a posedly neutral displays of site would finally be found objects actually contained for a Canadian Holocaust their own prejudices and museum. preconceptions. In 1989, There is also the anec- the notorious Into the Heart dote told by Gail Asper, head of Africa exhibit at the Royal of the family foundation that Ontario Museum in Toronto began the fundraising cam- was an attempt to install in paign for the museum and a new critical context the its chief advocate. The Asper many African artifacts col- Foundation regularly tours lected by Christian mission- school groups to the United aries earlier in the century States Holocaust Memorial and left mouldering in the Museum and other sites museum basement. With in Washington DC and, on a bit of tongue in cheek, it one of these trips, Asper found herself standing in But as the story museum rises so too do attempted to depict 19th-century colonizing atti- line with her Canadian cohort waiting to see the ugly debates about whose version of events tudes, but only succeeded in proving that museum American Declaration of Independence. Why, she the museum’s exhibitions must represent. The audiences were completely unprepared for irony wondered, was there nowhere in Canada where development of the CMHR has been marked and that museum curators needed a lot more prac- school children could see key documents in their throughout by an unseemly competition between tice telling stories. country’s human rights history. the Jewish and Ukrainian communities over The major Canadian museum founded during A Canadian Holocaust memorial. An institu- whose historic suffering will be given top billing. this new narrative age was the Canadian Museum tion dedicated to human rights education. The first However exhibition space is finally distributed, of Civilization, and it too was controversial from national museum outside Ottawa. The Canadian the museum seems unlikely to satisfy all the com- the start. The CMC has its roots in a collection of Museum for Human Rights slated to open some- peting agendas. Heedless of that lesson, the natural specimens and archeological and ethno- time next year is a museum built on ideas. Canadian government has just opened up a whole graphic material collected by the Geographical And with what else would you build a museum? second tier for debate with its decision to rename Survey of Canada in the 19th century. It had several Well, with objects, actually. the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, homes and names before it became the bifurcated The 19th-century museums that preceded Quebec, the Canadian Museum of History, and to museums of Man and of Natural Sciences housed today’s institutions were treasure houses dedicated launch consultations as to what history this new in the two wings of the Victoria Memorial Museum to the collection and preservation of wondrous institution should be telling. The glass display Building on Ottawa’s Elgin Street. In the 1980s, things, great hordes of Old Master paintings and cases have been shattered and the museum wars the two institutions split and the half dedicated ivory tusks, Japanese fans and Paleozoic trilobites. rage on. to the historical and ethnographic collections In the 21st century we insist that these things must was given a nice, new gender-neutral name and be organized to tell stories and if they mutely refuse f you want to remember what a museum a building of undulating sandstone designed by we step in with text panels and video screens. Iused to feel like, visit the Redpath Museum at Métis architect Douglas Cardinal. Its soaring Grand McGill University in Montreal, housed in the old- Hall featuring the towering Pacific Coast aboriginal Kate Taylor writes about the arts for The Globe and est purpose-built museum building in Canada. poles and colourful house fronts was from the start Mail and is the author of two novels, Mme. Proust Renovations in 2003 have focused the exhibits in a smash hit, and remains a must-see for every for- and the Kosher Kitchen (Doubleday, 2003) and A this Victorian charmer, but under its coffered ceil- eign visitor to Ottawa. Man in Uniform (Doubleday, 2010). Her ancestors ing, it still maintains some of the creative chaos The central history exhibit, on the other hand, include a Victorian sea captain who brought home bequeathed to it by geologist and McGill principal was much criticized. Unveiled in sections through- an elephant carcass from his travels, boiled it down Sir William Dawson and his colleagues as they out the 1990s, the Canada Hall takes the visitor and donated the skeleton to the Stewartry Museum collected fossils, rocks, and Greek and Egyptian from a 16th-century Basque whaling station on the in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. antiquities. It is one of those places where a dinosaur Atlantic coast through 18th-century New France
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 25 to a 19th-century Ontario main street and an early country, seem to prefer social to political history; or unique genocide that should be given the largest 20th-century ethnic bookstore in Winnipeg to a at least they are convinced that Canadian history floor space in the new galleries. The new institu- Vancouver airport in the 1960s. It has never been is not simply the story of the powerful or famous. tion has done significant work with the Ukrainian easy to distinguish what is an artifact and what is a They also, of course, want to see their various eth- community, which wishes to see the Holodomor replica in these carefully constructed displays where nicities and communities represented; the Canada given equal attention. It entered into a memoran- ephemeral pieces of social history that had long Hall already ticked off French, English, Ukrainian, dum of understanding with Ukraine’s Holodomor since rotted away—the Red River cart that carried Japanese, Chinese, African Canadian and Filipino museum last year, has organized a series of lectures meat and furs across the Prairies, for example— with its displays, but no doubt others will want about the 1930s Stalinist state-sponsored famine in needed to be constructed from scratch. If the dio- in. Voices both inside and outside the aboriginal which millions died, and is commissioning a docu- ramas with their mannequins and sound effects community have suggested that indigenous stories mentary film on the topic. However, the Ukrainian now seem a tad quaint, in the 1990s they were need to be included. This is somewhat ironic since Canadian Congress still expresses reservations perceived as an alarming new Disneyfication of the the CMC’s collection of indigenous objects is one about the proposed exhibits, while the more radical museum, turning a place that should have been of the best in the country, beautifully displayed in Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association is dedicated to the judicious display of artifacts into the Grand Hall and the galleries behind it. But it actively protesting what it sees as an institution that a populist entertainment that made no distinction is stories, not artifacts, that are at issue in today’s will elevate one people’s suffering over others. In a between the real and the reproduction. Nor did the museum environment. recent postcard campaign it denounced the CMHR clever way the hall covered a great as the pet project of a single com- swath of history and geography by The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties munity being unfairly underwrit- following the continent’s chrono- ten by tax dollars. logical settlement pattern from Association has denounced the Canadian In an article published last east to west please everyone: one year in the Journal of Genocide Quebec columnist complained Museum for Human Rights as the pet Research, Australian scholar Dirk that a display that made no refer- Moses identified the museum’s ence to her province after the days project of a single community being dilemma, arguing that the CMHR of New France implied Quebec was caught between its need to was not a modern society. More unfairly underwritten by tax dollars. unite a multicultural Canada recently, critics have lamented the around a human rights agenda on lack of much reference to major political events such Nonetheless, the CMC’s curators have not aban- the one hand and, on the other, the need to memor- as the Riel Rebellion or the Acadian expulsion. doned the search for telling objects. The museum ialize the tragedies of specific communities so as Despite criticisms, the Canada Hall has, in the has been beefing up its history collection in recent to meet its fundraising needs. Indeed, it is pinned end, proved highly popular with visitors who enjoy years and has just acquired a ceremonial last spike between its two foundation myths, caught between poking about the inside of an oil rig or a Victorian from the Canadian Pacific Railway, a strongbox Jean Chrétien’s commitment to a memorial (which parlour, yet it is precisely this display that the that belonged to Sir John A’s doctor and a large he later backed away from) and Gail Asper’s vision museum is set to rethink, spurred on by a govern- collection of objects retrieved from the Empress of of advocacy. The museum has raised $138 million ment that has picked the monarchy and the armed Ireland, the CP ocean liner that sank in the Saint from private donors to date, but Moses points out forces as its national icons and complains that Lawrence in 1914 in the worst maritime accident in that communities who have made donations will nobody knows their Canadian history anymore. the country’s history. feel they have bought space in this new institution. Education is, of course, a provincial jurisdiction, At least the new Canadian Museum of History Murray is already dampening expectations, warn- but perhaps a new Canadian museum of history will have some artifacts to display. ing some communities they will not be represented would be a useful federal contribution, Heritage The Museum for Human Rights is starting from on opening day, but promising that since the minister James Moore speculated to the CBC when scratch. Museum president Stuart Murray will not museum is primarily digital its exhibits will be ever he announced the plan to rename the museum and say what “iconic objects” the $350 million museum changing. “If we tried to tell every story every com- grant $25 million toward a $30 million reworking of project might have acquired with the $37 million it munity wanted us to tell we would never open this its history exhibits that will renovate almost a quar- is spending on the exhibits themselves. He men- museum,” Murray said. ter of its floor space. tions only the possibility that it will include a loan Just as the federal government made its com- There are several red flags attached to the pro- from Library and Archives Canada of the last letter mitment to this difficult new national institution ject: it certainly appears underfunded since it cost written by Louis Riel before he was hanged, but in 2007, it cancelled plans to build premises for a $50 million to build the original Canada Hall in the he points out the museum’s collection is mainly national portrait gallery that would house the large 1980s and ’90s, in an age that did not demand the digital: it is collecting oral histories on such topics portrait collection of Library and Archives Canada. interactive, multimedia displays that contemporary as women’s rights, gay rights, aboriginal rights Both decisions seem largely political: the portrait visitors have come to expect. Although the minis- and the experiences of new Canadians. A spiral gallery was an Ottawa initiative that had become ter has promised that the curators are to operate of glass erected at the historic Forks of the Red associated with Liberal profligacy; the human at arm’s length, the museum cannot be blind to and Assiniboine rivers in downtown Winnipeg, rights museum was a Winnipeg project associated the government’s interest in a kings-and-battles the building, designed by U.S. architect Antoine with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pro-Israel version of national history leading up to the 150th Predock, will take visitors from a dark entry hall stance and with the decentralization of federal anniversary of Confederation in 2017, the date the up toward the light. Its displays will cover notori- institutions. Still, they mark a telling choice to build exhibits are set to reopen. ous human rights abuses, including the Holocaust, a monument dedicated to complex ideas digitally In a gesture toward those who believe Canadian the Ukrainian famine or Holodomor, and Canada’s displayed and call it a museum while a physical history is the celebration of Canadian achievements, residential schools. But Murray stresses, “this is collection that languishes in storage can only rep- the museum already added a hall of personalities in not a museum of human wrongs; it’s a museum of resent itself to the public with digital images on a 2007, offering brief displays on 27 different figures human rights. It’s not that you shy away from the website. who, to use the museum’s own terms, inspired, disturbing material, but you look at it and say what “At the Holocaust Memorial Museum in founded, fought, built or governed, including writ- happened, why and what can we learn from it.” Washington you round a corner and you see a bin ers Gabrielle Roy and Mordecai Richler and polit- This is programming a long way from the idea of of shoes. There is nothing you have to say,” Murray icians Joey Smallwood and Jeanne Sauvé. Located a Holocaust museum originally bruited about when observes. The thousands of shoes are on long-term on a mezzanine level above the Canada Hall, it is it was decided in the 1990s that the Canadian War loan from the Majdanek Museum at the site of the not as popular with visitors as the quaint streets and Museum would not include a Holocaust gallery. In former Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. shops below it: on a quiet weekend this winter, the that instance, veterans had protested loudly, fear- To buy such objects would seem horrible, to fabri- Canada Hall was bustling with people while the fig- ing that such a gallery would overshadow what they cate them worse still; and yet their presence is key ure of Sir John A. Macdonald stood forlornly at the saw as their museum. to the story the Washington institution is telling and start of his exhibit ready to give lessons in the Great The question of whether the Jewish -commun the display is often cited as visitors’ most moving Men and Women school of history to students who ity will be satisfied with the much changed CMHR experience there. Sometime next year the doors were nowhere in sight. will only be answered on opening day, but the will open in Winnipeg and a fractious, opinionated Canadians, when asked their opinions at con- development process has featured a long and acri- citizenry can judge whether the Canadian Museum sultations that the museum held last fall across the monious debate about whether the Holocaust is a for Human Rights has found its pile of shoes.
26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Tailings of everyThing Warren Peace is so PoliTical New from A Novel by StepheN lAw A ColleCtioN of Short fiCtioN “A gripping tale that eerily by CANAdiAN writerS reflects a disturbing reality in Edited by Sandra McIntyre, global politics. It takes the reader Foreword by Fred Stenson on a scintillating journey that “Brimming with wild imagination and twists and turns from Canada stunning variety, this is one of those to Guatemala, war to peace, beautiful literary anthologies that comes and lost to love. This book is a along once a generation, that we’ll look celebration of the human spirit.” back upon as the beginning of a whole new 9781552665152 $19.95 9781552665497 $19.95 The remarkable story — Garry Leech, vision of Canadian fiction.” author of Beyond Bogota — Lee Henderson, of how Canadian farmers author of The Man Game killed GM wheat in Canada. R o s e w a y P u b l i s h i n g fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway Elemental to Canadian culture.
Growing Resistance Canadian Farmers and the Politics of Genetically Modi ed Wheat The Literary Review of Canada is the country’s leading forum for intelligent by Emily Eaton discussion and lively debate about art, politics and ideas. Since 1991, we have In 2004 Canadian farmers led an international featured in-depth articles on culture and public affairs from some of the coun- coalition to a major victory for the anti-GM try’s most provocative thinkers, critics, journalists and writers. movement by defeating the introduction of In recognition of this role as one of the basic building blocks of Canadian Monsanto’s genetically modi ed wheat in public discourse, the LRC was granted charitable status. Canada. rough interviews with producers, industry organizations, and biochemical We invite you to join a circle of exceptional LRC supporters dedicated to companies, Emily Eaton demonstrates how the bringing the country the kind of engaged, Canadian-focused conversation it inclusion of producer interests was integral to deserves. Every donation at every level can make an important difference in the coalition’s success in voicing concerns about enabling the LRC to extend the non-partisan, robust conversation you have environmental implications, international market opposition to GMOs, and the lack of come to expect from us. All gifts over $10 are recognized on our website at transparency and democracy in Canadian
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 27 Does Good Policy Make Good Neighbours? Without consistent rules, some voices get more attention than others. Michael Valpy
native-born Canadians but within seven Everyday Law on the Street: City years are substantially unhealthier than Governance in an Age of Diversity the native born, a result of the stress Mariana Valverde of trying to survive here. The urbanist University of Chicago Press Richard Florida has pointed out that 247 pages, softcover Canadian cities, like their American ISBN 9780226921907 counterparts, are producing a grow- ing mass of underpaid, non-upwardly mobile (and largely immigrant) service hortly before he died in 2006, industry workers. Bernard Ostry wrote an op-ed In McKenzie’s metaphor, rather Sessay for The Globe and Mail than the different coloured bits of advocating a royal commission of Canada’s multiculturalism forming a inquiry into multiculturalism. Ostry, one single mosaic picture, they more closely of Canada’s great civil service manda- resemble a pile of pieces dropped indis- rins, had drafted and implemented the criminately on the floor. Trudeau government’s multiculturalism Finally, on top of all that, Stephen policy in the 1970s. Harper’s Conservative government and In his essay, he applauded Canadians’ elite voices such as those of the business popular celebration of diversity, but community and The Globe and Mail worried that the wheels might be start- have turned sour on multiculturalism— ing to fall off and that, with a million “The terminology has ceased to have any newcomers turning up every four years, real meaning … Multiculturalism should Canadians had no idea where multicul- be struck from the national vocabulary,” turalism was going or what kind of soci- said The Globe in a 2010 editorial—and ety was being created as a result. are busy redefining immigration as Indeed, there are disturbing signs, an inbound conveyor belt of inexpen- which is why Mariana Valverde’s Every sive labour meeting whatever needs day Law on the Street: City Governance business has, crated and moulded to in an Age of Diversity is an excellent idea. She the pre-eminent immigrant entry points that applaud the War of 1812 and other designated sets out to examine cultural bias, meaning are home to 96 percent of Canada’s non-white symbols of bonding glue in the national culture. Eurocentricity, in municipal law and enforcement population—are becoming increasingly socio- Why train young Canadians to be plumbers and and to make the point that, if our pluralistic cities economically unequal with immigrants puddling electricians (and miners of the country’s natural are to be inclusive, urban governance must move at the bottom. Our boasted-about post-ethnic resources, for that matter) when it is cheaper to beyond micro-local planning and being captured culture looks a lot different viewed through the import people that other countries have trained, a by neighbourhood “village elder” politics, and statistic that, say, in a city like Toronto, more than business plan freighted with the risk of aggravating embrace rational, city-wide principles. 70 percent of Anglos live in Anglo enclaves, turn- job-seeking young Canadians’ already dystopian It is in cities where we live side by side, all ing Toronto into Oreo-ville, white in the downtown view of their future? Moreover, said McKenzie, colours, cultures and classes. City governments centre, brown, black and yellow in the suburbs. And planning immigration solely on the basis of today’s legislate how we share public space, tolerate each while the well-off, university-educated offspring labour market in a rapidly changing economy is at other’s cooking smells and noise and pastimes, of immigrants are sliding more or less easily into best a short-term fix. respect and assist each other as workers, parents, mainstream culture—and thus, yes, have no need With all respect to a well-known and esteemed homeowners, tenants and worshippers. City hall of multiculturalism as The Globe and Mail’s Doug scholar, Mariana Valverde’s book is merely a first is the common terrain where supposedly we meet Saunders writes—research points to less educated swipe at this subject, a somewhat helpful polemic to defend each other’s interests as well as our own. members of the second generation struggling with but not a satisfactory piece of research. We will have “Diversity Our Strength” says the City of Toronto’s the dashed expectations of seeing themselves in to wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting. motto, and it is Toronto, one of the world’s most the mirror as fully Canadian but living in a country Valverde, director of the University of Toronto’s ethnically diverse urban areas, that is profoundly where they and their families are not accepted as Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, absorbing the rapid changes to Canada’s demo- such. acknowledges that “I was limited both by the time graphic character. This city is Valverde’s focus. Sixty percent of recent immigrants are unable to and the research funding available and by my own There is so much to absorb. Our largest cities— find work commensurate with their education and background” (which she explains in her opening training. Kwame McKenzie, professor of psychiatry sentence: “I came to urban studies relatively late Michael Valpy is a senior fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at in life”). Perhaps her energy should be applauded in the University of Toronto. He is examining the Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, for setting out to accomplish so much in one state of social cohesion in Canada as the 2012–2013 told a recent LRC symposium that immigrants when book: a demolition of iconic urban philosopher Atkinson Foundation fellow in public policy. they arrive in the country are in better health than Jane Jacobs’s ideal of a city of villages achieving
28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada local solutions through grassroots political organ- ers and parking garages approved by city council. of Toronto’s licensing tribunal passing judgement izations; an exposé of the systemic flaws in city Moreover, Valverde does not make clear what it is on alleged wrongdoings of taxi and tow-truck planning and city hall governance; an analysis of that bylaw enforcement officers would be doing if operators and other business owners requiring cultural bias in matters such as street-food vend- they weren’t responding to councillors’ directives permits in the city, Valverde labels it “the Christian ing, private property use, poverty, noise control, the since, as she points out, there are only 150 of them spectacle of confession and repentance” focused rules governing the Toronto taxi industry and in a city of two and a half million people, too few on wringing satisfactory remorse (in a theological the “othering” of Muslims. But what she has pro- to be proactive, which means they are left being sense, she makes clear) from adjudicated miscre- duced is too spotty, too thin. reactive to complaints made to elected representa- ants. I have trouble with this. The defect in the Jacobs model, she says, is that tives—which sounds like democracy in action. She fnds a specific cultural target in Toronto’s so-called spontaneous interactions in neighbour- Valverde does bring out some interesting taxi industry, where so many of Toronto’s struggling hoods are in reality takeovers of the political agenda findings. immigrants are behind the wheel, unable to find by self-appointed “village elders” professing to She writes that the guiding principle of Toronto’s jobs elsewhere and bound to Dickensian working speak for the whole community but tending to be bylaw officers is not to bring down the hammer of conditions of 75-hour weeks at earnings a fraction white and established. This leaves on the margins law enforcement except as a last resort, but rather of the minimum wage. Valverde cites an ingen- the poor, the young, tenants and the newly arrived to bring complainants and offenders together in ious complaint brought before the Human Rights who do not understand what is going on or are too mediated agreement. As she points out, the impos- Tribunal of Ontario, claiming that the effect of the timid to speak out or, worse (as is often the case), ition of impersonal rules in large multicultural cit- city’s licensing system was to restrict new immi- are the targets of the self-appointed elders—the at- ies can lead to paradoxes and absurdities. Likewise, grant drivers—overwhelmingly from Africa and risk youth and mentally disadvantaged who will be the traditional legal test of “reasonableness” in a Asia and thus “racialized”—to holding inferior so- the occupants of proposed group homes battered culturally diverse environment can be problematic. called “ambassador” taxi licences that do not allow by the winds of NIMBYism, the people who want She encounters an officer who tells her the city’s them to hire replacements if they are sick or want to build houses or grow gardens culturally at odds bylaw against growing vegetables in front yards is time off. The drivers lost their case, but they made with some sort of nostalgic neighbourhood norm, not often enforced in neighbourhoods with large the point (after the city licensing office was ordered the entrepreneurs whose business ventures the vil- concentrations of Italian Canadians, which, she to submit photographs of all ambassador drivers to lage elders and their supporters consider morally says, is one of the rare examples she finds ofcultural the tribunal) that city law can have the appearance distasteful. of discrimination. The taxi regula- Writes Valverde: “Democracy The urbanist Richard Florida has pointed tions are currently under review. at the scale of the city, particularly Finally, mosques. in today’s increasingly economic- out that Canadian cities are producing Muslims are the Canadian ally divided cities, requires care- “other,” the people the rest of ful attention to the mechanisms a growing mass of underpaid, non- us in the country find most -dif used to solicit input and allow for ficult to accept. Of the approxi- citizen participation. Jane Jacobs’s upwardly mobile (and largely immigrant) mately dozen mosques built in front-stoop vision of spontaneous the Greater Toronto Area over the neighbourhood action, somewhat service industry workers. last two decades, maybe half have naive even in her own time and been resisted by “community place, has become completely inadequate, and it sensitivity in municipal governance. “I wondered,” activist groups” formed for no purpose other than may be positively harmful as a model of governance she writes, “if the antivegetable rule had been to block their fellow Canadians from building a in cosmopolitan cities riven by very sharp eco- passed at a time when Anglo-Torontonians were place for worship and to raise the usual objections nomic, social and racial differences. Democracy at feeling threatened by immigration”—a state- that mask Islamophobia—not enough parking the scale of the city, particularly in today’s increas- ment Valverde would agree is not the language of spaces, minaret too high, building footprint too ingly economically divided cities, requires careful academic research. In any event, the bylaw, now large, non-conforming uses of ancillary structures, attention to the mechanisms used to solicit input repealed, appears to have been specifically against fear that they will attract vandals. and allow for citizen participation.” growing vegetables on city-owned verges between Valverde devotes a chapter to mosque building, Maybe. But we need more evidence of how the street and private property. focusing on two Muslim congregations that had urban democracy truly works. Are tenants, the She points out that not all noise protection in a to battle their way through local government and poor and minorities really mute? Is the alterna- city is equal, something likely not to have occurred their neighbours and one Sikh community that got tive—muscular, professional municipal govern- to most inhabitants. Poor citizens and recent dinged for worshipping in a private home without ance handing down from above decisions based on immigrants with no economic choice but to live in a licence. This is a disgrace comparable to the anti- carefully crafted and adhered-to rules—really the low-rent accommodation along Toronto’s arterial Semitism that openly stained English and French alternative in a democratic environment as deli- roads and close to industrial and commercial areas Canada up until the 1960s and Valverde is right to cately stitched together as a big, multicultural city? cannot call on the same enforcement of the anti- highlight it. Valverde’s book is long on argument and short on noise bylaw as homeowners in leafy suburbs who However, she also might have written about examples. (Actually, in one of the illustrations she are bothered by garbage and delivery trucks and the mosque in the Toronto suburb of Vaughan, gives—a campaign led by a white community activ- amplified music. where community protesters—primarily Chinese ist against proposed assisted housing in a down- She notes that if she lives beside a noisy family Canadian, interestingly enough—were told by the town Chinese neighbourhood—she points out that there is little either she or city officials can do. “But mayor and most councillors (including one prom- some influential members of the Chinese- com if the people next door are singles receiving welfare inent Chinese-Canadian councillor) to get stuffed. munity were campaigning in favour of the project.) or disability payments and living in a legal room- Or about the mosque in the suburb of Thornhill that From her assault on the Jacobs paradigm she ing house, then I have an automatic right to voice shares a parking lot with a neighbouring church heads into city governance, presenting a portrait of my opinions about them to officials who hold the and synagogue. Or about the mosque built out of a elected councillors who, instead of devoting them- all-important threat of denying the proprietor a former horse barn in the suburb of Richmond Hill, selves to developing intelligent city-wide enhance- license renewal. In other words, neighbours wield which was welcomed by the neighbours as a com- ments, expend their efforts on chewing holes in a power that … can deny housing to those who are munity improvement. Valverde usefully could have planning rules and skewing bylaw enforcement already less empowered and more marginalized told us why one municipality differs from another. by perpetually responding to the loudest voices of not only economically but from the point of view The fact is, Everyday Law on the Street unfortu- complaint within their wards—creating in the first of citizenship.” nately does not take us to any conclusion; it merely instance a crazy-quilt of incoherent planning varia- She declares that noise protection against out- whets our appetite and Canadians definitely need tions and, in the second, wasting the time of bylaw door amplified music extended to noon on Sundays scorecards on how well they are managing divers- enforcement officers by deflecting them from more in Ottawa is a cultural bias. Well … would the same ity. Bernard Ostry said we had a choice: “stumble important work. bias apply to free street parking in Toronto until blindly into the future, accepting whatever flows Again maybe this is true. But her report is not 1 p.m. on Sundays, where across the street from from existing policies, or do the royal commission conclusive. One wonders, for example, if commun- my office Jews and Muslims and Hindus take their thing we’re so good at and come to a decision as to ity consultation might have saved Toronto from kids to a University of Toronto sports centre with- what kind of Canada we want to see.” That second the appalling waterfront wall of apartment tow- out paying $3 an hour? After watching the work choice sounds interesting.
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 29 Letters and Responses
Re: “Beautiful Mistakes,” by Siobhan Virtually every public safety organization in the establish a degree of distance from Britain (while Roberts (March 2013) country—the Canadian Association of Chiefs of continuing to depend on the empire) in order to hanks to Siobhan Roberts for an interesting Police, the Canadian Public Health Association, address the truculent attitude of the American Tand thoughtful review. I note that Roberts is the Canadian Criminal Justice Association—advo- government to Canadian autonomy within the an apt choice for reviewer, since she has written on cated for the law. Recently Toronto’s police chief empire. When Britain lost its status as a world related topics before, in her biographies of math- reported that without information contained in power, the Canadian Navy’s role in managing the ematicians Donald Coxeter—whose “obsession the registry, gun seizures are down 40 percent over relationship with the United States had to be trans- with geometry was motivated exclusively, almost last year. And according to material made avail- formed into careful partnership. The conclusion of with an elitist bent, by beauty”—and John Horton able through freedom of information provisions, an influential group of “20 Canadians” who met at Conway, who we learn here had a “lifelong obses- the cost of maintaining the registration of rifles the Château Laurier in July 1940 was that “cooper- sion with symmetry.” and shotguns—a mere $2 million a year—has been ation with Washington is going to be either volun- The review quotes mathematician Marjorie exceeded by the costs of new measures to com- tary on Canada’s part, or else compulsory; in any Senechal as saying that “the main intellectual pensate for its loss. Pearce’s claim that the law was event it is inevitable.” The struggle ever since has tool we have is to find patterns.” One difference ineffective but “a political triumph for the gun con- been to ensure the relationship is a constructive between the reductionist and complexity view- trol and women’s movements in Canada” seems a one that meets immediate national needs without points is that the former tends to see these patterns deliberate effort to marginalize. sacrificing long-term values. as underlying the structure of the system (so in a The notion that the gun lobby is a “model of Generally, this is a success story, but the prom- sense the system can be reduced to them). From democratic action” advocating for “traditional inent role that the Canadian Navy took in the the complexity standpoint, they are just patterns, masculine ideals” ignores the links between guns, enforcement of United Nations sanctions against which can be exploited to a degree but don’t hyper-masculinity and violence well documented Iraq following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 necessarily say much about what is going on at by Michael Kimmel and exploited by gun push- raises serious questions about Ottawa’s under- a finer level (where the patterns may be equally ers. “Consider your man card reissued” was the standing of the consequences of military actions. interesting but different). The model is therefore tag line for the AR-15 rifle used in the Newtown In 1983 Pierre Trudeau warned Parliament that perhaps less likely to become confused with reality. massacre. Canadian women are more at risk in “the starving refugee lying in the hot dust of the While an aesthetic sensibility is useful for rural and western communities precisely because Sahel can scarcely summon the strength to help detecting patterns, it is also the case that the pat- of the good old boys with guns about whom Pearce himself, let alone strike out at us. If his children terns we see are influenced by our aesthetic. One waxes poetic. survive,” he then added, “they will remember us, of the strongest contributions of the complexity Rabid opponents of gun control in Canada and with fury in their hearts, you can be sure.” approach (which, as discussed in the book, has (quite distinct from the average hunter or farmer) Only ten years later the spiritual leader of al been in development since at least the 1960s) have well documented ties to the National Rifle Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, made it clear that the is new visualization techniques, such as those Association in the United States, the most power- Iraq sanctions had aroused just such fury. Canada described in the last chapter for systems biology ful lobby in the world. And what is even more cannot impose strategic values on its more power- and economics, which have revealed features that ironic is Pearce’s wilful ignorance about the ideo- ful neighbours, and I do not dispute Lagassé’s con- elude reductionist, symmetry-based approaches. logical underpinnings of the gun lobby extrem- viction that leverage to promote smart strategies Roberts concludes very elegantly by quoting ists in Canada and their misogyny or links to calls for significant contribution of forces of the Emily Dickinson on the to and fro between truth white supremacists (well documented in Warren highest quality, but I believe that well-educated and beauty, and wonders if that is the deeper Kinsella’s Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Canadian officers should have the confidence to message I am getting at. I will of course leave the Network), and obvious to anyone on the receiving develop and put forward superior strategies, and book (and not just the cover design) to answer that end of their threats and harassment. that the Canadian government should make its one, although I would certainly agree with Emily Wendy Cukier military support conditional upon allies meeting Dickinson that the dialogue between truth and President, Coalition for Gun Control the highest strategic and ethical standards. beauty never really ends. Toronto, Ontario Nicholas Tracy David Orrell Fredericton, New Brunswick Toronto, Ontario Re: “The Siren Song of Independence,” by Philippe Lagassé (March 2013) Re: “Charity Gone Wrong?” by Kyle Re: “Bogeymen Versus Sportsmen,” by he opening paragraphs of Philippe Lagassé’s Matthews (March 2013) Christian Pearce (March 2013) Treview, expressing his concern that the n his review of my book, Haiti’s New hristian Pearce’s review of Arming and Canadian Navy be provided with the ships it wants, IDictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake and the CDisarming: A History of Gun Control in distracts from my focus in A Two-Edged Sword: UN Occupation, Kyle Matthews agrees with me Canada reiterates the often racist history of gun The Navy as an Instrument of Canadian Foreign that Haiti is broken. And yes, I place the primary control legislation directed toward the threat of Policy on the requirements, possibilities and blame for this on the international community. But guns in the hands of the “other.” He notes the racial pitfalls necessarily associated with the politico/ much of what I am trying to argue in the book is discrimination resulting from unequal applica- military role of the navy in Canada’s foreign policy. lost in his review. He accuses me of exaggeration, tion of mandatory minimum sentences for gun He notes, as I do, R.J. Sutherland’s advice that a but systematically caricatures what I write. Perhaps offences. However, his dismissal of controls on purely Canadian defence “rationale does not exist making it sound like I’m saying crazy things makes rifles and shotguns because “there are relatively and one cannot be invented,” but Sutherland’s was it easier to avoid dealing with what I am actually few problems with access to firearms appropriate an argument for multilateral defence structures, saying. for [hunting or sport]” could not be more wrong. not an assertion that Canada did not have its own There are so many distortions in Matthews’s Rifles and shotguns are the guns most often policy objectives. Multilateralism was a necessary review and I’ve not been granted enough space to used to kill Canadians. They dominate violence means of serving national purposes. reply to them all, but let’s take the most import- against women, suicides, accidents and murders While Lagassé correctly notes that Sir Wilfrid ant. My book does not call for the international of police. Prior to 1991, most murders in Canada Laurier’s decision to establish a Canadian navy community to leave Haiti. No one who cares about were committed with rifles and shotguns, which is followed in the wake of the 1897 German decision Haiti, least of all me, wants Haiti to be isolated why they were the focus of the 1991 and 1995 legis- to construct a high seas fleet, the German peril from the world. That is why I wrote in my conclu- lation. Since 1995 the overall gun death rate has was only the occasion, not the reason. Laurier was sion that “in electoral processes, international fallen by more than 40 percent. Homicides with more influenced by the growth of the United States observers, and the international media, should be rifles and shotguns have fallen by 62 percent, while Navy. For technical and constitutional reasons the welcome,” that “aid needs to get to Haiti in a way murders with handguns remained constant, driven Canadian Navy had to be closely partnered with that builds up the public sector … is controlled by weapons smuggled from the United States. the Royal Navy, but its strategic purpose was to democratically, and … is accountable to the
30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada public,” and that “Haiti will need capital, and that capital will have to come from other countries.” I don’t see how any of this could be interpreted as a call for North Korea–style autarky. Subscribe! Matthews writes that my assertions are “not evidence-based,” that he “waited to find the 1 year (10 issues) *Rates including GST/HST by province smoking gun, such as a government document … (individuals) (libraries and Individuals Libraries outlining a plan to form an empire on the back of institutions) ($56 + tax) ($68 + tax) Haiti’s people.” In my 530 endnotes I do, of course, Canadian addresses* $56 + tax $68 + tax BC, MB (12%) $62.72 $76.16 cite plenty of government documents and primary ON, NB, NL (13%) $63.28 $76.84 sources—thanks in part to WikiLeaks. But I argue Outside Canada $86 $98 NS (15%) $64.40 $78.20 that what has been done to Haiti was done right Prices include shipping and postage. Rest of Canada (5%) $58.80 $71.40 in the open. Who needs secret documents when the public record shows the U.S. embassy took President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on a plane to the Name Suite/Apt. Central African Republic in the middle of the night and coordinated with the armed rebels by phone? Street City Last, Matthews writes that “harping on the Province or State Country past will not change the future.” At Independence, France blockaded Haiti and forced it to pay Postal/Zip Code E-mail 150 million francs (about $21 billion in today’s terms) for the property France lost (i.e., the slaves). Telephone Fax NH1304 It took about 130 years, but Haiti paid. The legal case that the money be returned is irrefutable, the Please bill me! My cheque (payable to the Literary Review of Canada) is enclosed. sum of money immense for Haiti. When Aristide Charge my Visa or MasterCard. started asking for it back, France helped overthrow Card number Expiry him. Is the past really past? Justin Podur Signature Toronto, Ontario Fax or mail completed form to Literary Review of Canada, PO Box 8, Station K The LRC welcomes letters—and more are available Toronto on m4p 2g1 • fax: 416-932-1620 • tel: 416-932-5081 on our website at
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Illustration: Graham Roumieu
April 2013 reviewcanada.ca 31 Every year, I return to Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Coming up Marriage — an incredible collection of truths. What breadth of in the LRC vision, what profundity. The stories are utterly fresh, experi- menting with ever-wilder narrative structures. They turn corners you Saving nature by never sensed were there, but that feel fated once the outcomes play out. saving energy Alice Munro is the master of making the strange seem inevitable. Michael Cleland Esi Edugyan, novelist Who reads CanLit in high school? Michael Lapointe Minor hockey mania Sheema Khan When pundits look west Yuen Pau Woo The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud Lesley Krueger Mining with clean hands Philippe le Billon Women and girls in WWI Tim Cook Dave Barrett’s impossible government Beth Haddon Graphic stories from Jerusalem Kenton Smith
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32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada SpurSpur n.n. anythinganything thatthat urgesurges onon
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Power, Politics, and More
Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher? How Government Decides and Why Canada, the Provinces, and the Donald J. Savoie Global Nuclear Revival 978-0-7735-4110-8 $34.95 cloth Advocacy Coalitions in Action Ebook available The Merger Delusion Duane Bratt How Swallowing Its 978-0-7735-4069-9 $34.95 paper “Provides readers with an inter- 978-0-7735-4068-2 $100.00 cloth Suburbs Made an Even pretation of trends and develop- Ebook available Bigger Mess of Montreal ments inside the federal public Peter F. Trent service that is unmatched in its A timely contribution to under- 978-0-7735-3932-7 $39.95 cloth breadth and depth of information Ebook available standing the policy challenges and interpretation.” of relying on nuclear power. Paul G. Thomas, University Shortlisted for the of Manitoba Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing 2012
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