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Jessica Duffin Wolfe Decoding Boredom

Also in this issue Krzysztof Pelc Diplomatic Bullies Greg Marchildon Fixing Health Care Murray Campbell Lessons of Lac-Mégantic

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“Bessner’s writing brings this part of “[The Evidence Room] is a remarkable Authors Cyril Levitt and William our history out of the shadows. All of achievement, among the most Shaf r carefully sift fact from ction, us owe it to those remarkable men and important works in my view on the providing a compelling perspective on women to read their stories” Nazi ‘project’ - accessible but concise how ordinary Canadians reacted to the and extraordinarily compelling.” intensifying antisemitism in Europe. –Peter Mansbridge O.C. –Beryl Lang

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3 Letters 18 Recommended Dose of Reality 30 Worthy Backstory Bruce Conron, Heather Menzies, Yet another misdiagnosis won’t fix our The mystery of Ava Lee’s Uncle Chow Royce MacGillivray, Dan Falk health care system Basil Guinane Greg Marchildon 4 The Superpower Next Door 31 Dead on Arrival Bully for you — but at what cost? 20 A Doctor’s Practice There’s no elegant way to eat cretons Krzysztof Pelc Four decades in northern medicine Lydia Perovi Larry Krotz 7 One Explosive Situation 32 With Jackie An industry that writes its own rules 21 Racism in the Court It all started when I answered the phone leaves us all at risk The real consequences of fake justice Gilbert Reid Murray Campbell Harold R. Johnson Poetry Fishing for Answers 10 Bored to Life 24 Nocturne for a Revoked Citizen Finding ourselves in zeros and ones The causes and effects of the Phoebe Wang, p. 9 Jessica Duffin Wolfe Asian carp invasion Bob Sexton Although I Am Always Talking 13 Pax Atlantica Bardia Sinaee, p. 11 NATO’s long-lasting relevance 26 But Is It Trash? Lapse v. Detail Jeffrey F. Collins Evaluating art in the age of Nyla Matuk, p. 27 conspicuous consumption 16 Separation Anxiety Marlo Alexandra Burks The secret correspondence of two Quebec luminaries 28 The Voices of Summer Bruce K. Ward Baseball from the broadcast booth Charles Gordon

Marlo Alexandra Burks, a the Ottawa Citizen and Maclean’s, Greg Marchildon holds an Ontario Bob Sexton is the managing editor translator of German literature he’s still a writer. Research Chair in Health Policy and of Outdoor Canada magazine. and aesthetic theory, teaches at the System Design at the University of University of Toronto. Basil Guinane, an LRC editor, Toronto. Bruce K. Ward recently published was associate dean of the School Notes on Bergson and Descartes, Murray Campbell is a contributing of Media Studies and Information Krzysztof Pelc teaches international a translation of French philosopher editor to the LRC. He’s also an Technology at Humber College. relations at McGill University. He Charles Péguy. He is a professor active member of Rail Safety First, looked at global free trade in the emeritus of religious studies at a Toronto community group. Harold R. Johnson is of the March 2018 issue of the LRC. Thorneloe University, in Sudbury, Woodland Cree peoples of northern Ontario. Jeffrey F. Collins is a research Saskatchewan and a retired Crown Lydia Perovi ´c, an opera critic, is fellow with Dalhousie University’s prosecutor. He is working on a book currently writing a book on death. Jessica Duffin Wolfe is a professor Centre for the Study of Security and about the Canadian justice system. of digital communications and Development, as well as a Canadian Gilbert Reid lived and worked journalism at Humber College, in Global Affairs Institute fellow. He Larry Krotz wrote Diagnosing in Europe for many years, as an Toronto. lives in Prince Edward Island. the Legacy, about the discovery, economist, lecturer, and diplomat. research, and treatment of type 2 Back in Canada, he has a novel and Artwork by Cameron Chalmers, Charles Gordon was, until diabetes in Indigenous youth. a story collection due out this year. an award-winning illustrator, recently, a rec league third baseman. muralist, and graduate of OCAD Previously a humour columnist for University, in Toronto.

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2 Literary Review of Canada Letters

Re: “Keeping Governments Re: “‘Scots Wha Hae’” by ­displaced from their ­ancestral lands Re: “A Big Bang of Physics” by Honest” by Tim Harper Chris Alexander (January- through the “improvement” rational- Dan Falk (March 2019) (December 2018) February 2019) ization of the clearances, participated in the displacement of the Indigenous Not only a nice review and all-round had a chuckle reading Ray Argyle’s have a bone to pick with Chris peoples from their ancestral lands in piece, but a staggering effort. Dan, I dismissive remarks, in the LRC ’s I Alexander’s review: he elides one many places, including modern-day you must be hoping never to read January-February letters page, about of the main points that T. M. Devine Ontario. about superposition ever again. Power, Prime Ministers and the Press: makes in The Scottish Clearances: Heather Menzies @PhillipCBall A History of the Dispossessed. Devine Ottawa Via Twitter I enjoyed Tim Harper’s piece makes it clear that the Highland clear- on the Ottawa press gallery, but ances were different than the Lowland it didn’t tell me much about clearances because they ruptured a y admiration for this well-­ There must surely be a medal for Robert Lewis’s new book, Power, way of life. It was a way of life embed- Mwritten and most interesting­ working your way through five books Prime Ministers and the Press. ded in the land, oral tradition, and the book review by Chris Alexander, with at once (pun intended). Could the LRC get someone to Gaelic language. Devine makes his one caveat: my usual dismay at the @JimBaggott review it? case in a muted tone, so it’s possible subject.­ Via Twitter to miss his point; other reviews have In my many years of researching So here I submit my review: I came named it, however, and it’s supported the old Highland Scottish settlement to political consciousness around by recent scholarship. of Glengarry, Ontario, I have yet to It was a pleasure, and a challenge, to the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956. The “rigs” that Alexander says the discover any connection between read and review five books on quan- Reading Lewis’s book has given me cottars farmed were part of a long- it and the fabled Highland clear- tum mechanics. The good news is that an appreciation of men like Willison, evolved pattern of sharing the use ances. I don’t deny the clearances my summary of the relevant physics Dexter, and Dafoe, about whom I and management of land, through existed, but I suppose their magni- appears to be okay. But a few bio- had only a slight knowledge, and of self-governing townships known as tude has been wildly exaggerated by graphical slip-ups crept in during the women like Duncan, Lipsett-Skinner, fermetouns. Even when land came a multitude of authors. Victimhood editing process. While Canada some- and Brimmell, about whom I knew to be controlled on paper through is lovely — ­retrospectively — in its times tries to claim Lee Smolin as one nothing. the feu charters of the feudal period, sweet, dire way. But what of the facts? of its own, the Toronto-based physi- The year 1965 was also notable. local legislation like the Leases Act of cist (who holds a faculty position at Royce MacGillivray That sweltering summer, I had the 1449 protected the people who had the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Ottawa most exciting job: parliamentary tour traditionally inhabited and worked Physics) is technically American. Anil guide in the House of Commons. the ground. The new concept of Ananthaswamy, meanwhile, is not As Lewis points out in his treatment a lease on land was considered a Re: “Better Voters” by based in London but divides his time of the Pearson era, the year was “trust unit.” Elizabeth May (March 2019) between Berkeley, California, and one of triumph and trauma. It saw John Locke helped turn “land” Bangalore. And although Jim Baggott the inauguration of our distinctive into a commercial concept. Through Our democracies were designed has a doctorate in chemical physics national flag and the tragic fall of his philosophy of changing land into before anthropogenic climate from the University of Oxford, he is Guy Favreau. And then there was private property, it was “improved” change, nuclear weapons, geo­ not affiliated with Oxford and identi- Pearson’s ill-advised call to dissolve through the addition of labour, and engineering, ecology, and internet fies himself as a science writer. Parliament, to seek that illusory it could yield a profit. More than any propaganda. Maybe we need states, I regret the errors, and I blame the majority that his confidant Walter other, this idea of modifying land to constitutions, institutions, and pol- Uncertainty Principle. Gordon thought was within his make it profitable in an emerging itical philosophies that do not find Dan Falk grasp. But Pearson’s federalism was commercial era drove the clearances. their primary texts in the nineteenth Toronto cooperative, and landmark social I also want to highlight the con- century. @LRCmag @ElizabethMay legislation wove its way into our lives tinuity of local self-governance here in @David_Moscrop by the end of his mandate. Canada. Consider the self-organized­ A further clarification: The LRC iden- @BenClarkson Robert Lewis, thank you for writ- township meetings in Upper Canada tified Penguin Press as the publisher Via Twitter ing your first book. It is an excellent during the settler-colonial­ era. It was of Lee Smolin’s Einstein’s Unfinished history of the press gallery, tracing its through these meetings that Robert Revolution. That’s true in the United evolution from a cadre of nineteenth-­ Gourlay circulated his famous sur- This is a decent review — except the States, but in this parallel universe, century partisans to a legion of vey on the problems affecting rural last line kinda bungles it. We need the book is published by Knopf professionals redefining their roles development in the early 1830s. A to save democracy from partisan- Canada. in this digital age. I couldn’t put the coherent sense of shared grievance ship, not “politics.” @David_Moscrop book down. over absentee large-scale landowners @ElizabethMay Send your feedback and comments to and related transportation prob- [email protected], or post to Bruce Conron @TimAbray lems emerged, helping ignite the our social media channels. We may Toronto Via Twitter 1837 Rebellion. Thousands of Scots, edit for length, clarity, and accuracy.

April 2019 3 The Superpower Next Door Bully for you — but at what cost? Krzysztof Pelc

t the height of NAFTA renegotiations last summer, I found myself facing a A recurring question: What could Canada do? The Trump administration had raised tariffs on steel and aluminum in May 2018, with renegotia- tions well under way, and it had refused to exempt Canada, its biggest supplier of both. Trump called our genteel prime minister meek, weak, and dis- honest. Almost daily, his administration threatened to escalate the trade conflict and exit NAFTA alto- gether, upending the most important trade rela- tionship of our two countries. McGill undergraduates asked me the ques- tion during lectures, as did journalists on live television, when I was brought on wearing my political scientist hat. No matter who asked, they were hoping for some cunning strategy, a point of leverage that Canada might exploit, a winning argument we could make. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but what kept coming to my mind was that we were the Melians. And they, the Americans, were the Athenians. I kept coming back to the Melian Dialogue, an episode from the fifth century BCE, likely the most referenced diplomatic ­encounter in history. First translated into English by Thomas Hobbes in 1629 and translated anew ever since, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War rec- ords the unbalanced back and forth between the powerful Athenians and the far weaker Melians. As Thucydides — historian, general, and first-hand witness of the war — recounts, the Athenians arrive on the Aegean island of Melos demanding unconditional surrender. (This is the same island that would later give us the Venus de Milo, not to Diplomatic bullies demand more than your lunch money. mention countless Greek seafood restaurants bear- ing the name Milos.) Others throughout the region the Athenians press their siege, take Melos, slaugh- cheaper Canadian steel for their own production, have long ago submitted to Athens, but the Melians ter the men, sell the women and children into slav- and American consumers would end up footing the continue to resist, fearing a life of bondage. ery, and bring in 500 Athenian colonizers to inhabit bill. They tried in vain to demonstrate that the U.S. When the envoys arrive, the Melians attempt to the place themselves. actually had a trade surplus with Canada — buying reason with them, claiming a right to neutrality in Canada was not under siege in 2018. But, into Washington’s bogus trade-­deficit reasoning. the war between the powerful city and its neigh- confronted with an economy twelve times our None of this swayed the Trump administration, bours. But the Athenians will hear none of it. It isn’t size, what could we do? As we face a powerful which kept up demands for still further NAFTA a matter of anyone’s rights, they respond: “We shall nation bent on exercising its power, the logic of concessions. not trouble you with specious pretences . . . and Thucydides’ dictum seems irrepressible: little room So when asked about what we could do, I instinct- make a long speech which would not be believed.” for strategy, even less for argument. ively responded, Not much. But those students and Athens is merely enacting the natural course of If Canada could somehow find a point of lever- TV anchors got me wondering: When it comes to things, they say. And out comes Thucydides’ win- age, say by targeting a sensitive American industry bullies on the international stage, what, if anything, ning line, the one every political science student with countermeasures, the U.S. could retaliate has changed in the two millennia since Thucydides? and military college grad continues to memorize twice over, and at lesser cost in the short term. 2,500 years later: “The strong do what they can and Owing to its size, the U.S. has a large internal market f history is first recorded in newspapers, it’s the weak suffer what they must.” to fall back on, in a way that Canada does not. Like Iquickly revised in the prefaces of reissued publi- Nevertheless, the Melians try to defy the maxim, the Melians before them, officials in Ottawa tried cations. Book writing is a slog, so before an entirely and refuse to surrender. As if commenting on the reason against power. The Trudeau team argued new monograph can address a changed reality, turning of the leaves and the fall of the first snow, that proposed trade measures would end up cost- an older one gets updated with new front matter.

Thucydides informs us that the following winter, ing the U.S. economy: American firms relied on The authors of such addenda have the difficult task by Cam Chalm e rs e ron I llustration

4 Literary Review of Canada of squaring existing arguments with novel facts. a quasi-constitutional­ flavor: the superpower was It’s a game of reconciliation, and the palimpsestic tying its hands to reassure weaker states that it reading of history it invites make prefaces to new would not turn despotic, much as a constitution editions uniquely revealing. binds a sovereign as well as a people. Those weaker A new edition of G. John Ikenberry’s After governments, in turn, willingly entered into the Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the bargain in exchange for some influence over the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, the first emerging order’s development. Postwar institu- since its original 2000 publication, features just tions offered them voting rights, sometimes even such a preface, in which the author must wrestle veto power. They also provided, most crucially, the with ongoing events. When After Victory first came ability to hold the U.S. accountable and even chal- out, it quickly found its way onto political science lenge it if it violated the shared rules. syllabi across North America and became a go‑to Max Weber once observed that rulers need fewer reference for anyone examining how global order resources when ruling through consent rather than emerges out of international disorder. coercion. It’s an insight that extends far beyond Ikenberry’s instant classic focused on “order political economy. Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, for building” moments in the wake of great modern example, has shown that aging male baboons that wars: 1648, 1815, 1945. Postwar solutions varied get the most grief from a troupe’s alphas tend to be widely, he observed, and so did their successes. those that were the most aggressive when they were Some were short-­lived, while others outlasted in their prime. By contrast, the ones that engage in major historical shifts, like the end of the Cold grooming and socializing just carry on into their War. The book demonstrated how decision making golden years. specific to one historical moment can result in the Ikenberry showed that — not unlike kings and seemingly immutable logic of world affairs in the monkeys — states that restrain their power can next, as victors make bets on what kind of system actually maximize it, just as money put away in the will best serve their ends. In doing so, it served as a bank grows at interest. Selectively flexing its muscle reminder that the current international regime, of extends a superpower’s ability to do so, even as which NAFTA is a piece, had originally been erected underlying dynamics shift: the relative numbers of in the wake of the Second World War to advance tanks and people, the ratios of GDPs, differential American self-interest.­ rates of technological innovation. Through this Like the Athenians of antiquity, Americans found approach, a country can sidestep what might other- themselves with power to spend after the war. The wise be a violent transition or decline. question was how best to spend it. In previous eras, This is how America went about consolidat- the Romans and the British had used their power ing power through consent and socializing. By to dominate, ostentatiously projecting their might exercising restraint as the dominant player, the as far as it would reach. By contrast, the U.S. chose U.S. afforded others the luxury of restraining their to convert its preponderance of influence into a set power, too. By banking influence, it could make of staid global institutions — the United Nations, regular withdrawals, even during times of rela- the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the tive decline. In ways previous powers had not, International Monetary Fund — designed to bind Washington set out to outlast the fleeting postwar all countries together, including itself. The result moment that enabled it to shape the rules. And so was a very different hegemonic order. American policy throughout the second half of the Ottawa was an early supporter of U.S.-led multi- twentieth century gives the lie to what might seem lateralism. Together with their British counterparts, an inescapable logic of power, the one Athenians Canadian officials believed that such a regime could argued was immutable: “We found it existing before prevent U.S. isolationism — and with it a return to us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us.” the protectionism that had wrought havoc during the 1930s and paved the way for the Second World o how has Ikenberry’s original argument fared? War. Although Canadian officials were not always SHow difficult is it to preface the new edition happy with the new global trade regime, especially of his influential monograph two years into the in the 1950s and 1960s, they were the ones to push Trump administration? After Victory originally the broader GATT membership into negotiating appeared shortly before September 11, 2001, what would ultimately become the agreement’s changed the course of history. At first, the “new successor, the World Trade Organization. unilateralism” of George W. Bush’s War on Terror In building a new world order, the U.S. came seemed to throw the robustness of a decades-­old upon an original design of international govern- global arrangement into question. But Bush’s poli- ance, one more often associated with national cies look mild compared with the current presi- politics. As Ikenberry pointed out, the result had dent’s assault on global governance: exits from the Trans-­Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Intermediate-Range­ Nuclear Forces Treaty; blocking new judges at the Discussed in this essay WTO; repeated claims of NATO’s obsoleteness; and the barrage of NAFTA threats. The History of the With the benefit of hindsight, Ikenberry admits Peloponnesian War in his well-reasoned­ preface, “the strong version” Thucydides of his liberal hegemony argument now looks “a bit Translated by Richard Crawley fanciful.” So he retreats to a weaker form: exercis- ing restraint not only affects what happens when After Victory: Institutions, the tables have turned — it can delay that shift in Strategic Restraint, and the first place. While the U.S. can simply break out the Rebuilding of Order after of its self-imposed­ shackles if it so chooses, it pays Major Wars (New Edition) a price for doing so. Ikenberry suggests that Bush G. John Ikenberry spent part of his second term making up for his first term’s go-it-­alone approach. Beyond allies’ reduced willingness to cooperate, that cost included a renewed keenness among foes to disrupt­ the

April 2019 5 status quo. In other words, a superpower that once ­interests. And while Kim Jong‑un enjoys the lime- law of the strongest.” Resistance was not only rhet- exploited its might is one that others will be in light that two unprecedented summits with Trump orical. Japan, in particular, was bent on resisting a greater hurry to topple. have yielded, North Korea has so far rejected what it saw as illegitimate action. Yet we are left to grapple with the uncomfort- Washington’s core demands. The record shows that despite potent threats of able point that Trump’s ongoing belligerence In fact, I would argue, the history of the retaliation, the U.S. proved 34 percent less likely appears to have borne fruit. Ikenberry points out trade regime would lead us to expect as much. to secure concessions in targeted countries when that NATO allies, Canada among them, have com- Unilateralism breeds disproportionate resistance, it opted for unilateralism than when it chose the mitted to increasing their defence spending. North even when it is backed up with considerable power. ­formal multilateral route of dispute settlement Korea was brought to a negotiating table of sorts. In what might be described as its first exercise of under the GATT. The apparent lesson of American The European Union has adopted a stance on judi- postwar unilateralism, starting in the mid-­1970s, unilateralism of the 1970s is that legitimacy pays off. cial activism among WTO judges that is closer to the the U.S. expended significant efforts to impose its All these years later, the Melian Dialogue U.S. position. The Chinese government has vowed will on foreign partners, and it had just as hard remains an instructive lens through which to exam- to interfere less with foreign businesses operating a time getting those countries to give in to its ine the international order. In part that’s because in China. And in a test of wills, Turkey agreed, in demands as it does today. In what now looks like bullying does work: the Athenians take Melos, October, to release an American pastor held for two a rehearsal for the conflict with China, the com- after all. But, interestingly, the island’s resistance years on espionage charges. mercial foe of the time was Japan. Americans were is more effective than the Athenians expect. The Given the recent record, does Athenian-­style buying Japanese cars, and U.S. firms were running siege lasts nearly a year, the Melians score some diplomatic bullying, not restrained wielding of Japanese semiconductors. Japan, though, was small victories, and the Athenians have to call for power, work after all? On balance, Ikenberry’s hardly importing any American goods. Pundits reinforcements. In a passing remark that political updated answer appears to be yes, but with a sig- warned that schoolchildren would soon be learn- theorists have mulled over ever since, Thucydides nificant caveat: just as the spendthrift can live like a ing Japanese, the better to understand their new lets slip that the siege finally succeeds because of king for a week if he blows it all in one go, so too can overlords. Policy makers wanted to force a change, some “treachery taking place inside.” If not for this powerful states exploit their power in contravention and in 1974 Congress took global rules into its own act of sabotage, we are left to believe, the Melian of international rules, norms, and expectations. hands, creating a domestic trade court that would resistance might have endured a while longer. But The lingering question is what happens next. unilaterally decide whether Japan was in violation what is often overlooked is that the Melians, in their The system of governance that emerged after of its commercial commitments under the inter- entreaties to the Athenians, appeal not to universal the Second World War is ideally suited for keeping national regime. In defiance of that regime, the values of justice but to their adversary’s own self-­ count. Reputation in international affairs has always domestic court could allow for trade sanctions interest. As the Melian envoy warns, the Athenians mattered; but since 1945, it has been recorded for against countries it judged to be in violation. might “force others to become [enemies] who all to see, and everyone knows the score. When Allies reacted no less vehemently than today. would otherwise have never thought of it.” Trudeau’s diplomatic entreaties failed to bring The Canadian GATT representative claimed that The greatest effect of America’s approach over down the steel and aluminum tariffs, Canada American unilateralism was “a threat to the con- these last two years has been to shake our convic- brought a legal challenge to the WTO. A number tinued viability of the multilateral trading system.” tion in its reliability. Not since the War of 1812 and of other countries, including Mexico and the EU, And, using words that could be lifted straight the Fenian Raids have we so doubted the U.S. is filed parallel cases. Such disputes and appeals to from the Melian Dialogue, Europeans decried the on our side. Now an entire generation of Canadian the international regime matter. Few nations want U.S. actions as “an irreparable act of folly,” warn- policy makers may be brought up to think differently to be branded as violators of the rules — especially ing Washington was “weaving a web of frustra- and to take steps to ensure our interests against the rules they wrote. In fact, the Trump administra- tion, into which they too would most certainly unpredictability of U.S. behaviour — at great cost to tion went to great lengths to justify its steel tariffs fall. . . . It should not abuse its strength, nor use the the superpower that wrote the rules. under (an admittedly questionable invocation of) the national security exception. Yet that effort, in itself, testifies to the grip of law. Even when the U.S. skirts the rules, it does so by reference to them. The simple fact is that no nation today behaves like the Athenians, announcing “might is right” and carry- In the May Issue ing on. Governments have internalized the rhetoric of law, and that may be the most ingrained, lasting effect of American-led­ global governance in the second half of the twentieth century.

am tempted to take Ikenberry’s updated view of I power politics one step further: the last two years Vancouverism have actually led me to question the benefits of dip- lomatic bullying in the first place. After all, for all its Spencer Morrison belligerence during the NAFTA renegotiations, the U.S. under Donald Trump secured an agreement that might well have been reached under Hillary Clinton. The president may have vowed that any AIDS, Fashion, and Cosmetics deal would be “totally on our terms,” but in the end Canada conceded little more than it already had Elspeth H. Brown under the Trans-­Pacific Partnership, and it held out on every one of its top priorities: the enforce- ment mechanism of the original chapter 19 and the Mental Health system of supply management both remain. For all of Trump’s talk of exiting NATO, European allies Leanne Simpson have mostly paid lip service to his demands for increased defence spending: Canada has commit- ted to 1.4 percent of GDP by 2026–27, modestly up from 1.2 percent. In its trade conflict with the U.S., CBC History Lessons China offered little more than symbolic gestures that Trump might use to save face domestically, Matthew Bellamy and it has instead turned itself into an unlikely defender of the very internationalist values that the U.S. once promulgated, adapting the rhetoric of global governance to its own export-­driven

6 Literary Review of Canada One Explosive Situation An industry that writes its own rules leaves us all at risk Murray Campbell

The Lac-Mégantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied Bruce Campbell James Lorimer and Company 200 pages, softcover and ebook

ou can be forgiven if things get a bit foggy when Yyou think about the Lac-­ Mégantic disaster. Nearly six years ago, on a splendid weekend evening in a quiet Quebec village, forty-seven people died after a runaway train loaded with tank cars carrying highly volatile crude oil went off the rails and exploded. It was the largest disaster on Canadian soil since the Halifax explo- sion of 1917, and, deservedly, it was a very big story. But then, as is the way of news coverage, the TV satel- lite trucks and cable news reporters pulled out as the flames died down, leaving the town’s residents to make sense of the tragedy and to try to A runaway train carrying volatile crude oil exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, on July 6, 2013, killing forty-seven. put their lives back together. For the world outside Lac-Mégantic,­ the story has sput- nearly three days for the fire to be extinguished. of rigorous public scrutiny that pipeline projects tered intermittently in and out of the headlines: Shirts melted onto skin. No DNA could be found for face; the infrastructure is already in place, and Three railway workers were charged with criminal five of the victims. increased rail traffic does not trigger the same negligence and then acquitted. The rail company In Campbell’s view, the tragedy is further proof environmental review that a new pipeline does. carrying the oil that night declared bankruptcy, that the rules continue to be stacked in favour So-called pipelines on wheels running across and civil damage lawsuits dragged on through of railways — as they have been since the Pacific Canada, to refineries in eastern Canada and the the courts for years. Footage of the disaster was Scandal of 1873 revealed that federal politicians United States, largely depend on tank cars that are withdrawn from a Netflix production after general took bribes in return for contracts to build tracks to unsafe for the transportation of dangerous goods. outrage. But there’s one headline you haven’t seen, British Columbia. Corruption was the issue then, Trains are often two kilometres long — in Toronto because no senior officer of the rail and oil com- but today the impact of political interference is a locomotive would be at Yonge Street as the last panies involved was held criminally accountable, reduced safety. “The disaster was the direct result of car crosses Bathurst Street — and can carry up to and no independent inquiry into the Lac-­Mégantic decisions made by companies, and by governments 70,000 barrels of oil from the Alberta oil sands or disaster ever took place. that are supposed to protect the public,” Campbell the more recently opened oil patch in the Dakotas. Bruce Campbell clearly intends The Lac-­ writes. “A long pattern of loosening safety standards Crude is cut with chemicals to make it flow more Mégantic Rail Disaster to be the inquiry that never in the name of deregulation and cutting red tape freely, and it’s these chemicals that make the oil happened, and it’s just as clear that this is a work made the catastrophe in Lac-­Mégantic possible.” especially volatile. As the residents of Lac-Mégantic­ of deep emotion. (The book’s author and I are He adds an even more important reason why discovered, an explosion of cars carrying Bakken oil not related.) In August 2013, when he was still Canadians should care: “Many of the conditions from North Dakota devastates everything for two executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy that led to the disaster are still in place.” kilometres around. Alternatives, he took his son to Lac-Mégantic­ to wit- Campbell makes a vital point, because railcars ness the devastation. When he returned to Ottawa, carrying millions of litres of volatile crude oil, chlor- ampbell has scrupulously researched how we he learned that a colleague had lost three family ine, ethanol, and propane crisscross the country Cgot to the point where a small Quebec town members in the inferno, and he resolved to provide every day, often through heavily populated areas, could be nearly obliterated on a quiet evening in “a counterpoint to the official view” of the disaster. and there is little prospect of this situation changing July without any warning. In his telling, it begins The result combines meticulous research with as long as Canadians, Americans, and our govern- with the sloganeering of former U.S. president personal stories and horrifying details about the ments are divided about the wisdom of building Ronald Reagan, who talked about governments get- destruction caused when sixty-three­ railroad cars more pipelines. Rail shipment is safe — until it ting out of the way and “unleashing the magic of the

e dia c ommons Wikim ec / p h by S ûr e té du Québ p hotogra piled on top of each other and then blew up. It took isn’t. Yet it operates largely outside the framework marketplace.” Brian Mulroney was an early ­convert

April 2019 7 to this view, and the day after his Progressive ­phenomenon: he left government in 1987 to A decade ago, much of Alberta’s oil flowed south Conservatives took office in 1984, he delegated his become chair of what is now called the Canadian to the U.S. through pipelines, but rail was the only deputy prime minister, Erik Nielsen, to get rid of Transportation Agency, a quasi-judicial­ tribunal.) option for shipping North Dakota’s. With little regu- “red tape” and to reduce the amount of government CP Rail and the newly privatized Canadian latory or environmental scrutiny in the state, things intervention in the economy. National set out to bump up profits (and shareholder moved fast. The first loading terminal was built A new Railway Safety Act was introduced the value) by cutting costs. In this, they were helped in 2008, allowing 100-car trains to be assembled. following year, and a process of deregulation by the Liberal government’s introduction of safety Almost all of the oil was carried in the notorious began. (It’s one of the oddities of federal oversight management systems, or SMS, in 2001. In theory, the TC‑111 tank car, known in the U.S. as the DOT‑111, that the law is distinct from the Transportation of SMS regulations required companies to lead the way a vehicle so flimsy insiders call it “a pop can on Dangerous Goods Act, as if dangerous cargo has in managing risk and promoting safety. In practice, wheels” (it was designed to carry corn oil). no bearing on rail safety.) Deregulation continued Transport Canada, its resources drained away by By 2012, North Dakota was shipping some under Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government, with government spending restraint, proved incapable 450,000 barrels every day. The Irving Oil refinery a revision to the Railway Safety Act that further of holding the railways to their commitments, so in in Saint John, which was not connected to a pipe- reduced Transport Canada’s powers. line, was a favourite destination. The In place of orders that could be issued number of trains travelling across the to railways, there were now rail safety U.S. Midwest and crossing the border rules. But they were mostly written by So-called pipelines on wheels running at Windsor, Ontario, grew exponen- the industry itself — what Campbell tially — from an annual total of 500 describes as a major victory. “As one across Canada largely depend on tank cars in 2009 to 160,000 in 2013. former insider told me,” he writes, CP Rail trains were forced to travel “ ‘This is where things went astray: tank cars that are unsafe for the through built-up areas in southern­ When you put the fox in charge of transportation of dangerous goods. Ontario and Quebec, including mid- the chicken coop, you need to have town Toronto, because rail lines someone with a pretty big gun watch- through the Ottawa Valley had been ing the fox.’ ” abandoned. The railways’ hold on government deepened effect the industry became largely self-­regulated, Because CP no longer had track all the way to through the phenomenon of “regulatory capture,” which Campbell decries as “a major surrender of Saint John, it had to subcontract the final stretch in which industry veterans were recruited as Transport Canada’s direct-oversight­ authority.” to the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, a regulators and then returned to senior positions U.S.-­owned carrier with a poor safety record. The after a period in government. Since the Mulroney s railway regulations cooled in Canada, oil seventy-eight-car­ train that crashed into Lac-­ years, most senior managers in Transport Canada Aproduction in northern Alberta and North Mégantic began its 5,000-kilometre­ journey in have come from industry “and many of them do Dakota ramped up. The oil in both places is difficult North Dakota on June 30, 2013. Six days later, MMA not take off their railway hats after they arrive. to extract and requires chemical dilution. This is picked it up just outside Montreal. The train had just Senior officials tend to defer to companies’ exper- especially true of Bakken crude, which the industry a single crew member — MMA had talked a compli- tise and economic priorities, downplaying safety can ship only with the addition of toxic, volatile ant Transport Canada into allowing this — who was considerations.” (Nielsen was a prototype of this compounds. called in with three hours’ notice on his day off.

“A visual world of irreducible richness and complexity…” — Border Crossings, on the artwork of Don Proch

Since 1970, Manitoba artist Don Proch has built an astonishing body of work evoking a semi-mythical Prairie past and an unsettled and unresolved modernity. Richly illustrated with masks, prints, sculptures, and excerpts from the artist’s notebooks, Don Proch: Masking and Mapping surveys the career of one of western Canada’s most influential visual artists.

DON PROCH: MASKING AND MAPPING • $49.95 • 978-0-88755-834-4

8 Literary Review of Canada The lead locomotive was smoking and spewing in the air brake system leaked to the point where some initial moves: Ottawa moved to ban use of oil, pulling cars on track so badly maintained that the hand brakes that Harding had applied — seven the TC‑111 for crude shipments sooner than previ- Transport Canada mandated a top speed of just of them — could no longer hold the train. It began ously planned. Instead, the CPC‑1232, a slightly twenty-five kilometres per hour on some stretches. its roll into Lac-­Mégantic. By the time it reached improved TC‑111, would be allowed to carry After ten hours, the operator, Tom Harding, the centre of the town and hit a corner it couldn’t crude until 2025, when fully replaced by the new parked his 9,330-tonne rolling pipeline at the top navigate, the train was travelling at more than a TC/DOT‑117. of a hill, eleven kilometres out of town, because hundred kilometres per hour. Elsewhere, the Railway Safety Act was subjected parking it further back on a flatter surface would to a review, in which everyone from rail compan- have blocked a road crossing. He applied what he n a way, the fiery tragedy was a 2015 campaign ies to community groups was consulted. However, thought were a sufficient number of hand brakes Igift for the federal Liberals, who vowed to prop- Campbell maintains, the review was lacklustre and and walked away. Minutes later, the troublesome erly fund Transport Canada and railway oversight. sidestepped flaws of the overall safety regime. In locomotive caught fire. Local firefighters put out the After the election, the new transport minister, other words, the railways are still in control of their blaze, but to do so they turned off the engine. This Marc Garneau, talked tough, promising to make own safety practices. Worse, nearly a year after the disabled an air brake. An hour later, the pressure rail safety his “No. 1 priority.” There were certainly findings were released, Transport Canada has still not figured out what to do with them. And it hasn’t yet announced a review of the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act. Meanwhile, derailments are a weekly occur- rence — in remote regions, for the most part—and Nocturne for a Revoked Citizen many go largely unnoticed. In 2015, the northern Ontario community of Gogama jumped into the From a dissolved country, I crept over hardened fields. headlines briefly, with two separate derailments. Hours lapse to pitch, moon grainy over indifferent cottages. In the first, twenty-nine cars headed to a Quebec The ragged shore is slivered into portions. refinery came off the tracks, spilling 1.7 million What claim here, between scrub pine and dock pilings, litres of crude that burned for five days. In the thoughts tumble, choppy water, dark as a wiped slate. second, thirty-nine cars derailed, and the resulting I barter for a slippery entrance with heirlooms, fire destroyed a bridge. Other incidents are quickly waking aches, names I won’t pronounce again. forgotten because their impact is minimal. In Every night is an urgent crossing. August 2016, a sleepy two-man crew in charge Fireflies patrol the woodshed, tender dogs rave of two locomotives speeding through midtown at vagrant shadows. They have taken my blood scent. Toronto missed a signal warning and clipped the They have taken payment. I prepare to jettison my attachment tail end of a 900-metre-long train doing a crossover to terra firma, ease into the body’s wayward boat from one track to another. The two locomotives derailed and came to rest on Howland Avenue, in that expects betrayal, expects an unreliable bed. the densely populated Annex neighbourhood, spill- Will the waves accept me, will knees kowtow to the cold ing 2,500 litres of diesel fuel. cured mud and my mind sink downward, All the while the Alberta government has move parallel to bedrock and bitter earth pledged to buy as many as 7,000 railcars to ship and glide into solace like a selkie into her real clothing. 120,000 barrels of crude oil a day. And here’s Some nights, each stroke is an embrace in reverse, the thing: the 6 million litres of oil that spilled in carrying me halfway across on silken currents. ­Lac-­Mégantic easily eclipsed the biggest pipeline The warmth amniotic. The heart beats its animal kettle. spill in the past decade, the 4.4 million litres that Other nights, I’m escorted like a hostage, tethered poured out near Little Buffalo, Alberta, in 2011. to the shallow places, the perimeters, and never loosened Garneau’s pledge to zero in on rail safety also to the centre where desire can unfold infinitely seems to have dissipated, with the current situa- beyond its cross-examinations. Up ahead, the horizon tion frustrating the Transportation Safety Board, the federal investigator whose Lac-­Mégantic report is irreproachable and mapless, its long mouth accumulating griefs, was watered down under industry and government conferring them like toll payments, bribes, token gifts. pressure. In releasing its watch list last fall, the TSB Time’s relentless accounting doesn’t slow, but lets us recover pointed to “important gaps” in safety management in the absence of stars for one rotation, until, then . . . and noted that more than sixty of its recommenda- the unperforated dark, the ash-black, bone-black, tions are still outstanding after a decade — and some brightens to blood-black, iron-black, renewing itself, are more than twenty years old. It called for a “pro- outer edges flaming like surface corrosion, found change in attitudes and behaviours” around streaking to vermilion, the blood glow through skin, crew fatigue, a contributing factor in more than light dragging me through an aperture, ninety of its investigations. Furthermore, it observed the mind’s filmy paper exposed to a radiant bath, that Canada lags behind Europe and the U.S. in tech- imprinted with old negotiations, lists, heaped offerings, nologies that ensure crews respond to visual signals. shell buttons in dust. I am admitted on a trial basis It noted that Transport Canada and the industry remain in “study mode,” although the TSB has been into a whorl of sheets and merciful heat, pressing for changes: “The past few years have seen into a generous blankness, into the caesura of myself, many meetings but insufficient progress on imple- amid a vista dripping with ink and dispossessions menting the solutions that are already known.” that seep through the cotton curtains, shaking like banners Campbell comes to a more pointed conclusion: flying above the site of resuscitation, of return, “Deregulation and deference to industry are still of every alarm sounding, of irreversible exile the order of the day.” This underscores the pro- where loose scars and battered objects are cauterized found disconnect between our view of pipelines as artifacts in a country I’ve woken to reconstruct. and our view of railways. Pipelines are subject to heavy scrutiny, and every proposal is greeted with Phoebe Wang picket signs and protests. On the other hand, trains transporting dangerous goods near our homes operate largely out of the spotlight — except when Phoebe Wang, who teaches at OCAD University, is the author of Admission Requirement. things go tragically wrong. Even then, the world quickly moves on. The Lac-Mégantic­ Rail Disaster urges us to slow down and fix the problem.

April 2019 9 Bored to Life Finding ourselves in zeros and ones Jessica Duffin Wolfe

Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface Mark Kingwell McGill-Queen’s University Press 216 pages, hardcover and ebook

Bitwise: A Life in Code David Auerbach Penguin Random House 304 pages, hardcover and ebook

Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology Ellen Ullman Farrar, Straus and Giroux 320 pages, softcover

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms Hannah Fry W. W. Norton and Company 272 pages, hardcover and softcover

ometimes I, a millennial college prof, sit in meetings and listen quietly, attentively, to Scomplaints about how millennial students are too distracted, too bored, until I start to think that my entire generation must have leapt from the pages of an Isherwood or Waugh novel, and was not in fact scraped fully formed from Instagram’s databases, as everyone knows. On such occasions, I often think of the boredom chronicler and British In a sense, human boredom is where computer code begins. child psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s reminder that “the best thing we can learn from children counterpart, spare time, boredom is often the the actual machines now holding up the world. is how to lose interest.” The young — like social luxury of the young and privileged, while, as every Those who expect from his subtitle that he will media users, millennials, and their junior com- generation ages, there comes a moment when its illuminate digital user interfaces will be frustrated patriots Generation Nobody-­Knows-What-to-Call- bores decide the young are too bored and tell them by how he uses the term. He is not really trying to Them — are not necessarily mired in boredom, but so. In Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface, write about computer interfaces; rather he uses the they are rather good at losing interest when it’s time University of Toronto philosopher and declared word as a metaphorical amalgam of a broad range to learn something new or at acting bored when it social media non-user­ Mark Kingwell has penned of practices by which people live with technol- seems expedient. the latest in this genre. Kingwell gathers previously ogy. In his lengthy effort to define his idea of “the Beset as we are by the relentlessly proceeding published material with a delicate if not tenuous Interface,” he claims that it encompasses interstitial logic of computation, it seems worthwhile to return line of argument about boredom as a philosoph- places, as well as actual digital interfaces, users, now and then to the very human state of boredom, ical condition that presides over digital portals. At swiping, the “social, political, and economic fac- to celebrate the gawky sovereignty of its adoles- times he adulates boredom and investigates it as tors that are all in play in late-capitalist­ life,” and cent habits. Several new books — a ­philosopher’s “philosophically interesting,” a state that can gen- a few other things, too. I think what he is saying take on digital boredom, two memoirs by pro- erate choice, creativity, sense of self, and indeed here is that his so-­called Interface means whatever grammers, and a mathematician’s account of philosophy itself; at other moments, he decries he wants, and, capitalized, it becomes a personi- algorithms — offer fresh views of what it means what he sees as the boredom of media saturation. fied bogeyman standing in for whatever he thinks to be both bored and human alongside comput- He is persuasive in arguing the first point but comes is wrong with the world today. Indeed, the book ers. Together they reveal boredom as a mirror off as digitally prudish in making the second, when frequently evinces a digital paranoia that I have that shows us how our machines do not, in fact, he counterintuitively tries to locate boredom at the come to associate with baby boomers: for example, resemble us. heart of a certain twenty-­first-­century malaise of he gives a rather panicked account of how some The idea of boredom presents a series of div- the overstimulated. people listen to podcasts on accelerated speed set- isions, between being bored and not bored, and, Technology, Kingwell likes to say, is an environ- tings (gasp!), though this practice is hardly different

occasionally, between young and old. Like its ment, a formulation that slides rather quickly over than flipping through a book. by Cam Chalm e rs e ron I llustration

10 Literary Review of Canada Reading Kingwell when he does boredom — addicted to numbing engage with digital media is to hear their minds in pursuit of a false enjoy- Marianne Moore read the opening ment. Most seem to find a great deal lines of her poem on poetry: “I, too, Although I Am of genuine diversion in the habit. dislike it.” Nose-­thumbing is often So do I. Too much, in fact, to pursue it the descriptor that comes to mind regularly. Kingwell isn’t trying to write for Kingwell’s writing, especially in Always Talking about millennials or younger people his stance toward other authors and in general, but the negative pall of There is an air, among critics, alas. He occasionally proceeds his argument about the boredom of these miniature plateaus, by alternately trashing and rehashing digital life can’t help but implicate New Yorker articles: his animosity of childhood tucked away. them. Claims that life online is in toward Malcolm Gladwell, infamous Sunlight disappears here some way bad often have such under- ever since their strange 2008 debate like cheddar into tones of generational division, since on TVO’s Big Ideas, resurfaces here, the young now can’t really fathom while an extended section cribs an a dog’s mouth. This an entirely offline world. (I’m thirty-­ Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker piece is my desert island mood, five, and I remember life before the on facts. as free, surely, as I have internet. That makes me officially old. Kingwell is at his best when he ever felt. I have the muted, I’m fine with that.) We millennials are offers a philosophical and cultural toothless hunger accustomed to this sort of disdain for account of boredom itself, setting the our habits, but Kingwell’s complaints fashionability of French ennui against make me feel for all those other happy of a worm dividing itself, the ever-­present British risk of being users out there — Facebook grandmas the eagerness to occupy thought a bore, and exposing the pre- and Twitter dads — who are less fre- tenses of intellectual aspirants who your disregard. Love quently called vapid. I guess we’re all claim to get bored easily, as though apart from its habitual dimension millennials now. that were a good thing. Most com- is occasional, punctuated The bumf on the back cover sug- pelling is his encounter with Adam gests that Kingwell is not engaged in Phillips’s idea of boredom as a contra- like the weather moralizing, but this seems to be pre- dictory “wish for a desire.” As Kingwell with fatigue. My million cisely what he risks. There is a genera- puts it, “We can truly find ourselves contrary espousals, tional divide between those who, like again in boredom. We can discover my regimen of sleeping late Kingwell, were educated in the last what we temporarily lost, that is, and clear city streets, reveal gasp of a purely analogue public arena knowing what to do with ourselves.” and those who came next, who went This productive, even beneficial through grad school with Facebook a life lived outside of any aspect of philosophical boredom open in another tab. Yes, yes, yes, we local sense. I have conquered fades in the boredom he describes in know, we know, social media is offi- online life, which inheres in a sense of vast provinces. I have cially bad, it’s distracting, it’s mean- stasis provoked by having too much tasted every species ingless — and yet: reducing it, from a rather than too little to think about: on the mountain. distance, to a constant drain on the lives of those who both like it and rely There is tremendous loneliness Bardia Sinaee on it for personal, professional, and and desolation in the political life political well-­being is a mistake, as is of our time and the lifebuoy of failing to engage with the specifics of truth has disappeared beneath the Bardia Sinaee is a contributing editor at the LRC. the technologies that make it possible, waves. The boredom generated captivating, and treacherous. by such isolation is distinct from other modalities. . . . Its sufferers f technology creates an inhabit- are over-­stimulated, not under-­stimulated. in the first-­person plural about what is inevitably Iable environment, it is one made They do not know what to do with their a mind-blowingly­ diverse array of ways different up of a host of historically specific tools that may ­feelings, and, as so often, thwarted anger people use digital media. And indeed he vacil- be even more thoroughly entwined with boredom descends into depression. lates between speaking about how “we” all use than Kingwell proposes, which is why, despite mis- our devices and offering up aloof descriptions that givings about his argument in general, I am glad to I do not know who Kingwell is talking about claim a kind of anthropological distance from his have taken his invitation to think about boredom in this and other similarly generalizing passages, topic. In a part of Wish I Were Here that was first and technology together. For example, viewing but I suspect he might mean anyone who uses the published in this magazine, Kingwell imagines “the human boredom as the root of automation might Interface, which is to say, all of us. Despite appar- most vivid portrait of boredom from our own day” be useful. When something is too boring to do ently infecting everyone with this new kind of angry as a group of people flicking their screens together myself, I write a program or algorithm — literally and inarticulate boredom, his Interface is also too in a now-familiar­ scene of modern companionship. a set of steps or rules that tell a computer how to interesting. There is endless incident online, begin- “These people are not in that moment bored,” he automate a task. In this sense, human boredom is ning and ending with the provocative recurring writes, “or at least they would likely deny being so where computer code begins. We can think of the question of whether to like or repost something. if asked. The point is rather that this behaviour is boredom of trying to read large data sets, or pity This drama of banal choice, he suggests, is driven intended to ward off any lurking boredom.” He con- the search algorithms fated to spend eternity read- by neoliberal forces and hides the real boredom of tinues: “What we observe here, in short, is a quietly ing not just some but all of the most boring pages digital life. “The Interface thrives on decisions,” he desperate attempt, always doomed to fail, to stave of the internet. This isn’t Kingwell’s domain, but writes, “even if they are empty, addictive, or harmful. off any encounter between the self and its desires.” other recent books on the relationship between That is the essence of its relation to boredom. We are Boredom, he writes, “haunts the whole scene.” human beings and computation do help us to think never bored when we are making decisions.” While I wonder to whom Kingwell thinks he’s giv- through where boredom might fit in a concept Kingwell suggests that digital engagement defers ing this othering description of this little group of technology that is not purely cultural but also productive boredom, he also analogizes it to bore- of phone-flickers.­ He certainly does not include a realm of machines and their (boring) tasks. dom as entrapment: “We are stuck in the Interface, himself among them. One suspects he’s too old Memoirs by programmers have a way of bring- beguiled by our own device-­imprisonment.” to find himself in such a scene. I’m not much of a ing us closer to machineland. In Bitwise: A Life in Internet users, for him, are both ineluctably bored, social media user myself, but I think it’s patroniz- Code, the American programmer David Auerbach and not bored enough to be able to find themselves. ing, especially for declared non-­users like Kingwell, writes about teaching Google’s algorithm how I find Kingwell’s desire to have it both ways less to suggest that those who do seek out such digital to lose interest in useless results and notes the frustrating than his assumption that he can speak pleasures are bound in some kind of inescapable inflexibility of computers, which are very good at

April 2019 11 ­calcifying rules and abiding by them, in compari- computation; we are more. The machine’s ultimate son with our relative eagerness to shift and change, failure, she contends, is that it doesn’t eat and shit. either by error or by evolution in intent — or by Without a body, artificial intelligence can’t live the getting bored. “Computers,” he points out, “thrive desires that drive our real, intuitive, creative, emo- on tedium.” Auerbach’s primary interest is in tional, and non-linear­ thinking, that give us the “translation” between realms of computing and power known as being human — and that permit literature, an objective he pursues via dense and us to get bored. lofty explorations of computer science alongside “Thanks,” Ullman told the founders of Google memoir. His effort to compare human thought when they offered her a job in 1999, “but I’m tired of and algorithms leads him to personality tests programming.” She presents this retort as a regret- and a personal account of falling through the table product of twenty years of misfit immersion cracks of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the bro culture of tech, of not owning her skills of Mental Disorders. In both cases, he shows in the moment, of taking the fearful way out, of the weakness of letting constructed systems of letting a sexist culture diminish her confidence. order — codes — classify us. Nevertheless, the idea of moving on from program- In Hello World: Being Human in the Age of ming at Google’s very feet confers a certain status, a Algorithms, the British mathematician Hannah Fry thrill, and one suspects there was also some strong argues that algorithms are simply tools and should truth in the line. To be tired of programming — to be be seen as such. Her itemization of their work in able to get bored of it — may be the clearest display a variety of fields, including law, medicine, and of how powerful human beings remain in the face art, occasionally offers more recounting than ori- of machines. ginal reflection. What is refreshing about her take, though, is her clear-eyed­ encounter with program- f Kingwell’s philosophical take asks us to con- ming. Fry shows how algorithms are often seen as Isider where the mind wanders online, Ullman, forms of magical authority and deftly explains how Auerbach, and Fry expose the machines carrying inappropriate it is to bestow such a semblance it along. Their books temper Kingwell’s sometimes of power and invincibility upon rickety human spongy view of technology with a reassuringly structures. practical materialism. Kingwell seems to assume More than any of these authors, the programmer that because his encounters with the Interface are and novelist Ellen Ullman, also an American, has a passive, they are that way for everyone. But while mesmerizing ability to speak about the dramas of he may be right that a certain quotient of digital humans and machines at once. Her memoir Life activity involves an inoculating flow of insignificant in Code is a collection of chronological essays that choice, many of us, maybe especially the young, make up her own Bildungsroman as a programmer, take a more active view — whether by posting a history that runs alongside the growth of the inter- videos, photos, or pithy hot takes, or by writing net. One moving essay analogizes human and com- programs — of what it means to live in a networked puter memory; another on the process of writing world. I think of my students, an often shocking her 2012 novel, By Blood, overlaps her experience number of whom each year have achieved a level writing software with her life as a writer. In a turn of social media celebrity by the time they arrive in that echoes Saint Augustine’s famous experience of college that would dwarf the modest aspirations conversion as an exhortation to tolle lege, to take up of most Twitter-­obsessed Canadian media types. the Bible and read, she writes of hunting for a bug in These young people may be immersed in (and even a program: “I sat down — and read the code. It was sometimes bored by) online communities — but relaxing, a leaning-­back experience, like all reading.” they are also creating them, building them, and Travelling with Ullman down these circuits participating in a world of life and, indeed, mean- restores a sense of the humanity in code, which, she ingful action that we old bores can’t always entirely says, always returns her to a “state of not-knowing”­ fathom. I give them enough credit to believe that and a “re-­encounter with bafflement.” She’s able they know what they are about. to “feel again the wonder of a great algorithm’s In considering what Kingwell suggests is a logical beauty, its elegance of thought, the sheer fuzzy border between being bored and not bored intelligence and creativity it reflects.” Wonder and in digital arenas, therefore, why not take a cue boredom, these places at the end and beginning from the lived experience of programmers, like of logic, are essential human feelings that spur our Ullman and Auerbach, who dwell closer to the thinking, that prompt both algorithms and litera- actual technologies enabling these environments, ture. Translation is unnecessary, as the language is and shift the divide at play from one of genera- the same. tions, or of digital and non-digital­ habits, to one of Though Ullman traces how the tech industry kind, between human and machine. If boredom tried for years to downplay the importance of bod- is vital to the wandering and wondering thought ies by celebrating virtual life and the potential of that underpins curiosity, creativity, and learning artificial intelligence, she, like all women who code itself, let us hope that machined simulations of our and anyone who has had their skills questioned thinking account for and incorporate it in mean- because of how they look, knows that bodies are ingful ways. Such a smart algorithm might churn not so easy to get around as all that. (Just try breast- away for a while on some calculable dilemma but feeding and typing at the same time.) Her view, then lose interest, rove off to gnaw on some tidbits running sometimes contrary to notions in tech, of personal information, roll its eyes at the mun- is that computers are human objects: made by dane predictability of the data set and all hundred people, frail and flawed like people, and — import- billion of its points, and spider on to read a novel antly, enduringly — subject to people. Rather than or Wikipedia or (let’s be honest, this algorithm is a taking seriously Ray Kurzweil’s notion that the time millennial) watch Netflix. In short, as we feel more of human control over computers is running out, threatened, more eclipsed by the finer points of Ullman, like Fry and Auerbach, comes down firmly our devices, we might cling to some worthwhile on the side of the secret sauce of being human sense of self by seeing our bored human frailty as and not a machine. We can’t be controlled by a superpower and by learning from the young how machines because we don’t think like computers. best and when, at the perfect moment in a fruitless We do not simply proceed in the either/or logic of pursuit, to lose interest.

12 Literary Review of Canada Pax Atlantica NATO’s long-lasting relevance Jeffrey F. Collins

power. To no surprise, the Financial Enduring Alliance: Times described recent events as A History of NATO and the “the biggest upheaval” since NATO’s Postwar Global Order founding. Timothy Andrews Sayle It’s tempting to think that NATO Cornell University Press has entered new territory, one with 360 pages, hardcover less than rosy prospects. However, if the Cold War’s persistence for four- plus decades is any indication, the his year marks the organization may have a longer shelf seventieth anniversary of life than many of its detractors and T the North Atlantic Treaty worried supporters think. The alli- Organization, and to say that the ance, in the words of the NATO schol- celebrations will likely be subdued is ars James Sperling and Mark Webber, an understatement. Co-­founded by “seems to possess an inexhaustible Canada in 1949, in the aftermath of capacity for recovery,” a theme that the Second World War, the transatlan- runs throughout Timothy Sayle’s new tic alliance has grown from a mem- book, Enduring Alliance. bership of just twelve countries to Sayle, a history professor at the twenty-­nine following Montenegro’s University of Toronto, provides an entry in 2017. NATO’s allure — the in-depth analysis of NATO decision reason it attracts such a diverse mem- making, from its formative years bership, including Iceland (which in the 1940s and ’50s to the end of has no standing army) — comes the Cold War and the collapse of from being the world’s pre-­eminent the Soviet Union in 1991. Through military alliance, anchored by the personal papers, cabinet memo- military and economic might of the randa, and other previously classified United States. Today, more countries documents retrieved from a dozen seek to join it, like Ukraine, while archives across North America and others seek tighter bonds, as Brazil Europe, he contextualizes the per- has recently. Yet, despite its suc- sonal perspectives of the alliance’s cesses, NATO currently confronts a political, military, and diplomatic litany of major challenges. leadership. Countering a widely held Internally, a few alliance mem- public perception, Sayle persuasively bers (Poland, Hungary) are leaning makes the point that the primary fear toward authoritarianism, and a third among these leaders was not the Red (Turkey) is already there. Forced Army crossing Germany’s Fulda Gap migration and terrorism remain but rather the “problem of democ- constant dilemmas, while populist racy” itself. movements and allegations of for- eign election meddling have shaken t its heart, NATO was — and governments on both sides of the U.S. president Richard Nixon addresses NATO on its twentieth anniversary. Aindeed is — about maintaining Atlantic. A key member, the United the balance of power in Europe. Two Kingdom, remains impotent as it tries to navi- president has demanded that members spend the world wars had deeply scarred the continent, but a gate Brexit. And, of course, there is an outspoken equivalent of 4 percent of their gross domestic transatlantic alliance promised to, in the words of

ibrary of Congr e ss Coll ec tion / L ibrary W orld R eport American president, who holds a skeptical view of product on defence, when only five of the twenty-­ its founding secretary-­general, Lord Ismay, “keep long-standing­ allies. nine countries could meet targets of 2 percent of the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Even before his inauguration two years ago, GDP in 2017. His administration has also ignited Germans down.” The true challenge that faced the Donald Trump threatened to withdraw the U.S. trade fights against key U.S. allies, labelling coun- new organization, though, was less about armies from NATO, and he reputedly came close to doing tries like Canada “national security” threats in and more about public support. so at several points in 2018. Trump has called recent trade talks. Prosperous societies that favoured expansive NATO allies “delinquent” and has erroneously Externally, a revanchist Russia has made inroads and expensive welfare states — and that became claimed that the U.S. foots up to 90 percent of near NATO’s borders, seizing Crimea in 2014 and further removed from the memory of the wars the alliance’s defence bills (the U.S. pays 22 per- backing a secessionist war in eastern Ukraine. of 1914–18 and 1939–45 — represented a critical cent of NATO’s common budget). Viewing the Further afield, China continues its own arms weakness in the eyes of some senior diplomats,

s & New U.S. p h from p hotogra ­organization as a mafia-like­ protection racket, the buildup and the weaponization of its economic political leaders, and military officers in the U.S.,

April 2019 13 the U.K., France, and West Germany (which are at expenditures, insisted on preferential trade deals cases, though, it was the desire of allied leaders not the centre of Sayle’s analysis). They worried that in exchange for continuing military commitments to go to war that ensured NATO’s durability. The the public could be cowed by Soviet intimidation (a demand that faded as his administration des- certainty of the alliance’s purpose and the stability and grow supportive of disarmament policies and cended into scandal). it demonstrated time and again proved too enticing the “political disintegration” of NATO members. It may surprise most readers to learn that it to forfeit, no matter the disagreement. Only a robust transatlantic military and political was the popular anti-­nuclear movement of the ­alliance — a so-called­ Pax Atlantica — endowed 1980s that “posed the most severe threat to NATO’s ayle does not delve deeply into NATO’s post- with American nuclear weapons could stiffen endurance,” according to Sayle. The Soviet Union S1991 period. But, despite limited access to political resolve and ensure that a modicum of and its Warsaw Pact allies maintained a clear relevant documentation, his argument appears to defence spending was maintained. Easier said military advantage in troop and tank numbers. be equally applicable here. Whether manifested in than done. Keeping defence costs relatively low for NATO debates around burden sharing or the dispropor- Throughout the Cold War, alliance leaders had members, and therefore not undermining social tionate distribution of troop casualties (as was the to contend with a multitude of crises that might spending, was possible only with the secur- case during Canada’s 2006–11 combat mission in easily have ripped NATO apart, Afghanistan), defence versus social perhaps irrevocably. The 1956 Suez expenditures, European populism, Crisis opened a deep fissure between or rising isolationist and protection- the U.K. and France, on one side, The West needed a new ist impulses in the United States, the and the U.S. on another, bringing the transatlantic alliance that promised “problem of democracy” appears world close to a third world war — a to be as prominent a concern for situation resolved only by the dip- to “keep the Soviet Union out, NATO leaders today as it was for their lomatic skill of Canada’s secretary counterparts seventy years ago. of state for external affairs, Lester B. the Americans in, and the A series of crises since the fall of Pearson. In 1966, Charles de Gaulle, the Berlin Wall, such as the breakup of still fuming over the lack of allied Germans down.” Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the 9/11 terror support for France’s war in Algeria attacks, and the 2003 Iraq War (lead- and the general decline of French ing to a split reminiscent of Suez), power and prestige since 1945, pulled his country ity umbrella provided by U.S. nuclear weapons have demonstrated the alliance’s ability to both out of NATO’s military command (France would stationed ­throughout Europe. If they were taken adapt to new international security environments rejoin in 2009). For Canada, the withdrawal had out, it was feared, the alliance could no longer be and overcome major foreign policy differences. the frustrating consequence of forcing the closure sustained.­ Put another way, certainty and stability still matter. of an air force base in France, requiring a hasty Ironically, the Soviet Union itself helped heal Of course, Russia’s actions, like those of its Soviet and costly transfer of personnel and aircraft to some of NATO’s internal wounds, particularly predecessor, have also helped remind leaders of West Germany. And in a topical historical parallel when it crushed an uprising in Hungary within the relevancy of Lord Ismay’s dictum. So while the to Trump’s clamourings, U.S. president Richard the same week as the Suez Crisis and invaded American president clamours for more spending Nixon, fearful of Soviet influence in western Czechoslovakia in 1968. The actual collapse of the and better trade deals, for now, at least, history sug- Europe and ­irritated by waning European defence USSR put an end to the anti-­nuke debate. In other gests that the Pax Atlantica will endure.

Truth and Conviction Donald Marshall Jr. and the Mi’kmaw Quest for Justice L. Jane McMillan

A passionate account of how one man’s fight against racism and injustice transformed the criminal justice system and galvanized the Mi’kmaw Nation’s struggle for self-determination, forever changing the landscape of Indigenous rights in Canada and around the world.

2018 | 978-0-7748-3748-4 | hardcover

FREE SHIPPING on Canadian orders over $40 at ubcpress.ca ubcpress.ca thought that counts

14 Literary Review of Canada WHAT

THE–? Hell and Damnation: A Sinner’s Guide to Eternal Torment by Marq de Villiers “A comprehensive guide to all things Hades.” —Foreword Reviews “A deliciously cynical analysis of the afterlife viewed from a variety of historical and literary perspectives.” —The Walrus “Delightful.” —Publishers Weekly

Participation made possible through Creative Saskatchewan’s Market and Export Development Grant Program.

AprilLRC 2019 AD Hell and Damnation U of R Press.indd 1 2019-03-28 11:31 AM15 Separation Anxiety The secret correspondence of two Quebec luminaries Bruce K. Ward

impeccably and danced flawlessly Le pays qui ne se fait pas: but without spontaneity and with a Correspondance,1983–2006 joyless smile — prefigures his defi- Hélène Pelletier-Baillargeon and ciency as a leader unable to make a Pierre Vadeboncoeur human connection with the people. Les Éditions du Boréal She is not surprised that after the 302 pages, softcover and ebook defeat of 1995, he removes himself to his beloved France to devote his attention to his vineyards. (It is worth n January of this year, the noting that Pelletier-­Baillargeon and Bloc Québécois chose a new Vadeboncoeur are themselves ardent I leader, Yves-François­ Blanchet, francophiles.) who promised to promote independ- Vadeboncoeur, for his part, was ence tirelessly in order to “win at Collège Brébeuf with Trudeau, Quebec and win for Quebec.” To those and worked with him at the journal anglophone Canadians who noticed, Cité libre in its early days. He finds this probably seemed a ghostly echo the key to Trudeau’s political career from the past. Yet the event does in something he and others noticed prompt us to ask what has become of about the future prime minister: his Quebec separatism. Has it effectively Has Quebec independence always been an impossible dream? capacity for mathematical logic far disappeared as a force capable of pos- exceeded his literary-­philosophical ing an existential threat to Canada, or has it merely from the 1960s until his death in 2010 that touched sensibility. Trudeau was aware of this, too, and did gone quiet for a time, still able to take on new life if on art, literature, philosophy, spirituality, and, of his utmost to conceal the deficiency, succeeding sufficiently provoked? course, politics. because of his agile intelligence. Indeed, he shaped The answer might appear obvious if one takes Vadeboncoeur was also a prolific writer of a life and career out of the single-minded­ promo- the federal BQ and the provincial Parti Québécois letters (2,500 of them by his own count). Some tion of his “superior” part over the “inferior,” of as the measures of separatist strength. The former 100 of these are collected in a recently published the head over the heart. Quebec paid the price will struggle in the forthcoming federal election volume of hitherto “secret” correspondence with of Trudeau’s willingness to sacrifice its cultural to win enough seats for official party status, while another independence activist, Hélène Pelletier-­ survival to his hyper-­logical chimera of a bilingual the recent 2018 provincial election saw the latter Baillargeon, a prominent journalist, biographer, Canada, Vadeboncoeur believes: “We are the vic- reduced to third-­party status, with a mere ten seats. and feminist concerned with reforming the Catholic tims of Trudeau’s ambition, of his infinite desire to This is far from the halcyon days of René Lévesque church. Their friendship began in the 1970s, shortly camouflage his weaknesses.” or Jacques Parizeau. How many in the rest of after the October Crisis, when they both worked on What may surprise anglophone Canadians is Canada could even name the leader of today’s PQ? the editorial committee of the journal Maintenant. the remarkably cogent and dispassionate explana- (Pascal Bérubé, who became interim leader after Their letters, from 1983 to 2006, take us from the tions in these letters of why independence is Jean-­François Lisée lost his own seat in 2018.) The aftermath of the first referendum loss in 1980, “impossible.” This impossibility is apparent to decline is dramatic and appears terminal, though through the next failed referendum of 1995, to just Vadeboncoeur as early as 1983, after the first refer- ec e s du Québ A r c hi ve s national party politics, especially in today’s unsettled land- four years before Vadeboncoeur’s death. Publicly endum. He continues to confirm it before, during, u e t scape, is wildly unpredictable. available for the first time, these exchanges offer an and after the second referendum, despite the close Party fortunes are not the only way to measure intriguing look into private discussions of Quebec result. He asks rhetorically in 1997, “Isn’t independ- the vitality of separatism, however. From the begin- separatism. ence for us a project not lived, but only imagined ning, the PQ was the political wing of a movement and hoped for? So aren’t we in this regard nothing drawing its deeper life from the intellectual classes: nglophone Canadians able to read Le pays but gentle dreamers?” Although she tends to dis- the artists, writers, journalists, and academics who Aqui ne se fait pas in French will learn much tance herself from Vadeboncoeur’s “pessimism,” replaced the Catholic church, in the wake of the from Vadeboncoeur and Pelletier-­Baillargeon’s Pelletier-Baillargeon­ describes their correspond- Quiet Revolution, as the guardians of a unique insider perspective on Quebec politics. In read- ence as the “unavowable chronicles of a country and distinctive Quebec culture. Among these new ing their analysis of the personalities and the that isn’t happening.” guardians, Pierre Vadeboncoeur was a leading positions of leading figures — Lévesque, Parizeau, The unrealizability of the independence luminary: a Montreal lawyer, who worked as a Lucien Bouchard, and, of course, Pierre Elliott dream takes two dimensions in the letters: the negotiator and legal advisor for one of Quebec’s Trudeau — one realizes how small the world of exterior force of an irresistible historical Destiny largest trade union federations, he combined Quebec politics is. (Vadeboncoeur consistently capitalizes the word), social activism with a body of writing that made Pelletier-­Baillargeon, for example, knew the and the interior lack of force in Québécois identity. him highly regarded and widely read. As a public future premier, Jacques Parizeau, from childhood. As for destiny, the Quiet Revolution propelled the intellectual, he was a passionate proponent of Her archly amusing description of his typical province into the modern world with such abrupt- independence and arguably the most important adolescent behaviour at “mixed” parties held ness that it was impossible at first to measure the

essayist in Quebec, publishing some thirty works by the Scouting movement — where he dressed new reality, above all to recognize that it was not q H unt e r / B ibliothè F onds R aoul from I llustration

16 Literary Review of Canada static. Rather, this new world was characterized always been the only solution for Quebec, which in his writings, as well as his letters, virtually no by an ever-accelerating­ dynamism, driven by the I still believe.” The first conviction might be reassur- ­reference to the culture of anglophone Canada. He forces of global capitalism and technology, which ing to the rest of Canada, but the second should not does mention three names — Marshall McLuhan, tend to dissolve particular cultures. And in the fore- be: that without independence, the long-term sur- Glenn Gould, and Leonard Cohen — only inso- front of this dynamic is the American empire, right vival of French identity in North America is impos- far as they are better known in France than any at Quebec’s doorstep. If even France, one of the few sible. After all, the deeply embedded language and Québécois cultural figures. He seemed unaware great cultures left, is “menaced with the slide” into culture of Quebec is one of the few indisputable of the philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Americanization, what hope is there for Quebec? markers of Canadian distinctness from the U.S. Nation, which as early as 1965 questioned in pro- The other dimension entails an unflinching As a whole, these letters evince a great deal of found terms the possibility of preserving Canadian look into the mirror. According to Vadeboncoeur, skepticism, to say the least, about any notion that sovereignty, as well as Québécois culture, in the the “moral force” requisite for bringing about the Québécois culture can be better preserved face of U.S. hegemony. independence is lacking among the Québécois. For within the national larger framework. Pelletier-­ Of course, it is equally remarkable that most who have voted or will vote oui in the referen- Baillargeon regards Canada as a bilingual country Vadeboncoeur is so little known in the rest of dums, he writes, oui is strictly conditional on it not only in “the fantasies of the Commissioner of Canada. How many Québécois cultural figures — costing too much. From his perspective, the force Official Languages.” Vadeboncoeur dismisses the Vadeboncoeur among them — are familiar to of will necessary for political victory and, more concept of Canada as “vraiment trop bête.” In their anglophone Canadians? The two solitudes persist. importantly, for the real work of implementing such assessment, the country is incapable of preventing There are hints that Vadeboncoeur was inter- a victory against the fierce opposition of the rest of itself from disappearing into the American cultural ested in bridging those solitudes. He sets himself to Canada is notably absent. If he were alive today, behemoth, let alone preserving the fragile unique- improve his English (through a systematic reading Vadeboncoeur might well point to Brexit or the ness of Quebec culture. Failing the protection of the old anthology British Poetry and Prose), and Catalonian crises: real-life evidence that a referen- afforded by political independence, the destiny of thinks of writing a “Letter to English Canada,” pre- dum by itself solves nothing. Québécois identity will be if not complete death, sumably connected with the need for a complete Canadians outside Quebec might be thrown then a shallow survival of charming customs and “rethinking” of Quebec nationalism toward some- by Vadeboncoeur’s frequent allusions to the rest remnants of language, akin to that of other minor- thing more “polyvalent” or “­comprehensive.” of the country’s implacable opposition to Quebec ities within Canada. For both correspondents, the cultural form that independence, an opposition rooted in excessive In fact, the separatism of these two writers is Quebec incarnates comes from France; their own nationalism, teetering on “hysteria.” Although clearly premised on a decidedly un-multicultural­ cultural reference points are almost exclusively less prone to speaking of the veiled violence of understanding of Canada. At times, their exchan- French (Charles Péguy is prominent). They would “Canadian imperialism,” Pelletier-­Baillargeon ges read as naively simplistic; for instance, the likely be surprised to learn that Britain has ceased does note the potential for “outrage” among assumption of the “Englishness” of what both insist to be for the rest of Canada what France is for anglophone Canadians at the metamorphosis on referring to as “le Canada anglais.” One finds Quebec. The rest of Canada seems further along the of the “nice French Canadians we used to have” little appreciation of the complexity of the country’s path of developing a less essentialist identity tied (she employs English here) into something more cultural­ makeup. to a European mother country, something more demanding. Vadeboncoeur wrote works of cultural criticism “comprehensive.” In this respect, Quebec might This may not sound like us. But then how of a quality that makes him one of Canada’s most need Canada as much as Canada needs Quebec. often does the rest of Canada look at itself from significant thinkers — Les deux royaumes (1978), This mutual need could yet foster a moreconscious ­ the perspective of thoughtful Quebec nationalists for instance, is a both lucid and lyrical considera- cultural bond against the dissolving power of global who actually lived through the October Crisis? tion of the malaise of modern culture. Yet one finds capitalism. Vadeboncoeur suspects that tolerant respect for the democratic choices of Quebecers is more surface than real, reflecting an intuitive calculation among anglophone Canadians that little more is necessary in response to a tepid movement. He attributes a lack of political will, in part, to the psychological makeup of a subjugated people who got into the habit, as it were, of not being in control, so that when You know that Canadian books and ideas the opportunity finally arrives, they are unable to break the habit of feeling themselves still the van- matter. You also know there are fewer and quished — anxiously aware of their weakness.­ Given the absence of an absolute determination fewer places to thoughtfully engage with the that animates a people destined for sovereignty, independence is actually a species of consola- books and ideas that help shape our country. tory dream. Vadeboncoeur describes it as an “île flottante” — taken by the current until it meets a stronger counter-current.­ Your support is essential for sustaining Le pays qui ne se fait pas will not make for happy reading for those militant souverainistes who still the discussions that fill our pages each believe in the cause. Vadeboncoeur makes some disturbing comparisons, likening them at one point month. If you’re able, please consider to a “handful of Japanese soldiers on an island who, twenty years after Hiroshima, still did not know that donating to the LRC today. the war was over” — a comparison likely prompted by Pelletier-Baillargeon’s­ declaration that even though Québécois culture is going to die, it should reviewcanada.ca/donate “die fighting, die saying it refuses to die, die arms in hand.” With such images throughout the letters, it’s no wonder they wanted them kept strictly “top secret” (they used the English phrase) at the time. As Vadeboncoeur avows, “It is not my vocation to discourage others.” Canadian books, Canadian ideas— n December 2003, Vadeboncoeur confesses to Canadian matters. Ifeeling caught between two contradictory con- victions: “I have never really believed that sover- eignty would be realized, while believing it has

April 2019 17 Recommended Dose of Reality Yet another misdiagnosis won’t fix our health care system Greg Marchildon

This May Hurt a Bit: Reinventing Canada’s Health Care System Stephen Skyvington Dundurn Press 245 pages, softcover and ebook

hen I agreed to become the executive director of the Royal WCommission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, in 2001, I thought I knew what I was getting into. After all, I had dealt with dif- ficult and high-­profile policy issues as a prov- incial deputy minister and cabinet secretary in Saskatchewan. I was wrong — so wrong. Those eighteen months of the Romanow Commission, as it’s better known, would prove to be the most punishing of my career. Under a media spotlight, we were bombarded daily by individuals and organizations, all wanting to convince us of the merits and demerits of specific reforms. Some even launched pre-­emptive strikes, attacking the commission for what they presumed we would (or wouldn’t) recommend. Others personally went after Roy J. Romanow, the former premier of Saskatchewan and head of the commission, in the hope of discrediting him before the report’s release in November 2002. Before the Romanow Commission, numerous other groups had delivered reports on health care reform to their sponsoring governments, but calls for change had fallen, largely, on deaf ears. So why the barrage of opinions, on one hand, and a lack of interest in actual reform, on the other? Because we’re talking about big business. In fact, health care represents the largest economic sector in all high-­income countries. According to William Nordhaus, the 2018 Nobel laureate in economics, it has been the fastest-­ Canadian medicare has systemic problems — including the contempt of many who want to save it. growing part of the U.S. economy since the Second World War, as it has been in almost all high-income­ Beyond the self-­interest of stakeholders, there in the organization and delivery of care, but they countries, including Canada. The truth is that every is a polarization in the general public, between a remained highly supportive of the basic values health care expenditure by a federal, provincial, relatively quiet majority who favour medicare prin- underpinning medicare — hence the final report’s or territorial government ends up as someone’s ciples (though they are rightly concerned about the title, Building on Values. There have been dozens income, so every policy change creates winners and quality and timeliness of service delivery) and an of public opinion surveys conducted since, all of losers. A number of those who rail against medicare increasingly vocal minority who want medicare which confirm the consensus. are actually less interested in getting the govern- dismantled. How do I know the quiet ones are, ment out of the picture than in securing their own in fact, the majority? At the time of the Romanow early two decades after the Romanow access to tax-funded­ revenues — less concerned Commission, we organized a citizens’ dialogue, NCommission, more than a few books aimed about protecting the public purse than about lining in which nearly 500 randomly selected Canadians at the general reader have dished up doom and their own pockets. Also problematic: some of the from across the country met in twelve day-long gloom for our medicare system. They differ on more prominent pro-­medicare groups are in the sessions to discuss the options and trade-offs details, but the basic narrative always goes some- business of protecting aspects of the status quo that involved in reform. Surprisingly, each citizen panel thing like this: the majority of Canadians may still directly benefit themselves at the expense of the produced similar results, irrespective of region support the principles of medicare, but that’s only

broader public interest. or language. Canadians wanted major changes because they have been duped by politicians. by Cam Chalm e rs e ron I llustrations

18 Literary Review of Canada Taxpayers spend far too much on health care and Douglas, the Saskatchewan premier and father of duopoly between organized medicine and provin- get services inferior to those in other countries. universal health care in Canada, actually favoured cial governments. Medicare may have worked at first, but it is now user fees. This is simply not true. Douglas fought his The problem is that the decisions resulting from hopelessly outdated and in need of a major — if not whole life against them. He did accept that, initially, these confrontations have not been arrived at in complete — overhaul. individual and family premiums were needed to a transparent way, and Skyvington lifts the veil on This narrative is repeated in Stephen Skyvington’s supplement general tax revenues. However, these this shadowy world in his book. Something that has new book, This May Hurt a Bit. A long-time con- premiums were prepaid, like taxes (indeed, they always puzzled me about the OMA is that, unlike sultant, lobbyist, and columnist in this contested were eventually integrated into the regular tax similar organizations in other provinces, member- arena, Skyvington writes with a lively, highly con- system). Douglas held that there should never be a ship is mandatory. How did this happen? As part of versational style, speaking directly to those who charge at the point of service, as any fee could deter a deal with doctors to contain budget costs (a laud- share some of his concerns about the sustainability individuals from getting needed care. able objective), Bob Rae’s NDP government passed and quality of our health care system. He admits This May Hurt a Bit argues that the Canada the Ontario Medical Association Dues Act in 1991. to being an opinionated guy, to holding provoca- Health Act, passed in 1984, prevents major reform. The extra money from mandatory dues certainly tive opinions against the current of conventional This, too, is untrue. As Skyvington himself admits, helped the OMA, but it was of questionable value to wisdom. He explains that his first act, after being the act does not tell provinces how to administer Ontario residents and even rank-and-file doctors. born and spanked into life by a doctor, was “to piss and deliver care; it simply sets a floor along with a It was also highly questionable public policy that all over everyone” — a portent of things to come. He few national standards for provincial governments. has not, to my knowledge, been reconsidered. considers himself a rebel with a cause, dedicated They must, for example, provide universal access to Skyvington also tells us about the origins of to a popular movement that would fix medicare by hospital and medical services to all residents based Ontario’s primary care reform, and how the OMA fundamentally altering its working principles. on need rather than ability to pay, and they must initially drove care design. Little wonder the early In Skyvington’s view, our sixty-year-old­ pub- models kept doctors in charge. Furthermore, he licly funded, single-­payer system went off the rails gives us the inside dope on the changes wrought long ago. According to him, politicians across the by Progressive Conservatives with Mike Harris’s ideological spectrum have peddled snake oil for Common Sense Revolution of the late 1990s, while decades, saying they will protect and improve criticizing Harris for trying to strip the OMA of medicare, but with no sincere intention or ability its right to represent all of its members and (even to do so. In Skyvington’s words, the current batch more) for missing an opportunity to introduce of Canadian politicians couldn’t be worse: they a parallel private health care system. “are nothing more than a bevy of blathering buf- However, Skyvington’s contempt really leaps off foons — talking heads who look good, sound good, the page when he reviews the tenure of the Ontario and seem to make sense, all while talking non- Liberals between 2003 and 2018. He describes the sense.” Not surprisingly, the first of his ten “fixes” Commitment to the Future of Medicare Act (2003), is to just stop lawmakers from lying to Canadians which reinforces access based on medical need about medicare. In other words, This May Hurt a rather than ability to pay, as “abhorrent.” And he Bit is a breezy, occasionally entertaining polemic. portrays Eric Hoskins as a traitor to the medical At the same time, it is irritating in its inaccuracies. profession, calling him the worst provincial health Perhaps most unhelpfully, the book seeks to resur- minister ever for his role in the Patients First Act rect previously discredited ideas, known among (2016) and the Protecting Patients Act (2017). policy experts as health care zombies. Skyvington’s antipathy toward pro-­medicare The first zombie Skyvington attempts to revive: doctors is clear, as he also brands Jane Philpott, the need for user fees. He believes that if fees ensure portability of coverage when their residents Justin Trudeau’s former federal health minister, are set modestly, with exemptions for very poor travel to other parts of the country. Constitutionally, and Danielle Martin, the founder of Doctors for people, they would generate significant revenues however, the provinces are in the driver’s seat. It is Medicare, as traitors. However, I would contend for the government, while deterring unnecessary up to them if they want to exceed the floor of hos- that these individuals are just as dissatisfied with use of medical services. However, numerous stud- pital, diagnostic, and physician services and cover, the status quo as he is, but they disagree with him ies have shown that due to the high administrative for example, vision care and dental care (which on the fundamental problems and, therefore, the cost of collecting modest user fees, only a limited Skyvington argues they should and could provide, reforms that are required. amount of revenue is actually generated. Of course, if individuals covered more of their hospital and What truly needs fixing in Canadian health care extremely high fees might produce more revenues doctor costs). Moreover, provincial governments is much closer to the coal face: how we pay doctors, for government, but even Skyvington admits that don’t even have to adhere to the Canada Health Act manage hospitals, and treat patients; how we use this would block access for too many people. As as long as they are willing to forgo their per capita technology (we cling to fax machines and paper for their role in deterring people from seeking share of the federal Canada Health Transfer, worth documents instead of electronic medical charts unnecessary care, it seems that modest user fees on average just over 20 percent of provincial spend- and health records); how we coordinate services. would hardly deter upper-middle-­ ­class Canadians, ing on health. The Canada Health Act is hardly the I could go on and on. Access to medicine based on but they would discourage the working poor and iron cage described by Skyvington. need, rather than ability to pay, is not the problem, even some middle-­class Canadians from seeking either. Nor is the fact that we publicly finance about the medical care they need. kyvington is at his best when describing his 70 percent of all health care, a figure that is actually The second health care zombie promoted by Sexperiences as a health care consultant and lower than the average for high-income­ countries. Skyvington: a parallel private system that can lobbyist for the Ontario Medical Association in the We should instead be focused on improving qual- reduce wait times in the public sector. Again, 1990s and early 2000s. Provincial medical asso- ity, safety, and timeliness of service, even as we ­studies from around the world pour cold water on ciations such as the OMA represent physicians provide greater accountability to those we serve. this approach. There is, for example, no evidence throughout Canada and exert great influence. On According to Skyvington, the heroes of reform in that Australia’s parallel private insurance system, occasion, provincial governments have confronted Canada include people like himself who regularly along with private hospitals and clinics, has pro- these powerful associations in the pursuit of reform, question the consensus that universal health cover- duced shorter wait times in the public system, even and they have paid a high price each time. The age is beneficial, along with the many nameless and if Australians with private insurance have faster most famous confrontation — a twenty-­three-day faceless doctors who struggle mightily every day, access to care. At the same time, the private tier is doctors’ strike in Saskatchewan that the govern- against almost insurmountable odds, to make a supported by public money through generous tax ment allegedly won in 1962 when trying to imple- broken system work as well as it can for the patients incentives and some penalties if individuals do not ment universal medical care coverage — forced they serve. At one point, he singles out Brian Day, buy private insurance. a compromise that preserved the existing model who has been fighting for parallel private health For someone so piqued by lying politicians, of physician practice and dramatically increased care for decades. Love him or hate him, Day’s fore- Skyvington offers his own share of falsehoods remuneration for doctors. The ceasefire agreement word to This May Hurt a Bit is worth reading, if only and half-truths. To reinforce his argument that actually enhanced the power of medical organ- for the fact that, in three pages, you get a summary ­physician extra-billing­ and user fees should be izations by creating what the policy scholar Carolyn of Skyvington’s main arguments, pre-empting­ the permitted, for example, he claims that Tommy Tuohy long ago described as a jointly organized need to read the rest of the book.

April 2019 19 A Doctor’s Practice Four decades in northern medicine Larry Krotz

nuance is essential. Despite the best intentions of When Roedde entered medical school, her Deep Water Dream: A Medical Voyage of the health care providers, and of the faraway gov- teachers were mostly “staff men,” who comple- Discovery in Rural Northern Ontario ernment that dispatched them, they experienced a mented their white coats and stethoscopes with Gretchen Roedde serious disconnect in cultural understanding: “stern frowns.” While McMaster had “a reputation Dundurn Press for innovative learning,” she recalls, “many of our 184 pages, softcover and ebook It was the time of the spring goose hunt. The professors were old school and enjoyed ridiculing whole community — everyone, all ages, even the students.” And although women were almost the dogs — set out at night for the annual 50 percent of the class, “these more traditional he most compelling memoirs are traditional celebration. In the morning, the physicians weren’t sure what to make of us.” those that get beyond an individual’s surprised crisis workers wondered where Forty-­five years later, Roedde herself is prepar- Tlife to tell larger stories, training beams everyone had gone. Out on the goose hunt, in ing the next generation of doctors as an assist- of light on a time, place, or society that readers the midst of a community’s grief, there were ant professor at the Northern Ontario School of otherwise can’t see. Such is the case with Gretchen chuckles about how the health workers were Medicine, a pan-­northern institution with cam- Roedde’s Deep Water Dream, a look at Canada’s faring alone in the community. puses at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, and evolving relationship with Indigenous peoples Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay. Accredited through one physician’s eyes. Roedde writes of Though she does not name the community, the less than twenty years ago, NOSM trains physicians her career in remote northern Ontario, drawing story illuminates a larger national saga and the div- for the type of hard-to-fill posting Roedde eagerly on memories from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. These ide that deserves more and more attention today. sought when she started out. One of its innovative decades were critical in the transi- strategies: every first-year student tion between a colonial past and a spends a month living on a remote future that strives for reconciliation reserve — not to learn medicine, but and new relationships. In the early It is possible that, beyond sweeping to understand a culture. Roedde 1970s, for example, Indigenous mentors many of these students, the leaders rejected the infamous 1969 gestures of the state or society at vast majority of whom are from the White Paper, put forward by prime North and plan to stay there. minister Pierre Trudeau and min- large, reconciliation comes through Another absorbing part of Deep ister of Indian Affairs and Northern one small action at a time. Water Dream describes childbirth Development Jean Chrétien, which from a cultural and medical point of would have eliminated “Indian status” view. When Roedde first went north, and voided treaties. Things haven’t she had an opportunity to learn from been the same since. Roedde’s memories illustrate Roedde has worked hard to bridge that divide. Indigenous women with deep knowledge about how for young people on the ground, hippie-like When travelling throughout the North, she has birthing practices. She gained valuable lessons, engagement supplanted the missionary zeal that opted to stay in First Nations homes rather than even as the mainstream system failed to recognize had marked the colonial past. nursing stations and other “white” accommoda- the important role of midwives, instead trans- Gretchen Roedde grew up on the Toronto tions. She describes how her many hosts have porting pregnant women to obstetrics wards some- Islands and attended medical school at McMaster ­welcomed her to births, deaths, and funerals, and times hundreds of kilometres away. But Roedde University, in Hamilton. During her admissions how they have built deep, lasting friendships. stuck around long enough to see that wheel turn. interview, in 1974, she announced her plans to For a time in the mid-1980s, Roedde went Today, there is an uptick in the numbers of go north and work with First Nations. “The panel global, teaching at the Liverpool School of Tropical midwives and a growing appreciation of them. laughed,” she recalls. Four years later, armed with Medicine, in the U.K., and fighting HIV/AIDS in In the book’s final chapter, Roedde describes the a medical degree, she left for an isolated island in Africa, a period she recounts in her 2012 book, birthing room she has set up in her own home, in Lake Temagami with her equally idealistic hus- A Doctor’s Quest: The Struggle for Mother-­and- Haileybury, with the help of local midwives. There band, a researcher eager to work on land claims. Child Health around the Globe. But her career they mainly serve Amish women who have settled Roedde reflects on the big picture of her profes- has largely taken her from one First Nations com- in the area and disdain hospital births. sion over the last forty years. “Many of the efforts munity to another: Temagami, Sioux Lookout, and Ultimately, Roedde’s book offers an important to provide health care to Indigenous Peoples have Moosonee, where she spent a season helping local perspective. Reconciliation — very much a part been colonial and destructive of culture,” she health workers and elders develop a Cree-English­ of public discourse today — is not always easy to writes. “And yet it is the strengths of community medical dictionary “to help to explain symptoms actualize. It is possible that, beyond sweeping and tradition that have proved the most promising and illnesses” to Indigenous patients. gestures of the state or society at large, it comes in helping to build First Nations, Inuit and Métis through one small action at a time. Deep Water identities and close the gaps in health status with he story of northern health care delivery has Dreams is the story of a culturally and psychologic- non-­Indigenous people in Canada.” Tevolved slowly, and there have been setbacks ally adventurous white doctor who engages in daily Her stories supply nuanced context that rarely along the way (consider the prime minister’s recent activities with her Indigenous neighbours, col- registers in southern reporting. The arrival of men- apology for twentieth-century­ tuberculosis poli- leagues, and patients, developing rewarding rela- tal health professionals in an isolated community cies among Inuit communities). But, as this book tionships and mutual understanding on the path beset by a rash of suicides, for example, shows why shows, dramatic things are finally happening. toward positive change.

20 Literary Review of Canada Racism in the Court The real consequences of fake justice Harold R. Johnson

Senior civil servants wanted to keep expenses for for the death penalty to begin with. No matter: the The Court of Better Fiction: Three Trials, a show trial to a minimum and determined it would entire trial was a farce. The verdict, sentence, and Two Executions, and Arctic Sovereignty cost too much to bring a court party to Tree River, denouement were all faits accomplis. Debra Komar 600 kilometres north of Yellowknife. So they moved Dundurn Press the mock proceedings to Herschel Island — some ent Roach, a University of Toronto law profes- 200 pages, softcover and ebook 1,200 kilometres west in Yukon. No one considered Ksor, also considers a predictable formula of how the lesson taught would be transmitted back, racism that, for many Indigenous people, continues Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice: or that the people of Herschel Island spoke a differ- to typify the Canadian legal system decades after The Gerald Stanley and Colten Boushie Case ent language than Alikomiak’s home community. Judge Dubuc’s kangaroo court. Canadian Justice, Kent Roach Thomas Cory was selected as defence counsel, Indigenous Injustice: The Gerald Stanley and Colten McGill-Queen’s University Press after sending supervisors his thoughts on the mat- Boushie Case is a compelling, jargon-free­ read for 328 pages, hardcover and ebook ter: “As kindness has failed in the past I strongly those comfortable with an otherwise academic recommend that the law should take its course and structure, where the author first tells readers what those Eskimos found guilty of murder should be he intends to say, then says it, then reminds us what likomiak did confess to murder. hanged in a place where the natives will see and he has just said. In December 1921, he and another man recognize the outcome of taking another’s life.” As Roach recounts in his opening pages, on A were apprehended for killing Pugana, The judge, Lucien Dubuc, had experience pre- August 9, 2016, Gerald Stanley, a white farmer, con- his uncle. The arresting officer, Corporal William siding over northern cases. He was also known to fronted a group of five young people on his property Doak, took him to Tree River, then in outside Biggar, Saskatchewan. They the northeast Northwest Territories were heading back to Red Pheasant but today part of Nunavut, where he First Nation after a day of swimming was initially held in an RCMP stor- More of us are talking openly about and drinking. At some point, their age shed. Months went by, and Doak Ford Escape developed a flat tire. grew increasingly abusive toward the a racist justice system — something Grabbing an old pistol from a accused, until one morning in early shed, Stanley fired two shots into the April 1922, Alikomiak got his hands Indigenous people have discussed air — discharging what he thought on the officer’s gun and shot him. privately for centuries. was all of his ammunition. Having Afterwards, Alikomiak would offer a warned the group that they were full and detailed confession, through trespassing, and after some confusion an RCMP interpreter, including how near the SUV, he confronted Colten he also killed the Hudson’s Bay Company trader get things done: a previous trial had resulted in the Boushie, sitting in the driver’s seat. Not empty after Otto Binder, a potential witness. conviction and hanging of a Dene man. all, the pistol fired again — striking Boushie behind As bizarre as it sounds — a timid Inuit boy first After Irving Howatt was named prosecutor in the left ear and killing him. accused of murdering his uncle and then accused of the case, he communicated with both the Ministry The case made headlines across the country, murdering a police officer and another man likely to of Justice and Judge Dubuc about the verdict and and Roach takes his reader back to last year’s trial. find out — no one at the time seemed to question the the execution of “these people” — a blanket phrase In great detail, he explains the selection of an all- motivation or confession. To them, it made perfect other officials used when discussing the case, white jury, including how Stanley’s lawyers used sense that Alikomiak would commit murders for no including prime minister Robert Borden. peremptory challenges to exclude anyone who real reason. It confirmed the myth of the savage. Fred A. Hill, known as Special Constable Gill, was appeared Indigenous. He also questions why the The Court of Better Fiction does not have a selected as hangman because of his carpentry skills. Crown prosecutor, Bill Burge, did not ask potential surprise ending. There’s no mystery to be solved. He travelled with the court party, which included jurors about racial bias or racially charged social Yet Debra Komar — a forensic anthropologist white jury members recruited along the way, and media posts they may have seen. and the author of The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The brought along plenty of lumber and rope for the gal- While Stanley’s legal team did not explicitly rely Hudson’s Bay Company and the Murder of John lows. Upon arrival, he dug graves for the accused. on a self-defence­ strategy, they nonetheless put that McLoughlin, Jr. (2015) and Black River Road: An Throughout The Court of Better Fiction, Komar notion into the minds of jurors in subtle, deliberate Unthinkable Crime, an Unlikely Suspect, and reveals the biases of a wide cast of actors, as well ways. Their stated defence: hang fire. Experts testi- the Question of Character (2016), among other as the legal process itself. The crime had occurred fied that a cartridge could fail to fire initially and books — does a splendid job of telling a dramatic in the Northwest Territories, not Yukon, where discharge later, though delays are extremely rare story. With impeccable wordcraft, she details how the trial was held. Yet jurisdictional issues were and take less than half a second when they do hap- the system used Alikomiak to teach all Inuit a les- never resolved. There were procedural problems pen. Stanley’s lawyers had to persuade the jury that son. And though her passages are well written and (the investigator also conducted the preliminary his pistol’s hang fire was between thirty seconds often beautiful, they contain disturbing characters hearing, no fingerprints had been collected). There and a full minute. who reflect a deep history of racism and bias — was evidence tampering. There was the question- As in Alikomiak’s case a century before, a lot a history that underlies Indigenous justice through- able legitimacy of the confession. And there was went wrong procedurally. Investigators, for out Canada, but that many in this country have Alikomiak, a minor forced to testify against himself. example, left Boushie’s body out in the rain over- long ignored. A minor who, under Canadian law, was too young night, which ruined potential evidence. Roach also

April 2019 21 shows how the four Indigenous witnesses were And anyone in this province involved in the actual ones we’re likely denied. It determines where we themselves put on trial: much of what the jury administration of the law knows that race and go to school, and the quality of the education we heard involved their afternoon activities and not hate-­filled remarks are a constant factor. Publicly, receive. Race does more than determine how the their brief time on the Stanley property. we may deny it. Publicly, we may continue the fic- rest of Canada sees us: it determines how we see Canadians already know the outcome of the tion that justice is blind. We might tinker with the ourselves. It is the basis of our identity. trial, but in keeping with Roach’s structure, it’s Criminal Code, change the way juries are selected. Race is who we are, and this racist place is where sometimes good to be reminded of what you’ve We might even go so far as requiring mixed juries, we are. Neither the racist behaviour detailed by already read. As he puts it in the very first sentence as Roach recommends. But none of these measures Debra Komar nor the acquittal described by Kent of his introduction, “On 9 February 2018, a jury in would make a difference. Not until we solve the Roach should surprise anyone — though their Battleford, Saskatchewan acquitted Gerald Stanley, fundamental issue. books should be read by everyone. a fifty-­six-­year-­old cattle farmer, of the intentional A history of racism and bias — one that pre- For decades, I have maintained that murder and negligent manslaughter of Colten ceded and followed the hanging of Alikomiak — Saskatchewan is a racist place, and I have been Boushie, a twenty-two-­ ­year-­old Cree man from the is a matter of fact. It’s why so many Indigenous assured by well-­meaning people that I’m imagin- Red Pheasant First Nation.” Of course, even if read- people don’t like or trust the police or courts ing a problem that does not exist. I don’t hear that ers didn’t know the outcome up front, they would or educators or social workers or industry as much anymore. Racism is now out in the open. be far from surprised by the time they’ve finished representatives or municipal governments or That’s a good thing; it’s good that people post big- this detailed account. provincial­ ones. otry on Facebook. Whether we’re actively involved in the law or Because now more and more of us are talking anada can be a racist place, and Saskatchewan not, we remember the case of Louis Riel and his openly about something Indigenous people have Cespecially so. Well before the Stanley trial subsequent hanging in 1885. We remember the discussed privately for centuries. started, Premier Brad Wall issued a public state- Hangings of Battleford, that same year, as a way Hate-­filled conversations used to take place ment on Facebook: to instill fear. We remember Leo Lachance — mur- in private homes, around kitchen tables, at cof- dered in 1991 by a neo-Nazi­ who referred to fire- fee shops frequented by white Canadians, and in Racism has no place in Saskatchewan. In the arms as “Native birth control.” We remember the hockey arenas and curling rinks when there were wake of a shooting near Biggar, there have starlight tours in 2001 and the Indigenous men no Indians around. Now the conversations are out been racist and hate-filled­ comments on found on the outskirts of Saskatoon, left to freeze there — and we can engage with them directly. Even social media and other forums. This must by the police. We’ve watched the Indigenous incar- if the conversations remain ugly and hurtful, they stop. These comments are not only unaccept- ceration rate climb unabated for fifty years, and we are necessary. We might swear at each other and able, intolerant and a betrayal of the very val- know that rate includes more and more women call each other names — or worse — but at last we ues and character of Saskatchewan, they are and children. We remember all of the missing and are talking. dangerous. There are laws that protect citizens murdered Indigenous women and girls. We know The more we talk to each other — the more we from what this kind of hate may foment. They why Saskatchewan recently issued assault rifles to learn about the inequities that have plagued “jus- will be enforced. provincial conservation officers. tice” since well before Confederation — the better Inside and outside of courtrooms, our race is the conversations will become. And through them, Canadians do not need official statements the most fundamental factor of our existence. It hard as they may be, we can build a better tomor- to know racist commentary can be dangerous. determines the jobs we’re likely to get, and the row for our children and grandchildren.

22 Literary Review of Canada April 2019 23 Fishing for Answers The causes and effects of the Asian carp invasion Bob Sexton

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis Andrew Reeves ECW Press 384 pages, softcover and ebook

n an evocative scene, roughly halfway through his first book, Overrun, Andrew Reeves Iproves how singularly committed he is to exploring the Asian carp invasion of North America. The award-­winning environmental journalist has just hopped aboard a commercial fishing boat on the Illinois River, heading out to net Asian carp, when one of the crew tells him he doesn’t have to get dirty extracting fish if he doesn’t want to. “Sure,” Reeves writes, “I’ll take a pick.” Seven hours later, he’s covered in fish blood, slime, and feces, and stewing in his own sweat after helping to remove roughly 3,200 kilos of carp from the river. Like his journalism, Reeves’s book is an engaged and experiential example of immersive investigative reporting. Over four years, Reeves conducted interviews with wildlife officials, scientists, environmental- ists, and anglers, and visited fish farms, processing plants, laboratories, and water bodies across North With no natural predators in the Great Lakes, Asian carp threaten a $7-billion fishing industry. America. With a keen ear for dialogue and a maga- zine writer’s knack for scene setting, he explores spooked by motors, which poses a serious safety eeves’s book is original, refreshing, and how “we got into this mess.” The mess he’s referring hazard to boaters and personal watercraft users. Roccasionally surprising because it challen- to, of course, is the exploding Asian carp popula- Imagine cruising along at forty kilometres an hour ges conventional thinking on how the problem tion, and the consequences for native fish and when your face makes hard contact with a leaping began and what we can do to solve it. The widely habitat from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. fifteen-kilogram­ fish. accepted origin story is that grass carp imported Anyone with a passing interest in ecology or Asian carp have no natural predators in North by fish farmers in the 1960s first escaped into the environment likely knows that Asian carp America, and because they thrive in our relatively tributaries of the Mississippi after flooding. Reeves are a serious problem. Potentially worse than the cooler waters, they can quickly establish them- goes the extra mile, though, and actually names spread of sea lampreys, round gobies, and giant selves as a dominant species. In some parts of the fish farmer at ground zero: Jim Malone. He hogweed combined, the invasion is one of the the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, for example, then tracks down Malone’s son to learn more continent’s most pressing and complex environ- silver and bighead carp now make up 75 percent about the man and his intentions, and discovers mental issues. The non-­native fish have now of the fish biomass. They’re also very adaptable a scapegoat who was not as unscrupulous as is migrated so far north that they’re poised to enter and can withstand a variety of temperatures and commonly believed. Misguided? Without a doubt. the Great Lakes. conditions. Bighead carp can grow to 1.3 metres But nefarious? No. The biggest concern with Asian carp — the in length, weigh up to sixty-­five kilograms (though Now vilified, Malone was actually looking for common name covers four species, bighead, twenty kilograms is more common), and live at chemical-­free solutions to control aquatic weeds

silver, grass, and black carp — is that they can least nine years. Silver carp can get up to a metre in his rearing ponds. He was likely inspired by CE / fli c kr out-­compete native fish for both food and habitat. in length, weigh roughly fifteen kilos, and live for Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, Bighead and silver carp eat plankton, which native twenty years. Grass carp can be up to 1.5 metres which put America’s excessive reliance on chem- mussels and some other fish depend on. Grass carp long, weigh up to forty kilos (though they are icals and pesticides under the microscope. Just as consume aquatic weeds — up to three times their commonly between ten and fifteen kilos), and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had exposed the meat-­ own weight daily — and can drastically change can live for decades. Unchecked, they all “breed packing industry two generations before, Carson’s river and shoreline vegetation, thereby ruining like bunnies, and can double their biomass in less book uncovered the ills of rampant pesticide use, crucial spawning habitat. Meanwhile, black carp than three years,” Reeves writes. If a self-­sustaining practically launching the modern environmental eat snails and mussels, including native species population of Asian carp becomes established in movement in the process. Malone saw grass carp that are already endangered. Silver carp are also a the Great Lakes, a $7‑billion fishing industry could as the perfect biological solution to weed control,

problem because they jump out of the water when be doomed. as did the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, p h by L ouis v ill eUSA p hotogra

24 Literary Review of Canada which started raising grass carp in the mid-1960s­ and environmental groups who met monthly to Reeves recommends a holistic approach to solv- and actually introduced an official stocking policy find some kind of consensus on handling Asian ing the problem and wonders if too much attention in 1972. That’s the same year that Malone imported carp” — Reeves captures the human emotions is actually being given to the Great Lakes. To be bighead and silver carp to combat algae and for use behind the controversial proposal to close the successful, we need to focus not only on control- in treating sewage ponds. Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects ling Asian carp in Lake Michigan or Lake Ontario Along with creatively detailing the introduc- the Mississippi watershed with the Great Lakes. but on healing the whole continental watershed, he tion of Asian carp and the negative effects on the “Someone from Michigan choked up while describ- believes. As he learned from Jim Garvey, a Southern ecosystem, Reeves gives a thorough accounting of ing to me Asian carp’s devastating potential in Lake Illinois University biologist, “Asian carp are just what we’re doing to solve the problem. In plain, Michigan,” he writes. “I looked away as her eyes an example of the environment telling us that we simple language, he breaks down complicated filled with tears.” have done something dramatically wrong to our control and prevention measures that include While it’s clear Reeves is personally invested ecosystems.” using pheromones to trap, monitor, and disrupt in the subject matter, he lets his sources speak A number of organizations and agencies — carp; increasing carbon dioxide in the water; for themselves and refrains from offering much at the state, provincial, and federal levels — are using sound as a deterrent; installing electrical opinion until Overrun’s conclusion. Despite all the working to prevent the spread of Asian carp, but barriers; creating a hydrological sep- Overrun emphasizes the need for aration; and the potential role of the even more interdepartmental cooper- emerging field of eDNA analysis. He The invasion is potentially ation, better-­funded research, and also goes through the various ways additional money for prevention.­ that we might use the fish to our worse than the spread of sea With the anti-­science rhetoric advantage. Some that are removed coming from the U.S. president by commercial fishers, for example, lampreys, round gobies, and and, to some degree, the premier of end up as fertilizer. And while there Ontario, it’s essential that we keep have been various attempts to mar- giant hogweed combined. Asian carp control on the public’s ket the fish to consumers, none have radar. Reeves notes that Donald succeeded. Asian carp are just too Trump’s first budget proposal bony and difficult to process to make them com- doom and gloom he encountered in writing the removed nearly all Environmental Protection mercially viable. It also can’t help that they’re as book, he remains optimistic: Agency funding and “called for the Great Lakes ugly as, well, a carp. Restoration Initiative, the program responsible Despite the complexity of the problem and the To have any success against Asian carp, and for funding the bulk of Asian carp work, to oper- mitigation methods, Reeves doesn’t get bogged the next round of aquatic invasives sure to ate on a paltry $10 million, down from its annual down in jargon. He skillfully connects the dots come, new voices, opinions, small-scale budget of $300 million.” Time will tell if that kind between scientific intervention and major policy options and entirely new ways of thinking of short-­sightedness will be the edge that Asian decisions that affect everyday people. Attending about how we build our cities and grow our carp need to gain an even stronger foothold. a meeting of the Chicago Area Waterway System food must be included in future debates. Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back, as the Advisory Committee in 2015 — “an ad hoc cluster of These alternatives, taken together, can effect consequences of complacency are simply too city agencies, government entities, private industry real change. great to ignore.

What’s a nice Jewish boy from Montreal doing in Saint John, following his boss’s example to “Dress British, think Yiddish”? “A smart, funny and warm-hearted novel in the spirit and lineage of Mordecai Richler.” — David Bezmozgis, author of The Betrayers and Natasha and Other Stories

The only non-fiction A necessary, new voice

book you’ll need to in Canadian fiction. read this year. “A fierce bright new voice.”— Susan Swan, author of The Western Light and The Wives of Bath “Claws of the Panda fills an important need.” — The Globe and Mail “Laure Baudot’s prose is exquisite, patient, and sophisticated.” — Sarah Selecky, author “An important book … as compelling as of This Cake is for the Party it is disturbing” — David Mulroney, author of Middle Power, Middle Kingdom, former Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China www.cormorantbooks.com

April 2019 25 But Is It Trash? Evaluating art in the age of conspicuous consumption Marlo Alexandra Burks

Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste Amanda Boetzkes MIT Press 272 pages, hardcover

e are on the brink of ecological catastrophe, Wyet rates of conspicuous consumption are unprecedented, in part because we remain wedded to an economic system that depends on consumerism. Out of this contra- diction, a new market has arisen: the sustainability market. Eco-driving,­ travel mugs, organic food and tex- tiles, and the locavore movement, to name a few trends, are there to make our habits both ethical and fun. And there’s upcycling, which sounds great and gives us moral credit, just like riding a bicycle (except for the aluminum extraction required). The combined effect is the commodi- fication of morality — washed with Art, like nature, has become a repository for our plastic waste. a green veneer. Greenwashing helps to mask an emerging well as to petroleum-based­ polymers — prompts ism, reveals our crimes as a consumer society. placebo discourse around sustainability and us to grapple with an uncomfortable connection The newer works, in particular, expose the psycho- waste. As much as there might be all sorts of good we might otherwise ignore. Considered through logical deficiencies of placebo messaging, which reasons to use a travel mug instead of a dispos- her lens, both waste and art inhabit and incorpor- can ingrain the very behaviours new materialism able cup, we’re still purchasing our beverages “to ate the shadow landscapes we have created in the challenges. In doing so, she opens a window into go” and supporting companies that commit far Anthropocene — quite the opposite of a green- art’s capacities and its limitations. By consid- greater environmental degradation than our indi- washed view of the world. ering how individual pieces comment on our vidual purchases could ever counteract. Moreover, ­consumerist condition, for example, she challenges there’s the problem of so-­called rebound effects, reenwashing and clever marketing have the notion of art as a redemptive or compensatory those unintended negative consequences that Gco-opted­ contemporary eco-criticism­ “in force. Art has often been the privileged place of arise through the increased use of supposedly order to maintain an economy founded on the insight — a site of imagination and experiment, a more efficient, environment-­friendly products. depletion of resources,” as Boetzkes puts it early funhouse mirror of our own world. But is it also a True, cars get more kilometres to the litre than in Plastic Capitalism. This has produced a power- place for change? they used to, but we’re driving more of them. The ful yet deceptive discourse of sustainability — Boetzkes does not present a particular pre- total effect is worse. Increasingly, it seems there is a placebo narrative that obscures our march scription, but she does offer an uncompromising no ethical consumption under capitalism after all, through waste, excess, and expenditure toward perspective through which to recognize and vis- but is that reason enough to throw the travel mug destruction. Drawing on the so-called­ (and ualize our greenwashed condition. We see how a out with the bathwater? heterogeneous) new materialism of Jane multi-­channel video installation like Tejal Shah’s It is with an eye on this conundrum that Bennett, Timothy Morton, and other eco-­critics, Landfill Dance (2012) disturbs and provokes, how Amanda Boetzkes, a professor at the University of Boetzkes pushes us to re-­evaluate our attitudes it plays up the intimacy between human beings Guelph, in Ontario, has approached contempor- toward objects, the environment, and, implicitly, and waste. Shah’s shadow landscape serves as ary visual art. Her previous book, The Ethics of ourselves. backdrop and archaeological dig for a group Earth Art, from 2010, explored aesthetics, ecol- Through detailed, sensitive readings of a wide-­ of women performing a dance that is at times ogy, and the representation of waste. With Plastic ranging selection of modern and contemporary exploratory, at times erotic, and at times ritualis- Capitalism, she offers a broad and subtle discus- works — from Joseph Beuys, Alberto Burri, and tic. The women wear gas masks and are clothed sion of sustainability, art, and plastic waste in a Arman to Thomas Hirschhorn, Agnès Varda, and in white tunics covered with insect motifs. The world governed by neoliberal capitalism. Her title’s Mel Chin — she illustrates an enduring strand overlaid sounds bear witness to a polluted auditory

pun — alluding to the plastic (or visual) arts as of eco-critical­ art that, like investigative journal- environment: construction noise, the scurrying (2011) / MIT Pr e ss ss ) by Chris Jordan the G yre ( A lbatro m fro Me ss age Midway:

26 Literary Review of Canada of insects (have the textile motifs come to life?), defines the Anthropocene. But can we use art to Like waste, modern art is excessive. It renders the laboured ­breathing. “The atmosphere is suggestive redefine that structure? Can we turn our garbage raw materials of which it is constructed functionally of neither a neoliberal optimism nor paralyzing into gold in a sort of apotheosis of the “reduce, useless. But it is precisely in its wastefulness that despair in the face of the landfill,” Boetzkes writes. reuse, recycle” mantra? modern art is necessary, that it is art, and therein lies “Indeed, the movements themselves seem to draw Boetzkes looks to performances by Yves Klein, its moment of critique. The term “waste art” under- out the potential of the bodies to coexist with this in the early 1960s, for one possible answer. In what stood this way might seem redundant, or excessive. environment, as though shaping the figures with a seems like a stunt, the French Nouveau Réaliste But that is precisely the point: its excess is its way of new kind of exoskeleton forged through the per- sold a “zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility” existing; it is how it protests the status quo. formative acts.” in exchange for gold leaf, for which he provided If greenwashing is an attempt to gild our con- Landfill Dance speaks to a number of threads a documentation of ownership. The buyer could sumption and our guilty consciences, then Plastic in Plastic Capitalism. The impulses that drive us then meet with the artist to “complete” the work, at Capitalism shows us how we might strip away that toward destruction, for example, manifest as a which point Klein would throw half of the gold leaf veneer and make a spectacle of the waste that con- semi-­erotic interaction with decay. And while into the Seine and use the other half for another stitutes its materiality. Whether through a quasi-­ the white tunics and gas masks would suggest an piece. There was no art object, no materiality ecstatic celebration of our intimate coexistence anaesthetic approach, the insect motifs — both involved in the exchange — even the documenta- with waste, or through photographic autopsy of decoration and defilement — thwart that inter- tion of ownership was to be burned. Instead of the bodies that died from ingesting our plastic, the pretation by aestheticizing what would normally be turning garbage into gold, Klein turned gold into works discussed in this volume expose the undeni- an object of disgust or (worse) disregard. Boetzkes useless matter by removing it from the system of able fact that plastic is everywhere. As it becomes shows how aestheticizing is not an act of gilding capitalist exchange. In an act of conspicuous profli- even more difficult for us to ignore the material’s over rubbish, but rather one that renders that waste gacy, he “wasted” it in a radical sense: by preserving presence, the placebo discourse — one can hope — part of our sensory world. it from commodification. will begin to lose ground. Throughout Plastic Capitalism, Boetzkes considers how the insidious ubiquity of plastic presents a specific challenge: it is the thing that persists when we don’t want it, the thing that does not decay, the thing that cannot be thrown out. It Lapse v. Detail is waste that resists wasting away — an ontological in memory of Don Coles contradiction. Moreover, plastic is stubbornly polit- ical. In this way, the plastic arts lend visual expres- Nobody hears the planes overhead. Only sound sion to our specious discourse of sustainability by and knowledge of a particular afternoon beyond. emphasizing materiality. Since plastic is intimately I am with a woman who surrounds herself with hyacinths tied up with the corporate and national interests of and goes around in a labyrinth — office, home, shops, her place, his place. the modern state, it plays a special role in the visual representation of waste in a contemporary petro-­ capitalist world. In the Hippodrome carpark, a Funicello family sips limoncello. Consider Brian Jungen’s Cetology, which the The street is narrow and the gardens breed miniatures. Vancouver Art Gallery purchased in 2003. A simu- If it’s not too pretentious to say, she ventures, this omelette with garden herbs lated whale skeleton made from the legs of plastic is overpriced, then admires the Italian marble floor. chairs, the large sculptural work “exposes the concurrent procedures of historicizing indigen- Back in the village hotel, someone is lighting a cigarette ous people,” Boetzkes explains. It naturalizes “the in the lobby and it’s a parable: Camus taken as a colonial perspective of animal life as coextensively philosophical pause, and not a conduit of those sorrowful fossils and fossil fuels.” Playing on literary tropes poplars that are present all around us. (think Moby-Dick), Cetology visually connects the hunts that once sustained the whale-­oil industry What’s left except the fabric of unrelatables. I mean, this woman with the colonial destruction of Indigenous ways of life that today sustains the petroleum economy. with whom I am vacationing for the short time I’m here is all As petroleum supplanted whale oil, so too has plas- things to all commercial concerns. Her normal speaking tone tic supplanted bone. is unwittingly trying to sell something — even botanical facts In a manner less grand and stylized than Cetology, Chris Jordan’s photography project could be rendered enticing enough to act as wrapped purchases Midway: Message from the Gyre also looks to the or what is ineffable in the pleasantness of this sea air. sea, now with affective intimacy. In the concluding I recall the sound of a car driving away from the curb, as they do in section of her book, Boetzkes includes one of the films and the TV detective shows.A n encounter or departure Midway photographs that has become “an iconic image of the Anthropocene.” The rotting carcass which brooks no alternative unless it’s spectacularly expensive. of an albatross fledgling, with the contents of its The medium grey light of a March afternoon is spilling onto (­former) belly, has become a repository for our plastic waste. It is this that will remain when the a honeycomb of white and black bathroom floor tile. birds and we are gone. All the work is in changes I try to make using unfiltered language. Jordan’s related 2017 film, Albatross, which Boetzkes mentions but does not discuss in detail, “On July 31, 1971, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600.” * opens by quoting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Plainspoken, without the giddy Corniche palms and piano “Until my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me player in the lounge between five and seven; where sheen and perfection burns.” Just last month a whale carcass washed land, on the flickering place and the place where we might have been. up in the Philippines. Its stomach contained forty kilograms of plastic bags, as pretty much every * by Fleur Jaeggy major news outlet has reported. The ghastly tale is being told. Nyla Matuk hen we take an archaeological approach to Wcontemporary art — digging out the bones and detritus, sorting it all, presenting what we Nyla Matuk is the editor of the forthcoming poetry anthology Resisting Canada. find — we see how waste structurally constitutes our material and political world. We see how it

April 2019 27 The Voices of Summer Baseball from the broadcast booth Charles Gordon

Hello, Friends! Stories from My Life and Blue Jays Baseball Jerry Howarth ECW Press 360 pages, hardcover and ebook

The Legendary Harry Caray: Baseball’s Greatest Salesman Don Zminda Rowman & Littlefield 352 pages, hardcover and ebook

uke Snider’s last day broadcasting Montreal Expos baseball on the radio Dwas October 5, 1986, a Sunday afternoon. The Expos were playing the Philadelphia Phillies in a game that didn’t count for much, and they ended up losing 2–1. I recorded the broadcast for senti- mental reasons: Duke and his long-time partner, Dave Van Horne, had been essentially living at my house for twenty years. All these years later, listening to the audio cas- sette that, unsurprisingly, I never threw out, I notice that there was little sentimentality expressed in the booth that day. Duke and Dave did, however, For thirty-five years, Jerry Howarth helped us follow and celebrate the game, as he did here in 1985. launch into a splendid discussion during a lull in the play, based on the fact that the Philadelphia Unlike televised broadcasts, radio is content to avidly follow Toronto’s team. If the names Frank second baseman was named Legg and the third let the game happen. Where TV tries to make it Catalanotto, Huck Flener, and Gustavo Chacin baseman was named Schu. When Duke said it was fast — frantically switching camera angles between ­resonate with you, this is your book. too bad that the Philadelphia catcher named Barry pitches, announcers yakking endlessly about Howarth’s job came easily to him and became Foote was no longer in the game, Dave decided the exit velocity and other things they find on the easier still over thirty-five­ years. Perhaps that’s bit had gone far enough. “Wouldn’t that be some- ­internet — radio takes its time. The listener, freed of why he takes it for granted that we will know how thing,” he said, absently, and turned to other things. the necessity of watching, can be doing the dishes a broadcast booth works. But we don’t. We want to No matter how a game is going, there is always or tending to the dock. know how it feels and smells up there. We want to time for conversation in baseball. It has a certain Essentially, radio broadcasters tell us a story know about the give-and-take among broadcasters. pace, a certain sense of history that has proven each and every game. They’re helped by the fact that We want to know about relationships with players difficult to destroy. In the 1980s, baseball was baseball is so easy to visualize: We can picture the and coaches. And we want to know how having a romanticized to the point where people who had field. We know what a fly to left looks like or a one- major league team as your employer affects what actually played the game no longer recognized it. hopper to short. If we follow the ball, in our mind’s you say on the air. I call this the Thrill of the Grass period, after one eye, we follow the game. In other sports, there are To be fair, Hello, Friends! has different aims. of W. P. Kinsella’s books. Around the same time, important things going on away from the pigskin or Howarth briefly sketches out his apprenticeship baseball became a soft-focused­ metaphor for life. the puck, and radio can’t help us see them. years, then proceeds chronologically through Writers were forever finding truths in it that rather Back when the Expos were playing, I had radios every one of his seasons with the Jays, mentioning

mystified people who actually played, and who strategically placed around my house, so that virtually every player, coach, and manager he met pe rsonal c oll ec tion / ECW Pr e ss arth’s knew that the beautiful spheroid really hurt if it hit we wouldn’t miss a word of Duke and Dave. My along the way: the first at‑bat in the big leagues, a w you, and that your opponents in this soft-focused late sister, Alison, who covered the Blue Jays for career highlight or two, something about their post-­ metaphor might call you a hyphenated noun the Toronto Star, had speakers set up around her baseball lives (I counted four suicides, which seems because they hated you. house, too. They enabled Tom Cheek and Jerry unusual). And in case you’re interested, Howarth’s Today, fans have to contend with pseudo-­ Howarth to follow her from the living room into the favourite all-time Blue Jay was the relief pitcher scientists, who have found ways of measuring and kitchen and, if necessary, the shower. Tom Henke. quantifying every aspect of the game, bringing us Howarth is about as positive a person as you’ll such terms as “launch angle” and “spin ratio” and erry Howarth, who was in the Blue Jays broad- ever meet, so there is not a lot of dirt-­dishing. “wins above replacement.” But baseball is some- Jcast booth from 1982 through 2017, has just He thought the very talented third baseman how still baseball, particularly on the radio. published a memoir that will delight those who Kelly Gruber lacked a work ethic. He thought the H o J e rry p h from p hotogra

28 Literary Review of Canada ­manager Jimy Williams was too tense. Aside from that might be familiar: “Fly ball, deep left field! Yes When televised baseball began, broadcasters that, pretty well everybody was nice. sir! There. She. Goes!” That would be Jose Bautista’s would switch during the game from radio to TV. Nice also applies to Howarth’s life. Any setback bat-flip home run in 2015 — just as thrilling to hear Caray had some initial difficulty: provided a lesson worth learning. People who fired as it is to watch. him or didn’t hire him turned into lifelong friends. Not everybody subscribes to Howarth’s model, They told me, “Everyone will be watching the People who called him out for what he said about as a new biography of the legendary Harry Caray picture, so don’t talk as much.” . . . The first few the team always came around. Mistakes only made points out. Caray, who died in 1998, started with the days I hardly said a word, just pointed things him a better broadcaster. St. Louis Cardinals before moving to the Chicago out when they happened. Then the mail Howarth once sharply criticized the attitude and White Sox and, most famously, the Chicago Cubs. started coming in. “What’s wrong with Harry defensive abilities of the shortstop Jose Reyes. The “My whole philosophy is to broadcast the way a Caray? Is he sick? He’s not broadcasting like team’s president, Paul Beeston, took issue with the fan would broadcast,” he told an interviewer in 1966, he does on radio.” tone of the comment, so Howarth had to apologize after he had been at it for twenty years. “Some people to Reyes personally. Looking back, Howarth makes think I’m always favorable to the Cardinals, and So he took his radio style to TV and made himself no apologies for his apology. And that under- some people think I’m always so critical of them.” larger than life. He would broadcast games from the lines the difference between a broadcaster and A biography, Don Zminda’s The Legendary outfield bleachers. He would lead the crowd in sing- a journalist.­ Harry Caray is more analytical than Howarth’s first- ing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” His calls became When baseball first went on the radio, the com- hand account. It portrays Caray as shrewd enough ever more distinctive: “Perranoski from the belt . . . missioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, instructed to recognize that broadcasting as a fan meant occa- the pitch. . . . Here it is. . . . Base hit!! Left field!! Sox announcers: “If you see men putting up a gallows in sionally expressing a fan’s frustrations. “I started Win! Sox Win! Holy Cow! The White Sox win!” centre field and then see them lead me out to it and ripping everybody in sight,” he said of his early Caray also warred with management and his hang me on it, describe it into the microphone but career. “It was a calculated thing to make people partners in the booth, had an affair with an owner’s don’t question the justice of the hanging.” Howarth know you’re there. And it worked.” daughter-in-law,­ and jumped opportunistically followed that advice throughout his career, as he This philosophy made Caray a hero to fans from team to team. When he got to the Cubs he does in this book: “I feel great pride in being the and caused fear in players. In the 1960s, when became even more beloved, perhaps having been Blue Jays announcer while still maintaining my the Cardinals were winning pennants and even ordered to lose his edge. objectivity in highlighting the game itself.” a World Series, Caray made a bête noire out of His style was easily caricatured (have a look on Ken Boyer, a very good third baseman. Caray YouTube at Will Ferrell doing Harry Caray), but f course, “objectivity” means something was relentless in his criticism: “It’s the last of the no one seemed to mind. “Caray’s voice,” wrote a Odifferent to broadcasters than it does for ninth. The Cardinals have the tying run on second. Washington Post columnist, “carries across America journalists. Most fans accept that hometown radio Two out. Boyer’s the hitter. We’ll be back in one the story of love in the afternoon.” personalities are employed by the team, and many minute with the wrap‑up.” Caray’s attacks inspired That was written long ago, at a time when the even prefer hearing a positive spin coming from fan negativity toward particular players, some of Cubs never played at night. When life was slower, the booth. The majority of broadcasters today fol- whose careers were impacted. Cardinals outfielder without the internet. But it still seems appropri- low Howarth’s policy of a neutral tone of voice Curt Flood summed up the reactions of the ath- ate. Despite all that has changed, these two books punctuated by occasional outbursts of joy when letes: “By affecting public opinion . . . he affected remind us that radio is the true voice of a game that good things happen for the good guys. Here’s one our livelihood.” continues to take its time.

April 2019 29 Worthy Backstory The mystery of Ava Lee’s Uncle Chow Basil Guinane

­partner in these enterprises is Uncle Chow Tung, and compelling. But are his books literature? Fate: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow head of a Hong Kong triad, who is both her mentor And what, if anything, does commercial success Ian Hamilton and her protector. Hamilton’s latest mystery is the have to do with art? House of Anansi Press first in a trilogy that will form the backstory of the The two need not be mutually exclusive. Witness 304 pages, softcover and ebook enigmatic Chow Tung — his “lost ­decades” — before the many literary authors who have dabbled in the he met Ava Lee. dark arts of genre, among them such luminaries as Graham Greene, who described his forays into his is a review of a mystery novel. ate opens in 1959, when Uncle Chow and his mysteries (The Ministry of Fear and The Third Man) That’s right, a mystery novel reviewed F fiancée attempt to escape mainland China, as “entertainments.” The Booker Prize winner John T in the pages of the Literary Review of which is in the grip of Mao’s agrarian reforms. Banville, who also writes under the name Benjamin Canada — even though mixing the words “literary” Their escape ends in tragedy, and the novel’s action Black, eschews the term “genre” and has claimed and “mystery” in the same sentence breaks with a flashes forward to late 1960s Hong Kong. Uncle that crime novels were among the best writing of widely held view that genre fiction is artistic slum- Chow is now the White Paper Fan, or adminis- the twentieth century. Other “literary” authors who ming and not worthy of serious consideration. trator, of the Fanling triad. Serious-­minded and have flirted with philistinism include Joyce Carol The critic Edmund Wilson claimed he had self-­contained, he is valued and respected by gang Oates, William Boyd, and even our own Timothy outgrown mysteries by the age of twelve. The members for his strategic planning abilities. But Findley and Thomas King. poet W. H. Auden said whodunits “have nothing when he tries to take the triad out of the extortion How does Fate measure up? Truthfully, to do with works of art.” And Dashiell Hammett, racket, he faces opposition from its more con- Hamilton’s writing is not as polished as it might be. described by the New York Times as “the dean of servative elements. The murder of Goa, Fanling’s In fact, his use of language is at best straightforward the hard-boiled­ school of detective fiction,” once leader or mountain head, throws Uncle Chow’s and workmanlike: claimed, with a subversive note of pride, to have been “as bad an influ- I have no idea. The reason I left so ence on American literature” as any- quickly was that I wanted to grab one he could think of. Page-­turning plots are often seen some of the other Red Poles before Still, it’s hard to argue with suc- they could disappear. They were as cess. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher ser- as lowbrow, incompatible with stunned and surprised as me, and ies has sold in the millions. Walter they all claimed to know absolutely Mosley, Dennis Lehane, Sue Grafton, literary merit. Still, it’s hard to argue nothing about what happened. and Louise Penny all have sales that with commercial success. are off the charts. Detective stories But when it comes to pacing, have produced some of our most Hamilton is a master. He maintains enduring fictional characters­ — ­­Adam the tension and suspense that are the Dalgliesh, Philip Marlowe, and Jules Maigret, ­reformation efforts into confusion, setting off an hallmarks of a good read. We are never sure who to name a few — creations every bit as iconic as internal power struggle. And as other triads see is responsible for the death of the mountain head Hagar Shipley or Owen Meany. And their cre- an opportunity to take over Fanling territory, the Goa. We only know that trouble is brewing, and the ators — P. D. James, Raymond Chandler, and threat of a gang war looms. slow burn keeps us hooked. As any novelist knows, Georges Simenon — have deservedly taken their Hamilton’s grasp of the Byzantine world of literary or otherwise, pacing and compelling nar- place in the canon of popular culture. Chinese criminal organizations and their traditions rative arcs are­ critical — and devilishly­ difficult Ever since Charles Dickens’s Bleak House gave is impressive, a legacy of the more than twenty to achieve. us Inspector Bucket and Arthur Conan Doyle cre- years he spent travelling throughout the region as So this review of Ian Hamilton’s Fate, here in the ated Sherlock Holmes, mysteries have captured the a seafood importer-exporter. Living proof that it Literary Review of Canada, is for the many critical interest and affection of a huge swath of the reading is never too late, Hamilton did not begin writing readers of policy and literature who are also closet public. Abraham Lincoln was known to read them fiction until a near-death experience, at the age of mystery fans. Critics and editors alike do Canadian to unwind. Yet commercial success and page-­ sixty-­four, triggered an epiphany. He really wanted cultural production a disservice if they turn up turning plots are often seen as lowbrow, incompat- to write. A few days after he left a Toronto hospital, their noses at the undeniable pleasure many read- ible with literary merit. following surgery for an aortic aneurysm, he sold ers take in fast-­paced stories, and the consummate The book in question here is Ian Hamilton’s his business. A few days after that, he began writing skill involved in them — detective or otherwise. Just Fate, the eagerly awaited prequel to his popular about Ava Lee. as the Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic Jonathan eleven-­book Ava Lee series, which has sold hun- There is no doubt Hamilton is a Canadian Gold understood the appeal of a great burger or dreds of thousands of copies and garnered its phenomenon, and his near-instant­ success is testi- strip mall food court, so too must Virginia Woolf author multiple awards. The main character in that mony to his natural talents. There is no denying yield to Agatha Christie from time to time. series, which began in 2011, is Ava Lee, a Chinese-­ his creative powers; after all, convincingly getting In the words of Ian Rankin, creator of the peren- Canadian lesbian and forensic-accountant-cum-­ ­ inside the head of a lesbian forensic accountant nially popular Rebus series (who, by the way, did detective skilled in martial arts. Her specialty: and martial arts practitioner is no small feat for a his PhD thesis on Muriel Spark), “Some of the best recouping large amounts of money that cannot retired Canadian businessman. Hamilton’s char- crime fiction is literature. And some of the best lit- be recovered using conventional methods. Her acters are vivid and complex, his plots are ­intricate erature is crime fiction.”

30 Literary Review of Canada Dead on Arrival There’s no elegant way to eat cretons Lydia Perovi

What’s not superfluous? Diane’s flab and her back “on a perfectly adequate herbal tea.” (Seriously, Autopsy of a Boring Wife husband’s enduring good looks. The story starts with whose inner monologue runs like this?) Diane also Marie-Renée Lavoie the husband — an engineer, by the way — admitting loves her house and overgrown backyard — when she Translated by Arielle Aaronson he’s in love with a younger woman and asking for is not breaking stuff, that is. Lavoie exaggerates her House of Anansi Press a divorce. It continues as a series of steps and mis- heroine’s Bridget Jones–style goofs and has her do 280 pages, softcover steps on Diane’s journey to accept her new situa- things like smash walls whenever something pisses tion, distract herself from grief, and find another her off and obsess about how to French-kiss an office mission in life. So far, so reasonable a structure. fantasy, J. P., who’s otherwise a complete stranger. oo much of today’s anglophone The trouble is that Lavoie, instead of giving The presence of men seems to make everything CanLit wants to be American TV, and, Diane credible personhood, assembles a character better. When J. P. eventually says something nice T judging by Marie-­Renée Lavoie’s Autopsy from a set of out-of-the-box consumer habits. There to her, she is ecstatic: “I had been reborn and all it of a Boring Wife (Autopsie d’une femme plate), are two important shopping scenes, when even one had taken was a compliment.” At another point, she Quebec is not immune to this condition. Lavoie’s would be too many, and by the end of each we are meets a construction worker, building a house not Mister Roger and Me won the province’s version of informed how much Diane has spent. The scene far from her own. This being bad TV, with no verisim- CBC’s Canada Reads, the Survivor-­style competition of her crying on a boutique change-room floor? ilitude in sight, he is not, in fact, an immigrant with of non-literary­ book advocates discussing everything $200 jeans. When she buys running gear? Ka‑ching: rudimentary language skills minding his own busi- but literature. But I didn’t want to hold the dubious $427. “He flashed me the dazzling white smile of a ness, but rather a tattooed hunk who likes friendly honour against her latest: an abandoned-wife­ novel non-­coffee-­drinker,” says Diane of the salesperson. chats with middle-­class women passing by. When with an appealingly bleak title. After all, the scorned-­ (Men are handsome and flash smiles, women jiggle friend Claudine falls from Diane’s back deck (don’t wife theme has given us literary gems as disparate flab and model wrinkles.) After her sportswear bother visualizing it), Tattoo Guy rushes in: “With his as Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of dirty, chapped, cracked hands,” he lifts a She-Devil­ , Elena Ferrante’s The Days Claudine’s bruised forearm “delicately of Abandonment, Carellin Brooks’s toward him, like he was handling a One Hundred Days of Rain, and Katie Romance novels share with much newborn.” On another occasion, when Kitamura’s A Separation. he spots Diane crying in her car, he Autopsy, sadly, turns out to be nei- of Hollywood a certain flatness of comes over to comfort her, and, one ther a fantastical revenge romp, nor thing leading to another, “he slipped a dive into the darker side of human personality and memory, thinness of his arm of steel under my legs and psychology, nor a poetic meditation context, and overreliance on cliché. swept me up.” He even carries her on grief, nor a surreal travelogue. It across her own threshold: “Enfolded is a romance novel, post-­romance. In in his magnificent arms, my woes sud- reading it, I kept asking myself, What denly seemed negligible.” is Anansi doing publishing romance novels in its purchase, Diane comes home to make another one Excepting Claudine and Diane’s daughter, Arachnide imprint, which supposedly celebrates online. That’s three buys in seventy-­seven pages. women are evil bitches, and Diane employs her translators who “bring French voices into another The role of clothes does not end there. Through unruly post-­breakup behaviour to tell them this. language”? The book should have been marketed Diane’s first-­person narrative, Lavoie meticulously Her sister-in-law­ and mother-in-law,­ the office for its likely readers, not for literature lovers. describes what every character is wearing, includ- rival, her husband’s girlfriend — all monsters. Her Romance novels share with sitcoms and much ing makeup and jewellery where applicable. “She husband, though, remains an irresistible chunk of of Hollywood a certain flatness of personality and waved at me, fluttering her white acrylic nails manliness forever and ever. Which also goes for memory, thinness of context, and overreliance on and white pearl rings perfectly accessorizing the J. P.: “George Clooney couldn’t have held a candle clichéd shorthand. In Autopsy ’s nearly 300 pages, white earrings, bracelets, decorative comb, and to him.” Eventually, Diane runs into him outside the we never once learn what Diane, the narrator and eye shadow that matched her pantsuit” is how office, at the funeral for Claudine’s estranged father, titular wife, does for a living. What is her calling? we meet Josy, Diane’s office nemesis. One time, and laments, “I wished he hadn’t seen me, unpre- What are her interests, other than her husband? her therapist’s pale pink silk button-­down has a pared for the moment, and gave myself a quick We know that she goes to an office, where she has calming effect; another time her “mandarin collar once-­over — the corners of my lips, my eyes, under co-­workers, one of whom is head of HR. There is jacket” gives her a stern look. Charlene, her ex’s my nose, smoothed the eyebrows — before walking occasional talk of “sales.” We learn that she is hand- younger lover, comes to visit Diane “in loungewear,” briskly over to him.” The spread before them is full ling the “Murdoch file,” and that her department is but alas: “All my excitement had waned when she of food, which, if tasted, will make her look unlady- called Physical Resources. Near the end of the book, showed up looking so unkempt.” The mother-in-­ like. “Cretons: not a good day. There’s no elegant her nameless Quebec City company downsizes and law, of course, is the opposite: “A regular family of way to eat pork spread, period.” moves a chunk of administrative staff to Toronto. four could feed themselves for several months for I could go on and on, but there’s no elegant Throughout, bosses and secretaries pop in and out, the price of her most unassuming pair of earrings.” way to continue. I will say that I set out to compare but you give up trying to deduce anything substan- Diane loves wine — champagne in particular — Aaronson’s English translation with Lavoie’s ori- tive. Diane pretend-works­ at a generic pretend and she covers herself with not just any kind of ginal text, but there is no point. It makes no differ- business. A vocation is superfluous in the narrative ­blanket, but an alpaca throw. One night, having “no ence if the translation accentuated, attenuated, or of a woman’s life, this novel tells us. idea what wine to pair with plain old eggs,” she falls was equal to the paint-by-numbers­ original.

April 2019 31 With Jackie It all started when I answered the phone Gilbert Reid

t was the early 1980s. “There’s somebody of Grazia dei Rossi, about the extraordinary life I would superimpose various genre structures, you must meet,” rumbled the voice on the of young Danilo at court in Istanbul and on weaving them together, to create this one tale. I phone. It was Barry Callaghan — poet, writer, campaign in Iraq, with the army of Suleiman the But how would I connect the various levels? How and man of letters extraordinaire — deploying his Magnificent. would I relate the various backstories — the big-­ best imperious growl. “Yes, Barry!” I said, snapping But back in Rome, years before, when The Secret picture history — to the front story, the adventures to attention. Book of Grazia dei Rossi was still a dream: What of Danilo? So it was that, a few hours later in a back-­ did Jackie want from me? Access and information. The answer: the Republic of Venice would black- alley hole-in-the-wall Roman restaurant, I met She wanted to get inside the great noble palaces mail Danilo into becoming a spy. Jacqueline Park, the little Jewish woman who could. of Rome, inside the great shipbuilding centre of As a spy, Danilo would go everywhere and see Jackie was part of the remarkable Jewish dias- Venice. She wanted to walk around La Serenissima everything; as a spy, he and his fellow spy, stun- pora that fanned out from Winnipeg in the 1940s with somebody who knew it down to its paving ning Angelica, would be in continual danger. And and ’50s, and as we sat there forking up spaghetti stones and submerged foundations. My Italian as a spy, Danilo would play a role in the two great and drinking Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, her life partner at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Elena enterprises that lay behind the foreground plot: story unspooled. As a teenager, she danced and Solari, and I were able to help, and over the years the effort to protect the Republic of Venice from its sang for the airmen who would soon be fighting, we became part of Jackie’s research team. many enemies and, above all, the effort to protect and dying, in the Second World War. Later, she Thirty-five­ years later, in 2017, Jackie was “New Christians,” or conversos, from the Catholic was hired by the great John Grierson, founder of approaching ninety and found herself unable to com- Inquisition and to protect Jews everywhere — from the Canadian National Film Board. “He was drunk plete volume 3 of her trilogy. She gave me the job, and expropriation, torture, and death. at the time,” she recalled. “When I With the structural latticework arrived at the office, he’d forgotten pieced together, I had to decide on a he’d hired me. ‘Who are you, girlie?’ ” style, a voice. Here I felt I could take Never mind, she got the job — or, That letter unfolded and grew liberties, because Jackie had given rather, kept it. Television arrived, and me her blessing and she herself had suddenly Jackie popped up on CBC into an immense saga of Jewish adopted different voices: first person panel shows. Meanwhile she married, in the first book; third person omnis- had two daughters, and landed in and Renaissance life, centred on cient, and occasionally epistolary, in New York, where she founded the dra- the second book. matic screenwriting program at NYU’s a figure Jackie reimagined. For Son of Two Fathers, I wanted Tisch School of the Arts. There she to complete Jackie’s work with the taught generations of screenwriters, energy she would have put into it. directors, and actors, people such as Oliver Stone. with it carte blanche. “It’s all yours,” she said. “Do I wanted the reader to be extremely close to the With her second husband, Ben Park, she set off to with it what you will. I trust you. I don’t even want characters. I also wanted to have the freedom to explore — in ­particular, Italy. to see it.” Not long after, in January 2018, Jackie died. move fluidly from one point of view to another, so I It was Italy that changed Jackie’s world. She Jackie had sketched out what she wanted, she made extensive use of free indirect discourse: read a letter in which the Marchesa Isabella d’Este, had written a few chapters, and she had created a regent of Mantua, patroness of the greatest art- cast of fascinating characters. But the main struc- On a signal from Veronica, Danilo emerged ists, and arguably the greatest woman of her time, ture — the arc that would take us from the begin- from his hiding place. Zarah did indeed look implores a young Jewish woman to convert to ning to the end — was not there. like an exquisite boy, with dark lustrous skin, Christianity so her soul will be saved and so she can The starting point was this: In April 1536, twenty-­ marvelous, big dark eyes, and curly black hair marry the man she loves. year-old Danilo del Medigo, pursued by Ottoman cut short. She blinked at Danilo and reached That was enough. In that young woman, Jackie assassins, has just arrived in Venice. He enters out and took Veronica’s hand. The girl’s eyes, must have seen a partial reflection of her own the Ghetto, meets beautiful Miriamne Hazan, and Danilo noticed, were red, the kohl smudged, life, her own destiny. Those few lines in a letter participates in a Seder. Later he is betrayed by as if she’d been crying. unfolded and grew into an immense saga of Jewish Miriamne’s evil and jealous brother, Mordecai, and and Renaissance life, centred on the figure Jackie has to flee the city. He arrives in Mantua, and his life Now that I’ve laid out my process for picking reimagined as Grazia dei Rossi. The story ramified becomes deliciously complicated when he meets up the trilogy — the superposition of structures to include great events between the 1480s and the Isabella d’Este and a gorgeous actress, Angelica. and the choice of voice, tone, and narrative tech- 1540s and encompassed a huge array of characters: The action, I decided, would combine genres: nique — I must confess that it’s all false. What really artists, sculptors, bankers, courtesans, rabbis, doc- An episodic, picaresque novel, full of adventure. happens, as all writers know, is you throw your tors, aristocrats, pirates, charlatans, mystics, and A Bildungsroman, where Danilo discovers who he characters into a situation, and then they take over, the Ottoman sultan and his household. really is. A romance, with a girl-gets-boy, boy-gets- they hijack you, and they run away with the story. A whole world was born — that of Grazia dei girl structure, strewn with perilous obstacles. And an That’s how I was kidnapped by Danilo del Rossi and of her son, Danilo del Medigo. The Secret epic — a wide-ranging­ portrait of that splendiferous Medigo, by the beautiful Miriamne Hazan, by the Book of Grazia dei Rossi was an international best- age, the late Renaissance in all its creative flowering, suave courtesan Veronica Libero, and by all the other seller in 1998. But Jackie wasn’t done; she had a with its frenetic sexual energies, with its giant person- characters. They and Jackie cast a spell and took me trilogy in mind. In 2014, she published The Legacy alities, with its huge religious and political conflicts. on a magical voyage. I am still their captive.

32 Literary Review of Canada MAY TO 2 20197 Ladies, Upstairs! My Life in Politics and After Confessions of a Yiddish Writer Monique Bégin and Other Essays Cloth $34.95, 540pp Chava Rosenfarb Edited by Goldie Morgentaler The voice of a woman in a male world, What It Means to Write Paper $34.95, 296pp a francophone among anglophones, and Creativity and Metaphor a skeptical politician, Ladies, Upstairs! Adrian McKerracher “Original in perspective, range, and tone, provides a fascinating account of one of Cloth $32.95, 224pp Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Canada’s most impressive federal ministers Essays offers a powerful and remarkable and her discoveries through the decades. “McKerracher is both passionate and presentation of Holocaust-related memoir charmingly self-effacing as he describes his and careful readings of key Yiddish and quest to glean the metaphors that inspire European writers in Chava Rosenfarb’s other writers’ work. In describing his own personal and effective way.” journey in What It Means to Write, [he] Norman Ravvin, Concordia University Stories of displays a voice that is both accomplished and deeply human, vulnerable, and yearn- Creativity and ing for connection and understanding.” Quill & Quire Courage

Iroquois in the West Jean Barman Paper $29.95, 336pp

Wish I Were Here “… a detailed and well-documented narra- tive history. Illustrating how much can be Boredom and the Interface The Experience of Meaning accomplished with meticulous analysis of Mark Kingwell Jan Zwicky primary and secondary source materials, Cloth $34.95, 216pp Paper $29.95, 240pp Jean Barman has indefatigably tracked this little-known population of Iroquois trav- An urgent, timely, and political analysis of “Rich and thought-provoking, The Experience ellers and settlers across the continent.” the boredom that dominates our everyday of Meaning will change the way you see the Jennifer S.H. Brown, professor emeritus, immersion in distracting technologies. world. I literally could not put this book University of Winnipeg down …” Marjorie Senechal, Smith College

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